Isaiah Berlin - Russian Thinkers

end in nothing? Will it not be a cruel mockery of all our efforts, all

our blood and sweat and tears, if it all ends in some sudden, unexplained

brute fashion with some mysterious, totally unexplained event?' Herzen

replies that to think in these terms is a great vulgarity, the vulgarity

of mere numbers. The death of a single human being is no less absurd

and unintelligible than the death of the entire human race; it is a

mystery we accept; merely to multiply it enormously and ask 'Supposing millions of human beings die?' does not make it more mysterious or more frightening.

In nature, as in the souls of men, there slumber endless possibilities

and forces, and in suitable conditions . . . they develop, and will

develop furiously. They may fill a world, or they may fall by the

roadside. They may take a new direction. They may stop. They

may collapse . . . Nature is perfectly indifferent to what happens . . .

[But then, you may ask,] what is all this for? The life of people

becomes a pointless game . . . Men build something with pebbles

and sand only to see it all collapse again; and human creatures

crawl out from underneath the ruins and again start clearing spaces

and build huts of moss and planks and broken capitals and, after

centuries of endless labour, it all collapses again. Not in vain did

Shakespeare say that history was a tedious tale told by an idiot . . .

. . . [To this I reply that] you are like . . . those very sensitive people

who shed a tear whenever they recollect that 'man is born but to

die'. To look at the end and not at the action itself is a cardinal

error. Of what use to the Rower is its bright magnificent bloom?

Or this intoxicating scent, since it will only pass away? . . . None

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at all. But nature i s not so miserly. She does not disdain what is

transient, what is only in the present. At every point she achieves all

she can achieve . . . Who will find fault with nature because flowers

bloom in the morning and die at night, because she has not

given the rose or the lily the hardness of flint? And this miserable

pedestrian principle wt wish to transfer to the world of history . . .

Life has no obligation to realise the fantasies and ideas [of civilisation] . . . Life loves novelty . . .

• . . History seldom repeats itself, it uses every accident, simultaneously knocks at a thousand doors . . . doors which may open . . . who knows?

And again :

Human beings have an instinctive passion to preserve anything they

like. Man is born and therefore wishes to live for ever. Man falls in

love and wishes to be loved, and loved for ever as in the very first

moment of his avowal . . . but life . . . gives no guarantees. Life

does not ensure existence, nor pleasure; she does not answer for

their continuance . . . Every historical moment is full and is

beautiful, is self-contained in its own fashion. Every year has its

own spring and its own summer, its own winter and autumn, its

own storms and fair weather. Every period is new, fresh, filled

with its own hopes and carries within itself its own joys and

sorrows. The present belongs to it. But human beings are not

content with this, they must needs own the future too . . .

What is the purpose of the song the singer sings? . . . If you look

beyond your pleasure in it for something else, for some other goal,

the moment will come when the singer stops and then you will

only have memories and vain regrets . . . because, instead of listening, you were waiting for something else . . . You are confused by categories that are not fitted to catch the flow of life. What is this

goal for which you [he means Mazzini and the liberals and the

socialists] are seeking-is it a programme? An order? Who conceived it? To whom was the order given? Is it something inevitable?

or not? If it is, are we simply puppets? . . . Are we morally free or

are we wheels within a machine?; I would rather think of life, and

therefore of history, as a goal attained, not as a means to something

else.

And:

We think that the purpose of the child is to grow up because it does

grow up. But its purpose is to play, to enjoy itself, to be a child.

If we merely look to the end of the process, the purpose of all life

is death.

ALEXAN D E R H E RZEN

This is Herzen's central political and social thesis, and it enters

henceforth into the stream of Russian radical thought as an antidote

to the exaggerated utilitarianism of which its adversaries have so often

accused it. The purpose of the singer is the song, and the purpose of

life is to be lived. Everything passes, but what passes may sometimes

reward the pilgrim for all his sufFering�. Goethe has told us that there

can be no guarantee, no security. Man could be content with the

present. But he is not. He rejects beauty, he rejects fulfilment today,

because he must own the future also. That is Herzen's answer to all

those who, like Mazzini, or the socialists of his time, called for

supreme sacrifices and sufferings for the sake of nationality, or human

civilisation, or socialism, or justice, or humanity-if not in the present,

then in the future.

Herzen rejects this violently. The purpose of the struggle for liberty

is not liberty tomorrow, it is liberty today, the liberty of living individuals with their own individual ends, the ends for which they move and fight and perhaps die, ends which are sacred to them. To crush

their freedom, their pursuits, to ruin their ends for the sake of some

vague felicity in the future which cannot be guaranteed, about which

we know nothing, which is simply the product of some enormous

metaphysical construction that itself rests upon sand, for which there

is no logical, or empirical, or any other rational guarantee-to do that

is in the first place blind, because the future is uncertain; and in the

second place vicious, because it offends against the only moral values

we know; because it tramples on human demands in the name of

abstractions-freedom, happiness, justice-fanatical generalisations,

mystical sounds, idolised sets of :ovords.

Why is liberty valuable? Because it is an end in itself, because it is

what it is. To bring it as a sacrifice to something else is simply to

perform an act of human sacrifice.

This is Herzen's ultimate sermon, and from this he develops the

corollary that one of the deepest of modern disasters is to be caught up

in abstractions instead of realities. And this he maintains not merely

against the western socialists and liberals among whom he lived (let

alone the enemy-priests or conservatives) but even more against his

own close friend Bakunin, who persisted in trying to stir up violent

rebellion, involving torture and martyrdom, for the sake of dim,

confused and distant goals. For Herzen, one of the greatest of sins

that any human being can perpetrate is to seek to transfer moral

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responsibility from his own shoulders to those of an unpredictable

future order, and, in the name of something which may never happen,

perpetrate crimes today which no one would deny to be monstrous

if they were performed for some egoistic purpose, and do not seem

so only because they are sanctified by faith in some remote and

intangible Utopia.

For all his hatred of despotism, and in particular of the Russian

regime, Herzen was all his life convinced that equally fatal dangers

threatened from his own socialist and revolutionary allies. He believed

this because there was a time when, with his friend, the critic Belinsky,

he too had believed that a simple solution was feasible; that some great

system-a world adumbrated by Saint-Simon or by Proudhon-did

provide it: that if one regulated social life rationally and put it. in

order, and created a clear. and tidy organisation, human problems

could be finally resolved. Dostoevsky once said of Belinsky that his

socialism was nothing but a simple belief in a marvellous life of

'unheard-of splendour, on new and . . . adamantine foundations'. Because

Herzen had himself once believed in these foundations (although

never with simple and absolute faith) and because this belief came

toppling down and was utterly destroyed in the fearful cataclysms of

1 848 and 1 849 in which almost every one of his idols proved to have

feet of clay, he denounces his own past with peculiarly intense indignation: we call upon the masses, he writes, to rise and crush the tyrants.

But the masses are indifferent to individual freedom and independence,

and suspicious of talent: 'they want a . . . government to rule for their

benefit, and not . . . against it. But to govern themselves doesn't enter

their heads.' 'It is not enough to despise the Crown; one must not be

filled with awe before the Phrygian Cap . . .' He speaks with bitter

scorn about monolithic, oppressive communist idylls, about the barbarous 'equality of penal servitude', about the 'forced labour' of socialists like Cabet, about barbarians marching to destroy.

Who will finish us off? The senile barbarism of the sceptre or

the wild barbarism of communism; the bloody sabre, or the red

Aag? . . .

. . . Communism will sweep across the world in a violent tempestdreadful, bloody, unjust, swift . . .

[Our] institutions . ; . will, as Proudhon politely puts it, be

liquidattd . . . I am sorry [for the death of civilisation]. But the masses

will not regret it; the masses to whom it gave nothing but tears,

want, ignorance and humiliation.

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He is terrified of the oppressors, but he is terrified of the liberators too.

He is terrified of them because for him they are the secular heirs of

the religious bigots of the ages of faith; because anybody who has a

cut and dried scheme, a straitjacket which he wishes to impose on

humanity as the sole possible remedy for all human ills, is ultimately

bound to create a situation intolerable for free human beings, for men

like himself who want to express themselves, who want to have some

area in which to develop their own resources, and are prepared to

respect the originality, the spontaneity, the natural impulse towards

self-expression on the part of other- human beings too. He calls this

Petrograndism-the methods of Peter the Great. He admires Peter

the Great. He admires him because he did at least overthrow the

feudal rigidity, the dark night, as he thinks of it, of medieval Russia.

He admires the Jacobins because the Jacobins dared to do something

instead of nothing. Yet he is dearly aware, and became more and

more so the longer he lived (he says all this with arresting clarity in

his open letters To an Old Comrade- Bakunin-written in the late