Isaiah Berlin - Russian Thinkers

1 86os), that Petrograndism, the behaviour of Attila, the behaviour

of the Committee of Public Safety in 1 792 -the use of methods which

presuppose the possibility of simple and radical solutions-always in

the end lead to oppression, bloodshed and collapse. He declares that

whatever the justification in earlier and more innocent ages of acts

inspired by fanatical faith, nobody has any right to act in this fashion

who has lived through the nineteenth century and has seen what

human beings are really made of-the complex, crooked texture of

men and institutions. Progress must adjust itself to the actual pace

of historical change, to the actual economic and social needs of society,

because to suppress the bourgeoisie by violent revolution-and there

was nothing he despised more than the bourgeoisie, and the mean,

grasping, philistine financial bourgeoisie of Paris most of all-before

its historical role has been played out, would merely mean that the

bourgeois spirit and bourgeois forms would persist into the new social

order. 'They want, without altering the walls [of the prison], to give

them a new function, as if a plan for a jail could be used for a free

existence.' Houses for free men cannot be built by specialists in prison

architecture. And who shall say that history has proved that Herzen

was mistaken?

His loathing of the bourgeoisie is frantic, yet he does not want a

violent cataclysm. He thinks that it may be inevitable, that it may come,

but he is frightened of it. The bourgeoisie seems to him li-ke a collection

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o f Figaros, but o f Figaros grown fat and prosperous. H e declares that,

in the eighteenth century, Figaro wore a livery, a mark of servitude

to be sure, but still something different from, detachable from, his

skin; the skin, at least, was that of a palpitating, rebellious human

being. But today Figaro has won. Figaro has become a millionaire.

He is judge, commander-in-chief, president of the republic. Figaro

now dominates the world, and, alas, the livery is no longer a mere

livery. It has become part of his skin. It cannot be taken off; it has

become part of his living flesh.

Everything that was repellent and degrading in the eighteenth

century, against which the noble revolutionaries had protested, has

grown into the intrinsic texture of the mean middle-class beings who

now dominate us. And yet we must wait. Simply to cut off the;r

heads, as Bakunin wanted, can only lead to a new tyranny and a new

slavery, to the rule of the revolted minorities over majorities, or worse

still, the rule of majorities-monolithic majorities-over minorities, the

rule of what John Stuart Mill, in Herzen's view with justice, called

conglomerated mediocrity.

Herzen's values are undisguised : he likes only the style of free

beings, only what is large, generous, uncalculating. He admires pride,

independence, resistance to tyrants; he admires Pushkin because he

was defiant; he admires Lermontov because he dared to suffer and to

hate; he even approves of the Slavophils, his reactionary opponents,

because at least they detested authority, at least they would not let

the Germans in. He admires Belinsky because he was incorruptible,

and told the truth in the face of the arrayed battalions of German

academic or political authority. The dogmas of socialism seem to him

no less stifling than those of capitalism or of the Middle Ages or of

the early Christians.

What he hated most of all was the despotism of formulas- the submission of human beings to arrangements arrived at by deduction from some kind of a priori principles which had no foundation in

actual experience. That is why he feared the new liberators so deeply.

'If only people wanted,' he says, ' . . . instead of liberating humanity, to

liberate themselves, they would do much for . . . the liberation

of man .' He knew that his own perpetual plea for more individual

freedom contained the seeds of social atomisation, that a compromise

had to be found between the two great social needs-for organisation

and for individual freedom-some unstable equilibrium that would

preserve a minimal area within which the individual could express

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himself and not be utterly pulverised, and he utters a great appeal

for what he calls the value of egoism. He declares that one of the

great dangers to our society is that individuals will be tamed and

suppressed disinterestedly by idealists in the name of altruism, in the

name of measures designed to make the majority happy. The new

liberators may well resemble the inquisitors of the past, who drove

herds of innocent Spaniards, Dutchmen, Belgians, Frenchmen,

Italians to the autos-da-fl, and 'then went home peacefully with a

quiet conscience, with the feeling that they had done their duty, with

the smell of roasting human Besh still in their nostrils', and slept-the

sleep of the innocent after a day's work well done. Egoism is not to

be condemned without qualification. Egoism is not a vice. Egoism

gleams in the eye of an animal. Moralists bravely .thunder against it,

instead of building on it. What moralists try and deny is the great,

inner citadel of human dignity. 'They want . . /to make men tearful,

sentimental, insipid, kindly creatures, asking to be made slaves • . .

But to tear egoism from a man's heart is to rob him of his living

principles, of the yeast and salt of his personality.' Fortunately this is

impossible. Of course it is sometimes suicidal to try to assert oneself.

One cannot try and go up a staircase down which an army is trying

to march. That is done by tyrants, conservatives, fools and criminals.

'Destroy a man's altruism, and you get a savage orang-utan, but

if you destroy his egoism you generate a tame monkey.'

Human problems are too complex to demand simple solutions. Even

the peasant commune in Russia, in which Herun believed so deeply

as a 'lightning conductor', because he believed that peasants in Russia

at least had not been infected by the distorting, urban vices of the

European proletariat and the European bourgeoisie-even the peasant

commune did not, after all, as he points out, preserve Russia from

slavery. Liberty is not to the taste of the majority-only of the educated.

There are no guaranteed methods, no sure paths to social welfare.

We must try and do our best; and it is always possible that we shall fail.

The heart of his thought is the notion that the basic problems are

perhaps not soluble at all, that all one can do is to try to solve them,

but that there is no guarantee, either in socialist nostrums or in any

other human construction, no guarantee that happiness or a rational

life can be attained, in private or in public life. This curious combination of idealism and scepticism-not unlike, for all his vehemence, the oudook of Erasmus, Montaigne, Montesquieu-runs through all

his writings.

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Her-zen wrote novels, but they are largely forgotten, because he was

not a born novelist. His stories are greatly inferior to those of his

friend, Turgenev, but they have something in common with them.

For in Turgenev's novels, too, you will find that human problems

are not treated as if they were soluble. Bazarov in Fathn-s and Childrm

sufFers and dies; Lavretsky in A House of Gmtlifoll is left in melancholy uncertainty at the end of the novel, not because something had not been done which could have been done, not because there is a

solution round the corner which someone simply had not thought of,

or had refused to apply, but because, as Kant once said, ' From the

crooked timber of humanity no straight thing can ever be made.' Everything is partly the fault of circumstance, partly the fault of the individual character, partly in the nature of life itself. This must be faced, it

must be stated, and it is a vulgarity and, at times, a crime to believe

that permanent solutions are always possible.

Her-zen wrote a novel called Who is to IJ/amt ? about a typical

tragic triangle in which one of the 'superfluous men' of whom I spoke

earlier falls in love with a lady in a provincial town who is married

to a virtuous, idealistic� but dull and naive husband. It is not a good

novel, and its plot is not worth recounting, but the main point, and

what is most characteristic of Herzen, is that the situation possesses,

in principle, no solution. The lover is left broken-hearted, the wife

falls ill and probably dies, the husband contemplates suicide. It sounds

like a typically gloomy, morbidly self-centred caricature of the Russian

novel. But it is not. It rests on an exceedingly delicate, precise, and

at times profound description of an emotional and psychological situation to which the theories of a Stendhal, the method of a Flaubert, the depth and moral insight of George Eliot are inapplicable because

they are seen to be too literary, derived from obsessive ideas, ethical

doctrines not fitted to the chaos of life.

At the heart of Herzen's outlook (and of Turgenev's too) is the

notion of the complexity and insolubility of the central problems, and,

therefore, of the absurdity of trying to solve them by means of political

or sociological instruments. But the difference between Herzen and

Turgenev is this. Turgenev is, in his innermost being, not indeed

heartless but a cool, detached, at times slightly mocking observer who

looks upon the tragedies of life from a comparatively remote point of

view; oscillating between one vantage point and another, between

the claims of society and of the individual, the claims of love and of

daily life; between heroic virtue and realistic scepticism, the morality

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of Hamlet and the morality of Don Quixote, the necessity for efficient

political organisation and the necessity for individual self-expression;

remaining suspended in a state of agreeable indecision, sympathetic

melancholy, ironical, free from cynicism and sentimentality, perceptive, scrupulously truthful and uncommitted. Turgenev neither quite believed nor quite disbelieved in a deity, personal or impersonal;

religion is for him a normal ingredient of life, like love, or egoism,

or the sense of pleasure. He enjoyed remaining in an intermediate

position, he enjoyed almost too much his lack of will to believe, and

because he stood aside, because he contemplated in tranquillity, he

was able to produce great literary masterpieces of a finished kind,

rounded stories told in peaceful retrospect, with well-constructed

beginnings, middles and ends. He detached his art from himself; he

did not, as a human being, deeply care about solutions; he saw life

with a peculiar chilliness, which infuriated both Tolstoy and Dostoevsky, and he achieved the exquisite perspective of an artist who treats his material from a certain distance. There is a chasm between