Episode #140 - Transcript

Hello, everyone! I’m Stephen West. This is Philosophize This!

Want to give a sizeable thank you this episode to the people that support the show on Patreon, make it possible for everyone else that benefits from the show -- people like me.

Today’s episode’s on the philosopher Isaiah Berlin and his reaction to the political climate during the 20th century. I hope you love the show today.

So we’ve talked multiple times on this show about this ongoing debate between 20th-century political philosophers, this specter that always seems to be looming of nature versus culture, Socrates versus Protagoras, rationalism versus relativism. These thinkers so often seem to be faced with a choice between the essentialism of the Enlightenment or the nihilism of later modernity. But, nonetheless, even after having this conversation so many times, there always still seems to be hope for us because something no doubt every person listening to this has already considered by this point is, why does it got to be one or the other? I mean, this seems like a really easy problem to solve. Why can’t it be a little bit of both? Why can’t it be nature and culture? Now, something it’s important to understand is that it’s one thing just to say that, you know, to offer up that theory when you’re having coffee with your friends and to get nods of approval because it sounds so delightfully tolerant. But it’s quite another to be a philosopher staking your entire career and reputation on it and then, beyond that, trying to find a way to justify where exactly we should draw the lines between nature and culture. What is it about human experience that’s determined by the intrinsic structure of the universe, nature; and what can we say is a cultural construction? What criteria do we even use to determine that?

See, over the years it’s been hard enough for a philosopher to make a case for even one side of this, let alone both sides for different reasons. But, that said, the philosopher we’re going to talk about today tried to do just that. His name was Isaiah Berlin. And to understand how he tried to find a middle ground between nature and culture will take the rest of the next two episodes to explain. And I highly recommend sticking with his ideas for both episodes because, even more so than some other thinkers we’ve discussed in this series, he had some hauntingly relevant insights about the way we treat each other in the recent political landscape. And, like any nuanced idea, these insights require a bit of setup because they build off his other ideas that I just couldn’t get to them until episode two.

But, anyway, Isaiah Berlin began his career as an academic philosopher, then transformed into more of a historian of ideas, and then finished out his career making contributions to 20th-century political philosophy that ended up changing the world. And one of these subject matters within 20th-century political philosophy that needs some serious reevaluation to Berlin was the typical way that philosophers casually throw around the concept of freedom or liberty without ever really clearly defining what it is they’re even talking about.

Berlin would say that practically every moral philosopher that’s ever produced anything of significance in Western philosophy has talked about freedom in these glowing terms as though it’s some sort of universal good and an unquestionably valuable thing that we should strive to have as much of as possible. They’ve talked about freedom in this way and, yet, no one has seriously tried to get to the bottom of what really is meant when philosophers talk about this stuff. We just assume we know what they mean when they say “freedom,” at a certain level. But, in reality, Berlin would say, when you actually look at the history of ideas, there are over 200 different definitions of freedom that have been laid out by thinkers over the years. Maybe it’s time we consolidate these into an understanding of freedom that deals with what’s common among all these individual takes.

When Isaiah Berlin sets out to describe his concepts of negative and positive freedom, he’s not looking to provide the end-all-be-all definition of freedom. He’s trying to simplify thousands of years of philosophical discourse about freedom into something that’s a little bit more manageable and useful to us.

Now, these thinkers throughout history and all of their 200-plus definitions have described 2 very distinct types of freedom. Berlin calls these, once again, “negative freedom” and “positive freedom.” And the most basic, short-hand way that these concepts are sometimes described is to say that “negative freedom” is freedom from, and “positive freedom” is freedom to. It should be said, this is without a doubt an oversimplification of both concepts. But thinking about it as “freedom from” and “freedom to” can be useful when it comes to remembering the actual line in the sand Isaiah Berlin was trying to draw between these two types of freedom. “Negative freedom” or “negative liberty” is, simply put, freedom from interference by outside entities, whether that’s the government, whether that’s a hateful group, whether that’s a bully at school. “Negative liberty” is described by Berlin as, “simply the area within which a man can act unobstructed by others.” When philosophers over the years have talked about freedom, one common thread among them has been freedom from outside entities controlling aspects of a person’s life.

Now, “positive freedom,” on the other hand, was a bit more difficult to classify for Berlin because, while “negative freedom” can be seen as the possibilities that are open for you to explore -- freedom from obstruction by outside entities -- you still need the freedom to actually be able to act on any one of those options. “Positive freedom” is that freedom to. And the important distinction to make here is that it doesn’t just mean you have the opportunity to do something; true “positive freedom” means you have the ability to do it. For example, to Berlin, if you’re addicted to a substance or a behavior that prevents you from being able to function, then effectively it doesn’t really matter how many options are available to you within “negative freedom.” Your freedom to act on any one of them is nonexistent. And you could say the same thing about procrastination or a lack of motivation, chronic injury, disease. The point is, regardless of how many options we have at our disposal, sometimes we become slaves to our mental or physical shortcomings.

This is why in another part of his work Berlin offers a clarification of “positive freedom” and refers to it as a sort of “self-rule.” But what does it really mean to be autonomous like that or to “self-rule?” And to what end exactly are we supposed to be “self-ruling” towards? These questions and more instantly bothered Isaiah Berlin because he knew right away just how ambiguous the idea of “positive liberty” was and how, because of that fact, it could easily become coopted by governments narrowing the definition of freedom, trying to control people.

See, Berlin was worried about this because it was something he thought he had already seen play out historically. Jean-Jacques Rousseau had already defined freedom as a type of “self-rule.” But then he defined “self-rule” as adherence to the “general will,” or whatever was best for all the citizens. The significance of this is that it doesn’t matter what the individual citizen thinks they want because they’re often enslaved to their passions or mental shortcomings. True freedom and “self-rule,” to Rousseau, was to act in your own best interest. And it just so happens, your best interest is to act in accordance with what’s best for everyone because, after all, you are just one member of a society that needs everyone else’s cooperation.

So, based on this type of “positive freedom,” it really doesn’t matter if you think you want to take the week off and just watch TV all day. That’s not in your best interest. That’s not in the best interest of society. And, ultimately to Rousseau, you’re not “self-ruling” or free because you are enslaved to a lower version of yourself. But this leads to another question. Who or what decides what’s best for all the citizens? Well, in the time of Rousseau, we could use rationality and the political process to determine that; in later totalitarian societies, maybe a dictator.

And this is ultimately why Berlin thinks Rousseau is setting a dangerous precedent here. He’s promoting the idea that not only is there a single best way for a citizen to act that’s best for everyone but also that anything you want to do that runs contrary to this single standard that we’ve come up with really is just you not controlling your ability to “self-rule” vigilantly enough. So, as you can see, this is just one example of how “positive freedom” can become hijacked and used for the purpose of controlling people. And, to Berlin, it was particularly dangerous in the hands of thinkers from the Enlightenment. Reason being is that, like many other thinkers from this time, he thought the Enlightenment was characterized by an overall attitude of monolithic thinking that can lead to totalitarianism.

Berlin lays out three primary assumptions that thinkers from the Enlightenment brought to practically every theory they ever produced. When asking questions about human experience or the world we live in, the first assumption the thinkers of the Enlightenment made is that every question has a single correct answer that can be arrived at. We may have no idea what the answer even looks like. There are, of course, many different wrong answers thinkers may arrive at. But every question we can ask ultimately has a single correct answer.

The second assumption is that, when looking for that single correct answer, there is a clear methodology that we can use to be able to get to that answer. The question may be enormously difficult. Finding the answer to the question may take years. But, no matter how long it takes, we have a clear method we can use to get to that answer. During the Enlightenment this method was known as “reason.”

The third and final assumption that Enlightenment thinkers brought to bear was that, when we use this method to arrive at these single answers that we’ve come up with, that these answers will inevitably fit into a neat, cohesive picture of the universe and will correspond well with all the other single correct answers we’ve arrived at so far. Berlin says that these thinkers came to work every day with the assumption that these answers would give us the “solution to the cosmic jigsaw puzzle.”

So these three Enlightenment assumptions -- that there’s a single answer to every question, that there’s a clear method to get to those answers, and that those answers will all fit together into a neat, cohesive worldview -- Berlin thought that all three of these things were totally false. And he thought that people assuming they were true was emblematic of the pro-science, pro-mathematics attitude that dominated Enlightenment thought because these assumptions, if you think about it, are exactly the way it works in things like math and science. When you’re a mathematician and somebody gives you a difficult problem to solve that’s within the realm of known mathematics, you can proceed with the same level of confidence about these three assumptions as these Enlightenment thinkers. There is a single correct answer to this math problem. This problem may take you years to solve but, rest assured, there is a clear method you can use that you know is getting you closer and closer to solving that problem. When you finally arrive at the solution, you can feel confident that this answer is going to be consistent with answers from other mathematicians.

But Isaiah Berlin’s going to say that philosophy is different. Not only do we not know if there is a single correct answer to the questions that are asked, we don’t even know the proper methodology to use to arrive at that correct answer if there was one. Not to mention, once we arrive at an answer, there’s no guarantee it’s going to fit together well with all the other answers like a cosmic jigsaw puzzle. Finding answers to the questions that philosophers ask, specifically the questions of moral and political philosophy like we’ve been talking about on this show for a while, is a much different process than solving a math problem.

Political philosophy, to Isaiah Berlin, was a type of moral philosophy applied to the public realm. This was the part of society where your answers to these questions about human values would actually go on to affect large groups of people. The problem with the Enlightenment was that so many philosophers thought they could use rationality to arrive at a single correct answer to these questions of moral and political philosophy. See, to Berlin, because these specific types of questions have to take into account the complexity of the experience of billions of individuals, the absolute best answers philosophers can ever come up with are what he calls “blurry.” They’re layered, multifaceted. They overlap in weird places; they conflict with each other. But the thinkers of the Enlightenment believed they could solve these questions like math problems.

Berlin writes about this monolithic attitude of many Enlightenment thinkers here:

“Despite profound differences of outlook, there was a wide area of agreement about fundamental points, the reality of natural law, of eternal principles by following which alone men could become wise, happy, virtuous, and free. Thinkers might differ about what these laws were or how to discover them or who were qualified to expound them. That these laws were real and could be known, whether with certainty or only probability, remained the central dogma of the entire Enlightenment.”

This dogma of the Enlightenment, and previously a dogma of much of the philosophical and scientific thinking that came before the Enlightenment, Berlin sometimes refers to it as “monism.” The reference there being to the type of thinking of people like the pre-Socratics who sometimes believed in everything being reducible to a single substance, monism. But the reference to monism is actually making a much larger claim here because, so often within the history of thought when talking about moral or political philosophy, thinkers will try to find some sort of ultimate virtue that all other virtues ultimately rely on.

Take the virtue of temperance, for example. We’ll call it general abstinence from things that are bad for you. The move that’s sometimes done by thinkers throughout history is that -- yes, you can name a bunch of different virtues that philosophers have talked about, dozens of them, but couldn’t someone make a case that another virtue, like patience, is really just temperance? It’s really just abstinence from something that’s bad for you in a particular, isolated setting. Courage is a virtue. Could that be just another specific set of circumstances where you’re exercising a slightly different type of temperance? Justice, wisdom, you name it. See, if you wanted badly enough to make a case that there was a hierarchy of values that all lesser virtues fall out of, you could do it. This type of “moral monism,” if we want to call it that, has been undeniably present in the work of earlier thinkers trying to make sense of reality.

Now, even these two things might be enough for us to take a closer look at monism throughout history but, it just so happens, Berlin is making an even bigger claim here. Think of how this monism applies to that dogma of the Enlightenment within moral or political philosophy that he referenced. The idea that rationality -- that if only we think about things clearly and distinctly enough, we can come up with a single correct answer for how to live as human beings, and that answer is going to fit perfectly into a single cohesive worldview, completing the cosmic jigsaw puzzle -- this is just another example of this monism that’s existed all throughout the history of thought. And it is monolithic; it’s overly ambitious, given what we know about human existence, and ultimately leads to the totalitarianism of the political landscape in the early 20th century. Because if you can believe that rationality will provide us with scientific-like certainty or probability when answering questions about what it's like to live for people with numbers in the billions, then you end up with things like Marxism. You end up with National Socialism. You end up with late-stage capitalism. This attempt to use reason to arrive at something that’s supposed to work well for everyone in the world is an outdated concept.

So, what happens is, Berlin realizes this and then transforms into more of a historian of ideas. He wants to go back and figure out whether there were any thinkers during the beginning of the Enlightenment that saw something like this coming. What he comes across is a group of thinkers that are often referred to as the Counter-Enlightenment. And, simply put, Isaiah Berlin thinks this group of thinkers were some of the most underrated thinkers in the history of the world.

See, when the Enlightenment started to get into full swing and there were these dramatic changes in the way that people were thinking about stuff, what it was to live your life as a human being was also undergoing some pretty dramatic changes. For example, during the Enlightenment there was a new level of enthusiasm towards framing the world in terms of universals, meaning there is a real effort by thinkers of the time to use reason to arrive at conclusions that give us universal answers to things that can be applied generally: a universal view of the way that things are, to use reason to arrive at things like an understanding of human nature across the board, a common humanity that exists regardless of culture. But that’s not all. At the time, there was so much optimism towards reason and science and all the good it was doing, people were super excited to try to apply it to moral and political philosophy. As Berlin puts it, they wanted to arrive at a “scientistic” approach to things like a universal good or a universal best way that society should be structured.

During this same time period, people started thinking of themselves much more in terms of being an individual rather than as part of the community that they’re just one aspect of, this focus on the individual being one of the most classic examples of Enlightenment thought. The Enlightenment also used reason to analyze the efficiency of our economic systems, giving rise to things like the Industrial Revolution and with it the real possibility that much of your life as a human being could be spent working in a factory. This was a new type of modern existence that people would have to come to terms with.

So the thinkers of the Counter-Enlightenment represent the initial opposition to all these new ways of looking at the world and human life. They were the thinkers that looked at all these dramatic changes that were going on and thought, no matter how excited and optimistic thinkers are about this brave new world we’re about to create with reason, maybe these changes are going to lead to some real problems down the road. So it’s no wonder why Isaiah Berlin -- living 200 years in the future, the thinkers of his time looking around them trying to solve the problems they think are largely related to Enlightenment thought -- no wonder why he would see the Counter-Enlightenment as a potential source of real foresight and wisdom. When the Enlightenment focused on universals and an eternal understanding of things, the Counter-Enlightenment called for a focus on particular examples and the historical or cultural influence on our understanding of things. When the Enlightenment focused on the individual, the Counter-Enlightenment focused on community and our identities as members of a tribe. When the Enlightenment produces the possibility of modern factory life, there’s a Counter-Enlightenment revival of romanticism and a call for us to return to an earlier time when human life was more connected to nature.

So Isaiah Berlin, living in the middle of the 20th century, looks around him and sees totalitarianism in mass claiming to have a universal understanding of human nature or how to structure a society. He sees people viewing themselves as total individuals, completely alienated from people around them, starving for a sense of community. He sees the reality of modern work and how only the most privileged can ever go outside and try to connect with the natural world around them. Most of all though, he sees within the politics of his time the ever-presence of this moral monism that was so popular in our thinking for 2,500 years -- the idea that, when it comes to my moral or political views, there is one single answer to be arrived at, that I’ve discovered that right answer, and that my political views deeply inform a single cohesive worldview that I have that is correct.

The thinkers of the Counter-Enlightenment represent to Berlin an incredible missed opportunity. We were in such a state of delirium thinking about how great science and reason were that we ignored one of the biggest breakthroughs in the history of human thought, the call by these thinkers of the Counter-Enlightenment for us to move away from monism and towards what Isaiah Berlin called “pluralism.”

There’s a famous essay by Isaiah Berlin titled “The Hedgehog and the Fox.” Now, in this essay he provides a sort of spirit animal for these two very different kinds of thinking. The classic line from the essay is that the hedgehog sees one big thing while the fox sees many things: the hedgehog obviously representing the thinking of a typical monist, the fox representing the approach of a pluralist. To Isaiah Berlin, the hedgehog, or the monist, is operating from a very limited vantage point where they can really only see in one single direction, and they’re assuming that’s all there is. They think about understanding the world always in relation to how it fits into some sort of overarching structure, seemingly just for the sake of having a cohesive worldview which they assume is possible.

So what happens whenever you do this is that the value of anything in the world becomes its position within that organizing structure and how it relates to everything else. Quick example to illustrate this. Let’s say you wanted to come up with one of these systems of monism. And, from your limited vantage point, it seems clear to you that the government’s out to get you and is constantly trying to get more and more control and eventually turn you into a slave. Well, from that single limited vantage point, it’s not crazy to think that the paramount virtue you would want to strive for is freedom. You might want as small of a government as possible. You may be in favor of sacrificing a pretty large amount of security for the sake of freedom. In other words, the value that freedom and security both have in that particular, cohesive, singular worldview was determined by their position within that overarching structure, that single historical narrative that gives value to everything the hedgehog sees.

But the fox, on the other hand, doesn’t look at the world in the same way as the hedgehog. Berlin says the fox understands that the range and complexity of everyone’s human experience is so massive -- the way different languages orient people with the world, the way our different personalities orient us, the different preferences, feelings, experiences -- what it is to be a human being is far too complex to ever have a single spokesperson.

Now, your first question here may be, “Well, why doesn’t that just make the fox, or the pluralist, a covert relativist, I mean, if you’re just citing everyone’s individual preferences about things as what gives their views value?” So we’re going to talk a lot more next episode about why Berlin is not a relativist. Remember, he ultimately wants to find a middle ground between nature and culture. But, to the initial charge that the pluralist is actually just a relativist, Isaiah Berlin might reply with the famous quote from his work, “I prefer coffee; you prefer champaign. We have different tastes. There’s nothing more to be said. That is relativism. But Herder’s view and Vico’s,” two thinkers of the Counter-Enlightenment, “is not that. It is what I should describe as pluralism, that is the conception that there are many different ends that men may seek and still be fully rational.”

Two different people using the exact same process of rationality could arrive at very different conclusions about moral or political values simply because of the complexity of human experience. And, here’s the kicker that will make this have such an impact on political thought, both of those conclusions are intelligible and rational. There’s no ultimate organizing principle. There’s no logical conclusion we’re going to arrive at. There’s no mathematical or scientific answer to questions about values. There’s only human rationality and the vast array of experiences and tools that we have to pull from that will determine these “blurry answers” we’re capable of coming up with. Well, that and, to Berlin, everything that’s common among all human beings regardless of culture.

But that, I would say, is for next episode and, along with it, the answers to so many other questions. How does a pluralist ever determine which values should matter? How should we behave in the political realm if all this is true? What would Isaiah Berlin say to someone like Carl Schmitt? Seriously, is Berlin just a relativist?

Check out episode two to find out. Thank you for listening. I’ll talk to you next time.