Ramin Jahanbegloo - Conversations with Isaiah Berlin

Men who desire wisdom must be learners of very many things, said Heraclitus. Isaiah Berlin was a man of wisdom and a learner and teacher of very many things. All his life he championed pluralistic political wisdomthe fundamental, radical insight that human values are multiple, cannot be reduced to a single currency, and sometimes clash in perplexing and tragic ways. This made him a thinker of times of crisis. He emulated and developed Aristotles phronesispractical wisdomand Kants teaching that human beings are ends in themselves and should never be treated as mere means, least of all by paternalist despots. He battled against the incoherence of utopian thinking, the pitilessness of revolutionary programmes, and the delusory hopes of eschatology .

We are living in very interesting and also very challenging times. These are times which call more than ever for clear and realistic thinking. These are times which make demands on our political judgement and our sense of civic responsibility . Berlin remains an acutely relevant thinker today for many reasons, but above all because he rejects philosophical and political ideologies which affirm that there is only one form of the best life, one form of liberty, and one kind of individuality. In principle and practice, Berlin suggested, the pursuit of a unique and exclusive ideal is morally treacherous . In principle, it is dangerous because it denies that even the best ways of individual and social life entail the sacrifice of some moral values. In practice, the greatest political injustices have been perpetrated under the banner of a single Great Good: the only path to salvation; the final solution; a classless society; the preservation of the nation; and more recently the globalization and democratization of the world. In addition, the means that claim justification in the name of an ultimate end, even if the end itself is not illusory, are themselves treacherous. Inquisitions, holocausts, class purges and cultural revolutionssome of the greatest evils ever perpetrated by human beingshave flown the banner of the pursuit of the Greatest Good.

If we accept that a completely harmonious society is beyond our reach, Berlins critique of the pursuit of the ideal still leaves open the possibility that we should strive to create a society without massacres, murders, pogroms and, above all, genocides. Berlin thoroughly endorses such an aim, but argues that the best we can hope for in our world is a loose amalgam of non-ideal societies that are both decent and within human reach. It may be that decency is linked to a measure of democracy, but the problem with many members of democratic societies is that they take democracy as a given and not as a task. For Berlin, democracy is a process. Not only does Berlin emphasize the human capacity , displayed throughout history, for self-creation and making choices, but he insists on the necessity of a precarious equilibrium that will prevent the occurrence of desperate situations, of intolerable choices. His appreciation of moral complexity and his awareness of the inner dimension of human experience enables him to arrive at an account of politics that values and promotes freedom of choice, the forging of ones own identity, and the celebration of a diversity of values.

To understand history is to understand the open process of human self-creation . History for Berlin, as for Vico, is a perpetually changing process with no fixed and final goals.

But does this mean that for Berlin there is no such thing as progress? We can say that for Berlin, as for Kant, humanity does make a kind of moral progress, mainly because our knowledge of things and our judgement of events are subject to modification in the light of experience. But Berlin disconnects his idea of pluralism from a nave faith in moral advance. We have to remember that he is an anti-perfectionist liberal, so that for him there is no such thing as a Grand Design or a Promised Land. Liberal political ideals will have a more solid footing and embody a truer sense of reality if they draw their inspiration from a pluralistic conception of human experience. The totalitarian experiments of the twentieth century show us how bloody universalistic dreams can be.

Maybe this is why Berlin is more fascinated by personalities than by systems of thought or political systems. In his brilliant masterpiece KarlMarx:HisLifeandEnvironment he is highly sensitive to the complexity of Marxs personality. In much the same way, his studies of RussianThinkers and his acute painting of the characters of PersonalImpressions are driven by a careful search for, and an empathetic attention to, the circumstances in which individuals lived and found themselves. He refuses to reduce all forms of experience to one generalized abstract coin, but this is not a counsel of despair: on the contrary, he shows us that members of one culture can through empathy understand the forms of life of another culture or society. Human history is unpredictable because human agents are complex and idiosyncratic. But Berlin constantly stresses throughout his writings that, though human values are incompatible and incommensurable and embodied in specific forms of life in specific cultures, they must however possess some generically human character to be considered as human; and this shared substrate is the route to mutual understanding.

This is the key to Berlins objective pluralism, which distinguishes it from any kind of relativism. Through his encounters with the thinkers of the Counter-Enlightenment he succeeds in distinguishing pluralism from relativism. To be a pluralist is to acknowledge that there is a wide range of goods and lives that are genuinely valuable, whereas for a relativist anything goes and all standards are subjective and shifting. According to Berlin, the world we encounter in everyday life is one in which we are faced with choices between equally ultimate ends. There can be no realistic understanding of the moral world without the idea of value pluralism, because good ends and admirable ways of life can conflict with each other. Conflict is constitutive of moral life. Berlins liberalism is based, one might say, on the idea of conflictual consensusa belief in the incommensurability of equally valid ideals and truths. There can be no necessary harmony of values in a rational universe, and history does not tend towards a final goal. Political philosophy is the study of a world where ends collide.