Berlin, Isiah - The Pursuit of the Ideal

11/13/2009

Chapter from The Crooked Timber of Humanity, Henry Hardy ed., Alfred Knoph pub, 1991

This chapter gives an account of author's (autobiographical) progression from believing in one true ideal for the human condition to believing in a relativistic plurality of objective values. Author wants to avoid isolationist or absolute relativism, where the two parties can't come to understand each other. Author believes that with imagination and creativity we can understand the objective ends of other cultures, civilizations and people. (pg11) Author also understands 'objective values' to be things that humans pursue 'for their own sakes' (pg11).

The chapter is more story-oriented than full of argumentation: it starts with the reading of the great Russian writers, specifically Tolstoy, who were engaged in the struggle to find objective values and a way of living that supported them. This jibed well with the Greeks, at least Plato, and also with Hegel and Marx. The idea was that history was a set of progressive stages, some errors, but ultimately leading to a set of practices and principles that, if followed, would result in a utopian-type society. (II-IV, pg2-7)

Author began to change his mind about the unity of one ideal as the objective value for mankind when he started Machiavelli. It wasn't the political experience that started to crack this idealistic facade-- it was the observation that the Christian virtues were, inherently, at odds with the Roman ones. Further exploring the possibility of incompatible objective values, author took up Giambattista Vico's La Scienza Nuova, which discussed the various irreconcilable cultural ideals that have existed in the course of human history. (pg8-9) Author came to believe that there is no one ascendant objective value, but a pluralistic set of them, some mutually exclusive. And some are less acceptable than others-- e.g. ritualistic murder, slavery, torture for pleasure. (pg18)

The best (only?) way to get into an acceptable level of civilization is to pick a set of priorities that are mostly agreeable-- like reducing poverty, premature death, disease, suffering-- and use skill and wisdom to create a society that accomplishes them. But author also continually reminds that even these goals have unintended consequences, which will create additional problems that require further work-- utopia is unattainable. Author also states that the 'perfect whole, the ultimate solution, in which all good things coexist... [is] conceptually incoherent' (pg13) This is because there is a multitude of valid objective values and they 'collide'.