Pergamon History of European Ideas, Vol. 22, No. 5/6, pp. 369 383, 1996

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THE B U R D E N S OF BERLIN'S M O D E R N I T Y l

JONNY STEINBERG

Balliol College, University of Oxford, Oxford OX1 3BJ, U.K.

For Plato, as for Aristotle, valuable human ends are not only finite and numerable in advance, not only compatible with each other, but implied and overdetermined by one another. To scrutinise and to understand anything which is valuable is thus to illuminate a road to perfection. The human being in nature is, as it were, furnished with a paradigmatic moral architecture and content, and his or her life project is that of discovering and living the plenitude of which he or she is a deposit. And since we are, by nature, social beings, what is true for the virtuous individual is implicated inexorably in what is true for the virtuous association. Once this thesis is taken as axiomatic, the tasks of moral and political thought are laid out in advance; whether performed in the rarefied realm of a timeless, deductive logic, upon the practical, historical terrain of social practice, or in the religious world of revelation, they consist in deciphering the principles and imagining the institutions which are to undergird the perfect society, perfect in that it is the site of the consummation of all human goods and ideals.

The extent to which this thesis has animated Western thought ever since is difficult to overestimate. Wherever human endeavour is conceived as participating in a single and universal history, and wherever this history is understood as a process subjectable to a purposeful, meleoristic advance, the idea of the compatibility of human values is architectonic. Thus it is not just the Christian eschatologies of pre- and early-modern Europe which traded in the idea of value-compatibility. Modern philosophy, with its claims to adjudicate between rival moralities by harnessing the tools of secular reason, must also confess its allegiance to the idea of moral perfection, as must any project in the modern world which aims to defend what it construes as the paradigmatic principles of economic development, or of political governance.

If this is the case, Isaiah's Berlin's intervention into political philosophy is both eccentric and important. The master-thesis which animates Berlin's work is, as John Gray has cogently argued, the thesis of value-pluralism. And Gray is equally correct when he describes Berlin's value-pluralism as 'an idea of great subversive force'. 2 For if Western culture has taken as axiomatic the compatibility of human values, Berlin's project has been to tear this conception apart. At the heart of his thought is the idea that, while there exist objective human values, discernible by human reason, such values are necessarily diverse, and often uncombinable. Moreover, where they are not combinable, they are also sometimes incommensurable; they are not open to rational comparison. Two crucial corollaries, both highly counter-intuitive

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for the mainstream of Western political thought, follow. First, the idea of moral perfect ion--and with it, the idea of a universal and meleoristic progression of humanity to a higher state--is not simply unachievable, but incoherent. If goods are both uncombinable and incommensurable, then every moral order will carry the burden of tragedy, for the flowering of some goods will entail the destruction of others. Moreover, no moral order can ground itself upon a foundation of unassailable first principles. Its contours will instead emerge from a fragile and precarious process of negotiation, fragile because there is no superior vantage point, no place of final adjudication, which can mediate between the claims of rival ideals. If there is any single principle which animates the Berlinian moral order, it consists in the idea that the space in which political agents formulate their decisions must be left open, for such decisions are radically unprescribable. The following description of Montesquieu's political sensibility, is, in fact, the gravamen of Berlin's own intervention into political thought:

He was one of the few thinkers of his age who grasped ... that the ends pursued by men are many and various and often incompatible with one another, that this leads to unavoidable collisions between civilisations, to differences between the ideals of the same community at different times, and of different communities at the same time, and to conflicts within communities, classes, groups and within individual consciousness. Furthermore, he perceived that ... no single moral system, let alone a single moral or political goal, could provide the universal solution to all human problems at all times ... Only those societies are truly free which are in a state of "agitation", unstable equilibrium; whose members are free to pursue--choose between--a variety of ends or goals. A state might itself be free, that is, independent of other states, but if it becomes frozen and suppresses opinion in the name of no matter how sacred a principle, its citizens are not free but enslaved. 3

My aim in this paper is not to evaluate the currency of Berlin's thesis of value-pluralism. Instead, and for the sake of the investigation I have in mind, I take the thesis as true, as a universal, epistemic insight into the nature of human morality. My question is this: if value-pluralism is true, under what conditions are its insights available to political practice? If the building of civilized political institutions is nourished by value-pluralism's tragic and anti-perfectionist sensibility, what is the relationship between belief and action on the one hand, and knowledge on the other? I raise this question because it appears to me to be the site of some unease on Berlin's part. At his most polemical and propagandizing moments, he appears to suggest that knowing the currency of value-pluralism is, plainly and simply, a burden of being human, that those who fail to acknowledge the integrity of projects and ideals which conflict with their own, simply because they do so conflict, ought to be dismissed as moral idiots. Yet as a historian of ideas, Berlin has a more cautious, and indeed, a more haunted story to tell. Here, if there is any canonical sense to the term 'being human' , it consists in varying states of epistemic blindness; political imagination operates to dissemble the co-ordinates of moral knowledge. In this scenario, knowledge's influence on human practices is frail and

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haphazard. History is burdened by successive stories of cruelty, committed under the recurring influence of fantasies of perfection. My task in this paper is to explore this tension between Berlin the confident moral advocate, and Berlin the haunted historian.

Value-pluralism is, in the first instance, a statement of humanist universal knowledge. The value-pluralist is one who, as it were, registers the presence of a common human fund on a terrain of radical difference. For the key to his or her knowledge resides in the capacity to comprehend as human, canons of morality, custom and practice, with which s/he does not identify. On what grounds, for Berlin, are we able to affirm the existence of this loosely textured, family of conflicting human values? Berlin's answer to this question consists in a formulation which is at once very simple and curiously tautological. The ground he chooses to speak from is perhaps a little awkwardly described as that of an 'empiricist intuitionism': we are able to recognise others-- those who are inscribed in a matrix of values and practices which are different from ours- -as human, simply by virtue of carrying on with our own practices, simply by virtue of doing what human beings distinctively do. Let us introduce this line of reasoning with the following exchange between Ramin Jahanbegloo and Berlin:

R.J . . . . [W]hat are the grounds for preferring democracy to any other kind of regime?

1.B. Because it is based on belief in human rights.

R.J. Well, that's universal.

I.B. Of course; but it isn't based on rational insights. If you ask why we believe in human rights, I can say because it is the only decent, even tolerable way human beings can live with each other, and if you ask what is "decent", I can say that is the only kind of life which we think that human beings should follow, if they are not to destroy each other ... Don't ask me what I mean by decent. By decent I mean decent--we all know what it i s . 4

I will return later to Berlin's identification of decency with democracy. For the moment, let me deal only with decency--with the idea that we know human beings possess universal rights, simply because we know . . . simply because we too are human.

This tautological reasoning is ultimately traceable to Berlin's reading of Giambattista Vico, and in particular, to the latter's idea of fantasia. On its most banal reading, fantasia simply denotes the idea of sympathetic imagination or empathy, the act of placing oneself in the shoes of those who live in and by distant historical matrices, those who ask questions of the universe which are alien to, and perhaps incommensurable with one's own questions. But the profound logic of fantasia invokes a good deal more than

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the idea of empathy. Its interest lies in the enormous breadth of the conceptual work Berlin wants it to do: for it is the organising principle of Berlin's universal anthropology, the centrepiece of his conception of human activity as an underdetermined field of self-creation:

[Vico's] boldest contribution, the concept of "philology", anthropological historicism, the notion that there can be a science of mind which is the history of its development, the realization that ideas evolve, that knowledge is not a static network of eternal, universal, clear truths, either Platonic of Cartesian but a social process, that this process is traceable through (indeed, is in a sense identical with) the evolution of symbols--words, gestures, pictures and their altering patterns, functions, structures and uses--this--transforming vision [is] one of the greatest discoveries in the history of thoughts. 5

The most obvious claim in this quotation is surely embodied in its profound historicism: the idea that social reality emerges by virtue of the deposits left by parochial imaginations, indeed, in the network of symbolic forms with which these imaginations are inseparable. But if this is the most obvious claim here, there is another, buried beneath it, which is no less striking. It consists in the remarkable idea that there is an intimate relationship between knowledge and action, a relationship which issues in a universal human epistemology: a science of mind which is the history of its development--knowledge as a social process which is not only traceable through but identical with the evolution of symbols. Berlin's imagination is captured profoundly by Vico's idea of 'insider knowledge': the idea that we maintain a special epistemic relationship with what we have created, that to partake in human action is to claim an intimate, sensual knowledge of the human species, that our actions (our encompassing both our own and generically human activities) are therefore paradigmatically transparent to ourselves. It is this last formulation--the idea that the history of human action is transparent to us, as insiders, which demands our closest scrutiny. Berlin is quite explicit here: 'memory, not analogy, seems closer to the required faculty of imaginative understanding . . . whereby we reconstruct the human past'. 6 And again, he claims that each human deposit on the field of history is 'a world in its own, yet having enough in common with its successors, with whom it forms a continuous line of recognisably human experience, not to be unintelligible to their inhabitants'.

Berlin's claims here resonate across the entire field of modern philosophy. If Descartes prised open a haunting space between the subject and object of knowledge, Berlin has endeavoured to do no less than close it. For if 'objectivity' consists in the myriad deposits left by former subjectivities, then our very status as object-makers furnishes us with an intimate view of reality from the inside. To partake in the making of the particular and the parochial, is to open a window onto the universal. Berlin has essentially short-circuited the vexing question of the relation between action and knowledge, by claiming something of an inexorable relationship between them. And in so doing, he inevitably aligns himself with a startling proposition. If to be human is know, then not to know is an aberration, or at very least, a

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deviation from the canonically human adventure. And Berlin does indeed follow his argument to its logical conclusion, at least twice, as far as I am aware. In the first instance, he is paraphrasing Vico, in the second he is speaking for himself. Vico's 'ultimate claim to immortality', he argues, consists in his insight according to which man can understand himself because, and in the process of, understanding his past because he is able to reconstruct imaginatively . . . what he did and what he suffered, his hopes, wishes, fears, efforts, his acts and his works, both his own and those of his fellows. With their experience his own is interwoven, his own and his (and their) ancestors', whose monuments, customs, laws, but above all words, still speak to him; indeed, i f they did not, and he understood them, he would not understand his fellows" or his own symbols, he would not be able to communicate or think or conceive purposes, to form societies or to become fully human, v

Now, this is precisely the conclusion Berlin advances in his analysis of modem fascism. The fascist canon has lost sight of reality insofar as its practitioners reject the idea of a common horizon of human values. And in embarking upon this journey of epistemological misadventure, he avers, they no longer have any purchase on the claim to be human beings: ' . . . we find that we cannot argue with such people. Not so much because we are horrified as because we think them in some way inhuman--we call them moral idiots'. 8 My argument here is that this last statement is more than a rhetorical claim, or a strategic intervention. It has roots in the universal anthropology to which Berlin claims allegiance.

But this is not all that Berlin has to say on the subject of humanity and its self-knowledge. In what follows, I argue that the relation between action and knowledge I have outlined above--which reaches its apotheosis in the idea that an intrinsic, tautological, auto-transparency is inscribed in the very nature of human conduct--sits uncomfortably with a family of very different claims which permeate the texture of Berlin's work. This 'family of claims', I argue, not only denies fantasia's privileged place. In so doing it recasts the status of value-pluralist morality in two fundamental senses. First, value-pluralist morality is now rendered intelligible by virtue of its inscription in a unique, and culturally bounded historical experience--that of 'moderni ty ' - -and its import extends no further than the boundaries of this experience. Second, and far more significantly, even within the rubric of 'modernity' , value-pluralist morality is haunted by philosophical and social fragility: it has lost the moorings which Berlin is so anxious to claim for it.

A final word before commencing with the argument. I put scare-quotes around the word 'modernity' because I wish to make clear that we are dealing with a moment in Berlin's thought which, however pervasive, is untheorised, and at times, demonstrably incoherent. Thus when I say 'Berlin's conception of modernity' I am talking really of a buried and choked set of propositions, choked in the sense that Berlin has refused to register their import. Why he has done so is of interest in itself, and I speculate on this matter in the conclusion of the paper.

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II

I said earlier that the idea o f insider knowledge, the idea that to be human is know, issues in a rather strange corollary: namely, that not to know is to somehow fall short o f being human. As Michael Ignat ieff has argued, this issues in an awkward di lemma for Berlin's philosophical an thropology:

The dilemma Berlin's analysis presents us with is this: either you maintain that fascists are human only too human, and you therefore absorb into your account of human nature some of the de Maistrean vision of human beings as innately and naturally violent; or you maintain that all human beings know what inhumanity consists in, in which case fascists cease to qualify as normal human beings. Berlin wants to maintain that all beings know what it is to be human, and that fascists were human only too human. It is not clear how he can. 9

I f I am correct , if Berlin's designat ion o f certain politics, sensibilities and projects as ' i n h u m a n ' is g rounded in his theoret ical p ropos i t ion that ' to be h u m a n is to know' , then the d i lemma Ignat ief f has registered is not conf ined to Berlin 's t rea tment o f fascism, but resonates across his entire oeuvre. For Berlin incessant ly- - indeed , at times master fu l ly- - te l l s us the very opposi te: tha t to be h u m a n is, consti tut ively and primordial ly, not to know, that if there is indeed a canonical genre o f h u m a n action, it consists in our invent ion o f imaginary narrat ives which are at once utopian, teleological and monistic:

The notion that history obeys laws, whether natural or supernatural, that every event of a human life is an element in a necessary pattern, has deep metaphysical origins .. . In the first place, there is the teleological outlook whose roots reach back to the beginnings of human thought. It occurs in many versions, but what is common to them all is the belief that men, and all living creatures, and perhaps inanimate things as well, not merely are as they are, but have functions and pursue purposes. These purposes are either imposed upon them by a creator who has made every person and thing to serve each a specific goal; or else these purposes are not, indeed, imposed by a creator but are, as it were, internal to their possessors, so that every entity has a 'nature' and pursues a specific goal which is 'natural' to it, and the measure of its perfection consists in the degree to which it fulfills it. l°

And again, but this time more poignantly:

One of the deepest of human desires is to find a unitary pattern in which the whole of experience, past, present and future, actual, possible and unfulfilled, is symmetrically ordered. It is often expressed by saying that once upon a time them was a harmonious unity--"the unmediated whole of feeling and thought", the unity of the knower and the known, of "the outer and the inner", of subject and object, form and matter, self and not-self, that this was somehow broken; and that the whole of human experience has consisted in an endless effort to reassemble the fragments, to restore the unity, and so escape or "transcend" categories--ways of thinking--which split and isolate and "kill" the living reality, and "dirempt" us from it. We.are told of an endless quest to find an answer to the puzzle, return to the seamless whole, to the paradise whence we were expelled.., l I

The Burden of Berlin's Modernity 375

Berlin is careful to leave these remarks in a soft, fluid, somewhat literary register: he has no desire to hone them into a systematic reflection on the nature of human identity, nor to clothe them in hard, universal claims. Yet one cannot but notice that the sensibility which nourishes these statements sits uncomfortably with the 'fantasian universe': with the idea that the conditions of epistemic insight are ineluctably inscribed in the nature of human action. Indeed, the statements cited above bear far closer affinity to a family of contemporary theoretical interventions inspired by the work of Jacques Lacan: a somewhat tragi-comic conception of human action as a tortuous, impossible quest to recover an imaginary, sublime condition of pre- linguistic 'wholeness', a paradise from which we were expelled. The reference to Lacan is perhaps a little forced and fanciful, but the contrast to fantasia is certainly not. The citations above invoke the idea of human action as an arena steeped in metaphysical fantasy, a fantasy itself generated by 'one of the deepest human desires', and which sets human action on an imaginary course to an impossible utopian terminus. What is beginning to emerge--at this point very vaguely, and indeed, inchoately--is the idea of a constitutive chasm between action and knowledge, the idea that the insights which Berlin would like to allot to fantasia in fact emerge--if they do at all--at a distance from and in direct opposition to action: that insight is not so much an adjunct to action as a subversive unpicking of its fabric.

Indeed, one of Berlin's distinctively brilliant moments as a historian of ideas, consists in his capacity to trace the irradiation of this simple, metaphysical narrative across diverse epochs and ostensibly incommensurable discourses, stretching from Plato, to 18th century rationalism, to modern obscurantism. The epistemological monism made explicit by modern empiricist philosophers, Berlin argues, 'is entailed no less firmly by the views of their theological and metaphysical predecessors against whom they have been engaged in long and uncompromising warfare'. Both camps, moreover, 'are in line with a central tradition in western thought which extends back at least as far as Plato'. 12 The respective projects of Schelling, Hegel, Comte, Spengler and Marx are all charged by Berlin as 'an attempt to make history do the work of theology or speculative metaphysics', as projects of 'secular messianism'. J3 In Berlin's gaze across the history of Occidental thought, we find a myriad of hypostatic, anthropomorphised beings, as the subject charged with authoring History-in-the-Singular is displaced from the figure of Augustine's God, to Voltaire's Reason, to Marx's History, to Comte's universal science, to Fichte's organic nation, to Blake's sovereign individual. Indeed, one is tempted to read Berlin's oeuvre as a catalogue of the resemblances of a single family, as a record of the various historical embodiments of a single, transcendent, omnipresent impulse which construes all events in the world as moments in a journey towards a utopian consummation.

If this is indeed the case, then Berlin's work as a historian of ideas marks an impasse in his work as a philosopher. For Berlin the philosopher, liberalism's universal import resides in its privileged relation to universal knowledge: knowledge of the constitutive place of agonistic value-pluralism

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in human affairs, hence knowledge of the incoherence of utopian thinking and of the chilling injustice inevitably inscribed in utopian projects. Moreover, human beings can be expected to bear and harness this knowledge, for the conditions of its appropriation are ineluctably inscribed in the very character of human action: without it, we 'would not be able to communicate or think or conceive purposes, to form societies or become fully human'. And yet Berlin the historian of ideas tells us incessantly--although always implicitly, often inchoately--that 'to become fully human', to be the bearer of a political imagination, is not to know. When Berlin the historian of ideas casts his gaze across history he sees--again and again--forms of life instituted by virtue of their fabrication of imaginary, utopian horizons. He speaks of polities animated by journeys to an impossible telos, journeys ipso facto peopled by hubristic beings, seduced by the metaphysical fantasies through which they understand the world, and therefore blind to the modest, tragic knowledge of value-pluralism implicit in the experience of fantasia. If Berlin's liberalism is indeed animated by a knowledge of value-pluralism which emerges from the logic of human action, we need to search for the locus of this emergence a good deal more carefully than Berlin himself suggests.

At times Berlin seems to imply that the primary antidote to metaphysical thinking consists simply in the availability of an empiricist sensibility: we need only watch reality, so to speak, and it will reveal to us the fundamental incoherences lodged at the heart of every genre of metaphysics. All metaphysics, he argues, are ipso facto grounded in undemonstrable, a priori assumptions, and such assumptions are in turn not compatible with empiricism, the latter defined as 'any doctrine founded on knowledge derived from what men are and seek'. 14 Berlin tells us that the idea of historical inevitability, for instance, 'is a profoundly unempirical attitude' and that it appears in the history of humankind 'always at moments of confusion and inner weakness'. ~5 Elsewhere he comments that Montesquieu, despite his claim to have discovered a comprehensive science of humankind, can do nothing of the kind, because he realises that the material will not allow of it ... 'Despite his ambitions, he is 'dimly aware of the fact that to attempt to marshal the data into some preestablished pattern, whether metaphysical or inductive, is, in fact, an excessively artificial procedure, repugnant to the nature of the topic . . . ' Ultimately, and behind his own back, Montesquieu's metaphysics is eclipsed by the fact that he is 'an empiricist, concerned with the minutae...'.16

But if this is the case, if illusion can be erased merely by watching reality soberly, then Berlin has simply restated the terms of the impasse which, I have argued, marks his intervention into political philosophy. For if political practice spawns illusion, and if illusion is erased by mere sobriety, then the arena of political practice is not a sober one! To restate the point less flippantly, Berlin's incessant argument about the simplicity of empiricism only goes to buttress what his history of ideas implicitly suggests: that the relationship between action and knowledge is not the internal, ineluctable relationship suggested by fantasia: that political agents' relation to their

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practice is paradigmatical ly opaque, and not t ransparent: that the simplicity and the self-evidence o f empiricist technique lives_ at some distance f rom the rubric o f political practice (as well as a great deal o f Western philosophy).

So, if Berlin's liberalism is grounded in political agents ' knowledge of value-plura l i sm-- in an internal relationship between action and knowledge - - we must look a good deal further than ' the simplicity o f empiricism' in order find the locus o f this knowledge.

III

In this regard, we are dealing with a curiously choked and reluctant momen t in Berlin's work. For it is clear that despite Berlin's insistence on the ineluctable availability o f the value-pluralist insight to political practice, much in his work suggests that this insight is a peculiarly modem phenomenon , 'an arena bounded by frontiers ' . Indeed, Berlin argues:

For more than two millennia people had believed that every genuine question must have one true answer and only one. After the romantics had done their work it began to be believed that some answers were not to be discovered, but created; that moral and political values are not found but madeJ 7

And if Berlin is certain that the not ion o f an underdetemined, inventive human world is distinctively modern, he is equally certain that concomi tan t idea o f objective value incommensurabi l i ty is also a modern understanding:

Sincerity was not, as far as I can tell, considered a virtue in the ancient world or in the Middle Ages .. . Truth alone mattered. I doubt if the idea of sincerity as a virtue is much earlier than the late seventeenth century. Sincerely held error was all the more dangerous and of no moral or spiritual v a l u e ~ t best to be pitied. So, too, variety as a positive value is a new idea. The old idea is that truth is one, error is many. To any real question, only one true answer can in principle be given, the other answers are necessarily false. The idea that there can be two sides to a question, that there may be two or more incompatible answers, any one of which could be accepted by honest, rational men--that is a very recent notion. The merit of a free society is that it allows of a great variety of conflicting opinions without the need for suppression--that is surely comparatively new in the WestJ 8

I f this is the case, if the recognit ion o f value-- incommensurabi l i ty , and, accordingly, the condit ions o f a liberal genesis, are singularly modern, one would expect Berlin to expend some energy in at tempting to delineate the peculiar contours o f the modern age. If, in other words, humani ty ' s most poignant insight into its own character is a historical outgrowth, one would expect Berlin to clothe his intervention in an archaeological substance. Yet Berlin's relation to his own historicism is surprisingly reticent: ' F o r you ' , asks Ramin Jahanbegloo, 'what are the main characteristics o f moderni ty? ' ' I don ' t think there are characteristics of moderni ty ' , Berlin replies. ' I don ' t know what that means. I don ' t know where it begins. Pre-modernity. Modern i ty and Pos t -moderni ty seem to me arbitrary concepts ' . ~9 At times

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Berlin expressly states his lack of interest in exploring the historical genesis of the value-pluralist idea: 'Where did Vico's central insights originate?' Berlin asks, ' . . . this . . . is less important than the discoveries themselves'. 2°

Yet if we are to interpret Berlin's intervention with any integrity, we must surely refuse to follow him in his reticent relation to his own historicism and instead confront the peculiar place this reticence occupies in his work. The remainder of this paper explores two questions. First, what indeed is the meaning of 'moderni ty ' in Berlin's work: more specifically, what is its relation to value-pluralism in the arena of moral epistemology, and to liberalism in the arena of political practice? Second, whence Berlin's reluctance to speak of ' the modern age' despite the centrality of this concept to his work? Let us begin with the first question.

As we might expect, Berlin's conception of the peculiarity of the modem age does not appear in his work directly: in its most distinctive and consistent appearances, it is refracted through his famous, speculative psychologies. Every thinker, without exception, whom Berlin designates as distinctively modern, is curiously disembodied: an agent severed or dislocated from the cultural universe which is his condition of existence, and for whom political and philosophical practice is thus a project to retrieve a lost, ephemeral substance. Here is Berlin speculating on Hamann ' s genius: ' I t may be that members of backward communities on the edges of a culture which is being radically transformed, who at once feel powerless to alter the current and are tied more deeply to the older culture that is being displaced, are peculiarly sensitive to such change . . . The type of household in which [Hamann] was brought up . . . . was being crushed out of existence by the reforms of Frederick and his genuinely enlightened administrators ' . 21 And on Joseph de Maistre: ' . . . all his life he felt towards France that admiration which is at times found among those who live on the outer rim or just beyond the border of a country to which they are attached by ties of blood or sentiment, and of which they cherish a lifelong romanticised vision'. 22 And, perhaps most suggestively, in relation to Disraeli and Marx:

It is a well-known psychological phenomenon that outsiders tend to idealise the land beyond the frontier on which their gaze is fixed. Those who are born in the solid security of a settled society and remain full members of it, and look upon it as their natural home, tend to have a stronger sense of social reality: to see public life in reasonably just perspective, without the need to escape into political fantasy or romantic invention. This tendency to idealisation is most frequently found among those who belong to minorities which are to some degree excluded from participation in the central life of their community. They are liable to develop either exaggerated resentment of, or contempt for, the dominant majority, or else over-intense admiration or indeed worship for it, or, at times, a combination of the two, which leads to unusual insights and--born of overwrought sensibilities--a neurotic distortion of the facts. 23

It is easy to mistake the object of Berlin's reflections here. He is not simply talking of a handful of aberrant personalities, nor is he invoking the conditions of individual genius. When Berlin talks of cultural erosion, displacement and alienation, his object is distinctly epochal. This is most

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apparent in his speculations on the rise of irrationalism in the 20th century, where he speaks of ' . . . the disparity in tempo and extent between technical development and social change. . , accompanied by social, political, and moral disasters which the general f ramework-- the patterns of behaviour, habits, outlook, language . . . ----could not sustain. The result was a loss of faith in existing political activities and ideals, and a desperate desire to live in a universe which, however dull and flat, was at any rate secure .against the repetition of such catastrophes'. 24

Thus far, all we have by way of a definition of 'modernity' is a collection of disparate and imprecise references to cultural displacement or disembodiment. We can perhaps sharpen the import of these references if we recall the constitutive place which the concept of 'culture' occupies in Berlin's philosophical anthropology. Human nature, for Berlin, consists in an underdetermined datum of inventiveness, the heterogeneous social deposits inscribed on the world are secreted by moral purposes and goals which human beings invent in the course of canonically human activity. For Berlin, these values and goals are generated collectively by the questions which cultural groupings ask of the universe. Following Vico's and Herder's historicism, as well as Hamann's expressive conception of language, Berlin believes that morals, purposes and goals are ineluctably inscribed in the textures of cultural inheritance: in the language, rituals and myths which constitute the fabric of historical communities, and that to be human is thus to be inscribed in a cultural inheritance.

If this is the case, then the association of modernity with cultural displacement, however frail and clumsy it may appear qua theory of modernity, is deeply poignant when viewed against Berlin's conceptual universe. For if to be human is to be inscribed in a cultural inheritance, then it seems that for Berlin, the modern age is closely associated with the threat of the disappearance, or unavailability of a basic ground upon which human activity is performed. If the institution of human reality is coterminous with the availability of a cultural field in which, and by virtue of which, human conduct is performed, then modernity presents a haunting wager; an eclipse of the fundamental markers of human identity.

Fanciful and dramatic as this thesis may seem, it makes a good deal of sense when viewed against Berlin's conception of modern irrationalism. For Berlin, irrationalism consists in two defining gestures. The first consists in the denial of the integrity of all forms of epistemological realism. The world external to the subject consists, not in an objective ensemble of cause-and- effect, but, in Sartre's phrase, in an 'impenetrable opacity . . . . indecipherable nonsense'. 25 And in the second gesture, this 'indecipherable nonsense' becomes the object of occasio: of unfettered human volition. Terence Ball captures a pedigree of this second gesture beautifully when he describes Berlin's favourite Romantic narrative, Karl Marx's consummation of history:

... [A]s men work to transform nature ... they begin, haltingly at first, and later in an almost torrential rush of humus invention and technological innovation, to dominate nature, to harness its powers for human ends. Nature ceases to be

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alien, it becomes 'humanised nature'. Nature 'in itself'.., ceases to exist and is replaced by a humanised nature existing 'for man'. Nature--and man himself-- become at last a human creation ... In Marx's view, 'the entire so-called history of the world is nothing but the creation of man through human labour, nothing but the emergence of nature for man, so he has the visible, irrefutable proof of his birth through himself, of the process of his creation. 26

In other words, irrationalism's first gesture reflects the terms of a crisis which Berlin seems to suggest marks the character of the modern age: namely the threat of an erasure of meaning, of the conditions of the world's intelligibility. And the second gesture--which, in Berlin's words, is a 'neurotic distortion . . . born of overwrought sensibility'--effaces the haunting threat of the first by virtue of a dramatic, grandiose hypostatisation of the very figure which the modem age has endangered: the human being qua inventive author.

Berlin is deeply moved by the irrationalist canon: his relation to it is one of haunted ambivalence, On the one hand, he is impressed with the historicist and philological insights to which it aligns itself, in particular, with the idea that a distinctively cultural process of invention is coterminous with the institution of human reality itself. But if this insight impresses Berlin, he is haunted by the work to which irrationalism puts it: the hypostatisation of cultural heritage, the notion that such a heritage is an organic God-like figure which tautologically wills itself into existence, and which requires no justification external to its own self-styled rubric. Such a political imagination, Berlin argues, inaugurates a politics of fearsome madness. The horizons which it pursues are available, not universally, to humanity, but to a particular heritage. And so, what was once construed as a common humanity is now bifurcated into a sacred group on the one hand and its nemesis on the other. The upshot, Berlin posits, is an attitude unprecedented in the history of the West, which 'allows men to look on many millions of their fellow men as not quite human, to slaughter them without a qualm of conscience, without the need to try to save them or warn them'. 27 So, if the politics of irrationalism is indeed a distinctively modem phenomenon, if it emerges from the threat of cultural erasure which the modem age brings in its wake, then modernity harbours the possibility of the unraveling of a civilization and the institution of a politics of terror.

Yet, intriguingly enough, if the idea of cultural dislocation is so closely tied to the birth of a politics of terror, its relation to the genesis of liberalism is equally close. Once again, this reading of Berlin emerges from an examination of his speculative ps2ichologies. If the irrationalists who fill the pages of Berlin's work- -Hamann , Maistre, Marx28--are all marked by their occupation of a curious space of cultural dislocation, so too are Berlin's heroes: Machiavelli, the first proto-liberal, who found himself stranded between the rubrics of two incommensurable cultural ideals--republican and Christ ian--and who thus became the first philosopher to delineate the terms of a groundtess decision: Herzen, who said of the Westerner/Slavophile divide which split the Russian intelligentsia, 'We, like Janus or the double-headed eagle, looked in opposite directions, while one heart beats in us all': 29 Moses Hess, who, for most of his life, could not reconcile the demands of a Jewish

The Burden of Berlin's Modernity 381

nationalism with those of a socialist internationalism: and finally, Montesquieu, whose defence of negative liberty resides in his 'singular gift for identifying [himself] imaginatively with a great variety of forms of life'. 3°

What unites the liberals found in the pages of Berlin's work is their common location in cultural and political arenas which are loosely textured and ambivalent: figures detached from a single, determinate matrix: stranded between incommensurable horizons, and thus authors of groundless decisions. In this sense, their place in the world mirrors that of their irrationalist peers--the Maistres and the Hamanns of Berlin's imagination. And yet, despite their similar predicament, irrationalists and liberals choose diametrically opposed courses of action. The former's action is essentially neurotic (Berlin deploys this word again and again): they attempt to repress or deny the haunting condition of undecidability by erasing its import and its ground: 'the nation' in fascist discourse and 'communism' in marxist discourse are essentially decisionless realms, deposited ineluctably in the very fabric of history. The liberal response, on the other hand, instead of effacing recognition of its groundless terrain, invents a politics based upon a sacrosanct, inviolable respect for radical choice itself.

Yet if we were to leave things here--presenting a world bifurcated between a neurotic, terroristic response to modernity on the one hand, and a brave, virtuous and liberal response to modernity on the other--we would be gravely mistaken. For Berlin is keenly aware that the history of modem liberal discourse is not the open, celebratory recognition of radical undecidability which, as we saw in the introduction to this paper, he discerns in Montesquieu. On the contrary, if there is a dominant idiom in modern liberalism, it is aligned--from Voltaire, to Kant, to Mill, to Berlin's own contemporaries--to a project which aims to justify individual freedom, not by reference to the underdetermination of political choice, but, on the contrary, by construing individual freedom as the crowning moment in a rationalistically conceived terminus. 'Even the most individualistic among . . . those who believed in freedom as rational self-direction . . . - - and Rousseau, Kant, and Fichte certainly began as individualists--vame at some point to ask themselves whether a rational life not only for the individual, but also for society, was possible, and if so, how it was to be achieved'. 31

Berlin is thus not surprised by Fichte's transition from a steadfast individualism to a dark, uncompromising nationalism. Nor afortiori is he reluctant to assert that the later Fichte is indeed a child of Kantian philosophy. For despite their many differences, the philosophers of the Enlightenment and their Romantic critics collude at a moment of the utmost importance. Both deny the distinctively modern experience of objective value incommensurability--the former by insisting that the answers to all questions are compatible, the latter by insisting that there are no questions to ask. And in this sense, the institution of modernity is coterminous with an impulse which obfuscates its defining contours. Contra Berlin's confident assertion that 'to be human is to know', modems, like their predecessors, seem prone to misrecognise the nature of the world they inhabit.

Yet for Berlin, the price paid by modernity for obfuscating the character of

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its peculiar inheritance is far too high. The 20th century is littered with corpses which line the paths of respective political projects whose aim is to erase our peculiarly existential relation to our public conduct. And in this context, much of Berlin's work is only intelligible as a political intervention: an attempt to expose the obfuscating gesture itself as a philosophical masquerade and a political evil. If modernity's institution does indeed consist in two poles, the first being a peculiarly existential relation to practice, the second being an impulse to dissemble the reality of the first, then Berlin would, above all, wish to participate in erasing the second pole from the character of the modem age itself.

If this is indeed the case, then we have gone some way in making sense of an uncomfortable dualism which I have argued, pervades Berlin's work: the centrality of a conception of 'modernity' on the one hand, and yet the author's denial of its import on the other: the idea of a universal transparent relation between humanity and its practices on the one hand, and the idea of the opacity of practice on the other: the idea of fantasia as constitutive vs the idea of metaphysics as constitutive. For Berlin's Enlightenment defence of liberalism is meant to function as a trump card in his political intervention against what I have called modernity's obfuscating impulse. It consists in an attempt to win a parochial tussle by harnessing a universal, hermetically unanswerable genre of rationality. If knowledge of value-pluralism, and thus a morality of reverence for the condition of undecidability, is primordially deposited in universal human practice, then the obfuscating gesture is merely a historical deviation, a fabrication whose substance gives currency to the discourse of 'moral idiots'. Berlin, in other words, attempts to win his battle by dissembling the parochiality of his insights, and by smudging the profoundly historicist genealogy of his position: in doing so, he deploys the Enlightenment's canonical tools: the presentation of a privileged form of political society buttressed and rendered intelligible by a universal anthropology.

Yet this universal anthropology is surely so much bravado. The sheer tautology of its logic reveals that it has no place on the real terrain of the tussle in which Berlin participates. Berlin's own presentation of this terrain, as a historian of ideas, suggests that there is nothing ineluctable in human practice which places history on his side. For Berlin the historian, the dark side of modernity reaches as authentically into the funds of human possibility as Berlin's liberalism does. As Ignatieff has pointed out, Berlin cannot have it both ways.

NOTES

1. For their comments on an earlier draft of this paper, I am grateful to John Burrow, John Gray, Larry Siedentop, and especially, to Henry Hardy. None of the above agree whole-heartedly with my argument: the usual disclaimers apply.

2. J. Gray, Isaiah Berlin (London: Harper Collins, 1995), p. 1. 3. I. Berlin, Against the Current (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1981), p. 158. 4. R. Jahanbegloo, Conversations with Isaiah Berlin (London: Peter Halban, 1992),

pp. 113-114.

The Burden o f Berlin's Modernity 383

5. I. Berlin, Against the Current (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1981), p. 113. 6. Ibid., p. 99. 7. Ibid., p. 114 emphasis added. 8. I. Berlin The Crooked Timber of Humanity (New York: Vintage, 1992), p. 204. See

• also Michael Ignatieff 'Understanding Fascism?' in Edna and Avishai (eds) Isaiah Berlin: A Celebration (London: Hogarth, 1991), pp. 135-145. Ignatieff rightly argues that in positing the inhumanity of fascism, Berlin has opened a Pandora's box in regard to his own anthropology. The following section of this paper explores this issue in greater depth.

9. M. Ignatieff, Understanding FascismL p. 145 10. I. Berlin Four Essays on Liberty (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1991), p. 51. 11. Ibid., pp. 106-107. 12. I. Berlin, Against the Current, pp. 80, 81. 13. Ibid., pp. 217-218. 14. I. Berlin, Four Essays on Liberty, p. 154, note 1. 15. Ibid., pp. 53 and 116. 16. I. Berlin, Against the Current, p. 138. 17. R. Jahanbegloo, Conversations with Isaiah Berlin, p. 158. i 8. Ibid., pp. 42-43. 19. Ibid., p. 61. 20. I. Berlin, Against the Current, p. 116. 21. I. Berlin, The Magus of the North: J.G. Hamann and the Origins of Modern

Irrationalism (London: John Murray, 1993), pp. 127-128. 22. I. Berlin, The Crooked Timber of Humanity, p. 103. 23. I. Berlin, Against the Current, p. 258. 24. I. Berlin, Four Essays on Liberty, p. 26. 25. J.P. Sartre, The Communists and the Peace, trans. Martha Fletcher, John

Kleinschmidt and Philip Berk (New York: Braziller, 1968), p. 706. 26. T. Ball, Reappraising Political Theory (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1995), p. 227.

Bali's citation of Marx is from Economic and Philosophic Manuscripts of 1844 (New York, 1964), p. 145.

27. I. Berlin, The Crooked Timber of Humanity, pp. 179-180. 28. Marx's theory of history, in Berlin's construal, is nourished both by a vociferously

rationalist discourse, and by a classically Romantic narrative. This co-occupation of ostensibly contradictory logics in one body of work reveals an extremely important moment in Berlin's conception of modernity. I return to this shortly.

29. I. Berlin, Russian Thinkers (London: Penguin, 1994), p. 180. 30. I. Berlin, Against the Current, p. 158. 31. I. Berlin, Four Essays on Liberty, p. 145.