Berlin & Popper on Liberty & Enlightenment (Part III – Berlin’s Response)

Posted on May 5, 2013 by

I’ve devoted two previous posts to Karl Popper’s comments on Isaiah Berlin’s 1958 inaugural lecture “Two Concepts of Liberty,” as laid out in his letter to Berlin of February 17, 1959. This post will focus on Berlin’s response in his letter to Popper of March 16, 1959.1

Berlin’s response lines up neatly with Popper’s comments: one paragraph addresses Popper’s reservations about Berlin’s account of “rationalism” (which I discussed in my initial post on this topic), while a second responds to Popper’s request for an explanation of Berlin’s claim that Horace’s dictum sapere aude has served as a justification for totalitarian forms of rule (a discussion of this section of Popper’s letter was the focus of my second post). What I would like to do here, then, is to wind up my discussion of the exchange by examining Berlin’s response to Popper’s two objections (a subsequent postscript will deal with a few textual alterations in the Two Concepts lecture).

Reservations About “Rationalism”

In his letter to Berlin, Popper dissented from the characterization of “rationalism” Berlin offered in at the close of Section V of the Two Concepts lecture. What Berlin offers there looms large in Berlin’s account of the central philosophical commitments on which he saw the Enlightenment as resting. Here is how Berlin summarized these principles:

first, that all men have one true purpose, and one only, that of rational self-direction; second, that the ends of all rational beings must of necessity fit into a single universal, harmonious pattern, which some men may be able to discern more clearly than others; third, that all conflict, and consequently all tragedy, is due solely to the clash of reason with the irrational or the insufficiently rational — immature and undeveloped elements in life – whether individual or communal, and that such clashes are, in principle, avoidable, and for wholly rational beings impossible; finally, that when all men have been made rational, they will obey the rational laws of their own natures, which are one and the same in them all, and so be at once wholly law-abiding and wholly free.

Popper’s objection to this description of rationalism was simple enough: he saw himself as a rationalist but vehemently rejected these principles. So, there was at least one rationalist in the world who did not believe what Berlin claimed rationalists believed.

Berlin’s discussion of “rationalism” continued,

Can it be that Hume is right and Socrates mistaken, that virtue is not knowledge, and freedom not identical with either? that despite the fact that it rules the lives of more men than ever before in its long history, not one of the basic assumptions of this famous view is demonstrable, or, perhaps, even true?

Popper had problems with this as well:

when you say “Can it be that Hume is right, and Socrates mistaken”. I am far from convinced that Socrates would have accepted your for basic assumptions, although I agree that Hume would have rejected them.But much as I admire Hume, he was the founder of irrationalism, together with Rousseau. I hasten to add that he was infinitely better than Rousseau, and surely not a romantic. But his irrationalism was that of a disappointed rationalist; and a disappointed rationalist is a man who expected too much from rationality.

How, then, did Berlin respond to these objections? He began by assuring Popper that, “of course,” he had no intention of associating him with such beliefs. But he resisted Popper’s effort to distance Socrates from the broader “rationalist” tradition and questioned whether Hume was, in fact, the outlier Popper took him to be. Indeed, what Berlin would seem to be suggesting is that Popper turns out to be the outlier: as Berlin sees it, Hume was hardly alone in his excessive expectations about what rationality might accomplish. Here is the continuation of the passage quoted above:

Of course I do not suppose that you could ever have subscribed to any of the propositions listed on p. 39: but I do think that the classical rationalists from Plato & Aristotle to Descartes, Spinoza, Leibniz etc. could scarcely have denied them. What would Socrates have had against them? could he really have denied that all genuine questions had one true answer & one only, & that all rational men must, pro tanto, be capable of reaching perfect agreement on these answers? I think that Hume may have asked too much of rationality: but did Descartes or Aristotle ask less? I think they were genuinely mistaken about what being rational was: if my text implied that the alternative is rejection of reason in favour of some kind of Rousseau-ish état d’âme I have failed to convey my meaning.

It is possible that Berlin’s characterization of the thinkers he was criticizing as “classical rationalists” might have provided an opening for Popper to distinguish his “critical rationalism” from the line of (uncritical) rationalist running from “Plato & Aristotle to Descartes, Spinoza, Leibniz etc.” But much hangs on the question of who is included in Berlin’s “etc.”

The Two Lectures had explicitly linked Kant to this tradition, an interpretation that — for reasons discussed in the first of these posts — Popper clearly rejected. Further, Popper had already, in effect, answered Berlin’s question as to what objections Socrates could have had to the principles shared by Berlin’s rationalists: his letter to Berlin implied that the “Socratic way of life” was equivalent to the critical stance that Popper associated with Kant. As a result, it is difficult to see how Popper could have taken much comfort in Berlin’s insistence that he had no intention of implying that Popper would have subscribed to the premisses on which “rationalism” rested while, nevertheless, continuing to hold that Socrates (and, in all likelihood, Kant) embraced them. Whatever grounds Berlin might have had for distinguishing “classical” from “critical” rationalism remain, at best, elusive.

The remainder of Berlin’s response to Popper’s first objection does little to address the disagreement between them on the nature of “rationalism.” But it does help to clarify some of the ambiguities in the position that Berlin was staking out.

I feel at least as hostile to Rousseau as you do: I realise his vast influence, but dislike his very prose – or bad poetry – so deeply, that I feel I cannot do justice even to the original psychological aperçus which it occasionally contains. The last thing that I want to do is to hold open the door for romanticism and blind faith — what socialists in the nineteenth century used to can “fidéisme”. But unless the pretensions of “rationalistic” reason are seen in correct perspective, will the disappointment in which they end not always tend to bring grist to the irrationalist mill? will the effort to be “scientific” where this does not fit – by Russell, or Marxists, or various kinds of positivists – not inevitably drive the victims & their sympathisers into the arms of sceptics, cynics, Hegelians and other Charlatans? I think that you believe me liable to discredit too much – in my zeal to refute metaphysical rationalism, to cast suspicion on reason as such. Perhaps this is just. It is always more difficult to be positive & defend the good than negative & attack wickedness.

Berlin might be seen as making three moves here:

  1. Having reiterated his disagreement with Popper on the issue as to whether Socrates (and, by implication, Kant) are part of the tradition of “rationalism” that leads to disastrous consequences, he shifts the focus to a cluster of thinkers whose positions he and Popper are at one in rejecting: Rousseau, Russell, Marx, Hegel and assorted unnamed “sceptics,” “cynics,” and “Charlatans.” The result of this move is that, while Berlin remains a critic of a certain form of “rationalism,” he is able to assure Popper that he has no sympathy for the “irrationalists.”
  2. In developing this point Berlin makes use of what Albert O. Hirschman dubbed the “jeopardy” argument: a rhetorical move that maintains that the pursuit of an otherwise laudable end will, when pushed too far, undermine whatever progress has been obtained through the pursuit of such ends.2 This move allow Berlin to imply that there might, after all, be grounds for an alliance with Popper: certain forms of rationalism, by raising (as Popper himself had argued) unrealistic expectations about the power of reason, run the risk of driving disillusioned rationalists into the camp of the very thinkers that Popper (like Berlin) finds so treacherous. What distinguishes Popper’s rationalism from the sort of rationalism that Berlin is criticizing is that Popper, unlike the “classical rationalists” has tempered his expectations about reason.
  3. Having now indicated that, despite their apparent disagreement about rationalism he and Popper are actually allies, Berlin is able to conclude his response by apologizing for an excess of zeal in fighting their common enemies. This might serve as an excuse for Berlin’s treatment of Socrates and Kant: it is evidence of his excessive, albeit well-intentioned, zeal.

A Brief Note on Berlin and Negative Liberty

This last move may have broader applicability for the argument of the Two Lectures. In its zeal to point out the dangers associated with “positive liberty” it is too easy to assume that Berlin was staking out a sort of libertarian position in the “Two Concepts,” a position that defines “freedom” more or less along the lines laid out in the Mercantus Center’s reckoning of “Freedom in the 50 States” — a reckoning in which we residents of the Commonwealth of Massachusetts are seen as groaning under the yoke of oppression while our neighbors across the border in New Hampshire are happily pursuing the first of the two alternatives on their license plates. But, as John Holbo has recently noted in a nh2009comment on the Mecantus Index on Crooked Timber, the Index is engaged in precisely the sort of crude tallying up of negative liberties that Berlin himself had questioned in the long footnote from the “Two Concepts” that Holbo goes on to quote. In other words, Berlin’s critique of the excesses of “positive” liberty no more makes him an unapologetic defender of negative liberty, than his critique of the excesses of rationalism makes him an irrationalist. The same argument is sometimes made about his more general stance towards the Enlightenment: despite all his criticisms of the Enlightenment’s “monism” and despite his sympathetic readings of various “counter-enlighteners,” he was — at heart — a friend of the Enlightenment.3

“Of Course I Have Nothing Against Sapere Aude”

Popper’s second response to the Two Concepts lecture consisted of a counter-argument and a question. The counter-argument took the form an alternative conception of “positive liberty” that can be seen as cast in the terms of Kantian lines: adopt the maxim to think critically, i.e., “sapere aude.” Hence the simple question that he posed to Berlin: “what do you have against sapere aude?”

Berlin’s response was anything but simple. “Of course,” he began, “I have nothing against sapere cropped-minervahead3.jpgaude.” Of course, any sentence that begins with “of course” (including this one) is bound to invite suspicion and the fact that Berlin began both of his responses to Popper this way (“Of course I do not suppose that you could ever have subscribed to any of the propositions listed on p. 39”) suggests a certain defensiveness. Berlin goes on to lavish praises on Kant’s answer to the question “What is Enlightenment?”: “Kant’s essay on the notion of Enlightenment is moving and unforgettable.” But (of course?) the inevitable “but” arrives and we get back to business:

But in the days of Socrates sapere had not yet accumulated the association it acquired from being used as a weapon — the weapon — by every authoritarian and monopolistic doctrine that ever slaughtered people on its altars. By Kant’s time it was surely not enough to ask only for sapere — only for satisfaction of intellectual curiosity — or even knowledge in its widest sense. Kant himself has won immortal glory by stressing the very fact that a man might know & know & still be a villain. The whole of my lecture, in a sense, is an attempt at a brief study or prolegomenon to the study — of the way in which innocent or virtuous or truly liberating ideas (’know thyself’ or sapere aude or the man who is free although he is a slave, in prison etc.) tend (not inevitably!) to become authoritarian & despotic and lead to enslavement and slaughter when they are isolated & driven ahead by themselves.

Here, in a few complex sentences, we see Berlin’s stance towards the Enlightenment laid out in all its ambivalence. Admirers of Albert O. Hirschman have no doubt already noted that. once again, Berlin trots out the jeopardy trope: Horace’s advice turns out to be one of those ideas that, while “innocent or virtuous or truly liberating ideas” tends to produce disastrous results when “isolated & driven ahead by themselves.”

How exactly this is supposed to work could be summarized as follows:

  1. There is nothing inherently wrong with Horace’s maxim “sapere aude” (i.e., “satisfy your intellectual curiosity”): the dangers stem from the subsequent “accumulated association” that has been attached to the term.
  2. This subsequent “accumulated association” was acquired as a result of the concept’s having been used “as a weapon” in authoritarian politics.
  3. The use of the concept for such purposes is but one example of the way in which certain ideas “tend (not inevitably!)” to yield nasty results when they are “isolated & driven ahead by themselves.”

There is much to discuss here, but — in the interest of wrapping things up so that I can turn from the arduous task of unpacking Berlin’s sentences to the less demanding past-time of rolling around in nGram catnip — I’ll confine myself to a few points.

First, it is perhaps worth noting that Berlin raises no objections to the way in which Popper has decided to translate Horace’s (or is it Kant’s?) “sapere“: he accepts Popper’s suggestion that the term denotes “intellectual curiosity.” As I argued in my very first post on this blog, this is hard to reconcile with is hard to reconcile with either the literal translation of the Latin (what is needed here is “wisdom,” which has a somewhat broader reach than “intellectual curiosity)” or with the context in which Horace used the phrase (he is exhorting his friend not to delay moral reform). The reason for reiterating this seemingly pedantic point about the translation of sapere is that there are two different types of jeopardy arguments that Berlin could make and which one he deploys depends on how he chooses to read the maxim that Kant took over from Horace.

Using Popper’s definition would appear to support a jeopardy argument of the following sort: “intellectual curiosity,” pushed beyond a certain point, threatens to undermine previous achievements. But it difficult to see how the pursuit of more knowledge threatens the knowledge we have already obtained (e.g., more knowledge about subatomic particles may raise difficulties for particular theories, but we don’t see this as undermining scientific knowledge). On the other hand, it is not so difficult to see how relentless and unchecked attempts to satisfy our intellectual curiosity might threaten other values (for an argument of this sort, see Roger Shattuck’s book Forbidden Knowledge4). Had Berlin read sapere as referring to a something (i.e., “wisdom”) that is concerned not simply with the pursuit of “intellectual curiosity,” but also with other concerns (e.g., moral judgment, aesthetic sensibility, etc.) then he could have offered a jeopardy argument of a different sort. His rejoinder to Popper would be that, while there is nothing wrong, per se, in satisfying one’s “intellectual curiosity,” this pursuit (1) is only a part of what is involved in fulfilling Horace’s imperative and (2) it needs to be tempered by an awareness that neglecting these other concerns turns out to be “unwise.”

It is possible to catch a hint this line of argument when Berlin reminds Popper that Kant had been well aware of the danger of assuming that “intellectual curiosity” alone was enough to prevent the degeneration of “sapere” into manipulation (“Kant himself has won immortal glory by stressing the very fact that a man might know & know & still be a villain”). Pursuing this argument might have led Berlin to reflect on the role that Rousseau played in teaching Kant that knowledge and virtue did not always go hand in hand. As Kant explained,

I am myself by inclination a seeker after truth. I feel a consuming thirst for knowledge and restless passion to advance in it, as well as satisfaction in every forward step. There was a time when I thought that this alone could constitute the honor of mankind, and I despised the rabble who knows nothing. Rousseau set me right. This blind preference vanishes; I learn to respect men, and I should find myself far more useless than the common laborer if I did not believe that this view could give worth to all others to establish the rights of man.5

But, unfortunately, Rousseau has one, and only one, role to play in the argument that Berlin develops: he is the representative of the conception of (positive) liberty that allows compulsion to be presented as freedom.

One of the more peculiar features of the discussion of the phrase sapere aude in the Two Concepts is that Berlin’s concern lies not with the loss of the broader connotations that the phrase might once have had, but rather with the what it has gained over time: i.e., the “accumulated association” that it has taken on as a consequence of the uses to which it has been put. Much in this argument turns on what it means for a phrase to “accumulate” an “association.”

It is easy enough to come up with examples of previously “innocent” phrases that were subsequently tainted as a result of their use by political movements. For example, Walter Kaufmann once argued that when Nietzsche used the phrase “blond beast” he had lions in mind.6 With the rise of National Socialism and the repeated use of the phrase as a way of designating a certain racial ideal, Nietzsche’s phrase “accumulated” very different connotations: when we read it today we think of Nazi thugs, rather than lions.

While it is easy to see how such an argument might work for “blond beast,” it is a good deal harder to see how it can account for what allegedly happened with “sapere aude.” Berlin does not — and, indeed, could not — provide instances of the use of this phrase as “a weapon — the weapon” employed by authoritarians (e.g., Hitler may have talked about “blond beasts,” but he didn’t quote Horace). But this does not seem to be what Berlin had in mind when he spoke of an “accumulated association.” So let us try a different tack.

It is significant that Berlin’s reservations are not confined to Horace’s “sapere aude.” His letter to Popper offers Socrates’s “know thyself” as yet another example of one of those “innocent or virtuous or truly liberating ideas” that “tend (not inevitably!) to become authoritarian & despotic and lead to enslavement and slaughter when they are isolated & driven ahead by themselves.” He also mentions a third example: the idea that it is possible for a man to be “free although he is a slave.”

Readers of the “Two Concepts” (a group that, of course, includes Karl Popper) will recall that all three of these “innocent ideas” had played a role in Berlin’s argument: St. Ambrose’s statement that “A wise man, though he be a slave, is at liberty …” is quoted in Section III and “knowing oneself” is a prerequisite for the project of “self-realization” that Berlin takes up in Section IV, which also contains his first invocation of the phrase sapere aude. In saying that sapere aude have taken on an “accumulated association” Berlin is not making a claim about the history of a particular phrase, but is instead trying to capture something about the implications of the broader idea that Berlin sees this phrase, along with the phrases from Socrates and Ambrose, invoke: namely, the possibility of separating off a “rational self” that has the capacity for self-legislation and self-realization. Berlin’s concern, in other words, lies not with what has happened to a few “innocent phrases,” but rather with the trajectory of a few “innocent ideas,” all of which seem to be implicated in the creation of the potentially dangerous notion of “positive liberty.”

A Post Factum Prolegomenon

As I suggested in my initial post in this series, what Berlin needs to provide — if not here, then at some point — is a history that would trace how these “innocent” ideas were transformed into a “weapon” that was used to compel obedience. His letter to Popper would appear to concede the need for a history of this sort when it characterized the “Two Concepts” as “a brief study or prolegomenon” to such an account. But, as we now know, Berlin’s alleged “prolegomenon” was written after an extended, but incomplete, attempt at constructing such a history: his Flexner Lectures at Bryn Mawr College.

In these lectures the dangers that the “Two Concepts” lecture associates with Horace’s “sapere aude” had been associated with Rousseau’s insistence that compelling individuals to do what the general will dictates might, in fact, be seen not as compulsion but rather as liberation. This argument had been linked, at least in Berlin’s mind, with a commitment to those central principles of “classical rationalism” that Popper had seen as antithetical to his own understanding of “rationalism.” But just how all of this was supposed to fit together is not entirely clear — even to Berlin himself.

A letter from Berlin to Jacob Talmon dating from the December 30, 1952 helps clarify the problems Berlin faced in bringing the different threads of his argument together.7

Now I must sit down to the hideous task of writing a book. God knows, the awful shadow of Marx broods over the entire thing, and I do not know whether to put him in or keep him out, and I still feel terribly obscure and muddled about Rousseau. You and I think that he is the father of totalitarianism in a sense. Why do we think this? Because of the despotism of the general will What does he, in fact, say? He talks about (a) the necessity to keep out selfish and sectional interests, so that each man shall ask himself what is it right to do from the point of view of the community in general; this assumes that there is such a thing as a general interest or some courses of action which are better for entire societies than others, and this, although none too clear, obviously is in some sense valid; so far so good. One may raise questions about how one ever knows which course is best and then one may reasonably answer that Rousseau’s recommendations about eliminating selfish and sectional interests, as practical tips, have a certain value, at least in some situations, and that the difference between what is traditionally considered to be the right frame of mind for members of the English Parliament as against, say, American Senators, who quite openly represent territorial or economic interests, is a case in point. Again so far so good. Furthermore, everyone in the Assembly has the right to express his views as he pleases. Any suppression automatically breaks the social contract and destroys the general will, the Sovereign etc., so that liberty seems to be guaranteed. But once the decision has been reached the dissidence must form and this, I suppose, is the ordinary practice of all democratic assemblies, from Quaker meetings to Lenin’s Regional Central Committee and Politbureau.

Having reached this point in his elaboration of what Rousseau had said and, it would appear, having found it difficult to find much evidence to justify the picture of Rousseau as the “father of totalitarianism” (it is to Berlin’s credit that, though he finds Rousseau’s prose distasteful, his interpretation is rather charitable), he went on to ask,

What then do we complain of? Simply, (a) that Rousseau thinks that an absolutely objectively true answer can be reached about political questions; that there is a guaranteed method of doing so; that his method is the right one; and that to act against such a truth is to be wrong, at worst mad, and therefore properly to be ignored, and that all these propositions are false? (b) the mystique of the soi commun and the organic metaphor which runs away with him and leads to mythology, whether of the State, the Church, or whatever. Is this all? Or is there more to complain of? I don’t feel sure. The muddle is so great.

While both of these “complaints” will reappear in “Two Concepts,” it is not at all clear that Berlin actually needs both of them to explain why the “innocent” idea of autonomy became the weapon of choice for totalitarian regimes. The second complaint more than suffices: once the state is conceived as a collective subject, the idea of autonomy becomes a tool for domination. One of the advantages of such an explanation is that it eliminates the need to argue that every Enlightenment thinker was somehow committed to a rationalism of the sort that can be found in Leibniz and Wolff (or, alternatively, the need to restrict the corpus of “Enlightenment thinkers” to those who embrace these views and the reassignment of everyone else to something called the “counter-Enlightenment).

800px-Lammert_Karl_MarxThe explanation for why Berlin thinks he needs to insist that the Enlightenment was bound to a rationalism of this sort may have something to do with “the awful shadow” that Berlin found looming over the book that he would never write. In order to bring Marx into the picture, he was convinced that he needed to invoke his argument about “rationalism.” Indeed, as I noted in the first post in this discussion, the earliest appearance of Berlin’s 1939 study of Marx. Here’s what said there about the assumptions that Marx allegedly took over from the Enlightenment:

Reason is always right. To every question there is only one true answer which with sufficient assiduity can be infallibly discovered, and this applies no less to questions of ethics or politics, of personal and social life, than to the problems of physics or mathematics. Once found, the putting of the solution into practice is a matter of mere technical skill; but the traditional enemies of progress must first be removed, and men taught the importance of acting in all questions on the advice of disinterested scientific experts, whose knowledge is founded on reason and experience. Once this has been achieved, the path is clear to the millennium.8

It is difficult (at least for me) to read Marx as having thought that “every question” has “only one true answer”: there would seem to be any number of questions that Marx regarded as — at best — poorly posed (e.g., the value of commodities) or — at worst — utter nonsense (perhaps we could see “that’s nonsense” as counting as an answer to a question). It is even harder to see Rousseau signing onto this. However we understand the “general will,” it is clear that Rousseau does not see it as a single solution applicable to all political communities — different political communities have different common interests and, of course, the common interest of any individual community is not the same as the interest of all of its citizens: as Rousseau notes, were this not the case, politics would cease to be an art.

Final Solutions

In any case, Berlin seems to have had a deep and unshakeable conviction that much of the misery of the twentieth century can be traced to the belief that (to use the most concise of Berlin’s many different ways of putting it)

all genuine questions can be answered,that if a question cannot be answered it is not a question. … that all these answers are knowable … that all the answers must be compatible with one another … .9

The final section of the Two Concepts lecture (“The One and the Many”) opened with passage that leaned rather heavily on this point:

One belief, more than any other, is responsible for the slaughter of individuals on the altars of the great historical ideals — justice or progress or the happiness of future generations, or the sacred mission or emancipation of a nation or race or class, or even liberty itself, which demands the sacrifice of individuals for the freedom of society. This is the belief that somewhere, in the past, or in the future, in divine revelation, or in the minds of an individual thinker, in the pronouncements of history or science, or in the simple heart of an uncorrupted good man, there is a final solution.

The danger of spending looking too closely at passages like this is that it is all too easy (at least for me) to become unnecessarily concerned with rhetorical tricks like the positioning, at the very end of the second of these two sentences, of an “innocent term” that has now “accumulated” a truly monstrous “association.” Still, some resistance to what Berlin is doing here might be warranted.   The twentieth century was abundant enough in its slaughter that there is no need to be stingy in spreading the blame around: the rationale for the incineration of the residents of Hiroshima and Nagasaki appears to have rested on imperatives less lofty than the “great historical ideals” laid out in the opening sentence. There is little need for those of us who work in the area of intellectual history to try to corner the market on atrocities and no reason to think that big body counts are always the result of big ideas.

Popper may have had a better sense of where the problem lay.  In his letter to Berlin he suggested,

No doubt, the idea that anybody is wise, is dangerous and repugnant. But why should sapere aude be interpreted as authoritarian? It is, I feel, anti-authoritarian. When Socrates said, in the Apology, that the search for truth through critical discussion was a way of life (in fact, the best way of life he knew of) — was there anything objectionable in this?

He reiterated this point in his response to Berlin of March 21, 1959.

My main thesis can be summed up by saying: science has no authority; it can claim no authority. Those who claim authority for science, or in the name of science (the doctors, the engineers), misunderstand science. …All this is so important because without respect for science, for the search for truth, we cannot manage; and with too much respect (scientism) we cannot either ….10

To see problems as capable of solution is not the same thing as assuming that they will be solved, much less that they have now been solved. Nor does it mean, as Berlin sometimes seems to be saying, that we live in a world devoid of tragic collisions between opposing values. But adopting the stance that the world presents us with a myriad of problems does serve as a check on too early an exit from attempts to find solutions, achieve agreements, or find ways of living together. Not all disagreements are “tragic;” some of them are merely stupid and something stupidities are remediable.   There are times when enlightenment doesn’t  demand courage; sometimes it merely requires persistence.

  1. The relevant portions of the letter are available in the second volume of Berlin’s correspondence, Enlightening: 1946-1960, Edited by Henry Hardy and Jennifer Holmes with the assistance of Serena Moore (London: Chatto & Windus 2009) 680-682. ↩
  2. Albert O. Hirschman, The Rhetoric of Reaction: Perversity, Futility, Jeopardy (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1991) . ↩
  3. For an example of this line of argument, see Roger Hausheer, “Enlightening the Enlightenment,” in Joseph Mali and Robert Wokler, Isaiah Berlin’s Counter-Enlightenment (Philadelphia: American Philosophical Society, 2003) 33-50. At some point it would be interesting to take a closer look at the assumptions that drive the “enlightening the Enlightenment” trope. ↩
  4. Roger Shattuck, Forbidden Knowledge (New York : St. Martin’s Press ; 1996 ), I hope to say something about this book in a future post. ↩
  5. Akademie XX:44 (I’ve used Manfred Kuehn’s translation from Kant: A Biography p. 131-2), ↩
  6. Walter Kaufmann, Nietzsche: Philosopher, Psychologist, Antichrist (Princeton: Princeton University Press , 1974) 225.↩
  7. Berlin, Enlightening: Letters II 354-355. ↩
  8. Berlin, Karl Marx; His Life and Environment (London: T. Butterworth ltd, 1939). 44. ↩
  9. Berlin, The Roots of Romanticism 21. ↩
  10. I am obliged to the staff at the Hoover Institution Archives providing me with a copy of this letter, which resides in Box 276, Folder 10. I quote it here with the permission of the Karl Popper Library, Klagenfurt, Austria. ↩
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Fox News, the Enlightenment, and G. K. Chesterton

Posted on May 3, 2013 by

I’m about as familiar with the Fox News Channel as I am with golf: I know that people watch the former and I’m aware that people play the latter and when I go to the local YMCA I wind up in a locker room with people who do both. We all get along, because (1) we’re naked and (2) the Red Sox have stopped drinking beer and eating fried chicken in their locker room and are back to their usual trick of convincing us that This Might be the Year.

Given my limited contact with what goes on at Fox, it was with considerable trepidation that I clicked a link in an email from a fellow historian that took me to a “Fox & Friends” broadcast. The email read: “Thought you might be interested in this (rather bizarre) reinterpretation (???) of Dialectic of Enlightenment.”

Happily, Fox wasn’t doing cruel things to the book that everyone loves to hate. Unhappily, the link took me to a clip of Steve Doocy interviewing a woman named Penny Nance about imagesthe decision by Anthony Foxx, the mayor of Charlotte, North Carolina, to issue proclamations making May 2 not only a “Day of Prayer” but also a “Day of Reason.” Doocy and Nance had no problems with the former proclamation, but were quite annoyed about the latter. fox_ff_nance_reason_130502i-615x345-1 Nance, it turns out, is “CEO and President” (there’s a difference?) of something called “Concerned Women of America,” an organization whose “Statement of Faith” goes a long way towards clarifying her reservations about the “Day of Reason”:

• We believe the Bible to be the verbally inspired, inerrant Word of God and the final authority on faith and practice.
• We believe Jesus Christ is the divine Son of God, was born of a virgin, lived a sinless life, died a sacrificial death, rose bodily from the dead on the third day and ascended into Heaven from where He will come again to receive all believers unto Himself.
• We believe all men are fallen creations of Adam’s race and in need of salvation by grace through personal faith in the Lord Jesus Christ
• We believe it is our duty to serve God to the best of our ability and to pray for a moral and spiritual revival that will return this nation to the traditional values upon which it was founded.

It turns out that point three is the important one for Ms Nance’s take on the Enlightenment (I have no idea which, if any, of these concerns matter to Mr. Doocy or, indeed, if Mr. Doocy has views on the Enlightenment’s relationship to the Holocaust).

Mayor Foxx’s rationale for proclaiming May 2 Charlotte’s “Day of Prayer” was that May 2 is the “National Day of Prayer” and, perhaps, he thought that the good citizens of Charlotte needed an additional reason for observing it. Among the reasons for the proclamation of a “Day of Reason” (which can be seen below) was the conviction that “The application of reason, more than any other means, has proven to offer hope for human survival on earth.” No one should be surprised that there is also a “National Day of Reason” that, even less surprisingly, also falls on May 2.

charlotte_2013Fox’s interest in Foxx’s proclamation (stuff like this is enough to make me wonder whether theologians overlooked the most compelling proof for the existence of God: the universe is ruled by an all-powerful intelligence with a wicked sense of humor) might seem momentarily puzzling. Why are these Foxites so worked up over this particular Foxx when there so many other foxes trying to sneak into the great national hen-house? But everything became perfectly clear to me once Mr. Doocy kindly explained that Mayor Foxx is President Obama’s pick to become Secretary of Transportation. Fox News, of course, is interested in everything that President Obama does — indeed, so insatiable is their interest in his doings that they sometimes have to make them up.

Had Mr. Doocy or Ms Nance recalled John Locke’s distinction between ecclesiastical and civil interests (after all, Ms Nancy is a graduate of Liberty University and perhaps the Letter Concerning Toleration is part of the curriculum; I have no idea what Doocy has read), they might have looked more kindly on Mayor Foxx’s double proclamation: those concerned with the care of their souls can pray in the manner they judge most efficacious for their salvation while those concerned with “life, liberty, health, and indolency of body” can spend the day reasoning. But Ms Nance was concerned that a pursuit of civil ends without the leavening of faith ends in disaster. This is where the Enlightenment comes in. Thus spake Ms Nance:

You know, the Age of Enlightenment and Reason gave way to moral relativism. And moral relativism is what led us all the way down the dark path to the Holocaust… Dark periods of history is what we arrive at when we leave God out of the equation.

I suspect that friends of the Enlightenment can take a little comfort in Ms Nance’s use of the phrase “gave way” rather than “gave rise.” But I’m afraid that what she really meant was “gave rise” (but was kind enough not to say it).

Either way, Ms Nance’s argument isn’t quite the same as Horkheimer and Adorno’s. For them, the problem was that enlightenment kept collapsing back into mythology. For her, what’s bad about the Enlightenment was that it greased the slippery slope that culminates in “moral relativism.” During her three minutes on Fox Ms Nance didn’t have time to explain whether she believed that Voltaire, Hume, Kant, Smith, and the rest were moral relativists or whether the problem is that their moral philosophies were so deeply flawed that they provided no viable alternative to it — perhaps she’ll clear this up by giving a talk at the next conference of the American Society for Eighteenth-Century Studies.

Nance’s point has more in common with the position staked out in 1940 by the historian Carlton J. H. Hayes than it does with Horkheimer and Adorno’s Dialectic of Enlightenment.  Hayes argued:

For two centuries some of the classes, especially intellectuals, have been repudiating our common religious heritage, but indifference or hostility of the masses towards it, of the rural as well as the urban masses, is a strictly contemporary phenomenon. How this has come about, I shall not here attempt to suggest. I merely remark the fact, which seems to me self-evident, and pass on to an important consequence. No man, whether he be Western or Eastern, lives by bread alone. Everybody must have faith, a faith in some mysterious power outside of one’s self, a faith attested by feelings of reverence and expressed in external acts and ceremonials. When a man loses faith in one religion, he naturally attaches himself consciously or unconsciously to another object of worship. It may be worship of Christ; it may be worship of totem or fetish; it may likewise be worship of science or humanity – provided these concepts are written in his mind with capital letters.1

Among the possible objects to which men turn, especially in an age of disruption, are authoritarian movements. Unfortunately, Hayes failed to spell the relationship between these “self-evident” facts and what was regarded by some as his cozy relationship with the Franco regime during his stint as FDR’s ambassador to Spain (as the moral philosopher Bob Dylan once observed, in what might serve as a fair summary of Professor Hayes’ argument: “you gotta serve somebody.”)

There was a rage for these sorts of explanations of fascism during the late 1930s and early 194s, presumably because the idea that the Enlightenment might, somehow or other, have paved the path that led to National Socialism is less obvious — and hence — more noteworthy than arguments that attributed fascism to German nationalism, the imperatives of monopoly capitalism, or anti-semitism, a.k.a. “the socialism of idiots.” In intellectual history as in competitive figure skating, the degree of difficulty counts for something.

In those days, what Ms Nance calls “moral relativism” was characterized as “nihilism” and Leo Strauss, recently arrived in America but not yet schooled in the subtle art of concealing his punch lines, gave a lecture that he probably wished he hadn’t given that explained at some length how the Enlightenment led to a nihilism that was so pervasive that even intelligent young Germans came to view National Socialism as a plausible remedy.2 I suspect that Ms Nance is probably not a Straussian (though it does seem that Strauss was, if only temporarily, some sort of fascist).

Having explained the relationship between the Enlightenment and the Holocaust, Ms Nance went to show that she was not someone to be underestimated by quoting a bit of G. K. Chesterton (was this, perhaps, the first G. K. Chesterton shout out in the history of Fox News?):

You know, G. K. Chesterton said that the Doctrine of Original Sin is the only one which we have 3,000 years of empirical evidence to back up. Clearly, we need faith as a component and it’s just silly for us to say otherwise.

As I was listening to Ms Nance explain this to me, I was struck by two things:

  1. She says “you know” a lot — perhaps she’s trying to be kind to those of us who are utterly clueless about the sorts of things she claims to be true.
  2. She probably doesn’t want to go around quoting Chesterton: he’s not a reliable friend — he’s more like a frenemy.

For example, a careless reader might think that the following passage from Chesterton’s images-1What I Saw in America provides some support the last of the four concerns on the Concerned Women of America’s statement of faith:

America is the only nation in the world that is founded on a creed. That creed is set forth with dogmatic and even theological lucidity in the Declaration of Independence; perhaps the only piece of practical politics that is also theoretical politics and also great literature. It enunciates that all men are equal in their claim to justice, that governments exist to give them that justice, and that their authority is for that reason just. It certainly does condemn anarchism, and it does also by inference condemn atheism, since it clearly names the Creator as the ultimate authority from whom these equal rights are derived. Nobody expects a modern political system to proceed logically in the application of such dogmas, and in the matter of God and Government it is naturally God whose claim is taken more lightly. The point is that there is a creed, if not about divine, at least about human things.

I can imagine that when Ms Nance read this (for, of course, we can be sure that she has her Chesterton down cold) she was nodding along right up to the part about the condemnation of atheism and the clear naming of “the Creator” and go so excited with this that she overlooked those last two sentences where Chesterton starts making things complicated again.

And I suspect that perhaps she was so taken with the idea that Chesterton saw original sin as an empirical fact that she missed this tough little nut from his Orthodoxy, which is not very gentle with those people that Fox & Friends like to call “job creators.”

If we wish to pull down the prosperous oppressor we cannot do it with the new doctrine of human perfectibility; we can do it with the old doctrine of Original Sin. If we want to uproot inherent cruelties or lift up lost populations we cannot do it with the scientific theory that matter precedes mind; we can do it with the supernatural theory that mind precedes matter. If we wish specially to awaken people to social vigilance and tireless pursuit of practise, we cannot help it much by insisting on the Immanent God and the Inner Light: for these are at best reasons for contentment; we can help it much by insisting on the transcendent God and the flying and escaping gleam; for that means divine discontent. If we wish particularly to assert the idea of a generous balance against that of a dreadful autocracy we shall instinctively be Trinitarian rather than Unitarian. If we desire European civilization to be a raid and a rescue, we shall insist rather that souls are in real peril than that their peril is ultimately unreal. And if we wish to exalt the outcast and the crucified, we shall rather wish to think that a veritable God was crucified, rather than a mere sage or hero. Above all, if we wish to protect the poor we shall be in favour of fixed rules and clear dogmas. The rules of a club are occasionally in favour of the poor member. The drift of a club is always in favour of the rich one.

Chesterton is just too complicated to be Fox’s kind of Christian. Which explains why we are treated to the spectacle of Ms Nance explaining the finer points of the doctrine of original sin to a less-than interested Mr. Doocy.

It’s not surprising that she simplifies the passage about original sin  that she pretends to have read. Here’s what Chesterton actually said in Orthodoxy:

Modern masters of science are much impressed with the need of beginning all inquiry with a fact.The ancient masters of religion were quite equally impressed with that necessity. They began with the fact of sin — a fact as practical as potatoes. Whether or not could be washed in miraculous waters, there was no doubt at any rate that he wanted washing. But certain religious leaders in London, not mere materialists, have begun in our day not to deny the highly disputable water, but to deny the indisputable dirt. Certain new theologians dispute original sin, which is the only part of Christian theology which can really be proved. … The strongest saints and the strongest sceptics alike took positive evil as the starting-point of their argument. …In this remarkable situation it is plainly not now possible (with any hope of a universal appeal) to start, as our fathers did, with the fact of sin. This very fact which was to them (and is to me) as plain as a pikestaff, is the very fact that has been specially diluted or denied. But though moderns deny the existence of sin, I do not think that they have yet denied the existence of a lunatic asylum. We all agree still that there is a collapse of the intellect as unmistakable as a falling house. … For the purpose of our primary argument the one may very well stand where the other stood. I mean that as all thoughts and theories were once judged by whether they tended to make a man lose his soul, so for our present purpose all modern thoughts and theories may be judged by whether they tend to make a man lose his wits.

J. G. A. Pocock argued that there was a “magisterial enlightenment” as well as a radical one. Passages like the one I just quoted from Chesterton make me think that this was a good thing: beginning with a shared conviction that, as Voltaire insisted, there was evil in the world, these two enlightenments could keep each other honest.

The National Day of Reason is every bit as idiotic as the National Day of Prayer and the republic would be much happier if its trustees would spend their time trying to remedy actual wrongs rather than telling the faithful to pray and the rational to reason and acting as if these are two separate interest groups with no overlap in membership. I hope that Mayor Foxx will soon be freed from the need to engage in nonsense of this sort and — once the now-obligatory hearings, holds, filibusters, and faux outrage on the Fox News Channel are over and done with — he can get to work on dealing with the legitimate “civil interest” of moving citizens from point A to point B without their killing each other or burning up the planet.

As for Fox, of course, there is no hope. Looking at Mr. Doocy and Ms Nance as they chatter at each other I am glad to follow Chesterton’s advice and refrain from speculating on the state of their souls. But, you know, they’re both nitwits.

  1. Carlton J. H. Hayes, “The Novelty of Totalitarianism in the History of Western Civilization,” Proceedings of the American Philosophical Society 82, no. 1 (February 23, 1940) 95. ↩
  2. Leo Strauss, “German Nihilism,” ed. David Janssens and Daniel Tanguay, Interpretation 26, no. 3 (Spring 1999): 353-378 ↩
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Why It Wouldn’t Have Mattered if Isaiah Berlin used Ngrams

Posted on April 28, 2013 by

I’d been planning on posting the final part of my discussion of the exchange of letters between Isaiah Berlin and Karl Popper on liberty and enlightenment, but various commitments have conspired to delay my posting of that discussion until later in the week. But I’d been planning to say a few things about what we can — and mostly can’t — learn about the distinctions Berlin sought to draw by looking at the frequency of usage of the terms he was discussing. So now seems as good (or, as it turns out, as bad) a time as any to say it. Hence, here is a sort of “pre-postscript” to my posts on Berlin and Popper.

Earlier this term I discussed Berlin’s Two Concepts essay in my introductory political thought course and I thought it might be interesting to show the class (most of whom hadn’t heard about Ngram) how patterns in the use of “liberty” and “freedom” have changed over time. The results were more or less what I’d expected: “liberty” crests around 1790 and then begins a slow descent, “freedom” plays the tortoise to liberty’s hare and pulls ahead around 1905.

liberty&freedom

After constructing the Ngram it struck to me that I ought to push the end date up from Google’s default of 2000 to something closer to the present in order to see if there had been any uptick in uses of “freedom” in the wake of the September 2001 attacks (it certainly seemed as if “freedom” was being invoked quite a bit between 2001-2004, particularly by the man who just got his very own Presidential Library). Surprisingly, nothing seems to happen.

What I hadn’t thought to do at the time was to see if there was any way of seeing whether the nGram could tell us anything about shifts in the invocation of the concepts of positive and negative conceptions of liberty. But an attempt along these lines rather quickly brings us up against the difficulties of trying to pick up changes in the use of concepts by looking at changes in the use of words. For starters, an Ngram for uses of the phrases “positive liberty” and “negative liberty” tells us next to nothing. The reasons for this are easy enough to see: (1) these are technical terms that enjoy rather little usage outside of a specialized literature, so shifts in the frequency of their usage are small moves in a rather small sample and (2) they are terms that tend to be used together, as a way of drawing a distinction in philosophical discussions. As a result, all that such a search will pick up is how many articles are being published in any given year that are invoking the distinction that Isaiah Berlin made famous.

However, Berlin did employ, in passing, the circumlocution “liberty from” as a way of denoting “negative liberty,” a usage that echoes a distinction that Franklin Roosevelt had drawn in his list of the “Four Freedoms” between “freedom from” want and fear and “freedom of” speech and worship. And, much more emphatically, Erich Fromm’s Escape from Freedom (1941) had framed the distinction between “positive” and “negative” freedoms as the distinction between “freedom to” and “freedom from.” I’ve always found this way of explaining Berlin’s distinction more of a hindrance than a help: typically (and, I suspect, rightly) it tends to confuse students. They ask “Isn’t freedom from regulations that forbid something the same thing as freedom to do it?” and I say “Don’t pay attention to that” and point them to the way in which Berlin framed the distinction: negative liberty “is involved in the answer to the question ‘What is the area within which the subject — a person or group of persons — is or should be left to do or be what he wants to do or be, without interference by other persons?'” In contrast, positive liberty, “is involved in the answer to the question ‘What, or who, is the source of control or interference, that can determine someone to do, or be, one thing rather than another?'” But while the conceptual distinction between positive and negative liberty might better be grasped by focusing on the questions that Berlin posed, it is possible that tracking the use of the colloquial distinction between “freedom from” and “freedom to” might pick up something worthwhile.

Let’s start with “freedom from,” “freedom to,” and, for the sake of completeness, “liberty from” and “liberty to” (it turns out that there is no need to worry about the capitalized form of the terms):

from&to

At first glance, what we have here seem quite peculiar: the most notable feature is the long decline of “liberty to.” But a moment’s reflection should be enough to remind us that this decline probably tells us more about the fading of the once-prevalent idiom “at liberty to do x” than it does about the distinction between “positive” and “negative” forms of freedom or liberty. The Ngram may also be reminding us of two other things: (1) there is no equivalent idiom “at liberty from x” and (2) there are different idioms in play for talking about “freedom”: namely, “free to” and “free from.”

On one of the more influential early critique of the Two Concepts lecture, the American political theorist Gerold MacCallum argued that instead of seeing disputes over the concept of liberty as involving a struggle between Berlin’s “liberal” notion of “negative liberty” and the “romantic” (and potentially totalitarian) concept of “positive liberty,” we would do better “to regard freedom as always one and the same triadic relation, but recognize that various contending parties disagree with each other in what they understand to be the ranges of the term variables.” [“Negative and Positive Freedom,” The Philosophical Review 76, no. 3 (July 1967): 312]. He proposed that

Whenever the freedom of some agent or agents is in question, it is always freedom from some constraint or restriction on, interference with, or barrier to doing, not doing, becoming, or not becoming something. Such freedom is thus always of something (an agent or agents), from something, to do, not do, become, or not become something; it is a triadic relation. Taking the format “x is (is not) free from (to do, not do, become, not become) z,” x ranges over agents, y ranges over such “preventing conditions” as constraints, restrictions, interferences, and barriers, and z ranges over actions or conditions of character or circumstance. [313]

MacCallum, it should be stressed, was proposing a conceptual distinction, but he argued that we could use the distinction could clarify how disputes involving freedom might be seen as:

a series of attempts by parties opposing each other on very many issues to capture for their own side the favorable attitudes attaching to the notion of freedom. [313]

If MacCallum’s conceptual distinction remotely corresponds to the way in which contesting parties talk about freedom, what we would expect to find, at any given moment, is a rough equivalence in uses of “free from,” “free to,” “freedom of” and the corresponding forms of liberty. But (and here I am tempted to add “of course”), we don’t:

BigMashUpThis is a really ugly Ngram (and not just because it would profit from a better contrast between its colors), but it may have something to tell us about the folly of trying to use an Ngram to frame a history of this sort of concept (I’d like to think that there are other concepts whose history might be tracked more effectively byNgrams — for instance, “enlightenment”). Here’s what I think I’ve learned from this (I’ll be interested in seeing what others make of it):

  1. What we’re seeing here is not what a straightforward translation of MacCallum’s conceptual distinction into word usage would have suggested. We do see movement in the different aspects of his “unitary” concept of freedom. While there may well be variation in the ways in which different parties fill out the different parts of his “unitary” notion, what we seem to see here is that, over time, there is a shift in the usage of “freedom of,” “free from,” “free to.”
  2. I suspect, however, that some of what we are seeing here can best be explained in the migration of certain circumlocutions from various specialized discourses into common usage (and, perhaps, the reverse). For example: “freedom of” sounds, at least to me, like a term that had been at home in legal discourse, but began to spread into other domains during the 1930s (this is the sort of change that Bookworm is tailor-made to pick up).
  3. Other changes (e.g., the decaying of “freedom of” and the rise of “free of”) might reflect nothing more significant than a preference for the shorter term “free” over the more technical sounding “freedom.”
  4. Finally, to give MacCallum his due, perhaps we can understand the convergence of “freedom of,” “free to,” “free of,” and “free from” as we near 2000 as evidence that those who are engaged in disputes about “freedom” are busily involved in defining the “freedom of” agents “from” certain impediments “to” do or be something or other.

But, in the end, I’m inclined to think that the exercise in which I’ve been engaged here really doesn’t have much to recommend it.

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Isaiah Berlin & Karl Popper on Liberty & Enlightenment (Part II)

Posted on April 21, 2013 by

Last Sunday (which, for those of us who live in the Boston area, seems like the distant past), I began an examination of Karl Popper’s comments on Isaiah Berlin’s 1958 lecture “Two Concepts of Liberty” in his letter to Berlin of February 17, 1959.[1] Popper’s letter struck me as worth discussing for two reasons. First, Berlin’s Two Concepts is interesting in its own right: it is an influential — though at times quite puzzling — discussion of a central political concept and Popper’s letter allows us to see how one of Berlin’s contemporaries tried to make sense of its arguments. Second, the discussion between Berlin and Popper sheds some light on the diverging ways in which two self-described liberals, at the height of the Cold War, thought about the Enlightenment and its implications. In this post, I’ll finish the discussion of Popper’s letter by considering the second of the two points he raised. Next week, I’ll finish off the discussion by examining Berlin’s response.

A Kantian Case for Positive Liberty

Popper’s second point consists of a proposal and a question. The proposal takes the form of an alternative way of thinking about “positive” liberty. The question has to do with what strikes Popper as Berlin’s antipathy towards Horace’s phrase “sapere aude.” Our first task will be to figure out how the proposal (which is, I think, straightforward enough) is related to the question (which is, at first glance, a bit obscure).

Here is the relevant section of Popper’s letter (which consistently renders “sapere aude” as “sapere ande” — an error I have not transcribed here — and includes a minor typo that I’ve crossed out):

My second point is your picture of positive freedom. It is a marvelous elaboration of the idea of being one’s own master. But is there not a very different and very simple idea of positive freedom which may be complementary to negative freedom, and which does not need to clash with it? I mean, very simply, the idea to spend one’s own life as well as one can; experimenting, trying to realize in one’s own way, and with full respect to others (and their different valuations) what one values most? And may not be the search for truth — sapere aude — be part of a positive idea of self-liberation? What have you against sapere aude? No doubt, the idea that anybody is wise, is dangerous and repugnant. But why should sapere aude be interpreted as authoritarian? It is, I feel, anti-authoritarian. When Socrates said, in the Apology, that the search for truth through critical discussion was a way of life (in fact, the best way of life he knew of) — was there anything objectionable in this?

The connection that Popper seeks to draw here between the “very different and very simple” example of “positive freedom” that he offers and his defense of the “anti-authoritarian” implications of Horace’s sapere aude becomes somewhat clearer if we look at the lecture Popper had given (five years before Berlin delivered his inaugural lecture) on the BBC to mark the sesquicentennial of Immanuel Kant’s death.[2]

Popper began his homage to Kant by recalling the unexpectedly large crowds that gathered for the great philosopher’s funeral:

They came to show their gratitude to a teacher of the Rights of Man, of equality before the law, of world citizenship, of peace on earth, and, perhaps most important, of emancipation through knowledge (175).

Popper’s invocation of the idea of “emancipation through knowledge” sets the stage for a brief discussion of Kant’s response to the question “What is Enlightenment?” and a consideration of Kant’s role as the “last great defender” of the Enlightenment.[3] After quoting the opening paragraph of Kant’s answer, which culminates in Horace’s sapere aude, Popper provided the follow explanation:

Kant is saying something very personal here. It is part of his own history. Brought up in near poverty, in the narrow outlook of Pietism … his own life is a story of emancipation through knowledge. In later years he used to look back with horror to what he called “the slavery of childhood,” his period of tutelage. One might well say that the dominant theme of his whole life was the struggle for spiritual freedom.

With those last four words we arrive at the nub of Popper’s second comment on the Two Concepts. How can we to situate Kant’s “struggle for spiritual freedom” within Berlin’s distinction between “positive” and “negative” forms of liberty?

What is at stake in this struggle is not a question of the extent of the space in which an individual “is or should be left to do or be what he wants to do or be, without interference by other persons” (i.e., “negative” liberty). I can be “negatively” free to engage in any number of activities that I am “spiritually unfree” (e.g., because of fear or ignorance) to undertake. Kant characterizes enlightenment in terms of an escape from a state of “self-incurred tutelage [Unmündigkeit]” — a condition for which I am myself responsible. So the question of whether I am free or not turns on whether I am or am not exercising “mature autonomy” (one of a variety of terms that translators have used to try to capture the implications of the German Mündigkeit). What is involved, then, in the pursuit of enlightenment turns on considerations that were nicely captured by Berlin in his initial definition of “positive” liberty: “What, or who, is the source of control or interference, that can determine someone to do, or be, one thing rather than another?” Kant’s subsequent account of the differences between “public” and “private” uses of reason can, without too much difficulty, be understood as involving questions about the extent to which subjects are free, or not free, to articulate certain positions — i.e., with what Berlin characterizes as the “negative” concept of liberty. But Popper is not concerned with that discussion. What interests him, instead, are the broader implications of the motto that Kant took from Horace, a motto that Popper sees as summarizing the story of Kant’s life: “a story of emancipation through knowledge.” And this, of course, is a question about “positive,” rather than “negative,” liberty.

Berlin’s Case Against Positive Liberty

It would have been hard for Popper to overlook the degree to which Berlin’s critique of the concept of “positive” liberty represents a critique of the very idea that he had praised in his own discussion of Kant. Section IV of the Two Concepts lecture closed with a full-throated attack on what Berlin characterized as “the positive doctrine of liberation by reason,” which argued that,

Socialized forms of it, widely disparate and opposed to each other as they are, are at the heart of many of the nationalist, communist, authoritarian, and totalitarian creeds of our day. It may, in the course of its evolution, have wandered far from its rationalist moorings. Nevertheless, it is this freedom that, in democracies and in dictatorships, is argued about, and fought for, in many parts of the earth today.

Several pages later, in the sprawling second paragraph of Section V, he resumed his attack on the idea of “liberation through reason” by noting how it had figured in the work of such otherwise different thinkers as Spinoza, Locke, Montesquieu, Kant, and Burke and then went on to conclude,

The common assumption of these thinkers (and of many a schoolman before them and Jacobin and Communist after them) is that the rational ends of our ‘true’ natures must coincide, or be made to coincide, however violently our poor, ignorant, desire-ridden, passionate, empirical selves may cry out against this process. Freedom is not freedom to do what is irrational, or stupid, or wrong. To force empirical selves into the right pattern is no tyranny, but liberation.

But the passage in Berlin’s lecture that appears to have most concerned Popper was the opening paragraph of Section IV, where Berlin states that, when “free self-development” becomes the standard for determining whether one is truly free, individuals tend to view the various “obstacles which present themselves as so many lumps of external stuff” blocking the achievement of this goal. He continues,

That is the programme of enlightened rationalism from Spinoza to the latest (at times unconscious) disciples of Hegel. Sapere aude. What you know, that of which you understand the necessity — the rational necessity — you cannot, while remaining rational, want to he otherwise. For to want something to be other than what it must be is, given the premisses — the necessities that govern the world — to be pro tanto either ignorant or irrational. Passions, prejudices, fears, neuroses, spring from ignorance, and take the form of myths and illusions. To be ruled by myths, whether they spring from the vivid imaginations of unscrupulous charlatans who deceive us in order to exploit us, or from psychological or sociological causes, is a form of heteronomy, of being dominated by outside factors in a direction not necessarily willed by the agent. The scientific determinists of the eighteenth century supposed that the study of the sciences of nature, and the creation of sciences of society upon the same model, would make the operation of such causes transparently clear, and thus enable individuals to recognize their own part in the working of a rational world, frustrating only when misunderstood. Knowledge liberates by automatically eliminating irrational fears and desires.

There is more to say about what Berlin seems to be doing in this paragraph, but for now it may be enough to suggest that his use of the motto from Horace that had served as the touchstone for Popper’s encomium to Kant clarifies the context for the question that Popper posed to Berlin in his “second point”: “What have you against sapere aude”?

Histories, Individual and Collective

Popper had good reason to be puzzled by the link Berlin sought to establish between the “positive” conception of liberty and totalitarian forms of domination: the Two Concepts lecture was not entirely clear as to how this relationship was to be understood.

At the beginning of the discussion of “The Notion of Positive Liberty” (Section II of the lecture), Berlin explained that his intent was to show how the two concepts of liberty, which might initially seem to have been nothing more than two perspectives on the basic idea, had “diverged” over time. Here’s how he presents this in second paragraph of Section II:

The freedom which consists in being one’s own master, and the freedom which consists in not being prevented from choosing as I do by other men, may, on the face of it, seem concepts at no great logical distance from each other — no more than negative and positive ways of saying much the same thing. Yet the ‘positive’ and ‘negative’ notions of freedom historically developed in divergent directions until in the end, they came into direct conflict with each other.[4]

This suggestion that, while the “logical distance” between positive and negative conceptions of liberty may not be that great, their historical development proved to be quite different, would seem to be setting the stage for an historical account of how this divergence came about. But the lecture never quite provides one.

What Berlin offers, instead, is a condensed (albeit quite evocative) sketch of “the independent momentum which the metaphor of self-mastery acquired.” This sketch is notable for what it doesn’t contain: anything approaching an account of an historical transformation of a concept. Berlin starts with a passing reference to T. H. Green and then goes on to trace the “momentum” of the concept of self-mastery. Let’s look at the passage in question and then try to make sense of what is going on:

Have not men had the experience of liberating themselves from spiritual slavery, or slavery to nature, and do they not in the course of it become aware, on the one hand, of a self which dominates, and, on the other, of something in them which is brought to heel? This dominant self is then variously identified with reason, with my ‘higher nature’, with the self which calculates and aims at what will satisfy it in the long run, with my ‘real’, or ‘ideal’, or ‘autonomous’ self or with my self ‘at its best’; which is then contrasted with irrational impulse, uncontrolled desires, my ‘lower’ nature, the pursuit of immediate pleasures, my ’empirical’ or ‘heteronomous’ self, swept by every gust of desire and passion, needing to be rigidly disciplined if it is ever to rise to the full height of its ‘real’ nature. Presently the two selves may be represented as divided by an even larger gap: the real self may be conceived as something wider than the individual (as the term is normally understood), as a social ‘whole’ of which the individual is an element or aspect: a tribe, a race, a church, a state, the great society of the living and the dead and the yet unborn. This entity is then identified as being the ‘true’ self which, by imposing its collective, or ‘organic’, single will upon its recalcitrant ‘members’, achieves its own, and therefore their, ‘higher’ freedom. The perils of using organic metaphors to justify the coercion of some men by others in order to raise them to a ‘higher’ level of freedom have often been pointed out. But what gives such plausibility as it has to this kind of language is that we recognize that it is possible, and at times justifiable, to coerce men in the name of some goal (let us say, justice or public health) which they would, if they were more enlightened, themselves pursue, but do not, because they are blind or ignorant or corrupt. This renders it easy for me to conceive of myself as coercing others for their own sake, in their, not my, true interest.

What we seem to have here is a discussion of the dangers associated with the use of a metaphor: the metaphor of “self-mastery.” These dangers are illustrated by tracing a path that leads from an experience of liberation to a new form of slavery. To simplify (without, I hope, distorting Berlin’s argument ), the steps in the path might be summarized as follows:

  1. An experience of liberation from some form of “slavery”
  2. A subsequent interpretation of this experience in terms of a contrast between between two different “selves”
  3. The identification of one of these selves with a larger collectivity
  4. The exercising of coercion over the self that is not identified with the collectivity.

These steps are sufficiently abstract to allow them to be interpreted in a variety of ways. We might, for example, think of them as stages in the development of an individual. For example:

  1. After a youth spent in various pursuits, a young man experiences, for the first time, a sense of purpose and coherence in his life
  2. He identifies this new sense of coherence and purpose with the “new” (“truer” and “purer”) person he has become, a person that has overcome the temptations that dogged the “old” person that he was
  3. He finds a larger community (religious or political) that offers him a language in which he can articulate this experience, a language that carries on the interpretation that he has begun at step 2 by linking it to this larger community (e.g., as the distinction between those who have been “enlightened” vs those who remain in the “darkness”).
  4. As a member of this community the young man engages in aggressive efforts at recruitment and “conversion” (perhaps at the behest of his superiors) of others, in order to bring others (who remain in the darkness from which he has escaped) into “the light.”

While a narrative of this sort may have a certain plausibility — especially for those of us who spent Friday “sheltering in place” and watching more television than anyone should — we can, just as easily, imagine more benign versions. For example:

  1. a recent college graduate, having double majored in Economics and English, weighs the decision of whether to accept a promotion in the financial firm at which she is employed, but recognizes that accepting this position will mean increased demands on her time that will require her to abandon the writing she has been doing in her spare time. She concludes that the time has come to quit her job (which she finds rather tedious) and instead to pursue a career as a writer.
  2. Upon making this decision, she experiences a certain relief — indeed a “liberation” — in the realization that, all along, she had “really” been “a writer”, rather than an aspiring investment banker (this recognition may also help her to understand why she found work at the firm so tedious).
  3. She joins a group of writers in her city who get together from time to time to discuss their work and provide support to each other.
  4. The group she has joined also includes individuals who have yet to quit their day jobs and are, indeed, wrestling with the sort of decision that our recent college graduate has already made. She discusses the challenges and rewards of the path she has taken with those who are still trying to figure out what they should be doing.

Both of these narratives — and any number of other stories of this sort that we might want to construct — consist of a sequence of moves that, for all their apparent logic, are beset by any number of contingencies. The transition from step 1 to 2 may perhaps seem slightly less contingent than the other steps because we are familiar with the set of metaphors that both individuals are using to interpret their experience. But the interpretation of the experiences undergone at step 1 in terms of the metaphor employed in step 2 rests on the fact that the individuals in these stories being members of communities in which these sorts of metaphors have some currency. And, pushing on through the remainder of the steps, it is less than obvious that metaphors of this sort possess any sort of “independent momentum” that requires the individual who, at step 2, takes up the metaphor of “self-mastery,” to march onward through steps 3 and 4. Obviously, not all individuals who experience religious conversions wind up packing shrapnel into pressure cookers and not all accountants turned writers become members of writer support groups.

But while it may be appealing to read Berlin’s steps as describing a sort of personal history of the sort that I have constructed (at least it appeals to me, since it makes some sense of the process that he seems to be tracing), Berlin had something else in mind. He was attempting to trace the trajectory of an idea, not a life, which means that movement from step 1 through step 4 has to be reformulated as a sort of “biography of an idea” — i.e., as a history of the concept of “freedom,” cast in the form of a “history of ideas” written in the Great Books style: ideas are passed from thinker to thinker and reformulated along the way. But, while this sort of history lies at the heart of the transition that Berlin sketched at the start of Section II, this isn’t what he proceeds to offer in the remainder of the Two Concepts lecture. What we find instead is something that looks, at best, like an account of the implications of a metaphor and, at worst, like the “movement of the Concept.”

Berlin’s “Phenomenology of Freedom”: Self-Mastery, Self-Abnegation, and Self-Realization

So, let’s try again, this time talking about the history of a concept rather than the biography of an individual. Berlin’s account of the vicissitudes of the concept of “positive liberty” goes as follows.

  1. He begins with a brief discussion, in Section II, of the “desire to be self-directed” and then proceeds, in the next two sections, to explore the two directions that efforts to achieve such self-direction have taken.
  2. Section III (“The Retreat to the Inner Citadel”) considers the project of “self-abnegation,” i.e., the attempt to “strive for nothing that I cannot be sure to obtain.”
  3. Section IV (“Self-Realization”) focuses on a strategy of liberation that he sees as central to the project of “enlightened rationalism”: this project involves understanding what “rational necessity” demands and making this necessity into one’s own project.
  4. Finally, Section V (“The Temple of Sarasto”) examines how adepts at the project outlined in Section IV impose such projects on others in order to lead them (or, more bluntly, to force them) to “true” freedom.

These sections can, without too much difficulty, be mapped onto steps 2 through 4 of the sequence that I constructed above. Section III of the lecture generates a division between “rational” and “irrational” selves of the sort that can be found at step 2 of my earlier reconstruction. Section IV — with some difficulty (which can be clarified in a moment) — can be seen as a sort of merging of the “rational self” into a larger collectivity (e.g., one of Berlin’s favorite examples for this is a musician learning to play a composition and, in doing so, becoming “free” by subjecting himself or herself to the score). And Sarastro’s “enlightened despotism” in Section V is, quite transparently, an example of what Berlin sees at work in step 4.

As we make our way through these three sections we encounter many proper names (Kant, Spinoza, Montesquieu, Burke, Hegel etc.), but it is hard to get a grasp on how these names are supposed to be arranged into anything like a history of ideas (even in the Great Books style). While Berlin (like Popper) disliked Hegel intensely, the experience of reading these sections is not unlike the confusion that begins to settle over a reader of Hegel’s Phenomenology: concepts are on the move, changing their implications as they make their progress; glimpses of the development of these concepts can be seen in this or that thinker (though Hegel, unlike Berlin, is sparing in his use of proper names), but it is not always obvious how the discussion is supposed to line up with anything that resembles an actual history.

Kant’s name turns up quite a bit in Section III, where he serves as an illustration of how the breach between the “two selves” comes about. In Berlin’s account, the “retreat to the inner citadel” rests on the separating off of a “‘noumenal’ self” that remains free, even though the phenomenal self may be subject to external forces.

From this doctrine, as it applies to individuals, it is no very great distance to the conceptions of those who, like Kant, identify freedom not indeed with the elimination of desires, but with resistance to them, and control over them. I identify myself with the controller and escape the slavery of the controlled. I am free because, and in so far as, I am autonomous. I obey laws, but I have imposed them on, or found them in, my own uncoerced self. Freedom is obedience, but ‘obedience to a law which we prescribe to ourselves’ and no man can enslave himself.

From time to time, we find discussions in the Two Concepts lecture that provide something approximating an account of the development of metaphors and their appropriation by historical actors. For example, four paragraphs from the end of Section III, Berlin observes:

Kant’s free individual is a transcendent being, beyond the realm of natural causality. But in its empirical forms — in which the notion of man is that of ordinary life — this doctrine was the heart of liberal humanism, both moral and political, that was deeply influenced both by Kant and by Rousseau in the eighteenth century. In its a priori version, it is a form of secularized Protestant individualism, in which the place of God is taken by the conception of the rational life, and the place of the individual soul which strives towards union with Him is replaced by the conception of an individual, endowed with reason, straining to be governed by reason and reason alone and to depend upon nothing that might deflect or delude him by engaging his irrational nature. Autonomy, not heteronomy: act and not to be acted upon. The notion of slavery to the passions is — for those who think in these terms — more than a metaphor.

What Berlin might be suggesting here is that Kant provides a secularized form of Protestant theology and that — perhaps because his discussion of autonomy and heteronomy shared much with a more culturally pervasive appropriation of religious accounts of divisions within the soul — his particular way of framing these discussions went on to have a broad appeal to “liberal humanists” (e.g., liberals who were looking for non-religious ways of reframing the religious traditions from which they were coming?). An account of this sort might help clarify why the metaphor of self-mastery could take on a “momentum” that would allow it to complete the passage from step 1 to step 4. But it is hard to see how Berlin can characterize this “momentum” as in any sense “independent.” There is no logical explanation for the transition from step 1 to step 4 nor is it clear that the metaphor of “self-mastery” has any inherent relationship to the later discussions of “self-realization” or self-enslavement. If there is a connection here, it is an historical or cultural one. At the close of Section IV, Berlin is content to note that, in the account he has been offering, the idea of positive liberty has, “wandered far from its rationalist moorings.” Explaining that it is not his intent “to trace the historical evolution [emphasis mine] of this idea,” he proposes instead “to comment on some of its vicissitudes.” And, with that, we move on to the discussion of Sarastro’s Temple.

A Brief Consideration of the Flexner Lectures

Berlin had, however, attempted an account of the “historical evolution” of the idea of positive liberty some six years earlier as part of his Flexner Lectures at Bryn Mawr College. An adequate discussion of these lectures would drag this already lengthy set of posts out to an intolerable length. And, in any case, it would be folly for me to attempt such an account without having had the chance to read Joshua Cherniss’s recently published discussion of the development of Berlin’s thought, which draws on archival materials that I have not examined.[5] But, at the risk of having Cherniss’ book prove me wrong (and I’m enough of a Popperian not to get worked up about being proven wrong), here is my take on what is going on in the Flexner Lectures.

The history of ideas that Berlin offered at Bryn Mawr began by tracing the way in various Enlightenment thinkers (among them, Helvetius) advanced a concept of liberty that is grounded on the accumulation of natural scientific knowledge of the functioning of the world. This knowledge was seen as potentially liberating in two ways. In the case of the various illusions and prejudices that held sway over the human mind, a demonstration of their falsity was sufficient to break their hold. Further, human liberty could also be enhanced by an understanding of the actual constraints that nature places on human actions. In this case, emancipation took the form of the development of strategies that echoed Bacon’s idea that, in order to command nature, we must first learn how to obey her. It is important, I think, that there is no talk at this point about a division between “true” and “false” selves nor any suggestion that knowing how nature operates necessarily requires the leap that Berlin makes at the start of Section IV of the Two Concepts lecture when sapere aude is identified with a process in which individuals achieve liberty by subjecting their own ends to those of nature. Pangloss may do this, but Candide winds up learning that work (or, as Habermas would have it, “purposive-rational action”) is a reasonable alternative. And Voltaire, as we know, didn’t try to convince himself that torturing Huguenots was part of the “rational necessity” of the world.

In the Flexner Lectures, the discussion of these (“Enlightenment”) strategies for advancing human liberty is followed by an analysis of what he terms the “romantic conception” of liberty. As would be the case in the Two Concepts lecture, Kant’s role in this story lies in his distinction between two different “selves” (noumenal and phenomenal) (see pp. 147–148 and 173), which serves as the premise for Berlin’s discussion of the notion of “positive freedom” (166). The narrative that Berlin offered at Bryn Mawr associates “positive freedom” with what he terms the “romantic” rather than the “liberal” conception of liberty, and much of his discussion of it is accomplished in an extended account of Fichte (177–198). In Fichte, Berlin found a thinker who might be seen as tailor-made for demonstrating the dangerous “momentum” of the concept of “self-mastery”: the Wissenschaftslehre corresponds to the distinction between the “free” self and the “subject” one (step 2 in the sketch above), while The Addresses to the German Nation show how such a distinction might be transferred to a collectivity (step 3 above). But since Fichte is, in Berlin’s eyes, a “romantic” not an Aufklärer, a considerable reshuffling of labels is necessary in order to produce the account offered in the Two Concepts.

The label “romantic liberty” was jettisoned and the roots of “positive liberty” were seen as reaching back to (at least) the Enlightenment. This shift allowed Berlin, in the lectures, articles, and drafts that would follow in the wake of the Two Concepts, to bring the Romantics, along with that odd assortment of thinkers who make up the Counter-Enlightenment, onto the field as the opponents of what, in the Flexner lectures, had been characterized as the “Romantic conception” of liberty. It is possible that this may, in part, have provided a reason for avoiding an historical account of the transformation of the concept in the Two Lectures. Not only would it have been difficult to work such a discussion into the limited space permitted in his inaugural lecture, but it is also possible that Berlin was not, at least at this point, entirely settled on how such a history might be presented.

Popper on Positive Liberty as Self-Legislation

Had Popper been familiar with how Berlin’s argument had been developed in the Flexner Lectures, it would have done little to remove his reservations about Berlin’s attitude towards Horace’s “sapere aude.” Though Fichte might have shown how a thinker could run through the steps that culminated in subjection to the authority of the ”enlightened“ that had been previewed in the third paragraph of Section II and ultimately cashed out in the discussion of Saratro’s Temple in Section V, Popper would have had considerable difficulties in seeing Fichte as a legitimate heir of Kant. He had emphatically rejected that line of interpretation in his BBC lecture:

Kant believed in the Enlightenment. He was its last great defender. I realize that this is not the usual view. While I see Kant as the defender of the Enlightenment, he is more often taken as the founder of the school which destroyed it — of the Romantic School of Fichte, Schelling, and Hegel. I contend that these two interpretations are incompatible.[6]

What separates Berlin and Popper, then, are two rather different accounts of the relationship between “the Enlightenment” and “the Romantics.” These interpretations, to be sure, are creatures of a period in which the lines between enlightenment, idealism, and romanticism tended to be drawn more starkly than we might be inclined to draw them today. This difference in how Berlin and Popper situate Kant leaves us with two self-described liberals — both wary of the threat posed by a totalitarian enemy — who offer markedly diverging accounts as to how to trace the history of the ideas that laid the foundations for the enemy they both oppose.

But since the Two Concepts offered rather little of this history of ideas, their disagreement may not have been quite as significant for Popper as it might appear to those of us who can work our way through the Flexner Lectures and fill out the intellectual history that the Two Concepts lacked. Popper had the luxury of simply being puzzled by what Berlin was saying and could go on to read what Berlin was offering as an exercise in political philosophy that sought to distinguish two different concepts of liberty. What struck him as questionable in the lecture was its implication that positive liberty and negative liberty were ultimately incommensurable: a conjecture about the implications of a concept, rather than a history. And Popper, of all people, knew what to do with conjectures: try to come up with a refutation.

Popper’s second point, then, can be viewed as an attempt to refute Berlin’s claim that there is an inherent contradiction between positive and negative concepts of liberty by providing a “very simple idea of positive freedom which may be complementary to negative freedom, and which does not need to clash with it.” The example that he provides is — appropriately enough for a friend of Kant — cast in the form of a maxim:

search for truth — sapere aude

Popper prefaces this familiar quotation with the following maxim:

spend one’s own life as well as one can; experimenting, trying to realize in one’s own way, and with full respect to others (and their different valuations) what one values most …

However we understand what Kant was doing with the “motto” he took from Horace, Popper has captured something important about the form in which it is cast: it can only be interpreted as an example of “positive freedom.” In Berlin’s account, the adopting of a maxim (i.e., “search for the truth” or “think for oneself” rather than follow instructions that are given by others) is, and can only be classified as an example of positive, rather than negative, liberty since what is at issue here is a question of who is the source that is determining what I can be or do. Since “sapere aude” is a rule that I give to myself (as opposed to a command from a superior), it counts as an instance of “positive” freedom: it represents an act of self-legislation.

As I have suggested in an earlier post, this way of thinking about the phrase from Horace is not unique to Popper. When read in context, what Horace is advising his young friend Lollius Maximus to do is to adopt a rule for living properly. As my friend Manfred Kuehn has explained in a discussion of Kant’s lectures on anthropology, Kant held that

As free and rational beings, we can and must adopt principles according to which we live, and it is for that reason that character may “be defined also as the determination of the freedom (Willkür) of human beings by lasting and firmly established maxims.” Insofar as character is indeed the characteristic mark of human beings as free and rational beings, living by maxims makes us what we should be. … It is for this reason that he identifies character with our “way of thinking” (Denkungsart), which is opposed to the “way of sensing” (Sinnesart).[7]

This seems to have been the way in which Horace’s motto was understood by the “Society of the Friends of Truth,” that strange group of Epicurean champions of Leibniz and Wolff who were responsible for coining the medal that graces the right side of this page. They thought that the Horatian imperative could be reconciled with Leibniz’s principle of sufficient reason, hence the rule that they adopted for themselves: “Hold nothing as true, hold nothing as false, so long as you have been convinced of it by no sufficient reason.” Perhaps, a discussion of the difference between their use of Horace’s dictum and Kant’s might introduce some needed complexity into Berlin’s account of the relationship between “the Enlightenment” and the vicissitudes of the concept of positive liberty.

In his letter to Berlin, Popper emphasized the difference between claiming to be in possession of the truth, a claim that looms large in Berlin’s discussion of the dangers that haunt the concept of positive liberty, and the demand to seek the truth through a process of criticism (which Popper saw as the project pursued by Socrates). To quote the crucial passage once again,

No doubt, the idea that anybody is wise, is dangerous and repugnant. But why should sapere aude be interpreted as authoritarian? It is, I feel, anti-authoritarian. When Socrates said, in the Apology, that the search for truth through critical discussion was a way of life (in fact, the best way of life he knew of) — was there anything objectionable in this?

Popper, of course, could find nothing objectionable here. Next week we can see how Berlin responded.

  1. The letter can be found in Box 276, Folder 10 of the Karl Popper Papers at the Hoover Institution Archives and I quote from it here with the permission of the Karl Popper Library, Klagenfurt, Austria. ↩
  2. Popper, “Immanuel Kant: Philosopher of the Enlightenment,” reprinted as “Kant’s Critique and Cosmoology” in Conjectures and Refutations (New York: Harper Torchbooks, 1963) 175–183. ↩
  3. The discussion also features a footnote in which Popper takes aim at the OED’s infamous definition of “Enlightenment.” ↩
  4. In the version of this passage in Four Essays on Liberty, the words “not always by logically reputable steps” are inserted immediately after the words “divergent directions.” I’ll have more to say about this, and other, changes in the text next week. ↩
  5. Joshua Cherniss, A Mind and Its Time: The Development of Isaiah Berlin’s Political Thought (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2013). The first chapter of the book is available as a free download from Oxford’s website. ↩
  6. Popper, Conjectures and Refutations 176. ↩
  7. Manfred Kuehn, Kant: A Biography (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002) 147. ↩
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Edes and Gill, the “Patriot Printers” & Locke’s Second Treatise

Posted on April 16, 2013 by

I published this post about three hours before the bombing in Boston as the second of two posts marking the Patriots’ Day holiday.  In the wake of the attacks, I pulled both posts off the site.  I’ve replaced the first post with a very different one.  This one, I think, can stand more or less as it was.

As Richard Sher and Michael Warner have reminded us, any discussion of an “American Enlightenment” had better pay attention to printers. And what better printers are there to attend to on “Patriots’ Day”  than the “Patriot Printers” Benjamin Edes and John Gill? Among their many other achievements, Edes and Gill were the publishers of the Boston Gazette, the newspaper that played a leading role in the anti-British agitation that culminated with the confrontation in Concord that citizens of the Commonwealth of Massachusetts celebrate today, among other ways, by gathering along the route of the Boston Marathon.

My interest in Edes and Gill is rather limited and focuses on their roleEdesGill in publishing the item on the right. Despite having lived in Boston, off and (mostly) on for almost four decades, my knowledge of eighteenth-century Boston is scandalous spotty. And, despite having taught John Locke’s Two Treatises more times than I would care to remember (it’s possible to teach introductory courses in political thought without teaching Locke, but why would anyone want to?), it was only recently that I became interested in when the practice of reading the Second and only the Second Treatise was established. Granted, there are good reasons why interest in the First Treatise was bound to fade once Sir Robert Filmer’s reputation began its decline (I’ve always savored the irony that Locke’s attack on Filmer in the First Treatise was so successful in driving Filmer from history that it also removed most of the reasons why anyone would want to read what Locke had to say about him — who wants to read an attack on a nobody?). But when did this shift in the sense of what mattered in Locke’s work begin to be reflected in editions of the Second Treatise that presented it as an independent text that could be read on its own?

The answer, it seems, is 1691, the date of the publication of a French translation by the Huguenot émigré David Mazzel (the title page says “a Londres,” but I assume Mazellthis was produced in Holland for smuggling into France). Mazzel’s translation eliminated the First Treatise and the opening chapter of the Second (which made it clear that it was a continuation of the argument begun there), and retitled the volume Du Gouvernment Civil. The work that resulted sported a table of contents that looks exactly like the current Hackett edition of the Second Treatise, the version that most undergraduates wind up reading.

Along with a variety of editions of the Two Treatises that were published in England over the course of the eighteenth century, WorldCat notes the appearance in London in 1753 of a work by Locke entitled Of Civil Polity. It describes itself in its Preface as having been “extracted from Mr. Locke’s Essay on Civil Government, with some Alterations and Additions”. A quick look at the copy available on ECCO reveals a very peculiar book: it eliminates quite a bit of the Second Treatise, including the important (and incendiary) chapter on the dissolution of government that concludes the work (and which is, after all, the point of the entire exercise) and patches in a discussion of “the establishment of religion” (a quick scanning of the chapter suggests that it may have been pulled from the Letter Concerning Toleration, though I’ve done no more than glance at the text). In contrast to the Mazzel translation, here is a book that provides scant evidence that what Locke had produced was a powerful argument for deposing a monarch. What we are presented with is a treatise on the nature of civil government that is capped, not by a discussion of the legitimate grounds for dissolving a government, but instead by a sketch of the differences between the ends of civil and ecclesiastical society.

It was not until the end of the eighteenth century that editions began to appear in the United Kingdom that follow the model provided by Mazzel. As a result, the 1773 edition produced by the patriot printers Edes and Gill would appear to have been the first edition anywhere in the world to do, in English, what Mazzel had done in French. Theirs would be the only edition of either of the two treatises to appear on the North American continent. It should come as no surprise that Edes and Gill, like Mazzel before them, included the chapter on the dissolution of government.

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On the Boston Bombings

Posted on April 16, 2013 by

Yesterday morning, I published a post entitled “Liberty, Freedom, and nGrams! (A Patriots’ Day Special)” in which I explained that, though I try to limit my postings on this site to one a week, I’ve made exceptions to the rule: once to discuss some issues that had arisen regarding the Vienna Philharmonic’s dealings with its past (a topic on which I’ve written) and once again on the holiday popularly known as “Presidents’ Day” — when I offered a few thoughts on Thomas Jefferson as an Epicurean and John Quincy Adams’ translation of Friedrich von Gentz’s book on the American Revolution.

Since yesterday was “Patriots’ Day” — a holiday unique to Massachusetts and Maine — I used the holiday as an excuse for two posts: one tracing usages of the terms “freedom” and “liberty,” the other on the eighteenth-century “Patriot Printers” Benjamin Edes and John Gill. Yesterday was a beautiful April day in the Boston area (so, for that matter, is today), so I headed out for a long walk. When I arrived home around four in the afternoon, I learned of the bombings at the finish line of the Boston Marathon. Since my first post made passing mention of the Marathon (I’d suggested, tongue in cheek, that it was a contributing factor in preventing the commercialization of the holiday, since it makes it impossible for those of us who live here to cross Commonwealth Avenue for most of the day), I decided to take it, along with the other post, down.

This is a research blog that deals with “the Enlightenment as an historical period and continuing project.” While the events in downtown Boston today have little to do with the Enlightenment as an historical period, they are not without relevance for what I take to be the legacy that period has left us. My discussion of Edes and Gill, in a small way, had something to say about that legacy, so I thought that it might not be inappropriate to make it available again, with a brief preface. The situation with my discussion of “freedom” and “liberty” — which this post replaces — was somwhat more complicated: its main focus had to do with the difficulty in trying to pin down shifts in the usage of the terms “liberty” and “freedom” and was provoked in part by the opportunistic misuse of the latter term in American politics over the last decade or so. I think I can do it better if I drop the nGrams and simply say a few things about the Boston Marathon, about Patriots’ Day, and about the particular spot in the Boston where the first bomb exploded.

Johnny Kelly and the Boston Marathon

I live in Newton, a suburb outside the Boston city limits. The Marathon runs down Commonwealth Avenue, about a half mile from my house. I’ve spent a fair number of Patriots’ Days watching the stream of runners and wheelchair athletes as they begin their ascent up “Heartbreak Hill,” the last big climb before the long downhill stretch that leads down into Boston.

Newton is home to a statue honoring Johnny Kelly, who competed in 61 Boston Marathons, won two of them, placed second in 7, and finished in the top ten 18 times. He ran his final Marathon at the age of 84. In the last years of his life (he died in 2004 at the age of 97) he ran the last part of the race (about six miles or so — more than I can comfortably run), starting at the statue that had been erected to honor him, a statue that shows the young and the old Kelly running together, hands uplifted. The crowds that lined the way would always recognize him and cheer him on, as did his fellow runners.DSCF9420

Kelly was not a professional athlete and, until he retired at the age of 73, he continued to work as a maintenance man for Boston Edison. For much of the last century, the Boston Marathon was not an event for professional athletes, mainly because there weren’t such things as “professional runners.” It was a public event, open to anyone up to the challenge of running 26 miles. Even after it began to attract all the remarkable runners from other parts of the world who I’ve seen from my favored vantage point (for example, Uta Pippig), it remained — like most other marathons, I suppose — a competition that was open to the public. Yesterday’s bombs exploded well after the “elite” runners had finished the competition, which meant that those who were crossing the finish line and those who were gathered on the sidewalk to see them, were mostly amateur runners and their families, many from the Boston area.

What took place yesterday afternoon, then, was an attack both on the people who assembled to watch the end of the race in downtown Boston and on that strange but essential entity that we call “the public.” The reports in today’s newspapers have been explicit in describing what was only hinted at yesterday in the televised reports: many people have suffered horrible injuries as a result of bombs that, by accident or design, were positioned in a way that made them terribly effective at blowing off legs.

I stopped following the Twitter feed on the bombing after reading a tweet from a woman who — apparently having speculated in an earlier tweet that President Obama would, “once again,” fail to call this a “terrorist attack” — was outraged that, in his comments on the attacks, he failed to deploy the shibboleth for which she had been waiting. The public is under attack in a variety of different ways and we can leave it for a calmer moment to draw the subtle distinctions between someone walking into an elementary school with the sort of weaponry used by armies and slaughtering students and others placing the sorts of explosive devices used by other armies along a street filled with families watching a public event. Acts of both sorts strike at the heart of what republics require: public spaces where citizens can go about their lives. Yesterday evening, Boston Police Commissioner Edward Davis requested that people remain indoors, not congregate in large groups, and stay away from the immediate area of the bombings. In the short run, this is a reasonable request: the police have a crime scene to investigate. In the longer run, of course, it is the sort of request that is antithetical to what it means to be a citizen of a republic. But the fact that public officials are describing the area of the attack as a “crime scene” and that the use of “war zone” seems, thus far, to be limited to certain parts of the press is somewhat encouraging.

Patriots’ Day

I like Patriots’ Day quite a bit. In part, this has to do with local pride: it’s a holiday that is only celebrated by those of us who live in Massachusetts and Maine (a state that, long ago, was a part of Massachusetts). Prior to becoming a moveable holiday (it is now celebrated on the third Monday in April) it was observed on April 19, the anniversary of the battles at Lexington and Concord that began the American war of independence. I’ve been to Concord many times and like to take foreign visitors there. They are usually somewhat puzzled, especially when I insist on dragging them to the shabby building that housed the “Concord School of Philosophy” — a place where American Hegelians assembled in the nineteenth century. But they, like everybody else, seem to enjoy Walden Pond.

Sadly, over the last several decades, the holiday has been burdened with other associations. I was vacationing with my family in Florence on April 19, 1995, the date of the bombing of the Murrah Federal Building in Oklahoma City. I watched the scenes of the destruction on CNN with incomprehension and followed, with even greater incomprehension, the subsequent reporting on the militia groups from which the bomber had come. A few days later I was in the Sala della Pace of the Palazzo Pubblico in Siena gazing at the Lorenzetti frescoes. In 1995, “freedom” had not quite yet become what it would become in the wake of the 2001 attacks on the World Trade Center: a verbal tick, uttered by politicians in defense of increasingly questionable (but, unfortunately, not sufficiently questioned) ventures — a word intended to mark the true “patriots” off from the suspect parts of the population. But even then I was developing a preference for the Latin word that I saw on the shield on the balcony of the Palazzo and would see again, a few days later, on the walls of Lucca: Libertas.  It is a word that has always struck me as more complex in its implications than the word “freedom.”

768px-Ambrogio_Lorenzetti_-_Allegory_of_the_Good_Government_(detail)_-_WGA13487Among the lessons taught on the walls of the Sala della Pace is that the preservation of  liberty requires such things as concord, peace, fortitude, prudence, magnanimity, temperance, justice — especially justice (the inscription reads “Love Justice you who rule the earth”). At this hour, we do not know whether the bombings on Boylston Street were carried out by domestic or foreign enemies. But we should know by now that the only way in which republics can effectively respond to challenges like this is to call upon all of the capacities allegorized on the walls of the Sala della Pace. While the twittering woman was outraged (or feigning outrage — on Twitter there may not be a difference) that President Obama didn’t utter the word “terrorism,” I was gratified that he characterized Boston as “tough and resilient” — words that translate well into Latin as “fortitudo.” The reports in today’s newspapers also point to a considerable outpouring of magnanimity on the part of those who, in large and small ways, came to the aid of those whose live were disrupted, in ways minor and massive, by yesterday’s events. And the fact that the American war for independence began in a town called “Concord” ought to be enough to remind us that in a properly functioning republic citizens don’t need to be forever at the ready to topple their government.  They can put down their muskets, take up their pens, and make good use of the liberties that republics provide.

“The Safeguard of Order and Liberty”

A few years ago it struck me that, though I teach at Boston University, I wasn’t spending nearly enough time walking around the city of Boston itself.  I resolved that, rather than boarding the subway near my office for the ride back to Newton, I would instead walk the mile and a half into the city itself and get on the subway at the Copley Square stop, which stands across the street from the Boston Public Library. I subsequently realized that, though I was walking past the Boston Public Library quite a bit, I wasn’t spending nearly enough time in its g220px-Bates_Hall_Bostonorgeous main reading room. So, whenever I had an hour to spare, I went into the building and did my reading in the great vaulted hall. The first of yesterday’s bombs went off across from the new wing of the Library and, for the moment, the Copley Square station is closed as the investigation of the crime scene continues.

In the face of the pain and suffering that those most directly affected by the attacks have endured and will be enduring in the days to come it may be pointless to talk about walks in cities and reading rooms in libraries. An eight-year old child was the first confirmed death in the attacks and reports of the carnage filled the morning papers.  Families of children killed in the Sandy Hook shootings were among those on the stands erected at the finish and the streets across from the library were stained with the blood of the victims.

But there are two inscriptions on the outside of the library that strike me as worth recalling in the midst of these horrors. The first was composed by the board of trustees when they established what would be the first American public library: “The Commonwealth Requires the Education of the People as the Safeguard of Order and Liberty.” It might serve as a reminder that the things we need to do in order to protect the republic involve more than simply maintaining “homeland security.”  The other inscription, shorter and more direct, is on the keystone of the entrance. It speaks for itself: “Free to All.”

The doors of the Boston Public Library are, for obvious reasons, closed today.  But we can be certain that they will not remain closed.  And there is some comfort in that.

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Karl Popper & Isaiah Berlin on Liberty & Enlightenment (Part I)

Posted on April 14, 2013 by

On October 31, 1958, Isaiah Berlin assumed the Chichele Chair of Social and Political Theory at Oxford and delivered his inaugural lecture, “Two Concepts of Liberty.” The lecture — which is now regarded as one of the more important contributions to twentieth century political thought —  played no small part in making the case for the importance of political philosophy at a time when the viability of the discipline was in question. And, if I am permitted to Two Conceptsinject a personal note (and one of the privileges — and risks — of blogging is that there is no one to stop me), it was also one of the first pieces of “contemporary” political theory that I read. The copy of the lecture that lies open on my desk as I write is the original Oxford University Press edition, the version that Gordon Schochet (a great and inspiring teacher to whom I am greatly indebted) assigned during my freshman year at Rutgers University. Though its cover long ago separated from the text and while the text itself has been defaced by the various implements — pencils, pens, and (foolish boy!) yellow highlighter — that I’ve used to attack texts over the years, it Cruelty to Booksis still the version that I prefer to read. Turning its pages is a sort of homecoming and, every once in a while, I can take some comfort when I notice that the awful yellow highlighting, splattered throughout the text during a frenzied reading many decades ago, actually marks an important passage. But, as we will see, my peculiar attachment to this version has something more than nostalgia to recommend it.

Karl Popper was among those to whom Berlin sent copies of the Two Concepts and, on February 17, 1959, he finally got around to acknowledging Berlin’s gift. Henry Hardy and Jennifer Holmes included brief extracts from his letter to Berlin in the second volume of Berlin’s correspondence.1 But these extracts are not enough to convey a sense of what Popper thought of the lecture, though Berlin’s response to them (which is published in full in the volume) does make it clear that Popper had some questions about what Berlin had written. Even after reading the full text of Popper’s letter — which the staff at the Hoover Institute Archives was kind enough to retrieve from Box 276, Folder 10 of the Karl Popper Papers and which I am able quote here with the permission of the Karl Popper Library, Klagenfurt, Austria — it is difficult to grasp the point of Popper’s comments without consulting Berlin’s text. But, fortunately, Popper was quite precise in his citations and, luckily, I kept my copy of the edition that he was citing (which offers yet another argument for the questionable practice of never getting rid of anything).

Popper’s letter falls into three parts. He begins by expressing his general agreement with the thrust of Berlin’s argument:

I have hardly ever read anything on the philosophy of politics with which I agreed so completely on all important issues — and the issues are very important indeed. I am delighted by your clear distinction between what you call negative and positive freedom; in your own confession of faith — even though it is only implicit, it is no less open and forceful — for negative freedom; for your exposition of the dangers of the ideology of positive freedom; your stand, on p. 57, against moral historism and historicism; your warnings against the assumption that social problems must be soluble in principle, and that (‘real’) goods must be compatible, and in harmony; and above all, your declaration on absolute human rights, on p. 51. On all these things, there is perfect agreement between us; and I believe that the way in which you have discussed and presented these ideas is admirable.

Praise completed, he goes on to observe, “Nevertheless I have some criticisms — in fact, a long list.”

In the letter Popper limits his discussion to “only two points.” The first has to do with Berlin’s characterization of “rationalism” and focuses, in particular, on the discussion that takes place in the last paragraph of Section V of the lecture, a section that — in an allusion to Mozart’s Magic Flute — carries the subtitle “The Temple of Sarasto.”2 The second consists of an alternative interpretation of the notion of “positive freedom,” an interpretation of the concept that Popper suggests might be “complementary to negative freedom.” His presentation of this alternative rather quickly leads to a somewhat enigmatic question to Berlin: “What have you against sapere aude?” What is at issue here was Berlin’s passing reference, at the start of Section IV of the lecture (which carries the title “Self-realization”), to Horace’s famous words, which Immanuel Kant had quoted at the start of his answer to the question “What is Enlightenment?”  Popper, as we shall see in the sequel to this post, found Berlin’s treatment of these famous words rather troubling.

What I will be arguing in the next few posts (there is a lot to cover here, so this is going to take a while) is that (1) Popper’s two points are intimately related and (2) taken together, they represent a significant challenge to Isaiah Berlin’s interpretation of the Enlightenment. Popper’s first point can be understood as an attempt to question the concept of “rationalism” that Berlin had seen as central to the Enlightenment by contrasting it with a markedly different understanding of the Enlightenment that Popper associated with his own project of “critical rationalism.” In his second point, Popper seeks to associate the phrase that Kant had characterized as the “motto of enlightenment” with a form of “positive liberty” that would not be plagued by the various pathologies that Berlin had discussed in the Two Concepts. As a result, spending some time working our way through Popper’s letter and Berlin’s subsequent response will help to clarify the differing ways in which Popper and Berlin understood the Enlightenment — both the period and its broader project.  Since such questions are the raison d’être for this blog, let’s get to work.

Point 1: Popper’s Reservations About Berlin’s “Four Premisses”

Popper’s first point is, as he explains, “connected with” Berlin’s “picture of rationalism.” Here is the relevant section of the letter:

On p. 39 you state the basic assumptions of a kind of rationalism. Now I am sure you will believe me when I say that I was never in my life tempted to accept any of those four assumptions — on the contrary, I should say that ever since I could understand them — say, from my seventeenth year on — I would have turned from them in horror. Moreover, when you say “Can it be that Hume is right, and Socrates mistaken” I am far from convinced that Socrates would have accepted your four basic assumptions, although I agree that Hume would have rejected them.

The passage to which Popper refers is the final paragraph of Section V of the lecture and the “four assumptions” discussed there loom large in Berlin’s discussions of the Enlightenment.

In the paragraph at issue, Berlin summarizes the account that he has been developing, over the course of the previous three sections, of how the notion of “positive liberty” has evolved into a doctrine that now lies “at the heart of many of the nationalist, communist, authoritarian, and totalitarian creeds of our day.”3 “Positive liberty,” as Berlin defines it, is a conception of liberty that assesses whether one is free or not by posing the question “What, or who, is the source of control or interference, that can determine someone to do, or be, one thing rather than another?” (there has been much written about the peculiarities of Berlin’s characterization of positive liberty but, at least for the present, I’d like to avoid opening that can of worms — perhaps I can discuss those issues in a later post). Here is the entirety of the last paragraph of Section V:

If this leads to despotism, albeit by the best or the wisest — to Sarastro’s temple in the Magic Flute — but still despotism, which turns out to be identical with freedom, can it be that there is something amiss in the premisses of the argument? that the basic assumptions are themselves somewhere at fault? Let me state them once more: first, that all men have one true purpose, and one only, that of rational self-direction; second, that the ends of all rational beings must of necessity fit into a single universal, harmonious pattern, which some men may be able to discern more clearly than others; third, that all conflict, and consequently all tragedy, is due solely to the clash of reason with the irrational or the insufficiently rational — immature and undeveloped elements in life — whether individual or communal, and that such clashes are, in principle, avoidable, and for wholly rational beings impossible; finally, that when all men have been made rational, they will obey the rational laws of their own natures, which are one and the same in them all, and so be at once wholly law-abiding and wholly free. Can it be that Hume is right and Socrates mistaken, that virtue is not knowledge, and freedom not identical with either? that despite the fact that it rules the lives of more men than ever before in its long history, not one of the basic assumptions of this famous view is demonstrable, or, perhaps, even true?

The four premisses that Berlin lays out here could profit from some cleaning up, especially since there seems to be some unnecessary repetition (it tends to be his style to repeat his points in a variety of ways and, though this is sometimes quite effective rhetorically, it may get in the way of understanding his argument). As a first stab, his “four premises” might, without too much violence to his presentation of them, be summarized as follows:

  1. “rational self-direction” is the sole “true purpose” of all human beings
  2. the ends of all rational beings fit into a coherent pattern, which some people are better at seeing than others
  3. while rational purposes never conflict with each other, irrational (or imperfectly rational) purposes do
  4. when human beings have been made fully rational, conflicts can be avoided without impinging on human freedom

I think that the argument might be a bit clearer if we reformulated these premisses as follows (readers should feel free to venture alternative formulations of Berlin’s argument in their comments — I need all the help I can get):

  1. “rational self-direction” is the sole “true purpose” of all human beings
  2.  while rational purposes never conflict with each other, irrational (or imperfectly rational) purposes do
  3. actions based on irrational (or imperfectly rational) projects can be restrained without impinging on actions based on projects involving “rational self-direction”
  4. Some people are better at understanding premises 1,2, and 3 than others.

Readers will note that two things are missing from my proposed reformulation: (a) any mention of “freedom” and (b) any talk about purposes filling together into a “single, harmonious pattern.” It is simple enough to get “freedom” back into the discussion if we realize that Berlin’s “positive freedom” is probably best glossed as “rational self-direction” (which, for those familiar with Kant’s terminology, translates into Wille) and that “non-rational” or “false” purposes might — somewhat more tentatively — be glossed as freedom in the “negative” sense (i.e., the freedom to choose one thing rather than another without interference: what Kant would term Willkür). So, let’s try another stab at reformulating Berlin’s point (I’m not entirely happy with what follows, but it may be adequate enough for now):

  1. “rational self-direction” (i.e., the “rational willing” that lies at the heart of “positive liberty”) is the sole “true purpose” of all human beings
  2. conflicts between human purposes are limited to “irrational” or “imperfectly rational” purposes
  3. actions based on “irrational” (or “imperfectly rational”) projects can be restrained (i.e. the “negative liberty” to perform them restricted) without impinging on actions based on projects involving “rational self-direction”
  4. Some people are better at understanding premisses 1,2, and 3 than others.

The business about the “ends of all rational beings” fitting together into a “single, harmonious pattern” is still absent, though I think it is implicit in premise #2 since a lack of conflict between the rational wills of agents is, by definition, a “harmonious pattern.” Nevertheless Berlin, as we shall see, may have other reasons for talking about a “harmonious pattern.”  But, for the moment, we can ignore them.

Finally, I should probably say something about what I am offering as premise #4, which  extends the scope of what, in Berlin’s original formulation, had been limited to the idea that some people see a “harmonious pattern” while others don’t.  It strikes me that this premise actually does a fair amount of work in the argument of the Two Concepts and, for that reason alone, deserves to be emphasized. All that the first three premisses offer is a conjecture about the ways in which differing human purposes might (or might not) fit together: while rational projects of self-direction do not clash with one another, irrational projects may sometimes conflict (e.g., your desire to drive through the streets of Boston while wearing a blindfold will conflict with my desire to walk down the middle of Beacon Street while reading a book). The mischief done by the fourth premise is that it helps to insulate this conjecture about the difference between rational and irrational projects from refutation by suggesting that some people aren’t that good at understanding the fact that rational projects always harmonize while irrational projects sometimes clash.

To drive this point home, all we need to do is replace “Some people” with the words “Rational people” and “others” with the words “irrational people.” And this should make it clearer why Popper might see this is a version of “rationalism” that he has long rejected: it is a formulation that is tailor-made to produce conjectures that can easily evade refutation (e.g., “Your resistance to my conjecture that your symptoms are the result of an unresolved Oedipal complex strikes me as evidence of your suffering from an unresolved Oedipal complex. Whoops, time’s up.  Let’s talk more about this at our next session”).

There is still one more significant, if obvious, point to note about what Berlin is doing here:  he has not desire to defend the plausibility of these premisses. Indeed, the whole point of the Two Concepts lecture is that these premisses, and the conception of liberty that he sees as derived (somehow or other) from them (i.e., “positive liberty”, a.k.a., “rational self-direction,” or — as he puts it in Section IV — “self-realization”) are deeply flawed, terribly misguided, and responsible for many of the miseries of the twentieth century.  Much of the mischief that concerns him is, I think, done by the claim that I have reformulated in premise #4, which can be read as a warrant that allows me to force you to be free (e.g., “Your irrational attachment to bourgeois values prevents you from recognizing your failings as a citizen of the Soviet state. Why don’t we discuss this further in one of the basement rooms at Lubyanka?”).  Nevertheless, Berlin does need to show that these premisses, or something like them, have enjoyed some measure of historical currency. Otherwise he runs the risk of knocking down a straw man.

Berlin makes some gestures in this direction in the Two Concepts lecture — see, for example, his references to British Hegelians such as Bradley, Bosanquet, and T. H. Green, along with Kant, Fichte, Hegel, and Rousseau. But since his chief interest is with the contrast between “negative” and “positive” forms of liberty, he confined most of his discussion of the premisses on which the notion of positive liberty rests to Sections IV and V of the lecture and focused the bulk of his attention on the disastrous political implications that flow from the concept of positive liberty. In making that point, what mattered most were the first and fourth premisses on my revised list: the first provides Berlin with the potentially dangerous concept of positive liberty and the fourth gives a warrant for exploiting these dangers. As he argues in the fourth paragraph of Section II (which begins the discussion of the notion of positive liberty):

This monstrous impersonation, which consists in equating what X would choose if he were something he is not, or at least not yet, with what X actually seeks and chooses, is at the heart of all political theories of self-realization.

That this “monstrous impersonation” is something more than a theoretical possibility is clear from the outset of the lecture, which argues that the question Berlin wants to explore — namely, “the permissible limits of coercion” — is a matter on which “opposed views are held in the world today, each claiming the allegiance of very large numbers of men.” And while many of those who embrace the “positive” conception reside on the eastern side of the line that divides Europe, others were closer to home. For the “strange reversal” that transformed Kant’s “severe individualism into something close to a pure totalitarian doctrine” — a reversal that, as Berlin cautions his listeners, “is not of merely historical interest” — can also be seen in the evolution of “not a few contemporary liberals.”4

Interlude:  “Three Legs Upon Which the Whole Western Civilization Rested”

The “picture of rationalism” Berlin offered at the end of Section V was intended as a summary of a longer discussion that takes place in the first two paragraphs of the section. These paragraphs (which, combined, sprawl over four pages of the version of the lecture Popper was reading) offer an extended discussion of the premisses that Berlin attempts to summarize at the close of the section. In this account Berlin places particular emphasis on a point that I have, somewhat rudely, kicked out of my reformulation of his four premisses: namely, further arguments in support of the idea that the rational purposes individuals pursue fit together into a “harmonious pattern.” In an effort to summarize the assumptions shared by such thinkers as Spinoza, Hegel, Marx, and (depending on how one understands the relationship between the first and second paragraphs of this section) Rousseau, Kant, and Fichte, Berlin offers the following:

Thinkers of this type argued that if moral and political problems were genuine — as surely they were —they must in principle be fully soluble;5 that is to say, there must exist one and only one true solution to any problem. All truths could in principle be discovered by any rational thinker, and demonstrated so clearly that all other rational men could not but accept them …. On this assumption, the problem of political liberty was soluble by establishing a just order that would give to each man all the freedom to which a rational being was entitled. My claim to unfettered freedom can prima facie at times not be reconciled with your equally unqualified claim; but the rational solution of one problem cannot collide with the equally true solution of another, for two truths cannot logically be incompatible; therefore a just order must in principle be discoverable — an order of which the rules make possible correct solutions to all possible problems that could arise in it.

While the premise that all “genuine” problems must be soluble may not have been necessary for the critique of positive liberty that Berlin was offering, it does play a role in the overall argument he is making by providing an account of the broader set of assumptions that disposed certain thinkers to set off on the dangerous path that led to the deeply flawed set of premisses that close Section V. What we have here, then, is further evidence that the version of positive liberty that Berlin is criticizing is something more than a straw man.

The passage that I’ve quoted above will, no doubt, be familiar to Berlin’s readers since versions of it can be found in both the works that he wrote in the wake of the Two Concepts and in those that preceded it. For example, in his 1965 Mellon lectures at the National Gallery of Art in Washington (which served as the framework for a series of subsequent lectures on the BBC), we find the following summary of the “three legs upon which the whole Western tradition rested”:

First, that all genuine questions can be answered, that if a question cannot be answered it is not a question. … The second proposition is that all these answers are knowable … The third proposition is that all the answers must be compatible with one another ….

Notice that, in this discussion, there is no talk of “liberty” or “rational purposes” at all.  We are presented with a set of assumptions that lie at a more fundamental level than arguments about liberty.  The Enlightenment, he goes on to argue, “offered a particular version of them, transformed them in a particular manner” (21) and it was against these three principles that the Romantics mounted their attack. A similar claim can be found, a few years later, in his entry on “The Counter-Enlightenment” in the Dictionary of the History of Ideas, where a version of these principles serves as a rough characterization of what it was that the “Counter-Enlightenment” was countering.6

Working backwards from the “Two Concepts,” we see a similar list in his 1952 Flexner Lectures at Bryn Mawr College — a first canvasing of the concerns that Berlin explore, in more detail, over the next several decades. Surveying the eighteenth century he states that

Where ever we look — from the deists and the believers in natural law and natural religion to the disciples of Quensay or Adam Smith, form the German metaphysicians to the atheistic materialists in France, from the neo-classical aesthetic theorists to chemists and mathematicians zoologists — we find the same common assumption: that the answers to all the great questions must of necessarily agree with one another; for they must correspond to reality, and reality is a harmonious whole. If this were not so, there is chaos at the heart of things: which is unthinkable…. No truly good thing can ever be finally incompatible with any other; indeed they virtually entail one another: men cannot be wise unless they are free, or free unless they are just, happy and so forth.7

Pushing further backwards, we see much the same claim in his 1950 Foreign Affairs article “Political Ideas in the Twentieth Century”:

European liberalism wears the appearance of a single coherent movement, little altered during almost three centuries, founded upon relatively simple intellectual foundations, laid by Locke or Grotius or even Spinoza; stretching back to Erasmus and Montaigne, the Italian Renaissance, Seneca and the Greeks. In this movement there is a rational answer to every question. Man is, in principle at least, everywhere and in every condition, able, if he wills it, to discover and apply rational solutions to his problems. And these solutions, because they are rational, cannot clash with one another, and will ultimately form a harmonious system in which the truth will prevail, and freedom, happiness and unlimited opportunity for untrammeled self-development will be open to all.8

And, finally, we can catch the first glimmerings of this idea in his earliest book, Karl Marx: His Life and Environment, which — from the first edition onward — included the following summary of the lessons that Marx inherited from the Enlightenment:

Reason is always right. To every question there is only one true answer which with sufficient assiduity can be infallibly discovered, and this applies no less to questions of ethics or politics, of personal and social life, than to the problems of physics or mathematics. Once found, the putting of the solution into practice is a matter of mere technical skill; but the traditional enemies of progress must first be removed, and men taught the importance of acting in all questions on the advice of disinterested scientific experts, whose knowledge is founded on reason and experience. Once this has been achieved, the path is clear to the millennium.9

In short, Berlin’s characterization of the fundamental principles on which “rationalism” in general and the Enlightenment in particular rested was not an idea that he cobbled together for the “Two Concepts” and then discarded, nor was it a formulation that was limited to a particular period in his career. It was fundamental to how he understood the Enlightenment and, if was are to hold him to his formulation in The Roots of Romanticism, central to his understanding of the foundations on which Western Civilization rested.  In other words, slippery slope that leads to totalitarianism is rather long.

Popper’s First Point Concluded: What “Reason” Means

For this reason Popper’s first point marks an important disagreement: what Berlin saw as central to a conception of “rationalism” (surely a misguided conception of rationalism, but a form of rationalism that was held by a number of significant thinkers — e.g., Kant) struck Popper, the self-professed “rationalist,” as nothing of the sort. That point was driven home by Popper in a succinct comment aimed at the lengthy footnote that Berlin placed at the end of the penultimate paragraph of Section V of the lecture. After noting that Kant, in his “Idea for a Universal History with a Cosmopolitan Intent” “came nearest” to articulating a “negative” conception of liberty, Berlin went on to argue:

Mill, and liberals in general, at their most consistent, want a situation in which as many individuals as possible can realize as many of their ends as possible, without assessment of the value of these ends as such, save in so far as they may frustrate the purposes of others. They wish the frontiers between individuals or groups of men to be drawn solely with a view to preventing collisions between human purposes, all of which must be considered to be equally ultimate, uncriticizable ends in themselves. Kant, and the rationalists of his type, do not regard all ends as of equal value. For them the limits of liberty are determined by applying the rules of ‘reason’, which is much more than the mere generality of rules us such, and is a faculty that creates or reveals a purpose identical in, and for, all men. In the name of reason anything that is non-rational may be condemned, so that the various personal aims which their individual imagination and idiosyncrasies lead men to pursue, — for example aesthetic and other non-rational kinds of self-fulfillment — may be ruthlessly suppressed to make way for the demands of reason. The authority of reason and of the duties it lays upon men is identified with individual freedom, on the assumption that only rational ends can be the ‘true’ objects of a ‘free’ man’s ‘real’ nature.

I have never, I must own, understood what ‘reason’ means in this context; and here merely wish to point out that the a priori assumptions of this philosophical psychology are not compatible with empiricism: that is to say, any doctrine founded on knowledge derived from experience of what men are and seek.

To this Popper replied,

On the bottom of p. 38 (note) you say: “I have never, I must own, understood what “reason” means in this context”. Nor have I. But does not this passage read like an anti-rationalist declaration? And is not anti-rationalism, or irrationalism, at least as great an enemy as an uncritical rationalism?

To sum up: Popper’s first problem with Berlin’s lecture involves a disagreement about the proper understanding of what constitutes “rationalism.” Popper regards the premisses of the “kind of rationalism” that Berlin sees as providing the foundation for the “positive” conception of liberty as something that he — a self-described “rationalist” — rejects.  This allows him to agree with Berlin’s view that the line of argument traced in the long footnote on p. 38 employs a notion of “reason” that is suspect. But, for  Popper, what Berlin presents as a form of “rationalism” that reaches back through the Enlightenment and constitutes a central pillar on which Western Civilization rests might better be understood as a serious misunderstanding of what “reason” involves and (as we shall see in the sequel to this post) a misunderstanding that the Enlightenment (and, especially Kant) sought to correct.

Popper’s immediate (and perhaps strategic) response is to explain to Berlin that, despite what he may think, Berlin is a “rationalist” as well (albeit in Popper’s  understanding of the term).

In my view, you yourself are a perfect example of a rationalist; for “rationality” means, for me, the readiness to pay attention to criticism an argument—to other people’s criticisms of what one thinks and says, and to be highly critical of one’s own views and predilections.

But this praise of Berlin, even if sincere, carries the implication that Berlin would be well-advised to alter his understanding of what constitutes “rationality’ and instead embrace Popper’s conception of “critical rationalism” (as we will see in a subsequent post, Popper seems to be engaged in an effort to recruit Berlin to his position).  Doing so would ultimately require Berlin to revise his judgment on Kant and, more generally, his evaluation of the Enlightenment.

Such a revision will also deprive Berlin’s attack on the concept of “positive” liberty of some of its force, since it is central to that argument that, once a distinction has been made between the “rational” (i.e., “autonomous”) self and the empirical self (mired in heteronomous projects), the path has been greased that leads, at a minimum, to the “benign despotism” of Sarastro and, more ominously, to Soviet-style totalitarianism. Popper’s second point proceeds to develop a remedy for that problem: a reconsideration of what counts as “positive” liberty.

(To Be Continued)

  1. Isaiah Berlin, Enlightening. Letters 1946-1960, ed. H. Hardy and J. Holmes (London: Chatto & Windus, 2009) 680-682 ↩
  2. Since Berlin’s lecture was published three times — first in the Oxford edition of the lecture itself, then as one his Four Essays on Liberty (Oxford:  Oxford University Press, 1969), and most recently as Liberty (Princeton: Oxford University Press,  2002)— and also exists in any number of anthologies, I will point readers to the passages I will am discussing by counting paragraphs within sections. There are some minor — but interesting — differences between the first edition and the version in Four Essays.  Since I already own two copies of the Two Concepts, I’ve opted not to purchase the most recent incarnation. ↩
  3. Two Concepts 29 – this passage can be found in the last paragraph of Section IV ↩
  4. Two Concepts 37.↩
  5. The version reprinted in Four Essays deletes the word “fully.”  I will have more to say about the revisions that Berlin made to this version in my next post. ↩
  6. See Berlin, Against the Current ed. Henry Hardy (New York: Viking, 1980) 3-4, ↩
  7. Berlin, Political Ideas in the Romantic Age,ed. Henry Hardy (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2006 54-55.  The importance of these lectures for making sense of the development of Berlin’s argument cannot be stressed enough. ↩
  8. Isaiah Berlin, “Political Ideas in the Twentieth Century,” Foreign Affairs 28, no. 3 (April 1950): 357. ↩
  9. Berlin, Karl Marx; His Life and Environment (London: T. Butterworth ltd, 1939) 44. ↩
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