Persistent Enlightenment

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.

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 inject 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 is 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. ↩