On the occasion of the centenary of Isaiah Berlin's birth a variety of functions are being held around the world. Here are several useful links:
Isaiah Berlin Virtual Library;
Henry Hardy's web site ;
Isaiah Berlin in Riga
Isaiah Berlin is an iconic figure yet many find it difficult to see why he is so greatly esteemed and what are his essential contributions to our understanding of man's estate. It is so often said that he did not write
THE BOOK as was anticipated.
H. Hardy writes: "When Isaiah Berlin was awarded the Order of Merit, Maurice Bowra wrote in a letter to Noel Annan: ‘I am delighted about Isaiah. He is much better than all alternatives ... and very much deserves it. Though like Our Lord and Socrates he does not publish much, he thinks and says a great deal and has had an enormous influence on our times’."
The various films and lectures do cast light on him both as a person and as a thinker. The films show him against his personal political background - pogroms - the Russian revolution - a schoolboy at St Pauls - All Souls in the thirties - the Oxford philosphers- Zionism - the USA for the Foreign Office...
Of the articles about his thought those by Henry Hardy are particularly pellucid. Henry Hardy is the literary executor of Isaiah Berlin. Introducing himself Hardy writes in the article on Isaiah Berlin
’s
Four Essays on Liberty.
"I had no idea when I joined Oxford’s Wolfson College as a graduate student in 1972 that I was about to discover not only one of the principal sources of my liberation ..., but also my eventual occupation. The College’s President was Isaiah Berlin. It was clear as soon as I met him (at a scholarship interview for which I arrived late after a car accident, and during which he repeatedly went to the window to see if a taxi had arrived) that he was a remarkable man; but I had never read any of his work, and knew next to nothing about him.
I asked where I should start, and was rightly directed to
Four Essays on Liberty, published three years earlier. I took it with me on a visit to a remote Exmoor cottage during a vacation, and was transfixed. Berlin likes to refer to the unmistakable sensation of ‘sailing in first-class waters’, and this was the sensation I experienced. Quite apart from the persuasiveness of the propositions contained in the book, here was obviously a man of rare insight into human nature, a man plentifully endowed with that ‘sense of reality’ that he welcomes when he finds it in others. There was room for disagreement on this or that point, but on the large issues – one felt in safe hands."
Hardy also writes: "The working view I have arrived at is very much a view from the inside, in the sense that it is not in general informed by a full awareness of the contributions of predecessors (including those about whom Berlin writes) or contemporaries, and to that degree it cannot be offered as a balanced, contextualised account: despite philosophical qualifications my life has not been spent in philosophical teaching or research, so that I am by no means an expert. Nevertheless, there is a sense in which it is worth having a perspective uncontaminated by preconceptions derived from elsewhere: such a perspective is a luxury not easily available to professionals in Berlin’s fields of activity, and it may from time to time allow insights that might escape the better-informed, rather as children sometimes ask philosophical questions that adults have forgotten to be puzzled by.
There is another charge which may be levelled against what I say. I admit to a strong taste for simplification and generalisation: indeed the latter, at least, seems to me one of the main motors of philosophical investigation."
For an example of clear writing on a philosophical topic see his
Isaiah Berlin's key idea.
On a non-philosophical topic here is part of an introduction to the Isaiah Berlin film delivered by Hardy at the Oxford synagogue.
"The first woman Isaiah Berlin fell properly in love with was Lady Patricia de Bendern. She was a married woman, like all his other leading ladies. I wonder if this trend was significant. She was a Lady not by marriage but by birth, having been born Lady Patricia Douglas, the daughter of the 11th Marquess of Queensberry, and therefore great-niece of Lord Alfred Douglas, the object of Oscar Wilde’s ill-starred affections. Berlin’s best friend, Stuart Hampshire, thought Isaiah and Patricia an ill-assorted couple. Berlin was so very Jewish; indeed, he used to say that he saw himself, at that stage of his life, as an ugly, short, fat, swarthy Jew who could not possibly be attractive to women. The beautiful, petite Patricia, on the other hand, was, in Hampshire’s excellent phrase, ‘super-goyissimo’. Nothing physical occurred between them, but Berlin was besotted with her for years, and dedicated to her, with feeling, his 1950 translation of Turgenev’s novella First Love.....
Herbert Hart, the famous Jewish Professor of Jurisprudence here at Oxford, called Berlin ‘King of the Jews’. Christians in particular might regard this soubriquet, surely used slightly tongue-in-cheek, as a case of lèse-majesté. But it captures well an important truth about Berlin: that many Jews certainly, and surely many non-Jews too, regarded him as some kind of exemplar of what a Jew could be – what a man could be, too, but especially a Jewish man. There was no Jew more widely loved and respected than he.
... perhaps it is worth making explicit beforehand something that may not be well known to every member of this audience. This is that Berlin was both deeply aware and unquestioningly accepting of his Jewishness. In his own words: ‘my Jewish roots […] are so deep, so native to me, that it is idle for me to try to identify them, let alone analyse them’. And in a contribution to a symposium on the question ‘Why be Jewish?’, published in The UJS Haggadah the year before he died, and drawn to my attention by Peter Oppenheimer, he expressed a similar thought more fully:
I am quite incapable of writing even a short passage on what being Jewish means to me. All that I think is that I am a Jew, in exactly the sense in which I have two legs, arms, eyes etc. – it is just an attribute, which I take for granted as belonging to me, part of the minimum description of me as a person. I am neither proud of it nor embarrassed by it – I just am a Jew, and it never occurred to me that I could be anything else. The question ‘Why be Jewish?’ is something that I cannot answer any more than ‘Why be alive?’ or ‘Why be two-legged?’
And finally, again from Henry Hardy, a sentence or two for our cultural policy makers in the UK.
"In an age of multiculturalism – that is, the simultaneous presence of many cultures in one geopolitical unit (which may be the whole world, if we allow for the cultural globalisation induced by travel and the media) – what are we to say about the effect on cultural identity of the resulting admixture of cultural elements? Berlin believed that the dominant culture should be protected from too much infiltration and alteration by minority cultures, lest it forfeit too much of the character that gives it strength and confidence; enthusiastic multiculturalists may disagree."
At a more technical level there was a discussion at All Souls of IB's concepts of liberty. The panellists were leading philosophers who have interested themselves in IB's work. However, the conversational exchanges were difficult for non-professionals.
I have just read a wonderful piece about IB by
Michael Johnson. I cannot resist quoting this snippet! "As Isaiah talks I realise more pertinently than I have ever done before, although it’s always been on the edge of my mind, that one is in the presence of genius – that strange word. What does it mean? From my point of view, it means that I am listening to a man who deals with ideas as a painter deals with colours, as a musician deals with instruments and sounds. His pitch is perfect; there is not one instance I can disagree with, frown over, or shout disorder. You see for me he is original because he has painted portraits of both men and ideas which are three dimensional and which speak as a voice speaks to you across the room."
