Category: Thought

John Stuart Mill: Thinker and Human

I have taught English for several years now to a boy with cerebral palsy. He is about eighteen and he does not get out much. His English is excellent, and he is intelligent, but after several years I am tired out and really do not know what else to teach him. Still, one of the good things that has come from this pairing has been that I have been given an excuse to read authors that I would not otherwise have done. Carlyle is one such author. Another is John Stuart Mill, the noted 19th century British philosopher. We read Utilitarianism and On Liberty some time ago and now we are reading Mill’s Autobiography. In Aileen Kelly’s Herzen Mill was mentioned as one of Herzen’s favourite discoveries, and he was also praised highly by Bertrand Russell (Mill’s godson for a brief year!) – another thinker I was reading recently.

Nevertheless, I had little desire to read Mill, on account of the fact that liberalism is relatively boring. People should be free to do what they want so long as they don’t hurt others – very well. Society can be a pain – indeed it can. Increasing the general happiness is important – really, I had no idea. But Mill is a more complicated thinker than these pithy statements make him out to be, and in particular I found his Autobiography very interesting. For those readers who haven’t seen the point of Mill, I propose to provide a few things I enjoyed in these three works.

On Liberty

The purpose of Mill’s essay is to work out the limits to the power that can legitimately be exercised over the individual by society and government. The tyranny of the “will of the people” is something that Mill faced in his personal life, carrying on an intense friendship with a married woman which created great difficulties for him. The majority or the group that can get others to accept it as the majority will doubtless lead to oppressing the minority, so checks and balances must be created. But where, and of what sort?

The argument, as summarised by Mill, is as follows: “the sole end for which mankind are warranted, individually or collectively, in interfering with the liberty of action of any of their number, is self-protection. That the only purpose for which power can be rightfully exercised over any member of a civilized community, against his will, is to prevent harm to others. His own good, either physical or moral, is not a sufficient warrant. He cannot rightfully be compelled to do or forbear because it will be better for him to do so, because it will make him happier, because, in the opinions of others, to do so would be wise, or even right. … In the part which merely concerns himself, his independence is, of right, absolute. Over himself, over his own body and mind, the individual is sovereign.”

How, on the basis of this argument, can we have a good society? Firstly, by a free press. Secondly, by having as many opinions as possible. This latter suggestion I particularly liked. Mill argues that if the dissenter from popular opinion is wrong, they learn the truth by speaking out. Meanwhile, those who are correct come to appreciate the truth more. And often both sides may share some truth. “All silencing of discussion is an assumption of infallibility,” so either way we must always listen to others. Unfortunately, Mill’s views presuppose that arguments are made in good faith, and that people are willing to change their views if proven wrong. I believe the experience of a global pandemic seems to suggest that some people are unwilling to accept alternative viewpoints, whatever the strength of their foundations. (This is a dig at those against vaccinations, not those sceptical of them.)

If we live in fear, we will not speak out. This ultimately destroys independent thought, and the general development of a given community. At the same time, we must all work to “understand the grounds of one’s own opinions”. A free debate cannot proceed unless both sides know their foundations. A view without known foundations cannot be harmed through argument, but it can be terribly harmful.

Happiness is having the freedom to act according to one’s inner light. It consists in being spontaneous – the very thing society tends not to tolerate. Society, often internalised, leads to a “despotism of custom”. Contrary to the suggestion of coldness and rigidity, Mill’s idea of flourishing here is very freeform – “Human nature is not a machine to be built after a model, and set to do exactly the work prescribed for it, but a tree, which requires to grow and develop itself on all sides, according to the tendency of the inward forces which make it a living thing.”

Liberty ends when harm begins. If we harm others the law must be ready. But if we harm only ourselves, we have only ourselves to blame. The punishment for this is simply a bad reputation, and your friends turning away from you. Once we are adults, we are responsible for our decisions. Nobody can force us to change, or to act in a different way. A big government is unnecessary for Mill because it tends to make of us small people. In the field of human affairs, the government should less prohibit, than act as a guide. A sugar tax, rather than a sugar ban – for example – would be what Mill would propose.

Mill’s essay is marked by a certain gloom. He sees the development of society as leading to a general personal decline into slavish similarity. Communication, commerce, and technological advances have all brought people more in touch with one another, but at the same time they all have reduced the differentiation of the individual. Public opinion, growing ever stronger and more similar, becomes less willing to tolerate dissenting views. Finally, “mankind speedily become unable to conceive diversity, when they have been for some time unaccustomed to see it”. Liberty is lost when homogeneity means nobody has any use for it.

Mill’s piece remains useful today firstly as a reminder of the value of listening to others and understanding the basis of our own opinions, and secondly by arguing for the minimal intrusion of others onto the freedom of the individual. “That the individual is not accountable to society for his actions, in so far as these concern the interests of no person but himself”, is a challenging statement that we may not agree with. But it is useful to hear, to turn over in our minds. If for no other reasons that it makes us think upon our own answer to the question of the relationship between society and the individual.

Utilitarianism

Utilitarianism is about right and wrong. The philosophical idea was first put down by Jeremy Bentham, a friend of Mill’s father, in the form of “the greatest-happiness principle”. An action is good if it increases the general happiness, and bad if it doesn’t. This raised some issues, such as whether happy idiots are better-off than less happy intelligent people. It was also a rather cold doctrine, seemingly devaluing the arts in favour of more coarse pleasures such as eating and carousing. These are issues that Mill seeks to address in his essay.

Mill begins by noting that “actions are right in proportion as they tend to promote happiness, wrong as they tend to produce the reverse of happiness. By happiness is intended pleasure, and the absence of pain; by unhappiness, pain, and the privation of pleasure”. Happiness is desirable as an end, but that does not mean that simple pleasures are the most valuable. He suggests that we are capable of comparing pleasures, and in this way determining which of a given two is better. Having listened to some Mozart and eaten a burger I can decide for myself which I prefer. Now, many people may choose the burger (including, possibly, me). But Mill does not despair at this possibility, instead he draws a distinction between happiness and contentedness.

Contented people are generally stupider, meaning they require less pleasures and less complex pleasures. Intelligent people are more demanding of their pleasures, and also have a desire for more complex ones. Since we know the difference, we can say that “it is better to be a human being dissatisfied than a pig satisfied; better to be Socrates dissatisfied than a fool satisfied”. But the fool or the pig cannot agree – and nor could we expect them to.

Just as in On Liberty, here too Mill is concerned with the kind of world that allows for human flourishing. In this essay Mill argues that we need sufficient time to develop our tastes for pleasure, otherwise we will lose them. In a mediocre, unfree society, there will be mediocre and boring pleasures and a lower sort of happiness predominating. The present age, for Mill, with its poor education and dreadful social arrangements, does not let us be as happy as we could be, or develop as much as we could.

Education is particularly important for Mill. In On Liberty, he identified it as the period of a person’s life where we can form people’s tastes before they become entirely responsible for themselves. In Utilitarianism, Mill sees education as playing a key role in helping us to harmonise our idea of our own happiness with the general happiness. Through education we can shape our consciences to be more utilitarian, so that we come to see the interests of others as being more equal to our own interests.

Utilitarianism is really annoying because it’s hard to argue against it for a layman like myself. In its modern form, such as propounded by Peter Singer, it’s thoroughly miserable-making. Can I justify having any money at all when I could give it to the poor and make their lives considerably happier? Singer’s Effective Altruism really appears, when thought through, to be the least we can do, and yet it is more than most of us do. Mill and Singer are not the same person, and Mill’s piece is simpler and less demanding.

At the same time, Utilitarianism does still suffer a little from a belief in human rationality. I remember thinking of Dostoevsky while I read it – a man whose writings time and again demonstrate that people can choose suffering over happiness. Mill might argue that Dostoevsky’s characters are made happy by being miserable, and I’m sure many depressed people would concur with the statement that in despair there can often be something sweet.

Thinking about it now, however, I’m not sure a Dostoevskian objection really holds up – what Dostoevsky is fundamentally after is affirming a sense of human dignity, in other words saying that I’m not a pig but a human being. Taking away our dignity by taking away our responsibility for our actions, as do the great systems (including utilitarianism) that his characters rail against, ultimately deprives us of the foundation of our happiness – our freedom. In other words, we can be against utilitarianism while still fitting very snugly into a utilitarian conception of human ends and means. The fact that such a thought would probably bring The Underground Man to suicide does not devalue it – it just suggests we shouldn’t tell him!

Autobiography – The Childhood

Mill’s Autobiography is another interesting text that throws light upon the concerns of the other two essays, both by answering some of our criticisms about them, and by explaining the character of the man who wrote them. John Stuart Mill was an extraordinary character. At the age of 3 he was learning Greek, at the age of 8 he had taught himself Latin. He was writing and being published in the leading newspapers of the day while still a teenager. And the fact that we are reading him today indicates that all this education led to the creation of a formidable thinker, as well as just a precocious child.

Mill’s purpose in the Autobiography is to leave “some record of an education which was unusual and remarkable.” Under his father’s watchful eye, Mill learned everything under the sun. Pushed relentlessly, he learned that “a pupil from whom nothing is ever demanded which he cannot do, never does all he can.” Yet at the same time, the text is riddled with tensions. Mill was allowed no holidays; he had no friends. He felt bitter about being unlike other children, had trouble dressing himself and tying knots. Worse than that, “Mine was not an education of love but of fear.” These thoughts are hidden from sight, exorcised from the text by Mill’s wife and then later by his stepdaughter. His father alternates between awe-inspiring intellectual power and terrible coldness. The result of such an influence was that for a long time Mill lacked confidence and the ability to think for himself.

Mill’s mother does not receive a mention. I had thought perhaps she had died in childbirth, but apparently Mill was the eldest of nine children (they too are barely mentioned). Mill apparently found no warmth in his mother capable of making up for his father’s coolness. And so, stunted by this childhood, Mill developed, learning a great deal, but feeling very little – he considers himself at this time a mere “reasoning machine” – until he reached the age of twenty and had a great and terrible crisis.  

Autobiography – The Crisis

From his birth Mill had been raised to be a reformer of the world, and he had believed wholeheartedly in that goal. “My conception of my own happiness was entirely identified with this object”. Yet one day Mill asks himself whether he’d be happy if he achieved this goal, and he realised that he would not. Finding the end unrewarding, Mill can no longer see any value in the means and pursuing it. Though he continued to write, the light had gone out inside him. He felt desperately lonely, and could confide in no-one, least of all his father. He realised that his analytical abilities had done him just as much harm as good, because they had ruined his ability to feel. They were “a perpetual worm at the root both of the passions and of the virtues”.

Mill escaped from his despair, which was psychological as much as intellectual, through the help of art – he read Wordsworth for the first time. This led him to appreciate that “the internal culture” of an individual is more important than he’d realised. Happiness can lie not just in improving the world, but in art too. Indeed, Mill came to realise that happiness couldn’t be what we strive after – in something vaguely reminiscent of Wittgenstein, he noticed that whenever we asked ourselves if we were happy, we ceased being so. In other words, the resolution to our problems is a dissolution of them. In pursuing another worthwhile goal, Mill thought, “you will inhale happiness with the air you breathe, without dwelling on it or thinking about it, without either forestalling it in imagination, or putting it to flight by fatal questioning”. Suddenly utilitarianism does not seem so restrictive after all.

Autobiography – Harriet

Mrs Harriet Taylor, who later became Mill’s wife, was a married woman when they met in his early twenties. But in spite of this the two struck up an extremely intense and rewarding, and apparently platonic, friendship that lasted until her death in 1858. This friendship was “the honour and chief blessing of my existence” and Mill’s praise for his wife is extraordinary for the intensity of the feeling that it conveys. For Mill, Harriet was essential in making him the mature writer we associate with him. Where he had come to his conclusions about life through cold analysis and study, Harriet had come to the same conclusions through her feelings and empathy. Together, they created works like On Liberty and Utilitarianism, combining both approaches to the problems at hand.

Father’s Death, Political Career

Mill’s Autobiography is primarily a record of the first twenty-five or so years of his life, when all the major developments in his thought are taking place. The rest of his life is simply a long chapter at the end. Of this, aside from the records of what he wrote, the most interesting thing is Mill’s description of his brief stint as an MP.

Mill was put forward by some friends to be MP for Westminster. He refused to do any campaigning except at the end, and he also wrote a public letter in which he declared he would not fight for local interests. Nevertheless, he was elected. In Parliament he had a more direct effect on the affairs of state which he had attempted to alter from afar through newspapers and journals, but his radicalism – however normal it seems to us today – did him no favours. He fought for the Irish, for the colonies – in short, he was true to his views. All of these, sadly, were minority views. After the conservatives found themselves under threat, they themselves campaigned more seriously in the next election and Mill was thrown out. He had been an MP for all of three years.

Concluding Remarks

Mill’s Autobiography was written, at least in part, with the goal also of thanking those in whose debt he was for his development. It is at times tedious to read all these names, most of whom are well-forgotten these days. The prose is also rather stodgy. And yet, in spite of all that, I’m rather glad I read it. Mill’s book is not one of those tell-all gossipy biographies, but instead it serves a far more important purpose. It justifies his other works by answering for the man behind them. It shows that his ideas came not just from the cool reasoning of a man behind his desk, but also from the warm-heartedness and appreciation for internal development that it took a crisis and deep friendship to create. It also provides a clear example of how utilitarian ideas can be compatible with a well-lived, ultimately passionate, life. Meanwhile, Mill’s political work shows how committed he was to the ideas of On Liberty.

In sum, Mill’s Autobiography enriches his other works by showing that he had worked and lived enough to write them from a wealth of experience alongside the rational calculation we might expect. I am very glad I read all three.

Alexander Herzen, Moderate Revolutionary

Alexander Herzen was one of the towering figures of Russian culture in the 19th century. His epic memoirs, My Past and Thoughts, are considered the best example of that genre in that language. As a man he defies easy categorisation – he was a thinker, a revolutionary, the first Russian socialist and the person almost singlehandedly responsible for the creation of Russian public opinion through the establishment of Russia’s first uncensored news organ. For Isaiah Berlin, he was something of a hero. For Aileen Kelly, his former student and author of The Discovery of Chance: The Life and Thought of Alexander Herzen, which I have just finished reading, he is “one of the most talented and complex figures of his time”.

Kelly’s biography diverges from previous literature on Herzen to highlight his scientific education, which lead him to approach the practical matters of political agitation from an unideological and much more empirical standpoint. It also led him to distrust all goal-orientated ideologies, seeing the role of chance in evolution and human history as equally important. But the thinker that Kelly describes is less complex than she wishes him to be. Instead, Herzen’s own judgement of himself as the thinker of “two or three ideas” seems more accurate. But still, they are good ideas, and it’s worth knowing what they are. 

Alexander Herzen

Herzen’s Life

Alexander Herzen was born in 1812, the illegitimate son of a landowner and his German mistress. This was a difficult time to be alive. After the elation of Russia’s victory over Napoleon stagnation set in, and then after 1825, when a group of officers attempted to stage a coup in favour of Western reforms, stagnation turned into reaction. Herzen suffered not only from his alienation as an illegitimate child (though his father, a wealthy man, succeeded in arranging for Herzen to be admitted to the nobility), but from his own country’s backwardness. Similar to how the Germans had created Romanticism out of the national shame caused by French domination, Russians disappointed with the status quo after 1825 turned inwards. In this they borrowed from the Germans their thinkers and writers – Hegel, Schelling, Fichte, and so on. Kelly does a good job exploring the intellectual climate.

Herzen went to university and studied the natural sciences. He was then arrested on limited evidence and exiled to various unpleasant regions of Russia. Eventually he succeeded in fleeing Russia, ending up in London after some time. This is where he published The Bell, Russia’s first uncensored newspaper, which was smuggled into the country in great quantities. As he grew older, he witnessed the transition from his own generation into a new, more radical one. He made the acquaintance of such figures as Sergei Nechaev (the model for Verkhozensky in Dostoevsky’s Demons) and attempted to persuade them of his political views. In addition, he got to know such thinkers as Carlyle and revolutionaries as Garibaldi. His personal life, as we’ll see, was miserable, but it was certainly interesting.

One Life, One Chance: Herzen’s Thought

Herzen described himself as having only two or three ideas. By this he meant that his goal was not to present a system of his own, but rather to destroy what he saw as the pernicious systems and ideas of others – in this, we might think of him as similar to Bazarov in Turgenev’s Fathers and Sons. “I’m not a teacher but a fellow seeker,” Herzen wrote. “I won’t presume to say what must be done, but I think I can say with a fair degree of accuracy what must not be done.” How did he know what must not be done? For Kelly, this comes from his scientific education. He had an eccentric relative called “The Chemist” who exposed him early on to the excitement of science, and throughout his life he continued to keep abreast of scientific developments.

Science was useful because it taught Herzen the importance of method. It’s not enough to have a theory, because “There is no absurdity that cannot be inserted into the mould of an empty dialectic in order to endow it with a profound metaphysical significance”. Instead, we must be more empirical, going from our own experience. We must look at the world before we attempt to change it, otherwise we will not have the right approach. To be aware of difference is a key skill for Herzen. For the revolutionary, it allows him to understand the best approach for achieving a given goal – at times violence may be necessary, while at others it may not. But the only way to know is not through theory, but through using our eyes.

Darwin’s publication of On the Origin of Species was an important influence on Herzen, or rather a confirmation of his suspicions about the role of chance in our lives. Evolution, Darwin argued, is not goal orientated. We develop through chance – sometimes improving, sometimes getting worse – but without any goal in sight. We simply improve our adaptation to a given environment. Herzen believed that chance was equally important in human affairs. Progress is not a given, and it is not a goal that we should consider a justification for the present.

Herzen was obsessed by natural disasters. As they are random, they proved for him that development could as easily be destroyed as it was created. If we think that we know the future, we can justify any means to achieve it. This is the foundation of the dangerous ideologies of the 20th century, and it was Herzen’s insight to realise that all attempts to claim knowledge of the laws of a random process (history) would lead inevitably to a kind of despotism.

Everything is chance, at least in the future. There is only one place where we are given a certain responsibility – this is the present. If we make use of it well, we can help create a good future. But we must always be aware that chance will determine the future, not any laws. We can only do our best. Herzen was scathing of both optimistic and pessimistic visions of human development. He thought that optimists failed to see the potential for collapse and decay in humanity that stemmed through chance and potential bad decisions, while pessimists failed to see that things need not necessarily get worse, provided we are willing to act to make them better in the present. In the long run, as Keynes said, we are all dead. But we can make a better present. Herzen, ultimately, comes across as a realist. His stoicism involved controlling what he could, and accepting what he could not. But given a life of personal tragedy (dead wife, family members drowning, infidelities, betrayals) he found his acceptance of chance pushed to the limits.

He admits that chance is not something we easily accept, but he insists that we do. For Herzen makes chance the basis of human dignity – we can only see people as themselves when we have no theory of the future that lets us turn them into objects.

“All the individual side of human life is buried in a dark labyrinth of contingencies, intersecting and interweaving with each other: primitive physical forces, dark urges, chance encounters, each have their place. They can form a harmonious choir, but equally can result in dissonances that can tear the soul apart. Into this dark forge of the fates light never penetrates: the blind workmen beat their hammers aimlessly, not answering for the results.…

There is something about chance that is intolerably repellent to a free spirit: he finds it so offensive to recognize its irrational force, he strives so hard to overcome it, that, finding no escape, he prefers to invent a threatening fate and submit to it. He wants the misfortunes that overtake him to be predestined—that is, to exist in connection with a universal world order; he wants to accept disasters as persecutions and punishments: this allows him to console himself through submission or rebellion. Naked chance he finds intolerable, a humiliating burden: his pride cannot endure its indifferent power.”

Herzen wanted us to see that we believe lies for a reason, because the alternative – accepting chance – is a challenge. But we cannot believe in ideologies, we must not believe in them, because they destroy the very things that make life meaningful – people as distinct, valuable, individuals:

“If progress is the end, for whom are we working? Who is this Moloch who, as the toilers approach him, instead of rewarding them, only recedes, and as a consolation to the exhausted, doomed multitudes crying “morituri te salutant” can give back only the mocking answer that after their death all will be beautiful on earth. Do you truly wish to condemn all human beings alive today to the sad role of caryatids supporting a floor for others some day to dance on, or of wretched galley slaves, up to their knees in mud, dragging a barge filled with some mysterious treasure and with the humble words “progress in the future” inscribed on its bow.… An end that is infinitely remote is not an end, but … a trap. An end must be nearer … at the very least, the laborer’s wage, or pleasure in the work done. Each epoch, each generation, each life had, and has, its own fullness; and en route new demands grow, new experiences, new methods.… This generic growth is not an aim, as you suppose, but the hereditary characteristic of a succession of generations.…

The struggle, the reciprocal action of natural forces and the forces of will, the consequences of which one cannot know in advance, give an overwhelming interest to every historical epoch. If humanity marched straight toward some kind of result, there would be no history, only logic.… If there were a libretto, history would lose all interest, become unnecessary, boring, ludicrous.”

Herzen saw that as we destroy God, indeed as science forces our idea of God to retreat further and further from life, then ideologies will necessarily take God’s place. But he also saw that we can only live and make life good if we focus on the life to hand, and not some future abstract life. His words are fiery, passionate. In many ways, they remind me of Carlyle, but unlike Carlyle, there is no authoritarianism lurking under Herzen’s words. He despised nationalism, and he saw the Russian peasant commune note as a utopia, but as a good way for people to organise themselves, and one that should become more popular. He wanted a compromise between individual rights and collective feeling. Like almost every thinker from the end of the Enlightenment to the present day, Herzen wanted to restore the lost unities of Western Civilization, to bond together again the people. But this cannot be done by force, and it cannot be done under tyranny. The great challenge for any theory is “To comprehend… The full sanctity, the full breadth and reality of the individual’s rights and not to destroy society, not to shatter it into atoms, is the most difficult of tasks.”

To summarise these one or two ideas, all Herzen really wants to say is that an overreliance on future goals can mislead us at best and lead to terror at worst. My favourite quote of his on this is not in Kelly’s biography, but is still worth sharing:

“We think the purpose of a child is to grow up because it does grow up. But its purpose is to play, to enjoy itself, to be a child. If we merely look to the end of the process, the purpose of life is death”

The Political Actor

Beyond the need to concentrate on the present due to the unpredictable effects of chance, Herzen disliked all things whose foundations could not be proved and tested through experience, such as organised religion or Tsarist autocracy. Beyond these two thoughts, he simply had his own values. He wanted humans to have bonds without compromising their freedom. He saw the peasant commune, such as it then existed in Russia, as an ideal structure for achieving this. He did not idealise the peasants themselves, at least he was not as guilty of this as Tolstoy.

Still, he failed to see them for who they were. In 1863 there was an uprising in Russian-controlled Poland. Herzen had been in touch with the Polish revolutionaries for long before they actually revolted, and he had done his best to dissuade them from their chosen course. He had looked at the situation and decided that the timing was not right – they did not have a chance. But the Poles did not listen. Once they had risen up, Herzen did what he could for them, supporting them through The Bell, his newspaper. He condemned the Russian response, which was vindictive and brutal. But for all that, he found himself increasingly isolated. Russian society, which hitherto had been increasingly divided between different groups – Slavophiles and Westernisers, Radicals and Liberals and Conservatives – all united against the Poles and in support of the Tsar. The Bell’s circulation plummeted, and it lost the esteem it had held. Herzen had thought that socialism would be the idea capable of rebuilding the bonds between society’s many elements. He was incorrect – what actually was capable of drawing people together was nationalism.

After the Polish uprising Herzen’s influence was limited. The radicals who came to visit him in London or elsewhere were more interested in gaining access to his money than to his mind. To a new generation, determined to use more radical means to secure their goals, Herzen’s moderation was a problem. They preferred Herzen’s contemporary, the anarchist Bakunin, who is best-known for his declaration that “a destructive urge is also a creative one”. This generation had little time for the suggestion that violence may not be the only way of securing a successful revolution – indeed, it may not even be the best way. Herzen died, in some sense forgotten, in 1870.

Concluding Remarks

Jules Michelet, the French historian, wrote on Herzen’s death that with him had fallen silent “the voice of numerous millions of people.” Indeed, there had. But these were not, all told, Russian voices. In his refusal to acknowledge authorities based on trust, and his hatred of oppression, he was an anti-imperialist avant la lettre. His support for the Poles and for all oppressed peoples makes him an important figure in socialist history. His creation of The Bell, Russia’s first uncensored newspaper, and his own writings, give him a central place in Russian intellectual history, even if he failed to have a significant impact on its political history.

And, perhaps most importantly for us reading him or about him now, what he said, however simple it is, retains a definite power and wisdom. We are danger, especially in our own day, of a progress that looks always towards the future, and never at the present, and that sees people rather than individuals. When we start to acknowledge the role of chance in our lives, we successfully reorientate ourselves towards the one thing we can change – the present moment. We come to realise the “irreplaceable reality”, as Herzen termed it, that individuals themselves constitute. We are only alive once, and we must work to make a better world right now. This, whatever our politics, seems reasonable enough.

The Joy of Ideas – Isaiah Berlin’s The Crooked Timber of Humanity

Whether or not we ultimately see the French Revolution as stemming from a disillusionment with the monarchy, bourgeois self-assertion, or hungry peasants, it is obvious enough that after the initial turmoil the leaders who came to share power and chop heads were motivated by ideas of what society should look like, and where it was heading. The Russian Revolution and the early Soviet Union too, for all their betrayals of pure Marxian and Marxist thought, nevertheless contained many actors who took their cues from ideology, and often added their own lines to the drama. Thinkers, both on the right and the left, have been driven by ideas, consciously or unconsciously. And passionately held belief is something that many of us admire and envy, whatever the belief’s content. It is one of the attractions of the fictions of Dostoevsky that his characters believe so passionately in ideas.

Isaiah Berlin is a historian of ideas, but to my mind his closest affinity is to the Russian novelists of the 19th century, including his favourite Turgenev, and not to other historians. Berlin’s work is filled with a serious and excited engagement with ideas, good and bad, hopeful and hateful, so that we ourselves become aware of the sheer force which animates them as well as if we had seen someone slaughtering a pawnbroker with an axe over them or dissecting frogs. This is perhaps no surprise. Born in Riga in the Russian Empire in 1909, Berlin and his family moved to Petrograd (now Saint Petersburg) just in time to witness the Russian capital be torn apart, repeatedly, by revolutions coloured by ideological thought. He moved to the United Kingdom with his family shortly thereafter, studied at Oxford, and became one of the greatest thinkers of his time.

The Crooked Timber of Humanity, subtitled “Chapters in the History of Ideas”, is a collection of Berlin’s essays in which his principle concerns are on full display – the Enlightenment and Romanticism and both of their troubled legacies, and his own idea of “value pluralism”. At the centre of the collection is a magnificent, awe-inspiring essay on the Savoyard reactionary Joseph de Maistre. Besides de Maistre, other recurring figures in this collection include Kant, Herder, Machiavelli, Vico, Rousseau and Voltaire. Many of these thinkers will be familiar to us, at least in passing, but Berlin’s great strength – and the reason I adore him so much – is his ability to make their concerns appear fresh and relevant to our own age. In short, he makes us understand ideas from the inside – their excitement and their pleasure.

Rather than explore each of the essays in turn, here I will explore thoughts he develops throughout them, and why it’s exciting.

The Enlightenment Vision of the World and its Problems

These days the Enlightenment, the period in the late 17th and 18th centuries when clever philosophers, predominantly from France, tried to solve all human problems using reason, now has something of a bad name. Firstly, these eminently reasonable men (and they were, pretty much, all men), were often hypocrites. Kant, as is well known now, failed to apply his philosophy to the savages of the world, and was rather racist; Hume was no better. To my mind this charge, which Berlin does not bother addressing, is far less important than the one that out of their thought came the totalitarian systems of the earth. This is the view which Theodor Adorno and Max Horkheimer wrote about in Dialectic of Enlightenment. Karl Popper, another influential mid-20th thinker, called Plato, with the regimented society and clear social stratification of The Republic, one of the first totalitarian thinkers, and also had little love for the Enlightenment.

It is this view of the Enlightenment as a less-than-benign force that Berlin engages with. In The Crooked Timber of Humanity Berlin is keen to moderate criticism of both the Enlightenment and the Romanticism which followed. He explores how a combination of Enlightenment and Romantic ideas created the groundwork for modern totalitarianism, but need not necessarily lead to it.

Lost Unities – The Decline of Universalism

The Enlightenment was the last period of the world where dreaming of a utopia was in some way possible. It was an old idea that all genuine questions – about our place and goals upon the earth – could have only one valid answer. These answers could be found if we looked hard enough and knew how to do so. Finally, people believed that all the answers were compatible. People answered questions differently, whether due to religious or political thoughts, but nevertheless they were mistaken and simply missing the one Truth which could be found and should be propagated by those who found it. Believing all this makes a utopia – a place of stasis and conformity, possible. It allows for Hegel’s idea of progress, Marx’s idea of communism. It also allows for the rationalism of the French philosophes whose ideas came to justify the terrors of revolutionary France.

Killing people is of course a shame, but when you are building a perfect state, sometimes murder is necessary.

Enlightenment Smashers – Vico, Machiavelli, Herder

Berlin credits different thinkers with destroying these ideas and making way of Romanticism. Machiavelli realised that Classical and modern Christian societies had incompatible ideals. He showed that the honour and violence of Ancient Greece and Rome could not be combined with Christian ideals of meekness and piety. Both places, in short, had different ideas of perfection. Vico, meanwhile, who is something of a hero in The Crooked Timber of Humanity, understood that every culture has its own vision of reality, with its own value systems. He saw that through imagination – fantasia – it is possible for us to enter into another society’s view of the world, without adopting it as our own. Finally, Herder showed that each culture has its own centre of gravity, and would only suffer from taking its inspiration from others. Together these thinkers broke down the idea of universal Truth that had driven the French philosophes.  

German Romanticism and its Legacy

In doing so, they opened up a space for German Romanticism, which was far more intellectual and philosophical than its English equivalent (both made for good poetry, tho). The Romantics focused on a cult of self, rather than the universal. In doing so they made utopias impossible, by encouraging us to see that we each have our own utopia, rather than sharing a common one. Rather than feeling and emotion, what the later Romantics were interested in was the idea of will. We each have our own inner ideal within us, and rather than make peace with the world we must do whatever we can to bring that inner ideal out into the open. The idea of being true to yourself was essentially born at this time.

At first, being true to yourself just meant being a starving artist in an attic. But it left the possibility open of a kind of solipsism, wherein your own vision of the world could grow so powerful that it denied the significance of other people. At this point one was no longer an artist of the pen, but an artist of man, shaping others to create one’s own world. It is this idea – of the disregard for others, of the sense that objective truth is impossible and violence the inevitable consequence of clashing ideas – that Berlin considers the most terrible legacy of Romanticism. It allowed for madmen to take Enlightenment ideas and ignore all criticism, creating rationalist monsters in the early Soviet Union, and terror in fascist Germany.

Caspar David Friedrich’s The Sea of Ice, one of my favourite German Romantic paintings.

Neither the Enlightenment nor Romanticism need necessarily lead to totalitarian violence. Berlin, whose whole life consisted of a passionate and earnest engagement with these ideas, naturally was not willing to dismiss them completely. Instead, he makes it clear how Romanticism in particular also leaves open the possibility of humanism: “The maker of values is man himself, and may therefore not be slaughtered in the name of anything higher than himself, for there is nothing higher.” Abstract ideas have no value in themselves, and the worst thing is to get in the way of another’s will – out of such thoughts grew existentialism, a much more positive set of thoughts than those of either Adolf or Joseph.

Value Pluralism vs Relativism

Berlin’s main contribution to thought – he did not consider himself a philosopher – was the idea of value pluralism, which he built out of the ideas of Vico and Herder about the differences between cultures. Pluralism Berlin describes as “the conception that there are many different ends that men may seek and still be fully rational, fully men, capable of understanding each other and sympathising and deriving light from each other.” For example, those who value liberty above all else, and those who value equality above all else, will discover sooner or later that they cannot have a perfectly liberal and equal society – in other words, that their ultimate ideals are incompatible with each other, even though they are both recognisably good, and recognisably “rational”.

We can understand other cultures thanks to the imagination, or Vico’s fantasia, but we do not have to like them. As Berlin put it in one of the pieces included in the appendix to The Crooked Timber of Humanity, “I must be able to imagine myself in a situation in which I could myself pursue [their ideals], even though they may in fact repel me.” Literature, at its best, is in some way the proof of pluralism – we learn to see other ideals by their own internal light, even though we do not necessarily change our own views as a result.

How is this different to relativism? Berlin defines relativism as “a doctrine according to which the judgement of a man or a group, since it is the expression or statement of a taste, or emotional attitude or outlook, is simply what it is, with no objective correlate which determines its truth or falsehood.” In other words, relativism means that other cultures are unquestionable – we have no choice about whether we accept them or not, because there is too much distance suggested between our own values and those of the other group. Another way of looking at this is to suggest that with relativism, we may understand the values of other societies, but we cannot understand why they would be held. There is an insurmountable barrier between us and others, one that ultimately makes deprives us of a feeling of common humanity.

The Bad Guy: Joseph De Maistre

The majority of the pieces in The Crooked Timber of Humanity explore the ways that value pluralism works and the legacy of the Enlightenment and Romanticism; but by far the longest piece, on the Savoyard reactionary thinker Joseph de Maistre, is much more focused. Berlin’s goal here is to revaluate this thinker, dismissed by earlier historians as a simple conservative. Instead, Berlin argues that de Maistre speaks decidedly to our own time, as a prophet whose ideas in many ways suggest those of fascism. In other words, “Maistre may have spoken the language of the past, but the content of what he had to say presaged the future.”

Joseph de Maistre, Savoyard arch-reactionary. Agree or disagree as we may with his views, he comes across as a quite extraordinarily visceral thinker.

De Maistre was for most of his life a diplomat for the Savoyard king, and his most productive years were while he was in Saint Petersburg during the age of Napoleon. He was popular in Russia, and Tolstoy even mentions him in War and Peace. His ideas were reactionary, rather than conservative. Where the likes of Burke tried to explain conservatism through appeals to sunlit uplands, peace and prosperity, Maistre’s approach was almost the opposite – he saw humanity as irredeemable, a creature that needed the violence of the executioner to keep it in check. Reaction, for de Maistre, was about saving humanity, rather than about protecting some historic ideal of playing cricket on the village green.

In practice, this meant doing everything he could against Reason and its followers. He protected irrationalism, kings and queens, by suggesting that only what is irrational can lie beyond question. Indeed, to begin questioning is already to fall foul of the Enlightenment – one must never question. He hated intellectuals, he hated the free traffic of ideas, he thought that suffering was the key to salvation, and that only a strong state and strong elites can keep our evil urges in check. De Maistre is quoted a few times by Berlin, and he comes across as the most extraordinary thinker – I feel a shiver go down my spine just reading even the shortest of excerpts. He is frightening, like Dostoevsky’s Grand Inquisitor is frightening, because he has beliefs that he believes with all his heart and yet which to most people are complete anathema.

Here’s a taste:

“Over all these numerous races of animals man is placed, and his destructive hand spares nothing that lives. He kills to obtain food, he kills to clothe himself, he kills to adorn himself, he kills to attack, he kills to defend himself, he kills to instruct himself, he kills to amuse himself, he kills to kill. Proud and terrible king, he wants everything, and nothing resists him.”

“Don’t you hear the earth shouting its demand for blood? The blood of animals is not enough, nor even the blood of guilty men spilt by the sword of the laws.”

“In this way, from mite to man, the great law of the violent destruction of living creatures is ceaselessly fulfilled. The whole earth, perpetually steeped in blood, is nothing but a vast altar on which all living things must be sacrificed without end, without measure, without pause, until the consummation of things, until evil is extinct, until the death of death.”

All this makes one giddy. It is so violent, so horrible, and yet it fills one with a kind of awe. For Berlin, de Maistre is one of the history of ideas’ great villains, but he is a player in the drama. And we can all learn something from him. He believed that we do not know what we truly want, that ideas are often disappointing, and that the urge for self-sacrifice, for self-immolation, is just as strong as the desire for shelter or food or warmth. This is not the man of the French philosophes, but then again, as de Maistre says, “as for man, I declare that I have never met him in my life; if he exists, he is unknown to me.”

However much we may wish for ourselves, on the whole, to be rational beings, de Maistre offers a necessary dose of reality, and even if his suggestions of our terrible fallenness and the need for God and authority go far beyond what most of us like or want, still he has value. Otherwise we may end up just as foolish, just as idealistic, and just as dangerous as the Enlightenment, for all its light, turned out to be.

Conclusion

Berlin is exciting because he makes ideas feel real. He can transform a little Savoyard reactionary into a frightening, exhilarating, monster of a thinker, and he can do this with every thinker in the book. This is not because he tells us little titbits from their lives, but because he builds their ideas into something that we must engage with and evaluate for ourselves. Where do we stand on matters of the Enlightenment or Romanticism? However much we may think that they are ancient history, Berlin shows in The Crooked Timber of Humanity that their debates continue to be played out in our own era.

More importantly, in his idea of value pluralism, he advocates for a way of looking at the world which is moderate without losing the ability to judge. We can see what is good and bad in our opponents, without establishing such a distance between us and them as to make dialogue impossible. In our own age, when dialogue feels increasingly pointless, and actors increasingly hidden within the shroud of their own bad faith, Berlin provides a message of cautious hope, a guide to how to approach politics, and one that is hard not to like.

I have also read Berlin’s Russian Thinkers, available as Penguin Classic, and that is another work that I would recommend heartily. Berlin turns various thinkers, most of whom we would never have heard of otherwise, into living, breathing, arguing human beings. For anyone interested in 19th century Russian literature or history, the book is a must-read. As for this one, it’s pretty good too. Read it, think on it.