In 2008 the library at Whitgift School, South Croydon, in association with the Percy family, initiated an annual essay prize for its pupils to consider the legacy of an individual, born 100 years ago, who is included in the Oxford DNB.
This year’s competition was won by Wing Yung Chan who chose for his subject the philosopher and historian of ideas, Sir Isaiah Berlin (1909-1997). Here we reproduce an edited version of his winning essay.
You can also read Alan Ryan’s Oxford DNB entry on Sir Isaiah Berlin.
Further ideas for using the Oxford DNB online in schools are available in our Learning Resources section. Free institutional trials for schools are also available.
The legacy of Sir Isaiah Berlin today
by Wing Yung Chan
Among the fragments of the Greek poet and mercenary Archilochus (c.680-c.645 BC) a curious and unexplained saying is to be found: ‘The fox knows many things, but the hedgehog knows one big thing’. We know too little about Archilochus and the context of this line in his poem to draw conclusions with any certainty. However, these words have prompted a plethora of interpretations. As a mercenary who described himself as both warrior and poet, it is possible Archilochus was alluding to a battle between the two, in which the fox’s cunning was not insignificant, but the hedgehog—with its six thousand spines—relied on one defiant defence, and this was sufficient to defeat the fox. In 1953 a new light was cast on these two creatures. In his book, The Hedgehog and the Fox: An Essay on Tolstoy’s View of History, Isaiah Berlin identified thinkers and writers either as foxes or hedgehogs. Berlin went on to compare the two as schools of thought, one entertaining ideas that are centrifugal, the other with a single, central vision of ideas as centripetal. Berlin identified Dante, Plato, Lucretius, Pascal, Hegel, Dostoevsky, Nietzsche, Ibsen, and Proust as hedgehogs, while Shakespeare, Herodotus, Aristotle, Montaigne, Erasmus, Molière, Goethe, Pushkin, Balzac, and Joyce were labelled foxes. Following Berlin’s death in 1997, one of his obituarists likewise identified the philosopher as ‘a fox, intrigued by many ideas, unendingly curious, open-minded and pleading above all for tolerance’. It is prudent to look upon Berlin’s legacy from this fox-like perspective, for this concept was to shape his own ideas and values for the rest of his life.
Berlin’s legacy today is threefold. Firstly, in the tense political climate of the Second World War and cold war—fought against Nazi and Communist curtailments of freedom—Berlin proposed a revolutionary way of looking at liberty that would go on to spark much-needed debate about freedom and democracy. In 1958 he delivered ‘Two concepts of liberty’, his inaugural lecture at Oxford University, in which Berlin identified and developed the concept of negative and positive liberty. Negative liberty refers to ‘freedom from restraint’, while positive liberty is ‘not freedom from, but freedom to …lead one prescribed form of life’. Berlin criticized the abuse of positive liberty, for while negative liberty offered protection and real freedom, positive liberty could be abused to harm others in order to further one’s own agenda. It is this notion of negative liberty that is the central idea of modern liberalism. Berlin’s other main doctrine considered the idea of truth and reality. In 1900 members of the mathematical community —led by David Hilbert— had met at the International Congress of Mathematicians, where Hilbert listed 23 unresolved problems to be solved by his peers to help formalize maths and to find absolute truth. However, Kurt Gödel proved in his incompleteness theorem that for any non-contradictory formal system, there are some statements that cannot be proved. Hence, maths could not always provide absolute truths. Similarly in physics, Heisenberg’s uncertainty principle, coupled with Einstein’s theories of special and general relativity, led many to question their allegiance to a particular dogma or belief. This set the stage for Berlin’s objective pluralism in which he argued against both relativism and determinism. Berlin brought considerable originality to this view. Marrying this concept with his ideas of liberty, he argued that ‘not all values can be jointly realised in one life, or in a single society or period of history, and that many ideals cannot even be compared on a common scale.’
Berlin’s second legacy emerges from his work as a historian of ideas. This symbiosis of philosophy and history was novel and fresh, coming out of a dislike for what Joshua Cherniss has described as an ‘Oxford philosophy, with its analytical rigour, fixation on linguistic problems, and aspirations to technical mastery.’ Berlin instead preferred intellectual psychology: ‘what people believed, how they came to believe it, how their beliefs shaped their characters and actions, and, through those actions, history’ (Cherniss). Berlin’s mind was encyclopedic, capable of understanding not only the ideas but the connections between ideas, and of categorizing and contextualizing the work of those before him. It is telling that much of Berlin’s published work comes in the form of reviews—from ‘Reflections on the Art of John Armstrong’, while still a pupil at St. Paul’s School, London, to reviews of Churchill’s Memoirs.
Berlin’s third and final legacy is the enormity and extent of his personal influence. He defies the traditional perception of a philosopher, for he was far from reclusive. Like a fox, he did not live shrouded in mystery but instead was distinguished in public life, most notably for helping to found Wolfson College, Oxford. As its first president he attracted many distinguished fellows to the college, among them the Nobel laureate Nikolaas Tinbergen. Berlin himself attended St. Paul’s School, before studying at Corpus Christi College, Oxford, where he gained a scholarship. He achieved a first in both Greats and PPE and became a fellow of All Souls College in 1932 (the first fellow of Jewish descent). Here Berlin began to flourish, quickly gathering awards and titles including a knighthood in 1957 and appointment to the Order of Merit in 1971. Between 1957 and 1967 he held the coveted Chichele chair in social and political theory and—alongside the Wolfson presidency—was, in 1963-4, president of the Aristotelian Society (a position previously held by Bertrand Russell and Berlin’s close friend, A. J. Ayer). In 1974 he was appointed president of the British Academy, a post he held for four years.
Isaiah Berlin also had contemporary political influence on governments. In 1941 he worked for the Ministry of Information and was stationed in New York. In the following year he was transferred to the Foreign Office at the British embassy in Washington, reporting on the changes in the political mood of the United States. It was here that he impressed the then prime minister, Winston Churchill, via the despatches he sent from Washington to Whitehall. In the words of Henry Hardy, these regular letters ‘have long had a reputation for their brilliance.’
Berlin often conversed with Russian artists and writers who had been silenced by the communist region. ‘It was,’ he recalled, ‘like speaking to the victims of a shipwreck on a desert island, cut off for decades from civilization.’ He cited the radical publicist Alexander Herzen (1812-1870), who had lived in England for more than twelve years, as an inspiration for his work. He was active in the United States, taking up the post of professor of humanities in New York from 1966 to 1971, and embraced every method of communication: lecturing around the world, giving interviews to newspapers, appearing on television, and becoming a distinguished radio broadcaster. His legacy is to be found not just in his writing but also in the way that his thoughts and ideas have been picked up, developed, and debated by thousands of students, historians, and politicians.
Sir Isaiah Berlin was a man of phenomenal intellect who touched those he met with his honest and kind character, his impassioned and relentless defence of freedom, and his energetic and rapid conversation (he was said to be the only person in Oxford who could pronounce ‘epistemological’ as one syllable). He had many acquaintances, and formed close bonds with many people. ‘Isaiah Berlin was once asked what animal he would want to be, and he replied: a penguin. Because when the penguin remains alone, he dies.’ Berlin was known as the wittiest man in Oxford, the world’s greatest talker, the century’s most inspired reader, and the leading liberal thinker. And though he reached the pinnacle of human understanding, esteem and influence, he left us with a philosophy of tolerance, exemplified by his life, which is why Sir Isaiah Berlin will forever be remembered as the man who met thousands but inspired millions.
> Receive a free Life of the Day or a regular biography podcast
> Get the full Oxford DNB online, at home, via UK public libraries
> Personal subscriptions to the Oxford DNB and Who’s Who
> Back to What's new?
|
