A Century of Stories . . . And of Terrible Truths: The Crooked Timber of Humanity

자료: 뉴욕타임스 북리뷰, http://www.nytimes.com/books/98/11/29/specials/berlin-timber.html

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March 24, 1991

A Century of Stories . . . And of Terrible Truths

By GERTRUDE HIMMELFARB

In a recent interview, Sir Isaiah Berlin remarked: "I've never written much. I learned to dictate to secretaries at the British Embassy in Washington" (where he served during World War II). However he composed it, he has in fact produced a substantial corpus of work.

"The Crooked Timber of Humanity," as Henry Hardy, the editor, wryly observes, is "the fifth of four volumes" of "Selected Writings," the first four having been published a decade or more ago. Other volumes of essays have appeared under separate titles: "Four Essays on Liberty" and "Vico and Herder." And Berlin's biography of Karl Marx, his only full-length book, written early in his career, has been frequently reissued. If his friends and colleagues sometimes deplore the fact that he has not produced more work of a sustained, scholarly kind, it is because of his great erudition and verbal facility. He speaks so rapidly and so allusively that listening to a lecture by him is an exhausting as well as an enriching experience. Even on the written page his prose is breathless; there is hardly a page that does not have a string of references, ancient and modern, literary and philosophical.

The title of the present volume comes from Immanuel Kant: "Out of the crooked timber of humanity no straight thing was ever made." Berlin takes this to be an admonition against dogmatism, against utopianism, against any rationalistic system of thought that issues in "the pursuit of the ideal" (the title of his first chapter) -- and perhaps against philosophy itself. Kant, to be sure, created the most ambitious moral philosophy out of that aphorism. To Berlin it seems to suggest the limitations of the philosophical enterprise.

The ideal that Berlin is so apprehensive of is the Platonic ideal, which was reaffirmed, he says, by the Enlightenment and which is still the dominant tradition of Western political thought. This ideal is based on three premises: that all genuine questions have only one true answer, that those answers are knowable and that the answers, all compatible with one another, together form a single, coherent whole. Berlin believes these premises are fallacious because they do not take account of "the crooked timber of humanity," and dangerous because they contribute to a kind of philosophical dogmatism that can only result in political tyranny.

The corrective to this view he finds in Giambattista Vico, whose "Scienza Nuova" (written in 1725) expounded his "new science of the common nature of nations" and influenced a later generation of German Romantics, including Johann Gottfried von Herder. Berlin credits Vico and Herder with the ideas of "cultural pluralism," "cultural diversity" and "conflicting values," which he sees as the alternatives to the utopian ideas of "timeless truths" and "absolute values." For Vico and Herder diversity was a function of national culture: it was nations and peoples at different times that differed from one another so dramatically. Indeed, from Berlin's account, it is not clear whether they sanctioned that same degree of diversity among individuals within a culture. When he himself speaks of cultural pluralism and cultural diversity, he implicitly extends the concept to individuals, thus legitimating the diversity of individual, as well as of cultural, values.

The theme of pluralism versus utopianism is echoed in one essay after another, often in the same words and images. The quotation from Kant appears in two essays, and the "jigsaw puzzle" metaphor in three (the utopian ideal is a jigsaw puzzle in which all the pieces are expected to fit together to create a perfect whole). Another metaphor that is repeated -- the "windowless box" -- points to another important aspect of Berlin's argument: the distinction between cultural pluralism and cultural relativism.  (continued on the link at th top of the page) ...