Joseph Brodsky, ‘Isaiah Berlin: A Tribute’ in Edna Ullmann-Margalit and Avishai Margalit (eds.)

is already implicit in his historical methodology.

The first thing to say is that Berlin’s interpretation o f Vico and Herder has exhibited the significance of the idea o f ‘a sense o f reality’ already. It takes two forms. On the one hand, Berlin explicitly discusses this idea in his reconstruction o f Vico’s and Herder’s historical thought. On the other hand, more implicitly, the fact that Berlin does not take everything they believe on board means that Berlin himself has his own sense o f reality whereby Vico’s and Herder’s ideas are to be evaluated accordingly. Obviously, a satisfactory clarification of Berlin’s sense o f reality should include both what he explicitly says about the idea as well as how it actually operates in his navigation in other’s thought. For the sake of argument, however, it may be worthwhile dealing with his account o f the idea first, so that we can have a general idea o f what he takes to be a ‘sense o f reality,’ and the convenient point o f departure seems to be the fact that he takes the avoidance o f anachronism to be the core o f his Vichian methodology, for as a matter o f fact that is the primary aim o f an empathetic attempt. To be sure, to avoid anachronism is an idea as old as the discipline o f history itself, and few would disagree that there is more to discredit a historian than accusing him o f anachronism. Yet, if Berlin’s reading is correct, Vico tries to incorporate a moral sense into the idea’s original meaning. Note that the word ‘anachronism’ by definition refers to the mistake o f placing something in the wrong historical period, and that is a notion basically related to time. In any event, it is in this dictionary sense that Vico’s aforementioned case against the claim that the Romans borrowed the Twelve Tables from the Athens o f Solon’s day is to be chiefly understood. And no doubt the Cambridge School approach as discussed earlier would have no objection to

this understanding. However, Vico’s idea o f anachronism implies that to judge a

culture o f the past by today’s standards is also an instance o f this type o f mistake. If so, anachronism is not merely a mistake related to time but rather a moral one. Indeed, partly as a corollary o f Vico’s expressivism, according to which each culture has its own internal logic and hence an understanding o f it must involve an exposition o f its organising social principles as such, to criticise a particular culture by another’s logic is to make a mistake no less serious than misplacing an historical event in time.

pluralism, that is to say, the doctrine that ‘ [ejvery culture expresses its own collective experience, [and] each step on the ladder o f human development has its own equally

authentic means o f expression.’65 And indeed, without such insistence on the equality

of each culture as a ladder o f human development, he cannot attribute any instance o f judging another culture by one’s own standards as a case o f anachronism. In fact, any historian who sets out to undergo a Vichian empathetic navigation must presuppose this, and that seems to be what Herder intends to imply as well when he emphatically

declares that ‘Every culture has its own unique Schwerpunkt (‘centre o f gravity’), and

unless we grasp it we cannot understand its character or value.’66 That means, given that for Herder whatever is expressive of men’s genuine nature - either individually as

personality or collectively as a culture or Volksgeist (folk spirit) - is valid, there is

every reason for him to exercise the capacity to enter into the minds o f these people in order to understand them. In other words, what this doctrine of authenticity implies is that all cultures are unique, and for this reason alone the historian o f ideas must carry

out an act of Einfiihlung if true understanding o f those cultures is to be attained. This

position is unmistakably a methodological cultural pluralism. Indeed, if culture is

what provides the meaning and significance o f an individual’s actions, what can be

expected to be a proper understanding o f such actions must reveal how they may appear to be ‘natural’ in the light o f the whole web of concepts and beliefs. In other words, since they can only be evaluated according to the w eb’s own internal standards, to criticise them otherwise would be an act o f ‘anachronism’. Thus understood, cultural pluralism is the logical implication o f Vico and Herder’s argument against anachronism, and it is this cultural pluralism that underlies the method o f empathetic understanding. From this we can infer that part o f what Berlin considers to be a historian’s sense o f reality is the sensitivity to the reality o f each individual culture’s

particularities, and from this particularism we can further infer that Berlin’s realism

must include a sense o f cultural diversity as the human reality. When applied to the

field o f history, this suggests that cultures across time and space should be understood

65 Isaiah Berlin, ‘The Counter-Enlightenment’ in The Proper Study o f Mankind (London: Pimlico,

1998), p.247. 66 Ibid., p. 254.

in their own terms and fo r their own sake. And that is precisely what Berlin takes to

be the reason why Herder would have ‘rejected the absolute criteria o f progress then

fashionable in Paris: no culture is a mere means towards another; every human

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achievement, every human society is to be judged by its own internal standards.’ Thus understood, the Vichian historical method is necessitated by the reality o f the human condition, and surely this understanding o f anachronism is related to Vico and Herder’s holistic expressivist model o f man and society as explained earlier. Now, it should be noted that this is not the only way the idea of anachronism is understood by Berlin. Note that, as mentioned earlier, Herder’s holistic expressivism as discussed earlier is derived from his semantic holism. This view in fact implies - to use Andrew Bowie’s phrase - the ‘two-edged nature’ o f language: (1) language is a means by which a culture symbolises its identity and binds its members to each other as a social group; (2) those who cannot speak a particular language are to be excluded from the

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community it forms. In fact, this two-edged nature o f language is what

distinguishes Herder’s Einfiihlung from Vico’s fantasia in an important way. Their

difference can best be seen in the way Herder and Vico understand the idea of ‘belonging’. In the case o f Vico, the idea o f ‘belonging’ is predominantly a

historiographical concept. As understood by Berlin, what Vico emphasises is that it is

only when we have acquired knowledge o f what the essence o f a particular age or culture consists in can we say that some one is ‘typical of’ or ‘belonging to’ this age or that culture. That is, unless we have grasped the essence o f the Age o f Enlightenment, we cannot justifiably label someone, say, Voltaire, as ‘a great Enlightenment thinker’. And what is implied by this idea o f ‘belonging’ is that it

would be anachronistic to understand a thinker belonging to X age as a Y thinker, for

that will only generate false knowledge. In the case o f Herder, however, the idea o f

belonging to a particular culture is meant to be an anthropological thesis based on an

account o f human psychology. To explain, what the two-edged nature o f language implied by Herder’s semantic holism is that men’s language is at once expressive of

67 Isaiah Berlin, ‘The Counter-Enlightenment’ in The P roper Study o f Mankind (London: Pimlico,

1998), p.254.

and constitutive o f their own culture, and can build a person’s identity. That means, for one thing, no man can be an island, unless he abandons the use o f language - hence thinking entirely. And for another, it is men’s nature to seek a ‘sense o f belonging’ and only a culture can gratify this need. That is to say, for Herder, man has the natural desire to ‘belong to’ a culture, without which his acts o f behaviour could not be intelligible, and can be happier when living with members o f his own culture, in particular speaking the same language. Understood in this way, the two-edged nature o f language also means that learning a language is the key not only to understanding another culture but also to acquiring a cultural identity, and that is what keeps alive the hope for cross-cultural understanding - or, more specifically, to go beyond one’s own culture and understand another ‘from within.’ No doubt, the nrimacy o f language in Herder’s holistic expressivism reveals an important anthropological or sociological fact with epistemological implications. And it is in this Herderian sense that a situation where a historian wrongly recognises a person’s group

dentity may also be regarded as case o f anachronism.

Undeniably, Berlin’s interpretation significantly downplays the Christian framework in Vico’s and Herder’s historical thought. As mentioned earlier, Berlin is a secular thinker who would not accept Herder’s theological solution to the problem concerning the origin o f language, and it is thus not surprising that he should have grasped the point o f Herder’s doctrine o f authenticity to be abolishing the distinction between ‘explanation and justification, reference to causes and to purposes, [or] to the risible and the invisible, statements o f fact and their assessment in terms o f the listorical standards o f value relevant to them.’69 And that is why Berlin would have

iraised Herder for being among ‘one o f the originators o f the secular doctrine o f the

mity o f fact and value, theory and practice, “is” and “ought”, intellectual judgement

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ind emotional commitment, thought and action.’ For that amounts to a reverse o f

he relation between fact and value as traditionally understood by Christians who see vhat is ‘valuable’ to be ‘valued’ by God, because what is authentic now is real and

9 Andrew Bowie, Introduction to German Philosophy (Cambridge: Polity, 2003), p.51.

0 Isaiah Berlin, ‘Herder and the Enlightenment’ in The Proper Study o f Mankind (London: Pimlico,

good, and all human institutions are ‘valuable’ and ‘valid’ in their own right. Surely this is consistent with Berlin’s reading and appraisal o f Vico. On the other hand, as also mentioned earlier, Berlin is aware o f the Christian influence on Vico’s historical methodology, but he considers that what is most original in the latter’s thought, not

least his use of the ancient Judeao-Christian verum/factum principle, is when his ideas

are read in anthropological rather than theological terms. Thus, Berlin rejects Vico’s talk o f ‘stages o f human development’ which suggests a cyclical view o f human history, and interprets the term ‘modifications’ in the passage quoted above

concerning the verum/factuam principle as ‘what we should mean by the stages o f the

growth, or o f the range or direction, o f human thought, imagination, will, feeling’ - rather than the retrievable past mental states as implied by the Idealist’s account.71 By the same secular sense o f reality, he objects to Vico’s account o f human history as an ‘orderly procession’ of ‘ever deepening types o f apprehension o f the world’ guided by Providence, according to which ‘in the individual and society alike, phase follows phase not haphazardly (as the Epicureans thought), nor in a sequence o f mechanical causes or effects (as the Stoics taught), but as stages in the pursuit o f an intelligible

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purpose.

However, Vico’s approach to studying the past as a matter o f fact is related to his philosophy o f history which is again theological in nature. What enables Vico to talk of each culture as a unique whole, or each nation’s history as a self-contained process

of undergoing the cycle of corsi (advance) and ricorsi (regression), is his belief in

Providence - for, after all, this cyclical view o f human history suggests that human societies change non-randomly, and each phase o f them is a unique part with characteristics appropriate - in the eyes o f God - to their location in human history as a process o f transformation. Similarly, but probably more evidently, divine help is also evoked by Herder to establish his doctrine o f authenticity, for as a matter o f fact it is through God’s eyes that each culture is good in itself and hence not a primitive stage o f its successor. Without the idea o f Providence, it is difficult for Herder to talk

71 Isaiah Berlin, ‘Vico: Philosophical Ideas’ in Three Critics o f the Enlightenment (Princeton:

Princeton University Press, 2000), p.47. 72 Ibid.

o f each phase o f human history as ‘good’, for there is no ground for him to judge so -

or, to use John Milbank’s words, to affirm ‘a progress purely within the good, not

n'i

from evil to good.’ Clearly, the methodological cultural pluralism Berlin attributes

to Vico and Herder has transformed the nature and the theoretical ground o f their methodology - which inevitably gives the impression of reading past thinkers in his own terms rather than the thinker’s. Indeed, as Antonio Perez-Ramos complains,

Berlin has translated the Italian word ‘ritruovare’ as ‘to be found’ so as to ground a

theory o f empathy as analogous understanding on Vico’s remark (discussed in the first section o f this chapter) that ‘the world o f civil society has certainly been made by men,

and that its principles are therefore to be found within the modifications o f our own

human mind’, yet the word in fact means ‘to find again’ rather than ‘to be found’.74 When read in correct translation, according to Perez-Ramos, the very passage o f Vico taken by Berlin to imply a cognitive theory o f empathy in fact implies that ‘the human

mind is posited by Vico as containing in its present and civilised stage all the patterns

o f thought that it has deployed or projected into the surrounding world, first in the process o f humanisation and then in the setting-up o f the multifarious panoply o f human institutions, social structures and political systems.’75 And that means Vico’s thesis is metaphysical, concerning the relation between human mind and past events, rather than the cognitive theory of empathy as reconstructed by Berlin. Once again Berlin seems to have reconstructed Vico’s and Herder’s vision o f the world in a way that the resulting outlook can adapt to today’s secular, scientific world.

If so, one may even infer that a vision o f politics derived through Berlinian

empathetic understanding of a past thinker in practice falls into what Paul Kelly has

described as an ‘artificially-reconstructed argument’ discussed earlier - despite the theory o f it as formulated by Berlin suggesting otherwise. Nevertheless, a more charitable understanding of Berlin’s interpretation is possible. That is to say, instead

73 John Milbank, Theology and Social Theory: Beyond Secular Reason (Oxford: Blackwell, 1990),

p.173.

74 Antonio Perez-Ramos, ‘Giambattista V ico’ in Stuart Brown (ed.) British Philosophy and the Age o f

Enlightenment (London: Routledge, 1996), pp. 340-1. My own emphasis.

of seeing his reconstruction as a practical contradiction with his own methodological prescription, we can view his interpretation as conducted on what Donald Davidson

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calls the principle of charity. Note that, as a principle of interpretation, it holds that

when interpreting a speaker o f foreign language, one should ceteris paribus refrain

from ascribing false beliefs to the speaker. This charity is surely exhibited in the way Berlin interprets Vico and Herder’s thought. What is more, as this way o f interpreting inevitably reveals the interpreter’s own sense o f reality, Berlin’s secularised cultural pluralism in fact reveals not only Vico and Herder’s view o f human history but also his own secular sense o f reality with regard to human history, that is, his own disbelief in history as an ‘uninterrupted progress’ moving from ignorance to knowledge, from

• 7 7 cruelty to kindness, from slavery to freedom, or in short from misery to happiness.

In effect, this sense o f history amounts to abolishing the purpose o f history, for it

virtually prevents the talk o f human history as a drama with a single plot whereby all different acts are connected and whose meaning explained. Here we have come a long way to the point where we can begin to realise why Herzen is held by Berlin as his life-long intellectual hero. Note that Berlin has been reported to have converted to the

70 Realism o f G E. Moore and John Cook Wilson in his undergraduate years at Oxford. And he has evidently been influenced by British Empiricism and Oxford Realism to some extent - that is, respectively, the epistemological position that our knowledge is mainly derived from our experience through the traditional five senses, and the belief that the external world is independent o f human observers. Also, if Stuart Hampshire’s judgement is right, Berlin is subconsciously a Humean empiricist whose ‘thinking and writing is aware of the ample, generous, humorous and seductive figure o f David

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Hume smiling in the background.’ This thesis does not deny that Berlin’s thought

76 Donald Davidson, Inquiries into Truth and Interpretation (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1984).

77 Ramin Jahanbegloo, Conversations with Isaiah Berlin (New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1991),

p.35.

78 Chemiss, J. & Hardy, H. ‘Isaiah Berlin’, The Standford Encyclopedia o f Philosophy (Summer 2005