William Galston, ‘Kant’s Practical Philosophy’ in Ronald Beiner and William James Booth (eds.),

Kant and Political Philosophy - The Contemporary Legacy (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1996),

nature: given that this Herzenian conception o f value takes de facto human experience to be the point o f departure for theorising value, Berlin’s doctrine of value-pluralism grounded on it could not have been a metaphysical theory o f values or the good as Michael Lessnoff, among others, has understood.17 And that means any attribution o f a liberal politics based on such a ‘pluralist metaphysics’ to Berlin is bound to distort what he intends to argue as well as to bring into his value-pluralism a number of theoretical difficulties which in fact are alien to his system o f thought. For instance, as well be argued in next chapter, Berlin is not faced by difficulties concerning how values come into existence in the first place, nor does he have to give an account o f

how de facto values pursued by moral agents relate to the ultimate reality o f the good

which is supposed to be universal and abstract. As a matter o f fact, Berlin’s Herzenian conception o f value does not carry the metaphysical luggage that presupposes the identity o f the true and the good. In fact, one may even say that in a sense it is meant to do away with just that, for on this account the question concerning whether the good is (identical to) the true is inapplicable here, for there is no ‘intrinsic’ quality to be found - what Kant and his followers have sought for long - in a human-created value or in an agent’s chosen ends o f life. In defining ‘value’ as ‘ends men strive for,’ that is to say, Berlin has not only transformed the philosophical issue o f the ontology

of values from a metaphysical question into an empirical one - and accordingly the

question ‘What is a value?’ from a normative philosophical issue into a descriptive or

even anthropological one - but also switched our perspective from the external to the

internal, that is to say, from the third-person to the first-person. This shift in point o f

view in effect affirms once again our capacity to reflect upon ourselves and to see others as our own equals - i.e. what makes empathy as analogous understanding a real possibility, as discussed in last chapter. For this reason, this Herzenian conception o f

value can be said to be premised on our self-knowledge by way o f reflection as a

moral agent. What is more, since it involves seeing others as moral and creative agents equal to oneself, this conception of value in fact implies a respect for others as

17 Michael H. Lessnoff, P olitical Philosophers o f the Twentieth Century (Oxford: Blackwell, 1999),

persons. It follows that, Berlin’s conception of value is in effect o f a piece with his historical approach, and indeed what underlies both o f these two elements o f his methodology is his faith in men’s capacity to reflect on themselves as moral agents.

Despite the fact that Berlin’s conception o f value is free from those problems associated with the attempt to ground value on metaphysics, his way o f understanding human value generates new kinds o f problem. To explain, as Lessnoff has complained already, Berlin ‘endorses, indiscriminately, a plurality o f conflicting “values”, “ideals”, “ends” and “goals”, without any sense that the differences between these concepts might be important.’18 If this section is right so far, then what Berlin has in mind when he speaks of the conflict between values is the conflicting ‘positive goals o f life’,

‘ends o f life’, or ‘ideals o f life’ - as he indeed uses them interchangeably with the term ‘value’. However, although this clarification o f terminology sheds light on the

question ‘What does a value consist inV to some extent, what an instance o f ‘value’

consists o f is still vague. Consequently, we are left unclear about what exactly are in

conflict when values come into conflict with each other. This situation is complicated further by Berlin’s talk o f the ‘embodiment’ - or ‘incarnation’ as used in his early writings - o f human values. The idea o f ‘embodiment’ is important in that it reveals not only how Berlin considers the relation between value and action, but also what he takes to be required o f an agent when he professes to be acting in the name of a value. On the whole, this idea denotes Berlin’s acceptance o f Herder’s identification o f ‘is’

and ‘ought’. From this perspective, one may regard a value as a practical reason. And

that in a way helps Berlin evade the question troubling the ‘metaphysical’ approach to value: why should we have to act on moral values even if they exist? However, this idea also means that a value-concept such as ‘liberty’ or ‘equality’ in principle allows for more than one embodiment or more than one way o f embodying. In other words, there exists a distance between any value-concept and what counts its realisation -

that is to say, between value-referent and value-reference. This distance constitutes a

space where the agent has freedom to choose which way or by what - be it a course o f

18 Michael H. Lessnoff, Political Philosophers o f the Twentieth Century (Oxford: Blackwell, 1999),

action, institution, or even attitude, as Berlin once suggests - he intends to embody his chosen value, and will generate difficulties for the observer to ascertain what value is

being embodied.19 For example, ‘liberty’ may be said to be embodied by fighting off

an enemy, by a process o f decolonisation, or by going or not going to the polls. Thus, there is no single way o f embodying a given value, and sometimes new ways have to be created to suit new circumstances. What is more, given the possibility o f failure, that is, an agent can pursue a value ‘without conscious hope o f success’ on Berlin’s account, it appears to be impossible to tell what value has been pursued by an agent in the case of a failed attempt. It follows that the relation between a given value and its

embodiment in fact is not conceptual but interpretative. And that also means that if

there is no better way for determining the relation between value-referent and

value-reference, then authorial intention is the only thing we can appeal to when

deciding what or which value is being embodied in any instance o f value embodiment. Yet that amounts to according the valuing subject the ultimate right to determine the content of value and that runs the risk o f leaving the agent to decide the boundaries o f morality for himself - after all that is what he projects onto the world.

At this point, we begin to see how Berlin’s Herzenian projectivist conception o f value may bear on the issue o f morality. Nevertheless, there is yet another difficulty that arises mainly from the voluntarism inherent in the Herzenian conception. Central to it is the worry that Berlin by understanding value to be what moral agents would pursue for its own sake has effectively assigned the normative source o f values to the valuing subject alone, and that surely runs the risk o f granting each single individual the right to retreat from his value commitments at any time. If this is the case, it follows that whenever the agent is confronted with a situation o f value conflict he can

always voluntarily relinquish one of the conflicting values and therefore escape the

dilemma. That is to say, there is always a way out o f value conflict; in other words, tragic conflict - a feature o f human value Berlin often refers to when formulating his value-pluralism - in effect can be avoided in one way or another. As it seems, on

19 Berlin talks about how attitudes embody values in his essay ‘The Pursuit o f the Ideal’ in The

Berlin’s account, the moral agents can take the strategy to exit from value conflict, at least some forms o f value conflict; hence value conflict is not as inescapable as he suggests. Undeniably, this is an unpleasant implication for Berlin’s overall moral and political philosophy. Unless it can be established that there are some values whose normativity does not reside in the individual’s consent, that is to say, they demand action from all moral agents even when they do not give consent to their moral authority, Berlin’s talk o f tragic conflict seems to make no sense. What is more, if the

plurality of values is to be premised on the fact that there exits more than one value

demanding embodiment, then in principle we can reject any value’s moral command at will or decide to recognise just one supreme value. This voluntarism in Berlin’s conception o f value seems to threaten one o f the key tenets of his value- pluralism - the tragic conflict o f value - and generates an internal tension within the doctrine.

However, it is vital to point out that the voluntarism in Berlin’s conception o f value does not suggest that values are necessarily individualistic and subjective, and that certainly would place constraints on an agent’s strategy to escape from tragic conflict. Indeed, one should not forget that values are for Berlin objective. If so, then an agent in fact cannot always retreat from moral dilemma involving conflicting

values at will. To deal with this important issue o f course requires a full account o f

how human values can be objective under Berlin’s vision o f the world. The rest o f this section tries to pave the way for that by discussing Berlin’s idea o f objectivity first. To begin with, note that Berlin is aware o f more than one notion o f ‘objectivity’, and his point is that different notions suit different spheres o f human affairs and to apply one only suitable for a particular sphere to another is to violate the sense o f reality. He calls this type o f violation as ‘false analogy’, and in his judgement it is no less harmful than anachronism, especially when it comes to politics. The paradigm case Berlin has in mind is the concept of scientific history, which according to him is

grounded upon ‘a false analogy o f objectivity with some among the more exact o f the

natural sciences.’20 As we have seen, he regards history as a sui generis intellectual

activity involving practical judgement but no construction o f models or hypotheses. It

implies that the historian does not share with the scientist’s idea o f objectivity. Indeed, for Berlin, to be objective in natural science requires that ‘methods and criteria o f a less or more precisely defined kind are being used with scrupulous care; and that evidence, arguments, conclusions are formulated in the special terminology invented or employed for the special purpose o f each science, and that there is no intrusion (or

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almost none) of irrelevant considerations or concepts or categories.’ By contrast, to

see whether a historian is objective or not is to ask whether the historian is biased, in the sense that whether ‘proper methods o f weighing evidence have been too far ignored; or [...] what are normally called facts have been overlooked or suppressed or perverted; or [...] evidence normally accepted as sufficient to account for the acts of one individual or society is, for no good reason, ignored in some other case similar in all relevant respects; or [...] cannons o f interpretation are arbitrarily altered from case

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to case, that is, without consistency or principle.’ In short, the objectivity in history

has nothing to do with scientific instruments measurement but means exactly the same as in our daily language, and to apply the idea o f objectivity in natural science to history therefore is a misapplication rooted in false analogy, a failure to understand

what fits what and what can and cannot be done. The question is: what conception o f

objectivity for Berlin is appropriate for the sphere o f morality?

The crux of the matter lies in the second sentence in the passage quoted above to illustrate Berlin’s projectivism, according to which men pursue positive goals not just individually but also collectively. What is at work here is o f course Berlin’s holistic expressivism discussed in the previous chapter, derived from Herder and, to a lesser extent, Vico. Until now, his projectivist conception of value has been characterised by

the primacy o f the valuing subject’s voluntary consent, that is, the normative sources

of value reside not in the intrinsic quality o f such values but each moral agent, it seems that Berlin should endorse value subjectivism rather than objectivism, if he is to remain consistent. Nevertheless, one should not forget that he also holds to a holistic expressionism, and when the Herzenian conception o f value is read together

21 Isaiah Berlin, Four Essays on Liberty (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1969), p.89.

with this Herderian doctrine, the voluntarism inherent in the former in fact is not as subjectivist as it seems and, more importantly, does not have to imply a form o f subjectivism. No doubt, what serves as the constraints here is the ‘holistic’ nature o f the Herderian expressivism. It is holistic in the sense that the meaning o f a given act performed by an agent must be understood in the context o f the whole web o f social practices, in the way similar to a word’s meaning is defined by the whole language to which it belongs. However, that does not suggest that a deliberate break o f the social rules governing the web is not possible. Indeed, one should not conflate ‘holism’ with untrammelled ‘collectivism’ here. At any rate, in the case o f Berlin, the holism he derives from Herder only means that, in a way analogous to how a word’s meaning must be established by reference to the whole vocabulary of the language it belongs, a particular action must also be understood in the light of the web o f social practice it belongs to. Similarly, in a way a new word comes into existence within the vocabulary o f a language, novel acts o f behaviour can be made by free and creative moral agents, only that the meaning and significance o f them should be determined by reference to the old social practices. That is to say, Herderian holistic expressivism does not preclude what Mill calls ‘experiments in living’, and the possibility for the agent to assign a new meaning to an old pattern o f behaviour is not ruled out either. Rather, it provides the context whereby a particular creative expression is meaningful.

From this it follows that the Herzenian conception of value which is marked by agent-relativity does not contradict the Herderian expressivism. Rather, they together suggest a model o f men and society where an individual must belong to a group yet remain a free and creative moral agent. In other words, the selfhood o f the agent within Berlin’s Herderian-Herzenian vision o f the world is - to borrow the idea made famous by contemporary communitarian thinkers - an ‘embedded self, for his self- identify is inseparable from the group or culture he belongs to. To return to the issue of objectivity, that means human values created by agents within the social framework they belong to can not be purely subjective, for they are in fact regulated by the rules o f the framework and hence ‘objective facts’ which can be traced by anyone who knows their way in the web o f social rules. On the other hand, this interpretation seems to confirms John Gray’s reading that the idea o f objectivity held by Berlin can

best be understood in terms o f Wittgenstein’s famous notion o f publicness in his philosophy o f language - which is, as observed by Charles Taylor, a later version o f

Herder’s linguistic holism. Moreover, if this is Berlin’s idea of moral values, this

notion o f objectivity, as also suggested by Gray, implies a variant o f moral realism:

internal realism, that is, the meta-ethical position according to which ‘the elements in the world o f value, though they are historical creations - forms o f activity, such as science or art, forms o f life, such as friendship or romantic love - are nevertheless independent subject-matters, in respect of which our beliefs may be true or false.’24 In the light o f this holism, thus, despite that Berlin holds an agent-relative conception of value, the content o f value is not any individual’s own ‘preference’ or ‘interest’ but rather the ends o f life also intelligible to others as worth pursuing for their own sake.

However, although the Herderian holism enables Berlin to make sense o f value objectivity, this way of understanding value, paradoxically, gives the impression o f

cultural relativism. Indeed, for one thing, even though values can now be said to be

objective, their objectivity strictly speaking is ensured by a particular web o f social practice and hence relative to the culture or society to which a given value belongs. For another, even if a value can be ‘public’ in Wittgenstein’s sense, the value is public

only to the extent that it is intelligible exclusively to those who share with the agent

the same culture and hence remains subjective in a sense. In other words, in a way analogous to the two-edged nature o f Herder’s linguistic holism as noted in the previous chapter, Berlin’s holistic expressivism means that a given value’s symbolic