Isaiah Berlin’s Vision of Empathy and Pluralism

Ramin Jahanbegloo

By the time Isaiah Berlin died in November 1997 at the age of 88, a worldly fame had long since come to surround his name as the great political thinker of the age. He was also celebrated as one of the leading liberal thinkers of the century and as a remarkable historian of ideas. An acute practical analyst of international politics, a biographer of Marx and a translator of Turgenev in English, a longtime participant in Jewish affairs, a director of the Royal Opera House, a President of the British Academy and the founder of Wolfson College at Oxford, Isaiah Berlin was a man a man for all seasons and a humanist with diverse intellectual interests. Edmund Wilson once described him as” an extraordinary Oxford don, who left Russia at the age of eight and had a sort of double Russian and British personality.” I believe for those of us who were lucky to have known Isaiah Berlin, he was what Arthur Schlesinger called “a beacon of wisdom and humanity in the most terrible century in western history.” He had a serene, comic, joyous and secular personality. But I am sure that Berlin himself would have preferred to be remembered as what the 18th century philosophers called an “animateur d’idees”. His commitment to clarity went hand in hand with what he called “an unavoidable effort at Einfuhlung, however precarious and difficult and uncertain.” He saw his task as one of contributing to history of ideas by displaying, clarifying and criticizing the master ideas that lie behind the foundations of Western civilization. This task required the rare gift of understanding historical events and figures in all their variety. Berlin’s portraits of thinkers, politicians and artists are not a way for him to exercise the art of exegesis but an effort to present them from the inside. His contacts with his subjects are usually direct and full of psychological sensitivity. That is the reason why Berlin never gives the impression of seeking to conceal or mask these thinkers beneath a deceptive surface of ordinary and flat exhibition. Nor is he prone to the temptation of trying to minimize the enigmatic quality of the writers. On the contrary he shows himself to be acutely attentive to the visionary character which informed the thinking of thinkers like Vico, Herder, Herzen, Hamann or de Maistre. Such perspicacity is hardly found among philosophers and historian of ideas. Hence, Berlin has this exceptional ability to reveal for his readers the concepts and categories that inspired these thinkers, while painting in an exemplary manner the atmosphere of hope, fear, excitement and disturbance that surrounded the development of these ideas. However, it would be difficult to approach Berlin as a systematic thinker and philosopher or to reduce his writings to a systematic statement. Yet, while Berlin’s work ranges across many disciplines and embraces a varied cast of concepts and ideas, there is one principal leitmotif behind all his concerns and convictions. For Berlin the history of ideas was not a way to analyze the belief-systems of the past or portray the progress from one idea to another, but rather an art of understanding men’s relationships to each other and to their institutions. Berlin’s anti-teleological approach to history and his advocacy of pluralism are perfectly consistent with his comprehensive perspective on ideas and his experience of liberal humanism as a Russian Jew living and flourishing in England. Berlin’s commitment to pluralism and a moral humanism was born of his experience of violence in the Russian revolution and was forged in the shadow of Kantian respect of the individual as “the sole source of morality”.  His defense of Herzen’s “sense of reality” and Herder’s concept of “Einfuhlung” made him an anti-utopian with an intuitive appreciation of the plurality of lived human experiences. As such, Isaiah Berlin was vehemently against the shaping of human society according to a blueprint. He believed that human beings should be given the chance to find out what kind of world they live in and what kind of world they are making, otherwise they would walk in darkness and be governed by single set of rules. For Berlin the main strand of pluralism held tragically onto what Kant called in his essay, “Idea for a Universal History with a Cosmopolitan Purpose”, “ a crooked timber of humanity. Berlin used the metaphor in order to emphasize both on the imperfection and the cultural diversity of the human species, and on the resulting moral impossibility of monism. According to Berlin pluralities are made possible in life by the flexibility, fragility and imperfectability of human nature, which enables us to order our life experiences and our moral codes in terms of a plurality of cultural traditions. In other words, the desire for plurality goes hand in hand with an ethical maturity which is marked by an empiricist appreciation of the openness of the world. If life has no pre-established purpose, as Berlin reasons, then it is an environment in which we can have our own purpose for choosing and acting. Opposing an internal purpose of the human world, Berlin reminds us that “the notion of total human fulfillment is a formal contradiction, a metaphysical chimera.” But if the world is a realm of uncertainties, diversities and challenges, then life does not provide us with ready-made answers. That is why, Berlin frequently affirmed, by referring to Herzen, that “the ultimate goal of life was life itself” and that the answer to the perennial search for the meaning of life was not found in a logocentric or theocentric system of principles, but in the un-ended quest of daily existence. It is no wonder, then, that Berlin’s pluralist hope finally rests on a non-teleological account of human nature and needs. Thus, Berlin argues that human choice is the key to human dignity, since it protects each person’s ability to live for his/her own purposes. Hence pluralism is supposed to protect this area where our choices are self-defining and self-creating. If we consider pluralism after Berlin as a suspicion of a closed horizon of values and ends, we can say that it is an idea insistently mindful that the abundant meanings and experiences of life may not be fully realized within the horizons of one tradition or culture. As such, pluralism is a willingness to engage with the “Other”. It entails an intellectual and ethical openness to diverse strivings, cultures and forms of argumentation. Interestingly, Berlinian pluralism does not claim any special ontological authority for itself by putting things beyond contestation. Rather, it attempts to create a space of dialogue in which the opening of horizons of thought and discourse are possible. I believe one can say that the Berlinian approach to pluralism envisions diverse modes of transcending local horizons without the expectation that this process of displacement or detachment will result in the same ethical constellation as ours. Now, one might be tempted to describe Berlinian pluralism as an effort to take seriously the concept of diversity, but I think this would not account for the originality and importance of Berlin’s own views.

Pluralism for Berlin is not just a tolerant society which would accept diversity and cultural heterogeneity as opposed to homogeneity and exclusivism. Berlin underlines the fact that “there is a plurality of values which men can and do seek, and that these values differ.” But he also observes that human beings have the ability to understand and to recognize the ends and values of other societies without necessarily accepting or following them. As Berlin affirms: “ If I pursue one set of values I may detest another, and may think it is damaging to the only form of life that I am able to live or tolerate for myself and others, in which case I may attack it, I may even in extreme cases have to go to war against it. But I still recognize it as a human pursuit.” This, of course, is the crucial point that Berlin discovers in the works of Vico and Herder, namely this sense of a “general feel for what belongs where, of the notion of belonging in general.” This general feeling is what Berlin describes as the “sense of reality”. Berlin’s claim then is that pluralism requires a certain sensibility that “allows us to recognize unfamiliar values as genuine avenues of human flourishing.” That is to say, according to Berlin, it is possible for human beings of one culture or age to understand those of another culture or age. This indeed, is the principal lesson that Berlin takes from his study of Herder and more precisely the idea that in the comparative study of cultures “the happiness of one people cannot be compared with the happiness of another (as) there is no way of comparing the excellence of one culture with the excellence of the other.”  However, a central fact about human beings is that though they have different life experiences across times and cultures, there is a shared core of common humanity. What Berlin suggests after Vico and Herder is that despite the vast differences of values between cultures, it is still possible to grasp an understanding of one another, by ‘empathy’. Berlin maintains that all cultures despite value-conflict are subject to the same finite number of ‘basic human needs and interests’. In other words, historical or national cultures may respond differently to these finite needs and ends, thereby creating different, and often incompatible or incommensurable, ‘objective’ constellations of values. Nevertheless, these commonalities are sufficient enough to enable mutual understanding and a dialogue among diverse cultures. It is this capacity of mutual understanding and empathy that distinguishes Berlin’s value-pluralism from relativism. The key point in this respect is that the capacity for inter-cultural empathy is the evidence of the universality of values that give shape to that capacity and points to the adequacy of pluralism rather than relativism. Berlin does not give us a precise definition of these universal values that cross cultural boundaries, but he appears to endorse what he calls the ‘human horizon’, which is the basic common experience that identify us as human beings. This approach has the advantage that it enables Berlin to stay out of the controversies about the true nature of universal values. In some conversations, however, Berlin refers to “values that a great many human beings in the vast majority of places and situations, at almost all times, do in fact hold in common, whether consciously and explicitly or as expressed in their behaviors, gestures and actions.” Actually what Berlin makes clear is that these universal values are universally shared not only because they are humanly recognizable but also because they constitute a moral standpoint for human interactive plurality. As such Berlin’s idea of ‘ shared human horizon’ has a critical force of avoiding moral anarchy and relativism while acknowledging the plurality of modes of being human. On the constructive side, Berlin’s empathetic pluralism encourages and promotes the inter-cultural dialogue by drawing on the idea of a basic humanity and relating different cultural views to each other. That is to say, its hermeneutical potentials are greater than its transgressive possibilities. If that is case, then, Berlin’s empathetic pluralism provides us with an evidence of his preoccupation with an intimate dialogue between cultures. Berlin’s empathetic pluralism is more than simply an insight into the minds and lives of other humans; it is also a way to coextend the human capacity for criticism of barbarity. The capacity for empathy, then, is what allows the human race to against its capacity of producing violence. As such, empathy is a source of dignity and humanity, because it is a capacity for the human race to experience value conflicts and to become conscious of the tragic necessity of choice in human life. The tragic nature of choice is thus central to the Berlinian affirmation of empathetic pluralism and his criticism of the monist stance. In fact, Berlin has little doubt that it is better to choose tragically rather than to live comfortably with a universal hierarchy of ends prescribed by God or scientific rationality. Once we know this we can say that empathetic pluralism primarily reflects a deeply ethical vision of what it means to share life with others in its fullest sense and to choose to live it in the fullest sense of human freedom. Berlin’s conception of empathy is, therefore, inspiring and challenging because it does not envision an uncritical affirmation of all cultural values and it does not require a suspension of moral judgment in the process of a dialogue among cultures. It goes without saying that for Berlin there can be no such thing as a dialogue among cultures if there are no basic moral qualities to which every culture is committed. For Berlin these shared moral qualities are quite clear when he writes in a famous passage of The Crooked Timber of Humanity that “ there does exist a scale of values by which the majority of mankind – and in particular western Europeans- in fact live, live not merely mechanically and out of habit, but as part of what in their moments of self-awareness constitutes for them the essential nature of man.”

Of course, many critics of Berlin have doubts as to whether Berlin’s commitment to shared moral qualities of humanity is enough to ground a strong defense of pluralist politics. The interpretation that I have been developing suggests that these disagreements miss somewhat the essential in Berlin’s empathetic pluralism. Indeed on my reading I believe that one can say that the Berlinian empathetic pluralism responds to two conundrums simultaneously. First, it coincides with a sense that the claim of universal is not quite out there but lodged everywhere. Second, it would be a way of conceiving a sense of belonging appropriate to an inter-cultural environment, meaning a way of being receptive to others that avoids both the logic of assimilation that erodes cultural differences or a mono-cultural sense of belonging that makes dialogue impossible. In other words, it allows a sense of belonging that is not necessarily ethnocentric and exclusionary. It prompts us to go beyond our religious and cultural traditions and enrich our personal or national sense of belongings, while being responsive to our global challenges and responsibilities. This rejection of a mono-cultural sense of belonging leads us back to the question of Berlin’s appeal to central values that are common to human beings in most places and times. Berlin, however, does not allow a hard and absolute universalism to shape his view of pluralism. But in any case human life is worth defending for him because any kind of indifference to human dignity is a peril to the plural dimension of human beings. In other words, Berlin tries to defend human dignity without placing human cultures in a hierarchy, but by emphasizing on its self-creating character. Therefore, the philosophical heart of Berlin’s empathetic attitude towards cultures is found on the idea of unpredictable and endless creativity. Most generally put, in Berlin’s view, cultures and individuals are valuable, and they are not only valuable, they are also incommensurably valid. But this does not mean that they are equally pluralistic and humanistic. According to Berlin, the great danger comes from unquestioned dogmas in traditions and cultures. In an interview with Bryan Magee he underlines this danger: “Societies, notes Berlin, can decay as a result of going to sleep on some comfortable bed of unquestioned dogma. If the imagination is to be stirred, if the intellect is to work, if mental life is not to sink to a low ebb, and the pursuit of truth (or justice or self-fulfillment) is not to cease, assumptions must be challenged sufficiently, at any rate, to keep society moving.”

So, if we agree with Berlin, that given the existing difference among cultures, we cannot subscribe to all of them at the same time, how are we to choose between the moral values they represent? In other words, how can we reconcile our desire for belonging to one culture and our desire for freedom? Berlin’s own conclusion in The Pursuit of the Ideal calls for prioritization of avoiding cruelty and suffering in cultures. Not all cultures embody the empathetic qualities that Berlin applauds. As such, Berlin’s writings provide us with the ample evidence that dialogue among different cultures and religious traditions remains valid and valuable not only because of the multiplicity of values that are intimately connected to the multiplicity of cultures but also because of the evils in history that are needed to avoided. Therefore Berlin suggests empathetic pluralism as our best practice of political philosophy for the making of a less cruel world. I would even go further and say that Berlin’s political thought as it comes out in his writings is fundamentally empathetic in its orientation. This supports the view that Berlinian pluralism implies a case for liberalism but specifically for that kind of liberalism that while ruling out a hard universalism provides us with a common moral horizon that presents as a basis for cross-cultural critical conversation. In other words, it is a set of principles that could cross cultural boundaries by providing us with both a philosophical defense against different forms of fanaticism and an awareness of unreflective forms of cultural belonging. We can, therefore, describe Berlin’s empathetic pluralism as a politics of dialogue with the minimum accepted standards of ethics. It is a game of loss and gain of some fundamental human values and it lacks certainly a positive political program. As such, Berlin conceives moral and political perfection as conceptually incoherent and inadequate with any idea of pluralism. Berlinian pluralism, however, remains consistent with his liberal values despite its imperfection, but it is because of its imperfection that it makes Berlin so relevant to debates about contrasting claims of universal values and traditional values of particular communities. As such, it still has the potential to become a powerful weapon against the monisms of our time.