Isaiah Berlin - Russian Thinkers

lives of her peasants on the part of'the well-meaning, but vain and foolish,

landoWDer. His argument is highly convincing.

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TOLSTOY AND E N L I G HTEN MENT

schools on what, less or more correctly, they take this to be'. They

struck off one yoke only to put another in its place. Certain scholastic

philosophers insisted on Greek because that was the language of

Aristotle, who knew the truth. But, Tolstoy continues, Luther denied

the authority of the Church Fathers and insisted on inculcating the

original Hebrew, because he lmn» that that was the language in which

God had revealed eternal truths to men. Bacon looked to empirical

knowledge of nature, and his theories contradicted those of Aristotle.

Rousseau proclaimed his faith in life, life as he conceived it, and not in

theories.

But about one thing they were all agreed: that one must liberate

the young from the blind despotism of the old; and each immediately

substituted his own fanatical, enslaving dogma in its place. If I am sure

that I know the truth and that all else is error, does that alone entitle

me to superintend the education of another? Is such certainty enough?

Whether or not it disagrees with the certainties of others? By what right

do I put a wall round the pupil, exclude all external influences, and try

to mould him as I please, into my own or somebody else's image?

The answer to this question, Tolstoy passionately says to the

progressives, must be 'Yes' or 'No': 'If it is "Yes", then the Jews'

synagogue, the church school, has as much legitimate right to exist

as all our universities.' He declares that he sees no moral difference, at

least in principle, between the compulsory Latin of the traditional

establishments and the compulsory materialism with which the radical

professors indoctrinate their captive audiences. There might indeed be

something to be said for the things that the liberals delight in denouncing: education at home, for example. For it is surely natural that parents should wish their children to resemble them. Again there is a

case for a religious upbringing, for it is natural that believers should

want to save all other human beings from what they, at any rate, are

certain must be eternal damnation. Similarly the government is

entitled to train men, for society cannot survive without some sort of

government, and governments cannot exist without some qualified

specialists to serve them.

But what is the basis of' liberal education' in schools and universities,

staffed by men who do not even claim to be sure that what they teach

is true? Empiricism? The lessons of history? The only lesson that history

teaches us is that all previous educational systems have proved to be

despotisms founded on falsehoods, and later roundly condemned. Why

should the twenty-first century not look back on us in the nineteenth

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with the same scorn and amusement as that with which we now loolt:

on medieval schools and universities? If the history of education is

the history merely of tyranny and error, what right have we to carry

on this abominable farce? And if we are told that it has always been

so, that it is nothing new, that we cannot help it, and must do our bestis this not like saying that murders have always taken place, so that we might as well go on murdering, even though we have now discovered

what it is that makes men murder?

In these circumstances, we should be villains if we did not say at

least so much as this: that since, unlike the Pope or Luther or modem

positivists, we do not ourselves claim to base our education (or other

forms of interference with human beings)on the knowledge of absolute

truth, we must at least stop torturing others in the name of what we

do not know. All we can know for certain is what men actually want.

Let us at least have the courage of our admitted ignorance, of our

doubts and uncertainties. At least we can try to discover what others,

children or adults, require, by taking off the spectacles of tradition,

prejudice, dogma, and making it possible for ourselves to know men

as they truly are, by listening to them carefully and sympathetically,

and understanding them and their lives and their needs, one by one

individually. Let us at least try to provide them with what they ask

for, and leave them as free as possible. Give them Bildung (for which

he produces a Russian equivalent, and points out with pride that there

is none in French or English)-that is to say, seek to influence them

by precept and by the example of our own lives; but do not apply

'education' to them, which is essentially a method of coercion, and

destroys what is most natural and sacred in man-the capacity for

knowing and acting for himself in accordance with what he thinks

to be true and good -the power and the right of self-direction.

But he cannot let the matter rest there, as many a liberal has tried

to do. For the question immediately arises: how are we to contrive

to leave the schoolboy and the student free? By being morally neutral?

By imparting only factual knowledge, not ethical, or aesthetic, or

social or religious doctrine? By placing the 'facts' before the pupil,

and letting him form his own conclusions, without seeking to influence

him in any direction, for fear that we might infect him with our own

diseased outlooks? But is it really possible for such neutral communications to occur between men? Is not every human communication a conscious or unconscious impression of one temperament, attitude to life, scale of values, upon another? Are men ever so

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thoroughly insulated from each other, that the careful avoidance of

more than the minimum degree of social intercourse will leave them

unsullied, absolutely free to see truth and falsehood, good and evil,

beauty and ugliness, with their own, and only their own eyes? Is this

not an absurd conception of individuals as creatures who can be kept

pure from all social influence-absurd in the world even of Tolstoy's

middle years-even, that is, without the new knowledge of human

beings that we have acquired today, as the result of the labours of

psychologists, sociologists, philosophers? We live in a degenerate

society: only the pure can rescue us. But who will educate the educators? Who is so pure as to know how, let alone be able, to heal our world or anyone in it?

Between these poles-on one side facts, nature, what there is; on

the other duty, justice, what there should be; on one side innocence,

on the other education; between the claims of spontaneity and those

of obligation, between the injustice of coercing others, and the injustice

of leaving them to go their own way, Tolstoy wavered and struggled

all his life. And not only he, but all those populists and socialists and

idealistic students who in Russia 'went to the people', and could not

decide whether they went to teach or to learn, whether the 'good of

the people' for which they were ready to sacrifice their lives was what

'the people' in fact desired, or something that only the reformers

knew to be good for them, what the 'people' should desire-would

desire if only they were as educated and wise as their championsbut, in fact, in their benighted state, often spurned and violently resisted.

These contradictions, and his unswerving recognition of his failure

to reconcile or modify them, are, in a sense, what gives their special