Isaiah Berlin - Russian Thinkers

V I I

We are part of a larger scheme o f things than w e ca n understand. We

cannot describe it in the way in which external objects or the characters

of other people can be described, by isolating them somewhat from the

historical 'Row' in which they have their being, and from the 'submerged', unfathomed, portions of themselves to which professional historians have, according to Tolstoy, paid so little heed; for we ourselves live in this whole and by it, and are wise only in the measure to which we make our peace with it. For until and unless we do so (only

after much bitter suffering, if we are to trust Aeschylus and the Book

of Job), we shall protest and suffer in vain, and make sorry fools of

ourselves (as Napoleon did) into the bargain. This sense of the circumambient stream, defiance of whose nature through stupidity or overweening egotism will make our acts and thoughts self-defeating, is the vision of the unity of experience, the sense of history, the true

knowledge of reality, the belief in the incommunicable wisdom of

the sage (or the saint) which, mutatis mutandis, is common to Tolstoy

and Maistre. Their realism is of a similar sort: the natural enemy of

romanticism, sentimentalism and 'historicism' as much as of aggressive

THE H E D G E H O G AND THE FOX

'scientism'. Their purpose is not to distinguish the little that is known

or done from the limitless ocean of what, in principle, could or one

day would be known or done, whether by advance in the knowledge

of the natural sciences or of metaphysics or of the historical sciences,

or by a return to the past, or by some other method; what they seek

to establish are the eternal frontiers of our knowledge and power, to

demarcate them from what cannot in principle ever be known or

altered by men. According to Maistre our destiny lies in original sinin the fact that we are human- finite, fallible, vicious, vain-and that all our empirical knowledge (as opposed to the teachings of the Church)

is infected by error and monomania. According to Tolstoy all our

knowledge is necessarily empirical- there is no other-but it will never

conduct us to true understanding, but only to an accumulation of

arbitrarily abstracted bits and pieces of information; yet that seems to

him (as much as to any metaphysician of the Idealist school which he

despised) worthless beside, and unintelligible save in so far as it derives

from and points to, this inexpressible but very palpable kind of superior

understanding which alone is worth pursuing. Sometimes Tolstoy

comes near to saying what it is: the more we know, he tells us, about

a given human action, the more inevitable, determined it seems to us

to be; why?-because the more we know about all the relevant conditions and antecedents, the more difficult we find it to think away various circumstances, and conjecture what might have occurred

without them-and as we go on removing in our imagination what

we know to be true, fact by fact, this becomes not merely difficult

but impossible. Tolstoy's meaning is not obscure. We are what we

are, and live in a given situation which has the characteristicsphysical, psychological, social etc.- that it has; what we think, feel, do, is conditioned by it, including our capacity for conceiving possible

alternatives, whether in the present or future or past. Our imagination

and ability to calculate, our power of conceiving, let us say, what

might have been, if the past had, in this or that particular, been otherwise, soon reaches its natural limits-limits created both by the weakness of our capacity for calculating alternatives- 'might have beens'and (we may add by a logical extension of Tolstoy's argument) even more by the fact that our thoughts, the terms in which they occur,

the symbols themselves, are what they are, are themselves determined

by the actual structure of our world. Our images and powers of conception are limited by the fact that our world possesses certain characteristics and not others: a world too different is (empirically) not con-

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R U SSIAN T H I NK E R S

ccivable at all: some minds are more imaginative than others, but all

stop somewhere. The world is a system and a network: to conceive

of men as 'free' is to think of them as capable of having, at some

past juncture, acted in some fashion other than that in which they did

act; it is to think of what consequences would have come of such

unfulfilled possibilities and in what respects the world would have

been different, as a result, from the world as it now is. It is difficult

enough to do this in the case of artificial, purely deductive systems, as

for example in chess, where the permutations are finite in number,

and clear in type- having been arranged so by us, artificially-so that

the combinations are calculable. But if you apply this method to the

vague, rich texture of the real world, and try to work out the implications of this or that unrealised plan or unperformed action-the effect of it on the totality of later events-basing yourself on such knowledge

of causal laws, probabilities etc. as you have, you will find that the

greater the number of 'minute' causes you discriminate, the more

appalling becomes the task of 'deducing' any consequence of the

'unhinging' of each of these, one by one; for each of the consequences

affects the whole of the rest of the uncountable totality of events and

things; which unlike chess is not defined in terms of a finite, arbitrarily

chosen set of concepts and rules. And if, whether in real life or even

in chess, you begin to tamper with basic notions-continuity of space,

divisibility of time and the like-you will soon reach a stage in which

the symbols fail to function, your thoughts become confused and

paralysed. Consequendy the fuller our knowledge of facts and of their

connections the more difficult to conceive alternatives; the clearer

and more exact the terms-or the categories-in which we conceive

and describe the world, the more fixed our world structure, the less

'free' acts seem. To know dtese limits, both of imagination and,

ultimately, of thought itself, is to come &ce to face with the 'inexorable' unifying pattern of the world; to realise our identity with it, to submit to it, is to find truth and peace. This is not mere Oriental

fatalism, nor the mechanistic determinism of the celebrated German

materialists of the day, Buchner and Vogt, or Moleschott, admired

so deeply by the revolutionary 'nihilists' of Tolstoy's generation in

Russia; nor is it a yearning for mystical illumination or integration.

It is scrupulously empirical, rational, tough-minded and realistic. But

its emotional cause is a passionate desire for a m.>nistic vision of life

on the part of a fox bitterly intent upon seeing in the manner of a

hedgehog.

T H E H E D G E HO G AND T H E FOX

This is remarkably close to Maistre's dogmatic affirmations: we

must achieve an attitude of assent to the demands of history which are

the voice of God speaking through His servants and His divine

institutions, not made by human hands and not destructible by them.

We must attune ourselves to the true word of God, the inner 'go' of

things; but what it is in concrete cases, how we are to conduct our