Isaiah Berlin - Russian Thinkers

and checks the excess of her poetic fancy, her unbridled creative

passion.'2 Why should nature be expected to follow our dreary categories? What right have we to insist that history is meaningless unless it obeys the patterns we impose upon it, pursues our goals, our transient,

pedestrian ideals? History is an improvisation, it ' "simultaneously

knocks upon a thousand doors, . . . doors which may open . . . who

knows?" "Baltic ones, perhaps-and then Russia will pour over

Europe?" "Possibly." '3 Everything in nature, in history, is what it is,

and its own end. The present is its own fulfilment, it does not exist

1 ibid.: VI 36.

I ibid.: VI 31·

1 ibid.: V I 3z.

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R U SS IAN TH INKERS

for the sake of some unknown future. If everything existed for the

sake of something else, every fact, event, creature would be a means

to something beyond itself in some cosmic plan. Or are we only

puppets, pulled by invisible strings, victims of mysterious forces in a

cosmic libretto? Is this what we mean by moral freedom? Is the

culmination of a process eo ipso its purpose? Is old age the purpose of

youth, merely because this is the order of human growth? Is the

purpose of life death?

Why does a singer sing? Merely in order that, when he has stopped

singing, his song might be �emembered, so that �he pleasure that his

song has given may awaken a longing for that which cannot be

recovered? No. This is a false and purblind and shallow view of life.

The purpose of the singer is the song. And the purpose of life is to

live it.

Everything passes, but what passes may reward the pilgrim for his

sufferings. Gt'ethe has told us that there is no insurance, no security,

man must be content with the present; but he is not; he rejects beauty

and fulfilment because he must own the future too. This is Herz.en's

answer to all those who like Mazzini or Kossuth, or the socialists

or the communists, called for supreme sacrifices and sufferings for the

sake of civilisation, or equality, or justice, or humanity, if not in the

present, then in the future. But this is 'idealism', metaphysical

'dualism', secular eschatology. The purpose oflife is itself, the purpose

of the struggle for liberty is the liberty here, today, ofliving individuals,

each with his own individual ends, for the sake of which they move

and fight and suffer, ends which are sacred to them; to crush their

freedom, stop their pursuits, to ruin their ends for the sake of some

ineffable felicity of the future, is blind, because that future is always

too uncertain, and vicious, because it outrages the only moral values

we know, tramples on real human lives and needs, and in the name

of what? Of freedom, happiness, justice-fanatical generalisations,

mystical sounds, abstractions. Why is personal liberty worth pursuing?

Only for what it is in itself, because it is what it is, not because the

majority desires freedom. Men in general do not seek freedom, despite

Rousseau's celebrated exclamation that they are born free; that,

remarks Herz.en (echoing Joseph de Maistre),is as if you were to say

' Fish were born to fty, yet everywhere they swim.'1 lchthyophils may

seek to prove that fish are 'by nature' made to fty; but they are not.

1 ibid.: VI 94·

H E RZEN AND B A K U N I N ON LI BERTY

And most people do not like liberators; they would rather continue

in the ancient ruts, and bear the ancient yokes, than take the immense

risks of building a new life. They prefer (Herzen repeats again and

again) even the hideous cost of the present, muttering that modern

life is at any rate better than feudalism and barbarism. 'The people'

do not desire liberty, only civilised individuals do; for the desire for

freedom is bound up with civilisation. The value of freedom, like

that of civilisation or education-none of which is 'natural' or obtainable without great effort-consists in the fact that without it the individual personality cannot realise all its potentialities-cannot live,

act, enjoy, create in the illimitable fashions which every moment of

history affords, and which differ in unfathomable ways from every

other moment of history, and are wholly incommensurable with them.

Man 'wants to be neither a passive grave-digger of the past, nor the

unconscious midwife of the future'.1 He wants to live in his own day.

His morality cannot be derived from the laws of history (which do

not exist) nor from the objective goals of human progress (there are

none such -they change with changing circumstances and persons).

Moral ends are what people want for their own sake. 'The truly free

man creates his own morality.'2

This denunciation of general moral rules- without a trace of

Byronic or Nietzschean hyperbole-is a doctrine not heard often in

the nineteenth century; indeed, in its full extent, not until well into

our own. It hits both right and left: against the romantic historians,

against Hegel, and to some degree against Kant; against utilitarians

and against supermen; against Tolstoy, and against the religion of

art, against 'scientific' ethics, and all the churches; it is empirical

and naturalistic, recognises absolute values as well as change, and is

overawed neither by evolution nor socialism. And it is original to an

arresting degree.

If existing political parties are to be condemned, it is not, Herzen

declares, because they do not satisfy the wishes of the majority, for

the majority, in any case, prefer slavery to freedom, and the liberation

of those who inwardly still remain slaves always leads to barbarism

and anarchy: 'to dismantle the Bastille stone by stone will not of

itself make free men out of the prisoners'.3 'The fatal error [of the

1 'Letter on the Freedom of the Will' (to his son Alexander): XX 4-37-B.

z 'From the Other Shore': VI I 3 I .

3 ibid.: VI :z9.

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RU SSIAN T H I N K E R S

French radicals i n 1 848] is . • . to have tried to free others before they

were themselves liberated . . . They want, without altering the walls

[of the prison], to give them a new function, as if a plan for a jail

could be used for a free existence.'1 Economic justice is certainly not

enough : and this is ignored, to their own doom, by the socialist 'sects'.

As for democracy, it can well be a 'razor' with which an immature

people-like France with its universal suffrage in 1 848-nearly cut its

own throat;2 to try to remedy this by a dictatorship ('Petrograndism')

leads to even more violent suppression. Gracchus Babeuf, who was

disappointed by the results of the French Revolution, proclaimed the

religion of equality-'the equality of penal servitude'.3 As for the

communists of our own day, what is it they offer us? The 'forced

labour of communism' of Cabet? The 'organisation of labour in

ancient Egypt a Ia Louis Blanc'?' The neatly laid out little phalansteries of Fourier, in which a free man cannot breathe-in which one side of life is permanently repressed for the benefit of others?& Communism is merely a levelling movement, the despotism of frenzied mobs, of Committees of Public Safety invoking the security of the

people-always a monstrous slogan, as vile as the enemy they seek to