Isaiah Berlin - Russian Thinkers

Orthodox theologians, and political radicals equally, and profoundly

affected the outlook of the more wide-awake students at the universities,

and intellectually inclined young men generally. These philosophical

schools, and in particular the doctrines of Hegel and Schelling, are

still, in their modern transformations, not without inRuence today.

Their principal legacy to the modern world is a notorious and powerful

political mythology, which in both its right- and left-wing forms has

been used to justify the most obscurantist and oppressive movements

of our own times. At the same time the great historical achievements

of the romantic school have become so deeply absorbed into the very

texture of civilised thought in the west that it is not easy to convey

how novel, and to some minds intoxicating, they once proved to be.

The works of the early German romantic thinkers- Herder, Fichte,

Schelling, Friedrich Schlegel, and their followers, are not easy to read.

The treatises of Schelling, for instance-vastly admired in their dayare like a dark wood into which I do not, here at least, propose to venture-vtStigia terrent, too many eager inquirers have entered it

never to return. Yet the art and thought of this period, at any rate

in Germany, and also in eastern Europe and Russia, which were, in

effect, intellectual dependencies of Germany, are not intelligible

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without some grasp of the fact that these metaphysicians-in particular

Schelling-caused a major shift in human thought: from the mechanistic categories of the eighteenth century to explanation in terms of aesthetic or biological notions. The romantic thinkers and poets

successfully undermined the central dogma of eighteenth-century

enlightenment, that the only reliable method of discovery or interpretation was that of the triumphant mechanical sciences. The French philosopher may have exaggerated the virtue, and the German romantics

the absurdity, of the application of the criteria of the natural sciences

to human affairs. But, whatever else it may have done, the romantic

reaction against the claims of scienti fic materialism did set up permanent doubts about the competence of the sciences of manpsychology, sociology, anthropology, physiology-to take over, and put an end to the scandalous chaos of, such human activities as history,

or the arts, or religious, philosophical, social, and political thought. As

Bayle and Voltaire had mocked the theological reactionaries of their

time, so the romantics derided the dogmatic materialists of the school

of Condillac and Holbach; and their favourite field of battle was that

of aesthetic experience.

If you wanted to know what it was that made a work of art; if

you wanted to know, for example, why particular colours and forms

produced a particular piece of painting or sculpture; why particular

styles of writing or collocations of words produced particularly strong

or memorable effects upon particular human beings in specific states

of awareness; or why certain musical sounds, when they were juxtaposed, were sometimes called shallow and at other times profound, or lyrical, or vulgar, or morally noble or degraded or characteristic of

this or that national or individual trait; then no general hypothesis of

the kind adopted in physics, no general description or classification

or subsumption under scientific laws of the behaviour of sound, or

of patches of paint, or of black marks on paper, or the utterances of

human beings, would begin to suffice to answer these questions.

What were the non-scientific modes of explanation which could

explain life, thought, art, religion, as the sciences could not? The

romantic metaphysicians returned to ways of knowing which they

attributed to the Platonic tradition; spiritual insight, 'intuitive' knowledge of connections incapable of scientific analysis. Schelling (whose views on the working of the artistic imagination, and in particular

about the nature of genius, are, for all their obscurity, arrestingly

original and imaginative) spoke in terms of a universal mystical

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vision. He saw the universe as a single spirit, a great, animate organism,

a soul or self, evolving from one spiritual stage into another. Individual

human beings were, as it were, 'finite centres', 'aspects', 'moments',

of this enormous cosmic entity-the 'living whole', the world soul,

the transcendental Spirit or Idea, descriptions of which almost recall

the fantasies of early gnosticism. Indeed the sceptical Swiss historian,

Jakob Burckhardt, said that when he listened to Schelling he began

to see creatures with many arms and feet advancing upon him. The

conclusions drawn from this apocalyptic vision are less eccentric. The

finite centres-the individual human beings-understand each other,

their surroundings and themselves, the past and to some degree the

present and the future too, but not in the same sort of way in which

they communicate with one another. When, for example, I maintain

that I understand another human being- that I am sympathetic to

him, follow, 'enter into' the workings of his mind, and that I am

for this reason particularly well qualified to form a j udgement of his

character-of his 'inner' self- 1 am claiming to be doing something

which cannot be reduced to, on the one hand, a set of systematically

classified operations and, on the other, a method of deriving further

information from them which, once discovered, could be reduced to

a technique, and taught to, and applied more or less mechanically by,

a receptive pupil. Understanding men or ideas or movements, or the

outlooks of individuals or groups, is not reducible to a sociological

classification into types of behaviour with predictions based on scientific experiment and carefully tabulated statistics of observations.

There is no substitute for sympathy, understanding, insight, 'wisdom'.

Similarly, Schelling taught that if you wanted to know what it

was, for example, that made a work of art beautiful, or what it was

that gave its own unique character to a historical period, it was

necessary to employ methods different from those of experiment,

classification, induction, deduction, or the other techniques of the

natural sciences. According to this doctrine, if you wished to understand what, for example, had brought about the vast spiritual upheaval of the French Revolution, or why Goethe's Faust was a profounder

work than the tragedies of Voltaire, then to apply the methods of

the kind of psychology and sociology adumbrated by, say, Condillac

or Condorcet would not prove rewarding. Unless you had a capacity

for imaginative insight-for understanding the 'inner', the mental and

emotional-the 'spiritual' -life of individuals, societies, historical

periods, the 'inner purposes' or 'essences' of institutions, nations,

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churches, you would for ever remain unable to explain why certain

combinations form 'unities', whereas others do not: why particular

sounds or words or acts are relevant to, fit with, certain other elements

in the 'whole', while others fail to do so. And this no matter whether

you are 'explaining' the character of a man, the rise of a movement