Isaiah Berlin - Russian Thinkers

or a party, the process of artistic creation, the characteristics of an

age, or of a school of thought, or of a mystical view of reality. Nor is

this, according to the view I am discussing, an accident. For reality

is not merely organic but unitary: which is a way of saying that its

ingredients are not merely connected by causal relationships-they do

not merely form a pattern or harmony so that each element is seen

to be 'necessitated' by the disposition of all other elements-but each

'reRects' or 'expresses' the others; for there is a single 'Spirit' or 'Idea'

or 'Absolute' of which all that exists is a unique aspect, or an articulation-and the more of an aspect, the more vividly articulated, the

'deeper', the 'more real' it is. A philosophy is 'true' in the proportion

in which it expresses the phase which the Absolute or the Idea has

reached at each stage of development. A poet possesses genius, a

statesman greatness, to the degree to which they are inspired by, and

express, the 'spirit' of their milieu-state, culture, nation-which is

itself an 'incarnation' of the self-realisation of the spirit of the universe

conceived pantheistically as a kind of ubiquitous divinity. And a work

of art is dead or artificial or trivial if it is a mere accident in this development. Art, philosophy, religion are so many efforts on the part of finite creatures to catch and articulate an 'echo' of the cosmic harmony.

Man is finite, and his vision will always be fragmentary; the 'deeper'

the individual, the larger and richer the fragment. Hence the lofty

contempt which such thinkers express for the 'merely' empirical or

'mechanical', for the world of everyday experience whose denizens

remain deaf to the inner harmony in terms of which alone anythingand everything-is 'truly' to be understood.

The romantic critics in some cases supposed themselves not merely

to be revealing the nature of types of knowledge or thought or feeling

hitherto unrecognised or inadequately analysed, but to be building

new cosmological systems, new faiths, new forms of life, and indeed

to be direct instruments of the process of the spiritual redemption,

or 'self-realisation', of the universe. Their metaphysical fantasies arefortunately, I may add-all but dead today; but the incidental light which they shed on art, history, and religion transformed the outlook

of the west. By paying a great deal of attention to, the unconscious

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activity o f the imagination, to the role of irrational factors, to the part

played in the mind by symbols and myths, to awareness of unanalysable

affinities and contrasts, to fundamental but impalpable connections

and differences which cut across the conventional lines of rational

classification, they often succeeded in giving an altogether novel

account of such phenomena as poetical inspiration, religious experience,

political genius, of the relationship of art to social development, or of

the individual to the masses, or of moral ideals to aesthetic or biological

facts. This account was more convincing than any that had been

given before; at any rate than the doctrines of the eighteenth century,

which had not treated such topics systematically, and largely left them

to the isolated utterances of mystically inclined poets and essayists.

So too Hegel, despite all the philosophical obfuscation for which

he was responsible, set in motion ideas which have become so universal

and familiar that we think in terms of them without being aware of

their relative novelty. This is true, for example, of the idea of the

history of thought as a continuous process, capable of independent

study. There existed, of course, accounts- usually mere catalogues

raisonnls-of particular philosophical systems in the ancient world or

in the Middle Ages, or monographs devoted to particular thinkers.

But it was Hegel who developed the notion of a specific cluster of

ideas as permeating an age or a society, of the effect of those ideas

upon other ideas, of the many invisible links whereby the feelings,

the sentiments, the thoughts, the religions, the laws and the general

outlook-what is nowadays called ideology-of one generation are

connected with the ideology of other times or places. Unlike his

predecessors Vico and Herder, Hegel tried to present this as a coherent,

continuous, rationally analysable development-the first in the fatal

line of cosmic historians which stretches through Comte and Marx

to Spengler and Toynbee and all those who find spiritual comfort in

the discovery of vast imaginary symmetries in the irregular stream of

human history.

Although much of this programme is a tantasy, or at any rate a

form of highly subjective poetry in prose, yet the notion that the

many activities of the human spirit are interrelated, that the artistic

or scientific thought of an age is best understood i'n its interplay with

the social, economic, theological, legal activities pursued in the society

in which artists and scientists live and work-the very notion of

cultural history as a source oflight-is itself a cardinal step in the history

of thought. And again Schelling (following Herder) is largely respons-

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ible for the characteristically romantic notion that poets or painters

may understand the spirit of their age more profoundly and express

it in a more vivid and lasting manner than academic historians; this

is so because artists tend to have a greater degree of sensibility to the

contours of their own age (or of other ages and cultures) than either

trained antiquaries or professional journalists, inasmuch as they are

irritable organisms; more responsive to, and conscious of, inchoate,

half-understood factors which operate beneath the surface in a given

milieu, factors which may only come to full maturity at a later period.

This was the sense in which, for �xample, Karl Marx used to maintain that Balzac in his novels had depicted the life and character not so much of his own time, as of the men of the 6os and 70s of the nineteenth century, whose lineaments, while they were still in embryo, impinged upon the sensibilities of artists long before they emerged

into the full light of day. The romantic philosophers vastly exaggerated

the power and reliability of this kind of intuitive or poetical insight;

but their fervid vision, which remained mystical and irrationalist no

matter how heavily disguised in quasi-scientific or quasi-lyrical

terminology, captivated the imagination of the young Russian intellectuals of the 30s and 405, and seemed to open a door to a nobler and calmer world from the sordid reality of the Empire ruled by Tsar

Nicholas I.

The man who, more persuasively than anyone else in Russia,

taught the educated young men of the t 8Jos to soar above empirical

facts into a realm of pure light where all was harmonious and eternally

true, was a student of Moscow University called Nicholas Stankevich,

who, while still in his early twenties, gathered round him a circle of

devoted admirers. Stankevich was an aristocratic young man of great

distinction of mind and appearance, a gentle and idealistic personality,

and exceptional sweetness of character, with a passion for metaphysics