Isaiah Berlin - Russian Thinkers

The chief influence on Herzen as a young man in Moscow

University, as upon all the young Russian intellectuals of his time,

was of course that of Hegel. But although he was a fairly orthodox

Hegelian in his early years, he turned his Hegeliaqism into something

peculiar, personal to himself, very dissimilar from the theoretical conclusions which the more serious-minded and pedantic of his contemporaries deduced from that celebrated doctrine.

The chief effect upon him of Hegelianism seems to have been the

belief that no specific theory or single doctrine, no one interpretation

of life, above all, no simple, coherent, well-constructed sc-hemaneither the great French mechanistic models of the eighteenth century, nor the romantic German edifices of the nineteenth, nor the visions

of the great Utopians Saint-Simon, Fourier, Owen, nor the socialist

programmes of Cabet or Leroux or Louis Blanc-could conceivably

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be true solutions to real problems, at least not i n the form i n which

they were preached.

He was sceptical if only because he believed (whether or not he

derived this view from Hegel) that there could not in principle be

any simple or final answer to any genuine human problem; that if a

question was serious and indeed agonising, the answer could never be

dear-cut and neat. Above all, it could never consist in some symmetrical set of conclusions, drawn by deductive means from a collection of self-evident axioms.

This disbelief begins in Herzen's early, forgotten essays which he

wrote at the beginning of the I 84os, on what he called dilettantism

and Buddhism in science; where he distinguishes two kinds of intellectual personality, against both of which he inveighs. One is that of the casual amateur who never sees the trees for the wood; who is terrified,

Herzen tells us, of losing his own precious individuality in too much

pedantic preoccupation with actual, detailed facts, and therefore

always skims over the surface without developing a capacity for real

knowledge; who looks at the facts, as it were, through a kind of

telescope, with the result that nothing ever gets articulated save

enormous, sonorous generalisations floating at random like so many

balloons.

The other kind of student-the Buddhist-is the person who escapes

from the wood by frantic absorption in the trees; who becomes an

intense student of some tiny set of isolated facts, which he views

through more and more powerful microscopes. Although such a man

might be deeply learned in some particular branch of knowledge,

almost invariably-and particularly if he is a German (and almost all

Herzen's gibes and insults are directed against the hated Germans,

and that despite the fact that he was half German himself)-he becomes

intolerably tedious, pompous and blindly philistine; above all, always

repellent as a human being.

Between these poles it is necessary to find some compromise, and

Herzen believed that if one studied life in a sober, detached, and

objective manner, one might perhaps be able to create some kind of

tension, a sort of dialer.tical compromise, between these opposite ideals;

for if neither or' them can be realised fully and equally, neither of them

should be altogether deserted ; only thus could human beings be made

capable of understanding life in some profounder fashion than if they

committed themselves recklessly to one or the other of the two

extremes.

ALEXAND E R H E RZEN

This ideal of detachment, moderation, compromise, dispassionate

objectivity which Herren at this early period of his life was preaching,

was something deeply incompatible with his temperament. And indeed,

not long after, he bursts forth with a great paean to partiality. He

declares that he knows that this will not be well received. There

are certain concepts which simply are not received in good societyrather like people who have disgraced themselves in some appalling way. Partiality is not something which is well thought of in comparison,

for example, with abstract justice. Nevertheless, nobody has ever said

anything worth saying unless he was deeply and passionately partial.

There follows a long and typically Russian diatribe against the

chilliness, meanness, impossibility and undesirability of remaining

objective, of being detached, of not committing oneself, of not

plunging into the stream of life. The passionate voice of his friend

Belinsky is suddenly audible in Herzen's writings in this phase of his

development.

The fundamental thesis which emerges at this time, and is then

developed throughout his later life with marvellous poetry and

imagination, is the terrible power over human lives of ideological

abstractions (I say poetry advisedly; for as Dostoevsky in later years

very truly said, whatever else might be said about Herzen, he was

certainly a Russian poet; which saved him in the eyes of this jaundiced

but, at times, uncannily penetrating critic: Herzen's views or mode of

life naturally found little favour in his eyes).

Herzen declares that any attempt to explain human conduct in

terms of, or to dedicate human beings to the service of, any abstraction,

be it never so noble-justice, progress, nationality-even if preached by

impeccable altruists like Mazzini or Louis Blanc or Mill, always leads

in the end to victimisation and human sacrifice. Men are not simple

enough, human lives and relationships are too complex for standard

formulas and neat solutions, and attempts to adapt individuals and fit

them into a rational schema, conceived in terms of a theoretical ideal,

be the motives for doing it never so lofty, always lead in the end to a

terrible maiming of human beings, to political vivisection on an ever

increasing scale. The process culminates in the liberation of some

only at the price of enslavement of others, and the replacing of an old

tyranny with a new and sometimes far more hideous one-by the

imposition of the slavery of universal socialism, for example, as a

remedy for the slavery of the universal Roman Church.

There is a typical piece of dialogue between Herzen and Louis

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Blanc, the French socialist (whom . he respected greatly), which

Herzen quotes, and which shows the kind of levity with which

Herzen sometimes expressed his deepest convictions. The conversation

is described as having taken place in London somewhere in the early

sos. One day Louis Blanc observed to Herzen that human life was

a great social duty, 'that man must always sacrifice himself to society.

'Why?' I asked suddenly.

'How do you mean "Why?" [said Louis Blanc] -but surely the

whole purpose and mission of man is the well-being of society?'

'But it will never be attained if everyone makes sacrifices and

nobody enjoys himself.'

'You are playing with words.'

'The muddle-headedness of a barbarian,' I replied, laughing.

In this gay and apparently casual passage, Herzen embodies his

central principle-that the goal of life is life itself, that to sacrifice the

present to some vague and unpredictable future is a form of delusion

which leads to the destruction of all that alone is valuable in men and