Isaiah Berlin - Russian Thinkers

to complete harmony in which everything fits and is at peace; with

the corollary that knowledge of man's nature gained from observation

or introspection or moral intuition, or from the study of the lives and

writings of the best and wisest men of all ages, can show us this path.

This is not the place for considering how far the doctrine is compatible

with ancient religious teachings or modern psychology. The point I

wish to stress is that it is, above all, a programme of action, a declaration of war against current social values, against the tyranny of states, societies, churches, against brutality, injustice, stupidity, hypocrisy,

weakness, above all against vanity and moral blindness. A man who

has fought a good fight in this war will thereby expiate the sin of

having been a hedonist and an exploiter, and the son and beneficiary

of robbers and oppressors.

This is what Tolstoy believed, preached, and practised. His 'conversion' altered his view of what was good and what was evil. It did not weaken his faith in the need for action. His belief in the principles

themselves never wavered. The enemy entered by another door:

Tolstoy's sense of reality was too inexorable to keep out tormenting

doubts about how these principles-no matter how true themselvesshould be applied. Even though I believe some things to be beautiful or good, and others to be ugly and evil, what right have I to bring up

others in the light of my convictions, when I know that I cannot help

liking Chopin and Maupassant, while these far better men-peasants

or children-do not? Have I, who stand at the end of a long period of

elaboration-of generations of civilised, unnatural living-have I the

right to touch thnr souls?

To seek to influence someone is to engage in a morally suspect

enterprise. This is obvious in the case of the crude manipulation of

one man by another. But in principle it holds equally of education. All

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educators seek to shape the minds and lives of the educated towards a

given goal, or to resemble a given model. But if we-the sophisticated

members of a deeply corrupt society-are ourselves unhappy, inharmonious, gone astray, what can we be doing but trying to change children born healthy into our own sick semblance, to make cripples

of them like ourselves? We are what we have become, we cannot help

our love of Pushkin's verse, of Chopin's music; we discover that

children and peasants find them unintelligible or tedious. What do we

do? We persist, we 'educate' them until they too appear to enjoy these

works or, at least, see why we enjoy them. What have we done? We

find the works of Mozart and Chopin beautiful only because Mozart

and Chopin were themselves children of our decadent culture, and

therefore their words speak to our diseased minds; but what right have

we to infect others, to make them as corrupt as ourselves? We can

see the blemishes of other systems. We see all too clearly how the

human personality is destroyed by Protestant insistence on obedience,

by Catholic stress on emulation, by the appeal to self-interest and the

importance of social position or .rank on which Russian education,

according to Tolstoy, is based. Is it not, then, either monstrous

arrogance or a perverse inconsistency to behave as if our own favoured

systems of education-something recommended by Pestalozzi, or the

Lancaster method, systems which merely reRect their inventors'

civilised, and consequently perverted, personalities-are necessarily

superior, or less destructive, than what we condemn so readily

and justly in the superficial French or the stupid and pompous

Germans?

How is this to be avoided? Tolstoy repeats the lessons of Rousseau's

Emile. Nature: only natur� will save us. We must seek to understand

what is 'natural', spontaneous, uncorrupt, sound, in harmony with

itself and other objects in the world, and clear paths for development

on these lines; not seek to alter, to force into a mould. We must

listen to the dictates of our stiRed original nature, not look on it as

mere raw stuff upon which to impose our unique personalities and

powerful wills. To defy, to be Promethean, to create goals and build

worlds in rivalry with what our moral sense knows to be eternal

truths, given once and for all to all men, truths in virtue of which

they are men and not beasts-that is the monstrous sin of pride, committed by all reformers, all revolutionaries, all men judged great and effective. And no less by government officials, or by country squires

who, from liberal convictions or simply caprice or boredom, interfere

•'

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with the lives of the peasants.1 Do not teach; learn: that is the sense

of Tolstoy's essay, written nearly a hundred years ago, 'Who should

learn to write from whom: should peasants' children learn from us,

or should we learn from peasants' children?', and of all the accounts

published in the 1 86os and 7os, written with his customary freshness,

attention to detail, and unapproachable power of direct perception, in

which he gives examples of stories written by the children in his

village, and speaks of the awe which he felt while in the presence of

the act of pure creation, in which, he _assures us, he played no part

himself. These stories would only be spoilt by his 'corrections'; they

see� to him far more profound than any of the works of Goethe; he

explains how deeply ashamed they make him of his own superficiality,

vanity, stupidity, narrowness, lack of moral and aesthetic sense. If one

can help children and peasants, it is only by making it easier for them

to advance freely along their own instinctive path. To direct is to

spoil. Men are good and need only freedom to realise their goodness.

'Education', writes Tolstoy in 1 862., 'is the action of one man on

another with a view to causing this other person to acquire certain

moral habits (we say: they have brought him up to be a hypocrite, a

robber or a good man. The SP.rtans brought up brave men, the

French bring up one-sided and self-satisfied persons).' But this is

speaking of-and using-human beings as so much raw material that

we model; this is what 'bringing up' to be like this or like that means.

We are evidently ready to alter the direction spontaneously followed

by the souls and wills of others, to deny their independence-in favour

of what? Of our own corrupt, false, or at best, uncertain values? But

this involves always some degree of moral tyranny. In a wild moment

of panic Tolstoy wonders whether the ultimate motive of the educator

is not envy, for the root of the educator's passion for his task is 'envy

of the purity of the child and the desire to make the child like himself,

that is, more corrupt'. What has the entire history of education been?

All philosophers of education, from Plato to Kant, sought one goal :

'to free education from the oppression of the chains of the historic

past'. They want 'to guess at what men need and then build their new

1 Mikhailovsky maintains that in Polilusllla, one of Tolstoy's best stories,

composed during the period of the educational tracts, he represents the

tragic death of the hero as ultimately due to the wilful interference with the