Sunday, February 23, 2003		Books

Enthralling ideas of a towering intellectual
M. L. Raina

The Power of Ideas
by Isaiah Berlin. Edited by Henry Hardy. Princeton University Press, Princeton & Oxford. Pages: xv+240. $16.95 (paperback)

WHEN Isaiah Berlin died in 1997, Noel Annan declared his work to be ‘the truest and the most moving of all interpretations of life’ that his generation had made. Soon afterwards Christopher Hitchens blew the gaff on Berlin’s personal foibles as he skewered Michael Ignatief’s biography of the man. It is a measure of his stature as a thinker that Berlin is now being scrutinised with a toothcomb by his admirers and detractors alike. For me, however, he remains the quintessential intellectual defined by Clemeancu as one who asks questions and interrogates existing assumptions about people and society.

It was not as a thinker but as a prose stylist that Berlin bowled me over when I first read and later re-read many times what I still consider his masterpiece: The Hedgehog and the Fox. Here was a philosopher and political theorist who could swing his way into the readers’ minds through the sheer solo dance of his ideas. Reading him or, better still, listening to him (as I did in the seventies), you are reminded of a skilled rhetorician judging human affairs with the full weight of his intellectual authority.

His prose style, fashioned over years of lecturing at different venues, is the literary embodiment of his conversational cascade. His erudition, worn lightly, though not complacently, enabled him to render the most abstruse ideas in pulsating, straight-into-the-heart sentences. It is this rare quality that enthrals his readers as much as the seriousness of his thought.

With The Proper Study of Mankind, many thought that all Berlin’s major and minor writings were at last in print. But since then other essay collections have appeared, including one of his impressions of his contemporaries. The present collection is of apiece with these. Except for the first essay, My Intellectual Path (published in 1998), all the essays in this collection are more than two decades old and many of them were given as lectures.

Featuring only one previously unpublished item (The Search for Status), there is, nevertheless, enough substance in the volume to make it worth our attention, particularly if we are Berlin’s first-time readers. In fact, it is for the first timers that this collection would serve as an appropriate introduction.

All the virtues of the author’s intelligence and scholarship are evident here, namely the metaphoric style, the occasional epigrammatic wit and the disentanglement of complex thought. Even as Berlin’s ideas developed over time, the early essays provide a firm grounding for the philosopher’s later position. They enable us to see a developing continuity in his writing that does not get frozen in one particular groove, but takes into its current diverse elements of contemporary thought.

Even when some of the essays look dated, as do the ones on Israel and the Jewish slavery, they seem totally relevant for the time they were written. The essay on Chaim Weizmann’s leadership, for instance, may have somewhat faded in importance, but it brought out the strengths and weaknesses of the Zionist cause that Berlin espoused.

Berlin excelled in his use of the essay form. The uninhibited expression of thought that this form allows also makes ideas accessible. These essays provide enough evidence not only of Berlin’s lucidity of mind, but also of the flexibility with which he could mould what is inherently a personal mode of expression into a vehicle of social and political discourse. The only other writers of our time who made the most of the essay form were Theodor Adorno, the German philosopher and critic, and the English philosopher and savant Bertrand Russell. Like them Berlin succeeded in blending his clear-headedness with the resilient expression that the form allowed.

A good example is the early essay The Purpose of Philosophy: ‘The history of systematic human thought is largely a sustained effort to formulate all the questions in such a way that the answers to them will fall into one or other of the two baskets’. Here the juxtaposition of the high-minded philosophical thought and the mundane baskets serves to remove all abstraction from the philosophical issues and bring them within our everyday human understanding. This is reducing the lofty to the level of the ordinary. It transforms the empirical and the cognitive levels into a mutually close relationship.

In this book we get the first glimpses of Berlin’s life-long concerns namely, individual freedom, variety of humankind, Russian intellectual tradition, particularly the writings of Belinsky, Herzen Akhmatova and Pasternak and, towering them all, Vico. He maintained that the ‘goal of philosophy is always the same, to assist men to understand themselves and to operate in the open’. He never wavered from this goal in later works.

Berlin’s humane liberalism is essentially a defence of freedom even as he refused to regard freedom as licence. Notwithstanding mildly leftist views, he saw the dangers of Communism. This healthy paradox in his writing and philosophical career made him a distinctive intellectual presence, as evidenced in this collection.