Another Very Brief Note On Isaiah Berlin

I have been enamored with the thought, writing, and even the oratory of Isaiah Berlin ever since I first discovered his work sometime in the early to middle 1990s, that I never tire of discovering newer things about him or finding new applications of his work to current events and everyday non-academic life.

I want to focus on a particular move he always makes which forms but one part of his general wisdom. What he always does is to start by having what appears to be this comprehensive gaze, looking at wide reaches of vast historical time and its accompanying thought, chiefly among these his analysis of the great Romantic revolution and how it basically upended the entirety of the traditional/ ancient, as well as classical worlds.


But Berlin's move is always to go as deep into what he is describing almost as the greatest lawyer for the defense would, and still further as someone living inside or even born into the world he is describing.

Isaiah Berlin will go deep into whatever it is and then he will reverse course, suddenly pull back and outwards and say something to the effect of "but of course this world or object I am examining is far from perfect, is not entirely correct and needs some kind of countervailing force or dissent".


This move forms the basis of Berlin's worldview, not only his pluralism, but an attitude towards being in the world. It is the attitude of one who wished to be seemingly a skeptic and believer at one and the same time. Some might see it as the mark of an essentially moderate or centrist cast of mind. But this is not exactly right. The word that comes closest is that much debated word liberal. It is very close to the cast of mind of yours truly.

A good example of Berlin's brilliance as orator can be found here:


Unlike today's "thought leaders" Berlin was a genuine public intellectual. The thought leader today all too often advocates for a very specific case or cause, even an ideology. The public intellectual in Isaiah Berlin's sense sought to bring subjects into the widest public discourse with an aim at exploration and even genuine enjoyment.

The example I want to use is in his essay "The Sense Of Reality" which was delivered at Smith College in Northampton, in 1956. He takes a wonderfully long time discussing how  some humans have noted that some things seem inevitable in a natural and/or mechanical sense, while still others take the contrary view that things seem not inevitable but rather unpredictable, as "artificially" willed into existence and predicated on contingency, even randomness.  In short, how both contrary attitudes seem apparent at different times and in different reigning orders:

"Everyone, no doubt, believes that there are factors that are largely or wholly beyond conscious human control. And when we describe this or that scheme as impractical or Utopian we often mean that it cannot be realized in the face of such uncontrollable facts or processes. These are of so many kinds: regions of nature with which we cannot interfere, for example the solar system, or the general realm dealt with by astronomy; there we can alter neither the state of the entities in question nor the laws which they obey." 

Berlin goes on at great length in this vein, even discussing the reaction against mechanistic or reductionist views, for example, the influence of Hegel as well as Darwin and Marx. He admits, and not with any diminution of respect, that we have much to learn from such developments. indeed in one passage he is unabashed in his passion for the greatness of certain minds in history:

"It is when one of these nerves is touched, nerves which lie so deep within us that it is in terms of them that we feel as we feel and think as we think, that we are conscious of those electric shocks that indicate that some genuinely profound insight has occurred. It is only when this unique, immediately recognizable, disturbing experience comes that we are in the presence of this peculiar and very rare form of genius, possessed by those who make us conscious of the most pervasive, least observed categories, those which lie closest to us and for that very reason escape description, however much our emotions, our curiosity, our industry, are mobilized to record the whole of what wee know." 

How different this is than the current view which would only interrogate with suspicion or dismiss with disparagement "great" minds from the past!

Berlin is describing the unparalleled excitement that comes with a kind of discovery or breakthrough with more customary and traditional ways of knowing, and a development that is inseparable from the "specialness" of certain minds who appear to make the breakthrough. Partisans of rationality and the Enlightenment are right to conclude from passages like these that Berlin is never entirely in "their" camp, however much he respected their tradition. Why Isaiah Berlin matters is that he refused, for the most part, to be solidly in any discernible camp, neither fully rationalist, nor fully romantic.

But then he goes on:

"For Marxists and, indeed, all those that social or individual life is wholly determined by laws at least in principle discoverable, men are weaker than they supposed in their pre-scientific pride; they are calculable and in principle capable of omniscience. but as we ordinarily think of ourselves, especially as historians or men of action - that is, when we are dealing with particular individuals and things and facts - we see a very different spectacle of men governed by few natural laws; falling into error, defeated, victims of one another, through ignorance not of laws, but largely of the results of human acts, those being most successful who possess (apart from such, which is perhaps indispensable) a combination of will-power and a capacity for non-scientific, non-generalizing assessments of specific situations ad hoc; which leads to a picture of men as free, sometimes strong, and largely ignorant that is the precise contrary of the scientific view of them as weak, determined and potentially omniscient." 

I love how he pairs omniscience and weakness here, contrary to usual habits which would have us think that the position of omniscience would usher in only maximum strength. But above all, as always, he says science alone is never enough. We live today in a world dominated by two views, one you could call religious (and/or spiritual) and the other scientific. Though the scientific and the spiritual are thought to be opposites (with the important exception of those who hold that both science and religion tell essentially the same story, or work and evolve in tandem) they both have a consensus and similarity that is less positive: in both there exists a rule bound sense of determination. A law is a law whiter given by a supernatural force or scientific proof or discovery and these appear to pronounce upon what is to be done.

The scientific view is the dominant one in our current epoch, for it claims to the fullest knowledge possible at any given time - which is considered to be something like a final argument. Indeed, science is so dominant that it is practically a requirement when any subject is broached in major media outlets, it seems de rigueur  to always say "what the science has to say" on the given subject - whether we are discussing eating and nutrition, music appreciation and performance, or ethics and morality, and. of course, sexual behaviors. I am reminded of a recent podcast on dreams which was all about what science tells us dreams in fact actually are rather than what people have simply always thought about them since the latter might appear self evidently inadequate. This is a very different way of discussing dreams than as a source of both mystery and revelation, or as a mere entertainment to pass the time.

Another important thing to note about Isaiah Berlin is his influence on prominent and helpful minds who are currently active. Berlin's work never becomes dated and is applicable to real life situations rather than mere academic speculation or specialization. To name only two: Timothy Snyder, the political historian and commentator and contemporary philosopher  Kwame Anthony Appiah are both deeply influenced by Isaiah Berlin.

 I think Berlin points to something that is neither science nor spirit exactly. It doesn't not contradict nor challenge these but does not wave the flag for them either. This "something else" of Berlin refuses systemization; it might refuse even definition, and Isaiah Berlin held it to be real. In much the same way that he though freedom itself was a real fact of human existence, and thus of reality. Yet the only way Berlin was able to conclude as he did was to pass through a great many views that had come before him and enter into such views with the greatest sympathy, even if the views in question were initially alien to him or at least not far from intuitive or self evident. To me, such a process or style of thought is itself one kind of wisdom.

http://berlin.wolf.ox.ac.uk

Taking Differences Seriously: An Introduction

"We are always coming up with the emphatic facts of history in our private experience and verifying them here. All history becomes subjective; in other words there is properly no history, only biography. Every mind must know the whole lesson for itself-must go over the whole ground. What it does not see, what it does not live, it will not know." Ralph Waldo Emerson, History, Essays: First Series
In contrast and in contradiction to my previous post on Ronald Dworkin, I turn here from abstract and objective principles to personal and subjective values.

It is a commonplace view that the world or universe, at least the human social world, is a holistic totality. That everything is connected to everything else, and that there is thus a center from which to comprehend and  conform to an objective Truth appears a majoritarian proposition. This view has perhaps always been a predominant one in both secular and religious worlds; people even enlist hard science to support such a view.

I should like to introduce a contrary account.

It is abundantly clear that there are gripping and dramatic divisions which daily and increasingly fray, indeed practically dismember, our current society.  Whether it is conceived of as a polarization or cultural alienation, the really central question is whether such divisions reflect a contest between objective truths and falsehoods or,  conversely, subjective value.  Are such divisions the expression of equal and competing values, values that are incommensurable, to use Isaiah Berlin's carefully chosen word?

In many respects this might be thought of as the age of Psychology. Whatever differences experts and professionals may have over difference itself (the valence and extent of difference, whether individual temperament matters the most, or, conversely, large, group identity matters most), anybody - whatever their background - who has lived in a family, or dealt with coworkers, or simply observed the variety of motivations that create individual variations in human behavior, can attest to the power and intractability of such differences. The psychologist Steven Reiss has a theory of at least 16 different motivational values that, when found in various combinations, combine to make every one of us truly unique (and even invent some hypothetical individuals who have yet to be born!) In his two books, Who Am I, and The Normal Personality, he has put forth a scientific account of these variations in individuality. I believe Steven Reiss' project to be a great advance over theories of single and unified psychological health. (For example, the superiority of intimacy or social justice, to name two currently privileged values).

In past ages there have been many theories of group interests. On the political Left, to name the most prominent taxonomy of group identities, accounts of dominant and subordinate class identities, or accounts of  shared struggles owing to membership of a gender or ethnicity that have a certain history and experience have been put forth to explain a great deal of human behavior. Steven Reiss notes that when differences are discussed at all it is almost always large scale group differences that are being discussed rather than the harder to notice individual differences between any two people.

One of the virtues of the filmmaker Ozu was that his entire art was an exploration of the power of such differences. Though the setting of his films is an ostensibly unified one, at least on the surface, there is nevertheless immense drama in his films as, given the cultural unanimity, the underlying individual difference stands in relief, mainly because of the subtle comic or dramatic misunderstandings among his characters. Ozu's films are case histories of the power of temperament in the world.

One of the advantages of a contemporary post-industrial and post-agricultural society is, for all of the sins of such a society, it enables people to understand and realize their individuality in way that would have been impossible in heavily traditional societies marked by only duty or rank.

As we come to to see things in more intimate and psychological terms might we also understand large scale collective phenomena as a manifestation of individual psychology writ large? What if the conflicts that most inflame passions are not conflicts between a side that has it right and a side that has it wrong but, rather, conflicts that reflect subjective and tragic differences in values that admit of no central and objective solution? We can even take the most sensitive of examples to see this. What if, in the abortion debate, the anti-abortion side is not merely or only pathological misogynists, but rather people for whom sexuality is a most precious affair and family and childrearing are concerns to be placed above all others? Conversely, the pro-choice side takes the freedom of choice of individual female, and human lives very seriously, and thus sees a multiplicity of meanings and uses for sexuality. The abortion debate is between two opposing views of sexuality itself  - views that cannot be objectively morally evaluated precisely because they are so very different.


The painful truth is that sometimes there is no holistic totality in which we can inhabit to make the perfect choice, from an objective perspective.  This is what Isaiah Berlin meant in using the word incommensurable.


Sometimes whole epochs are in the grip of a single standard of human character. Ever since the presidency of Bill Clinton we are enthralled by a certain kind of magical and charismatic "people person". President Obama is constantly measured against this standard and found wanting. I never thought I would live in a world in which a journalist would publically ask the president if he "had juice".  It is not only the lack of respect and tact that had entered the public sphere that surprised me, doubtless the culmination of an excessively casual, rock n'roll influence upon all areas of life. It is the assumption that a leader must possess certain fixed psychological traits to be deemed a competent leader. The question concerned the juice, as if it were a masculinist magical elixir to deal with an intractable and hostile congress. It is like something from an old Firesign Theatre comedy skit. Yet this was a serious question. But, of course, the problem is not with Obama but with the belief in the juice itself. This is a belief that all problems can be solved and overcome and the failure to do so must always already be a failing of individual character rather than, say, the structural limits of an impossibly complex society. Who is to say how long this ideal of the "I feel your pain" people-person will last? Doubtless some time in the future it will be eclipsed by something else: the socially awkward loner who finds the cure for cancer, for example. And in the reign of a newfangled sensibility in the far future a figure like Clinton might seem corny and inauthentic. We might one day regard the current mode of expected behavior like that of opening up like a cheap suitcase.

Every currently fashionable philosophical orientation seems to me in error. The newfound interest in "Virtue" ethics blinds us to the inevitability of tragic choice; where choices aren't clearly right or wrong, or the product of character defects, but the result of innate limits. Utilitarian philosophy holds that pleasure and pain, and good and evil can be quantified as if a science by comprehending the whole "big picture": it is a view that intentionally disregards the innate biases and preferences of individual persons. Yet bias and preference is not always a bad thing. As Stephen Asma argues in his book Against Fairness, knee jerk fairness is ultimately a view that seeks to always disparage favoritism and bias when, in reality, there are many realms of life where bias is essential, preeminent among them, the prominence a parent's child holds for the parent over a stranger's child in another neighborhood or country. To say nothing of the notion of monogamy, superior artistry, and all other sorts of defensible favoritism.http://bloggingheads.tv/videos/16249

A utilitarian aims to know some general good for all while forgetting that there is really no such thing as an average person and that we must experience the world always from a biased and particular point of view. One cannot have it all, and one must choose  how to spend one's time. When the difference in choice is translated into a question over what is the objective moral law,  you get political disagreement.

Psychological disposition is powerful: think of the debate between an extroverted and introverted sibling inside a family about whether to go out to a party. When we move from light issues to the heaviest of issues, the causes of the conflicts in both might have similar roots, psychologically speaking.The extroverted sister wants to go out on the town and be the life of the party and the introverted sister or brother wants to stay inside and have peace and quiet. People become religious fundamentalists or liberal secularists and vote accordingly, not for objective moral principles, but because their choice serves their respective needs for freedom, order, loyalty, security, risk taking, and a whole host of other values.

Life is quite a bit like that Neil Simon light comedy The Odd Couple. Oscar Madison is not unclean and dirty, just very relaxed and loose.  Felix Madison is not anal retentive and uptight, as Oscar Madison might see it, just neat and precise. They each might pathologize the other but both men's habits and temperaments have something to be said for them. Objective truths are quite beside the point. It seems to me that many of the intractable and perennial debates in human life are extensions or collective manifestations of such individual and subjective differences. It is hard to realize that the minor issues of personality conflict in a light popular comedy are at the root - however hidden - of some of the most serious debates in public life. The difficulty in admitting the psychological root is that we always, already assume an Archimedean objectivity to be attainable, thus implying that psychology is a moot point.

Many of the conflicts inside families are in fact conflicts over competing and equally valid values. An intellectually inclined parent will be dismayed over a son turning out to be a jock or vice versa. I have often thought that the whole drama that we call The Sixties turned not only on a clash over objective moral truths like war and social justice but on differing generational styles and sensibilities. For the Left that drama was story of progress and liberation over outmoded and ethically compromised and flawed older generations. For the Right the drama was a tragic story about the growth of decay and slipping of standards. Both points of view ignore subjective, psychological difference however; they think they are in possession of the Truth. If the so-called Greatest Generation was about achievement, sacrifice and work, the Boomer generation was more about exploration, leisure, and work-life balance.  Steven Reiss uses the phrase "I don't get it and neither do you" to describe this sort of conflict between conflicting values.

 As I have remarked before, our culture is one that fails to see the beauty or truth in the quotidian. We also tend to see beauty in that which unites us rather than that which divides us. As an antidote we need illustrations of the power of individual difference and we need illustrations of live not lived in extremis. Thus my invoking of Yasujiro Ozu.http://www.rogerebert.com/rogers-journal/silence-is-golden-to-ozu

Imagine trying to "prove" the superiority of either Mozart of Beethoven over the other. They are both very different, even when working in similar style and often identical forms, and yet the quality of both is equally outstanding.

It is easy to see the power of individual difference in aesthetic preference; it is far harder to see the power of individual difference in forming political or religious beliefs. The usual image we have in mind when understanding or conceiving of conflict is the image of a person struggling to directly master or overpower another person. The more common, though less discussed picture is the conflict between two over a third, almost always a value that is in question i.e. how much to eat and what kind of food, questions of taste and so on. The reason for the conflict is that there is a choice that must be made between two equally valid courses: both cannot be pursued simultaneously, and one must be discarded.

Since practically every human being, however introverted or passive, aims to remake their environment in order to suit their values and tastes, all sorts of conflicts inevitably ensue, all the more so when the larger society has at least a partial commitment to maintaining the freedom to pursue and indulge a plurality of choices.

Usually experts try to recommend that in solving conflicts we emphasize our similarities. Yet I would suggest the opposite. We should bring up bad news and elephants in the room first. The more we are conscious of individual difference and, moreover, conscious that the causes of individual difference are not rooted in objective moral stances but rather in the partial, subjective emphases of the interlocutors or combatants, the more possibility there is of preventing conflict and domination.

The real secret to solving many of our seemingly intractable divides is to imagine and inhabit points of view utterly foreign to ourselves. Afterwards we can then return to our rather different or even opposed point of view - not to "give in" to the other side, but to hold our usual values a bit more provisionally. Fallibilism is one philosophic word for this move. This would look rather similar to what I imagine therapists do in so-called "couples' counseling".

The greatest and surest way to imagine or inhabit alien points of view is through works of art.

As historian Carlo Ginburg famously wrote:"The historian's task is just the opposite of what most of us were taught to believe. He must destroy our false sense of proximity to people of the past because they came from societies very different from our own. The more we discover about these people's 'mental universe,' the more we should be shocked by the cultural distance that separates us from them." I am merely suggesting that we apply this principle to any two or more people inhabiting the same time and space and in the same culture.

Romanticism Past and Present

I should like to make some remarks on Romanticism, in particular inspired by Berlin's seven part lecture series, the first part of which is embedded here, and all of which is included on youtube.

I will only briefly summarize Berlin's taxonomy, risking injury to his majesty. More importantly, I will offer my own remarks on the wider culture, in both the present and recent past.

For millennia, Berlin says, there was a code or the code. He calls it the "structure to things". The details of this structure may very well vary according to geographic distance or individual and group placement in society, but the important thing is that the structure came first. Interiority was always subordinated to the code, as was personal feeling more generally or individual initiative.

One of the marvelous, revolutionary things about Shakespeare is that he was the first artist to create a break or crack in the code, such that individual differences, in terms of psychological diversity, came to the fore as never before in representation.

But it would not be for another hundred years until a revolt against the code was to be realized in the broader society.

This code was the precondition for other things in life. It was always cause and never effect. In that special sense, sincerity, in the usual and modern sense of that word, was either a nonexistent or incoherent notion. You were either right about a proposition or not. And intent, that major psychic force in modern jurisprudence, was also not conceptualized. It did not matter much what one's intent was behind an act, but rather whether the intent followed the code or not.

Isaiah Berlin (in The Roots Of Romanticism) illustrates this with a wonderfully graphic and clear illustration from political and religious history:

"Suppose you had a conversation in the sixteenth century with somebody fighting in the great religious wars which tore Europe apart in that period, and suppose you said to a Catholic of that period, engaged in hostilities, 'Of course these Protestants believe what is false; of course to believe what they believe is to court perdition; of course they are dangerous to the salvation of human souls, than which there is nothing more important; but they are so sincere, they die so readily for their cause, their integrity is so splendid, one must yield a certain amount of admiration for the moral dignity and sublimity of people who are prepared to do that'. Such a sentiment would have been unintelligible...the more sincere, the more dangerous."

While it would be absurd to carry a Michel Foucault styled social constructionism too far - that is, to the point where emotions are thought to be suddenly created, without any underlying latency, potential or constancy across cultures and times - it would be equally absurd to suppose that emotions are static and without history. I believe that the current ability to empathize with emotions that are contrary to our own - modes like comprehension and appreciation for diversity and multiculturalism, for example - came to the fore at the time in the 18th century as Isaiah Berlin records, and ushered in a new epoch in consciousness. This is especially the case with the conviction that Will and Intention, and Sincerity of belief and emotion are innately virtuous.

For some reason Germany was the beginning of the greatest shift in consciousness. (He speculates that this was due to an inferiority complex on the part of Germany and the domination of culture by the arguably more "advanced" country of France. If France was going to play the game of Truth and rationalism and science, it was left to Germany to trumpet the game of psychology, feelings and Spirit etc.).

Yet all of the great art movements of the modern and current post modern period are heirs to Romanticism and not merely the familiar poets of Keats and Wordsworth, but even the Avant-Garde, even when that Avant-Garde was opposed to sentiment in favor of detached rigor. That is, the anti-Romantics are themselves, in spite of themselves, Romantic.

The list is long: surrealism, naturalism, the Method approach in acting, the emotive cinema of Douglas Sirk or Nicholas Ray, Classical Cinema of Hollywood, the observational cinema of John Cassavetes, the abstract painting of Pollack, Bauhaus architecture, the ecology movement, the poetry of Robert Lowell, Sylvia Plath and Anne Sexton, jazz improvisation, the Feminist and Civil Rights movements in politics and culture, the Rock Revolution in music, including both Glam and Punk rock, Disco music, all folk music of course. And in matters sartorial: both the t-shirt and jeans revolution of the sixties and seventies as well as the go-go 1980s, and especially the grungy nineties. All these and more should be seen as heirs to Romanticism too.

Lest you, dear reader, feel this is to stretch the word Romantic till it loses all definition and boundaries, there is a principle uniting such disparate and often opposed movements: this is the principle of a sincerely felt and freely willed individuality in expression and creativity, coupled with the conviction that authentic, sincerely felt expressive acts ought to take priority over unfelt rules or codes. Words like "real" and authenticity are key here.

I would dare say that even the most "ironic skepticism" of the the past thirty years is as heavily invested in this notion of the authentic. To feel a loss of the self is to have always already believed in a deep self to begin with.

Does this mean we are all Romantics today? Yes and no. We are, in truth, divided souls. One half of each of us carries a vestige of the Classic and Ancient piety towards the code (which accounts for the continuing popularity of the older religious traditions), the other half committed to the newer principles of sincerity and individual freedom.

However Romanticism carried too far becomes an evil thing: both Fascism and Bolshevism, though foes of one another, are part of Romanticism's legacy too. Ironically, Romanticism carried too far destroys Romance itself as normally understood, resulting in a kind of Sadeian orgy of depersonalization. Conversely, Romanticism can be anti-erotic, resulting in a Platonic idealism: devoid of lust and seeking refuge in a cult of Androgyny, free from the code of gender altogether.

So too, the notion that the truth or falsity of a behavior or assertion is less important in comparison to the depth of sincerity and intent behind a behavior or assertion has caused a great deal of mischief, resulting in a kind of "sophomoric Relativism".

Beliefs and convictions we utterly take for granted today, like the belief that one's feelings have a sacredness that ought to be tolerated and honored by others, (such as one finds in modern psychology), have been made possible by Romanticism.

At times it may seem as if the only area of life untouched by Romanticism in the sense that Berlin and I mean, is in the scientific method, that last bastion of Enlightenment belief.

Most representative and illustrative of long standing tensions in the individual self and the collective culture is the important passage in Portrait Of A Lady by Henry James, in chapter 19. Other authors have written on this passage. Above all, Ray Carney (in the The Films Of Mike Leigh, Cambridge University Press 2000), has written wisely on this passage. More recently Robert Pippin has commented in his book on James. The dialogue is between the novel's protagonist Isabel Archer and Madame Merle.

"When you've lived as long as I you'll see that every human being has his shell and that you must take the shell into account. By the shell I mean the whole envelope of circumstances. There's no such thing as an isolated man or woman; we're each made up of some cluster of appurtenances. What shall we call our 'self? Where does it begin? Where does it end? It overflows into everything that belongs to us–and then it flows back again. I know a large part of myself is in the clothes I choose to wear. I've a great respect for things! One's self–for other people–is one's expression of one's self; and one's house, one's furniture, one's garments, the books one reads, the company one keeps–these things are all expressive."

This was very metaphysical; not more so, however than several observations Madame Merle had already made. Isabel was fond of metaphysics, but was unable to accompany her friend into this bold analysis of human personality. "I don't agree with you. I think it is just the other way. I don't know whether I succeed in expressing myself, but I know that nothing else expresses me. Nothing that belongs to me is any measure of me; everything's on the contrary a limit, a barrier, and a perfectly arbitrary one. Certainly the clothes which, as you say, I choose to wear, don't express me; and heaven forbid they should!"

"You dress very well," Madame Merle lightly interposed.

"Possibly; but I don't care to be judged by that. My clothes may express the dressmaker, but they don't express me. To begin with it's not my own choice that I wear them; they're imposed upon me by society."

James was so prescient. In this one passage, written in 1881, at the end of the nineteenth century, he anticipated the 1960s cultural revolutions that would mark the end of the twentieth century: the cult of authenticity, the battle between, on the one hand, the plea for the "real me", free from oppressive masks and artificial codes, and on the other hand, the plea for traditional values, the feeling that fashion and, in one sense, "the mask" is needed for formal rigor, or even as a precondition for expressing the truth of the self.

I can imagine a contemporary reader saying "you go girl" to Isabel Archer's stance against what today would be called "fakeness" or oppressive codes. Yet such a reader would be wrong in that Madame Merle, though she is a negative figure in the novel, is giving in part an authorial view: the degree to which Isabel Archer looks past surface signs, is what causes her to end up wedded to the most unsuitable, indeed, sinister Gilbert Osmond. She refuses to see the surface when the surface was warning her all along. (She also stubbornly clings to a romantic view of the ultimate changeability of all character flaws, also related to a belief in inner, deep essences). Isabel Archer's dream of a formless, pure self, floating free of masks and constructions is a vision of self that cannot read the surfaces of life very well. Moreover, at it's most extreme, it is a view of selfhood that is against the aesthetic, favoring the alleged utility of raw and unmediated emotion.

This is both the best and worst of times for "the couple". It is the best in that for the first time people may freely choose for reasons of individual and sincerely felt meaning rather than the "code". It is the worst, because, the more choice there is, and Capitalism is surely one of the engines of this phenomenon, the more burdens there are upon each individual self: the more a self is blamed and shamed should things go awry.

And that is all I have to say for now on the subject of Romanticism.

Year's End: A New Year Plea For the "Foxy"

In keeping with my general antipathy to year end resolutions and summaries in particular, and closure in general, this post shall be a late one in the new year. But its lateness is not only for reasons of precision and exactitude on my part: it is above all for reasons of alienation from the whole cultural business of such ways of viewing time and destiny. In short, there is nothing worse than a wrap-up. Everything about it is explicitly and implicitly infected, riddled with all sorts of fallacies.

One of these fallacies is a linear temporality that makes us servants to the future and enemies of the present. Another fallacy is a progressivism or historicism that thinks that there is a quantifiable measure of our many losses and improvements into a final verdict of decline, or as we are wont to prefer, ascent.

I remember one particularly obnoxious wrap-up that circulated through the mail from one of my many married acquaintances. The whole things was so glowing with prideful self assertion; it all but nakedly stated how great everyone involved had been over the previous year and how surely they were to be better in the forthcoming year. It read as an advertisement for a chain restaurant rather than a report on a family, though I would argue there is little difference between the two in our current historical moment.

Related to the wrap-up and though less egregious, yet still problematic, is the resolution.

People make resolutions not only because of the perennial cult of self improvement but because of a peculiarly linear temporality. This temporality admits of a straight line of onward and upward Progress, with History falling in line, in increasing maturity, wisdom, even enlightenment.

To clarify where I deeply stand on such matters I must interrupt with what may apparently be a digression but, as we shall see, connects to where I have been heading all along.

One of the most brilliant, most distinguished minds in legal (or indeed any other kind) philosophy, Ronald Dworkin, has just published a book called Justice For Hedgehogs. Now, given the fame of the author, there will doubtless be hundreds of responses to the book. The book itself is magisterial and as such I am only halfway through it, and there is much good in it and much with which I agree. Yet his central claim, and the book's title are most contrary to my disposition, as readers of my blog will undoubtedly see.

You see, dear reader, though Dworkin is a most brilliant mind and his book covers so much -from the question of free will through the role of the state and even aesthetics - he is on the opposite side to me since I am most deeply influenced by the late great Sir Isaiah Berlin.

This explains Dworkin's title. Isaiah Berlin wrote the essay "The Hedgehog and The Fox: An Essay On Tolstoy's Conception of History".

The Greek poet Archilocus said: "The fox knows many little things but the hedgehog knows one big thing".

While Berlin admits Tolstoy was a combination of the two as a thinker, Berlin himself was an advocate for the "foxy" position as he was a passionate defender of pluralism.

The title is incorrect in more than one way since hedgehogs don't need justice; we foxes, however do. Most of the world, like Dworkin, believes the world is one and that there is a right or wrong answer to most questions. They believer such unity is backed up by some sort of grand metaphysics. Ronald Dworkin is more modest and sophisticated than that: but like grand theorists before him, he aims to create a unifying and unified theory where all things go together.

The last highest and most noble attempt to present such a grant theory was John Rawls in A Theory Of Justice. Yet what made Rawls' theory notable was that it made space for subjective difference and diversity. It recognized irresolvable problems; that is why Rawls felt a need for a neutral space from which to govern.

Dworkin, on the other hand, wants more than neutrality; he seems to want to pronounce what the good and the true are at every turn; where any controversy or disagreement is but a cover for genuine error or misunderstanding of the facts, rather than irreducible, insoluble difference. If freedoms are sacrificed for social justice then there was not really freedom to be sacrificed to begin with, but, rather, a too narrow definition of freedom as license. (Which is how I do define freedom). Yet some freedom we must sacrifice if we are to prevent certain suffering. (The suffering caused by other's freedoms).

Dworkin would retort that we have been under assault from moral relativism, and thus, a variant of objective all inclusive theory like his is sorely needed to set the record straight and keep us safe from fashionable relativists.

But the world is as hostage to monism like Dworkin's as it is to relativism; indeed I consider relativism as serious a sin as Dworkin's monism. It has nothing in common with my or Isaiah Berlin's "Objective Pluralism."

Josh Cherniss states three propositions in his Stanford Encyclopedia entry on Isaiah Berlin:

All genuine questions must have a true answer, and one only; all other responses are errors.

There must be a dependable path to discovering the true answers, which is in principle knowable, even if currently unknown.

The true answers, when found, will be compatible with one another, forming a single whole; for one truth cannot be incompatible with another. This, in turn, is based on the assumption that the universe is harmonious and coherent.

Like Berlin, I deny all three of these propositions which is why I am a thoroughgoing pluralist.

A relativist, on the other hand, believes such problems are clashes of merely subjective points of view. At worst, the relativist denies the existence of true or false statements altogether, denies the existence of good and evil, however construed.

I believe such problems as the inability to answer the three propositions in the affirmative to be caused not by relativity but rather, ironically, by objectivity! It is precisely because we can see - most painfully - the truth of the various sides, and yet see the impossibility of fulfilling all sides simultaneously; it is because we can see the inevitable necessity of tragic choices that we pluralists are anything but relativists.

And, above all, because the world is not one in any systematic way, it is perfectly possible for there to be some answers that are clearly right or wrong, as in the science of gravity, Hitler's evil, Bach's grandeur, and so on, and simultaneously other answers that are undecidable, like trying to weigh the relative merits Japanese filmmaker Ozu in comparison with French filmmaker Robert Bresson.

Yet Ronald Dworkin wants to apply his monistic inclinations to a comprehensive legal theory. It is a curious thing to be reading a book in which I agree with so many of his conclusions (about issues of the day in the courts) yet disagree most vociferously with how he arises at our shared conclusions.

But I have said too much about this issue. Please enter this new year in the spirit of the fox. Be flexible. Don't be afraid of being called a dilettante if you happen to have more than one single minded interest. Take each day and each case, one at a time. Think for yourself. Not all situations are identical. No two people are alike. Respect the profound differences around you. Not merely differences backed by group identity and and pride of membership; those as of late have been more acceptable to tolerate. But pricklier and trickier differences: ones that reside in the innermost recesses of an individual human heart.

And that is all I can stand to say in anything like the spirit of a new year.