It's the way he tells them
Blair Worden
THE SENSE OF REALITY by Isaiah Berlin, edited by Henry Hardy Chatto, £20, pp. 277 How do libraries and bookshops decide where to position Isaiah Berlin's books? He seems pre-eminently a philosopher. Yet at Oxford he held a chair in politics, and inaugurated his reign by attacking the 'pedantry' that separates politics from philosophy. He denies that he is a historian. Yet how many historians command such a breadth of comparative reference, or so luminously relate the ideas of the past to their political and social contexts? Then there is Berlin the literary critic, the unsurpassed expositor of Turgenev and Tolstoy. There is even Berlin the musicologist, the writer of learned notes in opera programmes.
Berlin's range and his impatience with disciplinary boundaries made him an increasingly uncharacteristic member of the
increasingly fragmented academic commu- nity, from which he retired in 1975. So did the ethical purpose of his writings, that unifying force behind the diversity of his subject-matter. He remarks in this volume that the Romantic .movement killed the ancient equation between learning and virtue, Yet no Greek or Renaissance writer communicated more persuasively than Berlin the conviction that we learn in order to live well, or that true philosophy is that which addresses the fundamental responsi- bilities and choices of our lives. For him, ideas are the motor of history. In our century the perversion of ideas has wrought terrible results. Beneath the exhilarating surface of Berlin's prose, beneath its crescendos of wit and sparkle, there lie the gravest of memories.
It is the human engagement of his writings, quite as much as their intellectual and literary distinction, that won for him, long before he reached a venerable age, a respect unequalled in English intellectual life. Yet his versatility has given his admir- ers a practical problem. His shorter writ- ings have been discretely published and can be hard to locate, even to know of. Henry Hardy is remedying that difficulty by edit- ing a series of volumes that draws Berlin's essays and.lectures together. Hardy's enter- prise, which rescues much that might have been lost, reveals the essential coherence of Berlin's thought. The present volume consists mostly of hitherto unpublished lec- tures, some of them given as long ago as the 1950s. There can never have been a more captivating or inspiring lecturer than Berlin, never one more adept at enlarging his hearers' sympathies and appetites. Yet what works in the lecture-hall can work less well in print. This volume makes observa- tions about the damage wrought by second- hand philosophers, or about the idiocy of the Middle Ages, which on the page lose the restraining inflections of humour and thus look crude and even abusive, qualities the opposite of Berlin's. There is a dazzling excursus on the various answers which a series of great thinkers would have given to the question why Hamlet could not have been written in ancient Rome. Yet the virtuosity of that passage, which must have enthralled its audience, here looks self- indulgent.
A writer can cover ground more quickly than a lecturer. The first two chapters have their airy moments. Yet there is profound wisdom in them. Berlin explores territory, pre-eminently of historical inquiry and of political judgment and statesmanship, that lies beyond the reach of generalisations and theories. We can understand a histori- cal experience or decision, he maintains, only by recovering its particularity, its unique combination of pressures, the unrepeatable perceptions or calculations of its participants. That gift is more intuitive than analytical. Berlin, describing and exemplifying it, makes all system-building in the humanities look reductive. That sixth sense is still more evident in the remaining chapters, which in general are more historically angled. There are pieces on the relationship of philosophy to liberty, on socialism, Marxism, Romanti- cism, nationalism, national identity. A recurrent theme is the division in the modern world's allegiances, and perhaps in Berlin's own, between the legacy of the Enlightenment, which was rightly compas- sionate and libertarian but wrongly didactic and schematic, and that of the Romantic movement, which overturned but could not eliminate Enlightenment certitude.
Berlin, Hardy tells us, doubted whether all the chapters should appear. This is not the book of Berlin's with which to begin. But once begun, the reading of him is hard to stop.
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