Berlin and Me

I am reading the works of Isaiah Berlin at the moment. I began rereading his famed essay "Two Concepts of Liberty" last night in the bath. I really understand him. It is one thing to follow a phiosopher's arguments--to grasp what he is saying, to place his thought within the history of ideas, etc. But it its quite another thing to truly understand one. To understand a philosopher is to find that there is a part of one's own perspective that squares with his own. It is to recognize affinity, a kind of unity of vision. Nevertheless, this is a troubling thing for me because I am reasonably sure that Berlin has been rather misused in the history of ideas. Because he argued for a prevailing philosophical understanding of the world in a time when this understanding was acheiving fame and success in the social and political world wherein he lived and thought (in contrast, for example, to the New Left, whose philosophy, while popular and deriving force from the socialist/communist world, was nevertheless a critical, oppositional philosophy), his insights have been cheapened and streamlined in order to reflect the state of the world as is. My commitment, aboveall, is to change the present state of the world--and yet here I am looking into the soul of Isaiah Berlin and fnding a part of my own there.

Obviously, I can simply claim that Berlin is misunderstood. But that would be dishonest. In a real sense Berlin was a proponent of the liberal-democractic world of which I remain at best a skeptical critic. However, in a real way I need Berlin to remain a good skeptic, a critic committed to building up rather than simply tearing down. I really think that intellectual maturity consists in the simple ability to read and to understand disparate intellectual traditions, and to begin to think their concepts at the same time.