More musings on freedom

Freedom. It can either be negative or positive. There is, at least with respect to the idea if not the reality, this choice.

So I am reading Isaiah Berlin, but I am also at the same time reading Hannah Arendt. They are fighting an epic battle in my head. The irony is that both Arendt and Berlin think that freedom is sacred for radically different reasons--rather, Arendt's passion is for a critical freedom, a freedom that is truly opposed to external positivity. Berlin, however, seems in the end to be a lover of the freedom that is.

Berlin and Arendt hated eachother--or in any case Berlin hated Arendt. This makes sense, considering their different approaches and final evaluations, really, of the march of freedom in the world.

In the end, I think their difference is in fact the most important difference within the liberal tradition--where to hang ones hat in terms of moral judgment. Berlin saw Arendt's judgment as fundamentally flawed because it lacked pity. Arendt certainly would have seen Berlin's appeal to pity as compromising a truly honest evaluation of the world. Berlin's judgment was a judgment informed by liberal principles of thought, like Arendt's, but with this fundamental difference--he accepted liberal democracy into his soul. I don't think that Arendt ever went as far. She certainly considered liberal democracy as the best system of government available, and as such morally legitimate, especially since it protected fundamental human rights. Nevertheless, it never became for her the internal structure of her soul as it did for Berlin. Michael Ignatieff notes that Berlin saw himself as "a cosy Russian tea-drinking Jew" and Arendt as "the qunitessential Yekke, the punctilious, exacting and charmless German Jew." Better: Berlin was content with the world he had escaped to and loved it as an end-in-itself; while Arendt appreciated the world she escaped to, but loved it enough to keep it brutally, painfully honest and growing.