Contemporary Jewish life, torn by factionalism that
turns complementary polarities into warring polarizations, has much
to learn from the balanced wisdom of the celebrated historian of ideas,
Sir Isaiah Berlin. Bolstered by vast erudition, Berlin challenges
the long prevailing absolutistic conceit in western thought: that
there are universal, timeless truths that hold for all people, everywhere,
at all times; truths that label dissenters as wrong headed heretics.
In many of the essays in this newly edited work by
Henry Hardy, Berlin criticizes the two-millennial philosophic credo
that all genuine questions have only one true answer; those answers
are noble, compatible with one another, and together form a single
coherent goal.
Berlin identifies this monistic creed throughout European
rational and spiritual thought and warns of the dangers of its oversimplification.
He understands the lure of security driving the quest for certainty.
The embracing systems they spawn are characteristically one-sided
and dismiss the facts and values that do not fit; moreover, they transfer
methods from one discipline where they have worked to other disciplines
where they distort. Throughout his many essays, Berlin is intent to
free us from the Procrustean bed of monolithic orthodoxies that penetrate
political, religious, and moral judgment.
Berlin, born in Riga Lithuania in 1909 and educated
in England, died there in 1997. He was influenced by the German philosopher
and poet Johann Gottfried Herder, who, among others, stressed the
plurality of ideals, the plurality of cultures, and the plurality
of temperaments. Values are not truths written in the platonic heaven.
Rather, they are created by human beings born of different cultures
and dispositions.
While espousing the values of pluralism, Berlin does
not lapse into relativism. Values are not reduced to matters of subjective
taste, "degustubus non disputandum est." Values are objective and
varied. And even when we disagree with the values of others, we must
recognize and understand their emergence as the essence of humanity.
In contrast to the reductionist creed of monism, the fruits of pluralism
are tolerance and dialogue.
Isaiah Berlin, like William James, is a perspectivalist.
Like Nietzsche, he combs the history of ideas to conclude that there
is no immaculate perception. We may learn from Berlin's judicious
and modest approach to avoid the perils of dichotomous thinking. More
often than not, we are presented with forced options, either/or hard
disjunctives that box us into partisan, denominational camps. Schismatic
either/or thinking produces narrow choices: either particularism or
universalism, either revelation or invention, either literalism or
fantasy, either law or spirit.
Throughout many of the essays, Berlin warns of the
monistic trap that chains us to one obdurate view and denies the richness
and complexity of perspectivalism. Many of Berlin's essays lean upon
those ignored thinkers who risked popularity but enlarged the mind
and spirit of civilization. They include such thinkers as Giambatissto
Vico, J. C. Herder, Benjamin Disraeli, Moses Hess, and Georges Sorrel
among others.
Isaiah Berlin's masterful critique of both absolutism
and relativism brings to mind a profound midrash from Pesiktah de
Rav Kahana in which the rabbis ponder the meaning of the verse in
Exodus "I am the Lord thy God." How is it, they wonder, for though
the voice addressed an entire people, each person heard the voice
as if it were addressed to him individually. Rabbi Levi explained
"God appeared to them like a mirror in which many faces can be reflected.
A thousand may look at it and it reflects each of them. So the text
does not say 'I am the Lord your God,' addressed to the collective
but 'I am the Lord thy God,' addressed to the individual." Other rabbis
concur and add their own illustrations. The manna tasted differently
to each: to the children, to the young, to the old, each according
to their power. God speaks to every person according to his or her
power.
The mirror is one, the reflections are many. The voice
is one, but the echoes are multiple. It is therefore wise to listen
to those who have heard differently and to respect their hearing.
It is wise to compare and evaluate the different reflections from
the same mirror. In our time when we are experiencing mounting impatience
with pluralism and intolerance toward dissenting voices, Berlin's
perspectivalism is healing.
Berlin is sensitive to the excesses of either approach.
Monotheism can degenerate into monism and pluralism into anarchic
relativism. But a holistic view of our tradition can avoid the extremes
of each that are forms of avodah zarah, that strange idolatry that
worships a part as if it were the whole. The parts are splinters;
they need not be discarded. They must be gathered together and traced
to the roots of the Tree of Life and Knowledge.
