Reading Notes on Isaiah Berlin Talk
Two Concepts of Liberty
Note on the Text: I used this pdf, but I see that it includes some material other editions do not. For example, in this pdf, which is from a published book, the essay starts in the first section and omits Berlin’s introduction.
Note on “freedom” and “liberty”: Berlin uses the words interchangeably; this is his explicit practice.
I tried to take notes on most all of the paragraphs. I do worry that my numbering is off or that the edition I use might differ somewhat from other editions, so I include the section breakdowns (there are 8) to help guide the reader. So for example, maybe my paragraph 46 is not exactly right but at least you know the notes there are to be paired with the beginning of section VII. In total I count 55 paragraphs, including Berlin’s introduction which is omitted from some editions.
Berlin’s Introduction
The idyllic state has no questions. Marx et alia reduce everything to a technical question; most people today live in this Garden of Eden.
That so many people live in Eden is surprising and dangerous. Heine quoted on the power of ideas… he warns the French.
Berlin justifies the present piece: he is moderating radicals. Liberalism may be investigated if the investigation serves liberalism. It is not impious in other words. (And indeed, it really isn’t.)
Defenses of political philosophy…
Praise of Douglas Cole -- proof a political philosopher can make a difference, make things better and this can make you famous. You can become famous without needing to become a bad or uninteresting person. Douglas Cole did this with his humane promotion of socialism.
Thoughts make conflicts historical (meaningful): there is a current conflict over command and obedience. Two senses of Freedom introduced.
I. (The Notion of ‘Negative’ Freedom)
In all the other sections, the section title coincides with the section number. Not so here, where we get the section and then a paragraph later comes the section title.
Freedom is difficult to define and there are hundreds of definitions. IB will focus on two ways…
** IB tries to explain reasons philosophers had debates over width or scope of freedom. The tone is the Berlin sits above them all in judgment: all the philosophers took the “how much freedom” question seriously, as one that could be answered definitively. IB sees all the games played, all the arguments, counterarguments and terminal points in the process.
What Troubles minds of Western liberals: they do not mind that different men enjoy different amounts of freedom, what they mind (hate in fact) is the idea that there are different amounts of freedom being enjoyed unjustly. They hate that some men have more freedom because they exploited others. BUT … they also hate when those who have more freedom simply avert their gaze from the less fortunate… Berlin seems confused here or does not write clearly. That is, he starts out seeming to say all that is bothersome is unjustly gained liberty but he appears to go onto say that regardless of how the liberty was gained it can be bad if its possessor isn’t sufficiently attentive to plight of poor.
** Locke, Smith, and Mill are “optimists” whereas Hobbes, reactionaries, and conservatives are “pessimists”: but they all agree that a private sphere exists. Constant was the best, most eloquent defender of the private, of the private and therefore inviolate character of religion, opinion, expression, and property.
The argument for Negative Liberty (according to Berlin): must preserve minimum of freedom or else “degrade our nature”. No “absolute” freedom—give up some to preserve the rest. Likewise, No total surrender, that is despotism. There is no real standard or way of determining these boundaries and while many debate these things Berlin makes them seem frivolous. What matters to his investigation is the general character of negative liberty.
Mill’s view of liberty…
involves an individualistic conception of man
Man’s dignity and ingenuity require and demand private liberty
IB gives 3 facts about Mill’s position
Fact number 1: Mill confuses two distinct notions. There is the idea that coercion is bad and non coercion is good. 2: The liberal idea of how to use that freedom. (What IB is saying here is that Mill defends being free and assumes that there is universal agreement among rational men about what a free man will do with his freedom, when in fact Mill has inappropriately universalized the liberal ideal.
Fact #2 this is a new post-reformation/renaissance moral view. It is an exceptional, not usual, ideal.
Fact #3 (now a “characteristic”): Mill’s liberalism is not really connected to democracy or limited government, not necessarily connected I mean. His liberalism could, you know, be the policy of an enlightened despot. It’s compatible with autocracy.
Question of WHO RULES is not the same as POWERS OF RULER. (This is the basic distinction between positive and negative liberty it’s a good formulation anyway, very much in line with Constant’s view—which Berlin stubbornly fails to understand.)
Often, desiring to rule, caring more about the first question, can make men appear illiberal.
II: The Notion of Positive Liberty
** Positive liberty is not only wishing to not be told what to do, but to not be able to be told what to do. Positive liberty independence. Positive liberty is possessing the sovereign power. In other words, positive liberty is actual liberty. Ultimately – and I wonder if IB gets lost because he goes off on this – ultimately, positive liberty is being a “self-legislator” a philosopher. He gives a very nice description of an ideal thinking man/mastery.
Negative and positive liberty are really two very different traditions though it looks like they are not so different. They are in fact so different that they come into conflict.
** The idea of self-mastery has an internal logic that leads to fascism or totalitarianism. (Philosophy or mastery or whatever-elitist always scares a certain type.)
The ideal, the justification of mastery, becomes an “occult entity” – a subjective non demonstrable standard that justifies coercing others against their will and claiming to be helping them.
Freedom can be reduced, under dialectical pressure, to “the right to act according to your good and nothing else” such that only allowing men to act according to their good is not contrary to freedom no matter how much they, being irrational, protest.
This by the way is true and is why Arendt spends so much time purposefully obscuring this dialectical process. She sets up that last barrier to clear thinking, by making “your good”, the final object of dialectics, into the obscure “to determine who you are”; it’s a parlor trick that works in the right parlor. That is a bit flippant—it is true that choosing your own good is the only true freedom. However, to give the other side its due, it is also true that other people choosing your good for you, or coercing you to do what is good for you, is in a since impossible and foolish or at the very least very very different than if you had chosen your good yourself. It matters who does the choosing in other words.
The claim to know men better than they know themselves is a “monstrous impersonation” and the foundation for the grossest oppression.
The same mischief can be wrought with the negative conception… the self or rights not to be violated can be shifted and minimized. However, as a matter of history and practice, it is the positive conception which tends towards mischief.
Here we start to see a concept Berlin will use intermittently – the “two selves” problem: “the transcendent, dominant controller, and the empirical bundle of desires and passions to be disciplined and brought to heel.” He says splitting men up this way is what makes the monstrous impersonation possible, makes it possible to say you know them better than they know themselves because you can say they are tuned into their lower self when you know the needs of the higher self (through philosophy, science, medicine whatever).
So it matters whether you define man as Unified or Split because that effects your definition of freedom. These obscure questions are not merely academic questions. cue celebratory music, the scholar has justified himself
Let’s do a historical study of this desire to split men into two.
III. The Retreat to the Inner Citadel
One way to get “freedom” is Stoicism. Oddly, Berlin likens stoicism to political isolationism. This is actually not THAT odd, it’s a very Old Liberal view of isolationism as cowardice or a contemptible acquiescence to a worse world.
...
If you take Kant’s view of man as naturally autonomous sovereign, then you have to try not to reform or coerce them, know better for them. The split person … there is that inner man or true man. On the other side is Bentham and Helvetius: man is One, you can lie and manipulate to reform because it’s all the same. If you joggle the passions you get to the core of the man anyway so it’s all good. Like soul vs. materialist view of man but Berlin sticks with split for unified view of man.
Kantianism is secularized Protestantism.
Positive conception = person split in two. There is a real/fake, high/low, self and this is deeply important to the liberal tradition, as important as the negative conception of liberty.
Ties stoicism to a bad political situation. You get stoicism when times are bad. Stoicism is contracting, lying to yourself, aiming at death and pretending your aiming at life. Stoicism is the “sour grapes” doctrine.
Paragraph best ignored. Muddles things.
Stoicism and asceticism are just contracting and bad. Negative liberty likened to this.
** Contracting is not the only response to obstacles. Conquering and violence is also a way…
Claims men are hypocritical on this point. They get their own positive liberty by violence but deprive others of it. Seems unfair!
Kant = positive = transcendent/dual view = you cannot violate others = you cannot overcome obstacles hypocritically violating others = inner citadel
But many with this Transcendent view do violate others liberty…
IV: Self-realization
(This section does not need to be read)
** Aristotle’s conception of choice (you are only free to choose what is good for you)… pressed into the service of egalitarian politics (make society so that all men can make choices).
There are some good formulations in this paragraph about “true freedom”.
Fitting Hegel and Marx into the liberal framework… they try to adhere to nature or the way things are at bottom but the way things are at bottom are evolutionary, i.e., changing (as in improving) all the time.
Their doctrines can easily spin out of control.
V. The Temple of Sarastro
(I haven’t seen the Magic Flute but it is a reference to that.)
Society can be rational like men – this is a leap that thinkers want to make. All force and the like would be unnecessary if all men in society were rational, because the desire to dominate would disappear because all men would respect their fellow men. Ideal society is based on need for ideal type.
…
The anarchists are the people who took all the idealist assumptions to their ultimate conclusion. Liberalism is watered down anarchism.
The way to universal anarchy or rational behavior is Education and Coercion “for your own good” is right around the corner. IB hates this tendency and really this is the reason he wrote this sprawling confused essay. He doesn’t know what to do with this unassailable position… it’s refreshing that he notices it anyway.
Attacks Comte for promoting education in this oppressive way. Attacks Greeks for the same reason.
The “single true solution” is what causes this Oppression Disguised as Education ploy. It’s not what he had said earlier, with the whole “Split person” thing where there is a true and false self. That’s Kantian and now that is opposed to this Final Solution stuff.\
** Well… Kant at least wanted to be different but apparently he failed.
Intention: a. moral action/self-direction possible for all men. b. therefore no experts in moral matters – morality is not knowledge but use. c. therefore no coercing men for their own good.
Error: No law that is rational deprives men of rational freedom. Therefore, the rational ruler can treat irrational men, like children, savages, idiots etc.
So I guess the “single solution” and the “split person” doctrines are both problems…
****If this all leads to despotism—isn’t there likely a flaw? Berlin then lists 4 assumptions of philosophy… and then promptly never discusses them again in the essay. And he lays all of this at the feet of Socrates. **This paragraph is important because it serves as a sign—as well as the other times he mentions Socrates… What Socrates represents is, really, philosophy; Isaiah Berlin has a problem with philosophy. It’s both too elitist and not powerful enough. He wants thinking to have real power like Marx promised and for this to happen thinking should be capable of coming with an idea that can be followed without ending in oppression or without being used, compellingly used, to oppress people. This is what upset Berlin.
VI. The Search for Status
A gratuitous addition … it’s like Berlin thought of an objection mid-flow, made a section to cover it but otherwise this section is not connected to what came before or what comes after. This is not a well written or tightly argued piece. It is notable because Berlin has some excellent formulation and is admirably honest. But all in all… why is it so poorly written? If someone reading this sees that I am wrong please, I am all ears. As things stand, I don’t consider it worth reading or Berlin a tight enough writer to have made it necessary to understand what he is saying.
Maybe lack of freedom is really about recognition or social status and not really about freedom.
Not everything is about freedom. Recognition cannot be subsumed by freedom. The two are two differently values.
…
This desire cannot be reduced to Freedom even if there are strong similarities.
…
VII. Liberty and Sovereignty
What I said for last section applies to this section as well.
Democracy is not always synonymous with liberty, for Mill.
More Constant. Same argument. Hobbes was at least honest that sovereignty looks like slavery.
…
Liberalism has a “normal” i.e., a defined nature that provides liberalism its limits and revulsions.
Desire to curb authority = negative liberty. Desire to possess authority = positive liberty. It’s a good formulation but the reader has to wonder “well, so are we back to the original long lost question of the essay?”
VIII. The One and The Many
The conclusions Berlin comes to in this section explain, for me anyway, the miserable quality of section 6 and 7: he doesn’t have an answer. He set out to solve a problem but he cannot. If he had been clear thinking he would have ended at the end of section 5 where he blames Socrates and basically argues “if this can lead to despotism then maybe there is a better way” – it suffices to say, if there is a better way, Berlin did not find it..
Ideals responsible for slaughter all have a final solution. (Hitler is evil and we can orient ourselves … in failure … not by what we want but by what we know we don’t want.)
…
** Liberty must be WEIGHED against other values: equality, justice, happiness, security, public order. The messiness of life may be maddening but it is beautiful … humans are so unique… crooked branches who won’t fit into the thinker’s system. (God what a cop-out.)
All you ever have to do when someone starts waving their hands saying “we have to weigh competing goods we can’t determine any ultimate value or right” … all you ever have to do here is ask “by what standard are we weighing them” and then you can pick the argument back up. Usually, it is mere life and the plight of those the leftist envisions as closest to death by poverty or oppression—so, the highest right and value, the ideal, is the most downtrodden type. In thought and in law all pride of place should belong to him. It’s just egalitarianism all the way. However, in Berlin’s defense… it’s as if he comes to this unwilling, exhausted, without any other idea of what he could or should say. So he throws out rigorous argument, calls for weighing, and starts speaking poetically about the messiness of life and human nature.
Making all ideals conform to one is intellectually and emotionally satisfying, but it leads to DEATH.
Pluralism and negative liberty are just going to have to work. In sense this paragraph, this “solution” is why he added section 6 because pluralism is based more on the value of “recognition”… you have to combine liberty and pluralism (they aren’t the same).
Flight to poeticized relativism.