Isaiah Berlin philosopher: Riga->Oxford

Isaiah Berlin

1991, Independent

Isaiah Berlin (1909-97) was born to Russian-speaking Jewish parents in Riga. His father Mendel owned a timber business providing material to the Russian railways; he and his wife Marie were very cultured people. Their only child developed a passion for music. In 1915 the family moved St Petersburg, staying during the revolut­ions. The Russian Rev­ol­ut­ion was a period of great hope for the future but one that also opened up the risk of anti Semitism. So after the violence, the Berl­ins returned to the most beautiful street in Ri­ga. Eventually they decided to move to Britain where Mendel had friends and business ties.

From 1921 the clever lad was educated at St Paul's School London, then at Oxford to study Classics. Isaiah was thrust into the excite­ment of 1930s Oxford, becoming part of the British intell­ect­ual estab­lish­ment. Not bad for a foreigner who had once spoken Yiddish, Ger­man, Russian and Latvian at home, but had to learn English and French from scratch.

With war coming to Europe, Berlin welcomed a chance to work for the British Ministry of Information, firstly in Washington where his bril­liant wartime dispatches were read by Churchill (1940-2). Then he bec­ame part of the British Foreign Office team that lived and worked in Moscow and in St Petersburg (1942-6). 

 Isaiah and Aline

Isaiah Berlin certainly did not live in an ivory tower; like many ot­her academics, he became engaged in the outside world. Through­­out his career, Berlin’s personality and contact skills saw him actively welc­om­ed by a great range of polit­ic­ians, businessmen and ac­ademics. Ber­lin did not like making enemies; he was uncomfort­ably aw­are of his dual allegiance when working for a British government which was unsym­pathetic to to Jewish dreams for a safe haven. But as a loyal Zion­ist, he was keen to play a role as a contact bet­ween his friend Chaim Weiz­mann and some American polit­ic­ians, bef­ore the State of Israel was established. Only when David Ben Gurion asked him to move to Israel, to play a part in shaping the new state, did Berlin decline.

In 1950, Berlin returned to All Souls, where he became Chair of Social and Political Theory. He was often heard on the radio, the broadcasts and lectures now available in the Isaiah Berlin Virtual Library. 

Because I knew even less about philosophy even than I knew about physics, I was excited to read Isaiah Berlin; A Life by Michael Ignatieff 1998. The author noted several times that Berlin was Russian by bir­th, Jewish by family and English by choice. So he knitted together the three ident­ities into a cosmopolitan awareness that informed his career.

Berlin affirmed the importance of individual freedom. Yet he was clear that the ideals of liberty, equality and social justice inevitably con­flicted and required negotiation. Even his liberal friends argued that indiv­id­ual freedom had to be limit­less. Berlin had absorbed British values: 1. decency, 2. tol­eration of dissent and 3. Import­ance of liberty over effic­iency. In his view, thinking society members had to embrace contra­dictory values. Britain's open political system had to be an embodiment of pluralism at its best.

When seeing so many important conflicts, Berlin felt there was much to be said for each side i.e his commitment to pluralism. If free­dom, jus­t­ice, equality, tolerance, loyalty and compassion and coll­ided, they could be rightly sought after; but equality could be achieved by curt­ail­ing the liberty of some.

In 1956, middle-aged Berlin married Aline de Gunzbourg Halban (1915-2014). He had found the brill­iant Paris-raised wife and stepsons who would be the centre of his life from then on. He was a director of Covent Garden, opera pat­ron and trustee of the National Gallery. A grateful nation was pleased to see Berlin knighted in 1957.

The Berlin house at Oxford

 
This philosopher’s most important stance was that there could never be any single, universal, complete and demonstrable answer to the most moral qiestions of all: how should we live? Contrary to C18th Fr­en­ch Enlightenment visions of an orderly synthesis of all objectives, Ber­l­in showed there was a huge number of competing, irreconcilable ul­timate values; humans had to make choices.

Pluralism meant every family and every society had to accept that there was never one absolute value to which other values had to be sub­­ordinated. There were many values in life that commanded resp­ect, but what if freedom, justice, equality, tolerance, com[assion and loyalty collided? Berlin thought no amount of rational discussion could resolve these conflicting values. So his solution was not to give any one value absolute priority over the others. We have to res­ol­ve the tensions between values by keeping them in pragmatic balance. We have to accept trade-offs, even if people make choices that are less than 100% satisfactory.

Isaiah Berlin; A Life
by Michael Ignatieff, 1998

Conclusion

Ignatieff’s interviews captured one of Oxford's most pop­ular professors, the most humane of modern philosoph­ers. He was a historian of the Russian intelligentsia, biographer of Marx, pioneer­ing scholar of the Romantic movement and defender of proper, positive English freedoms. Just as well for posterity that Ignat­ieff managed to question and tape Berlin for 10 productive years, before Berlin died. Then Ignatieff interviewed Berlin's widow, friends, students and colleagues.