Finding the In-Between

Following this logic, he placed among the single-minded hedgehog thinkers like Plato, Lucretius, Dante, Pascal, Hegel, Dostoevsky, Nietzsche, Ibsen and Proust. Among the pluralistic foxes he numbered Herodotus, Aristotle, Montaigne, Shakespeare, Erasmus, Molière, Goethe, Pushkin, Balzac and Joyce. The distinction furthered Berlin’s fundamental need to explore radically opposing intellectual and artistic temperaments as they mirrored human nature itself, and his thinking led him to a deeper consideration of Tolstoy, whose extraordinary struggle to place himself in one camp or the other defined his fiction.

Tolstoy published War and Peace between 1865 and 1869, during which time he was in his late thirties and early forties. Berlin greatly admired the novel’s sweeping panorama, its countless brilliantly realistic portrayals of characters living at a tumultuous moment in Russian history. Only a young fox in his prime, with powers of multiplicity and elasticity, could produce such a monumentally orchestrated depiction of the inner lives of so many characters and their mediations with their external surroundings. By contrast, in The Death of Ivan Ilyich, published in 1886, when Tolstoy was fifty-eight, we see him anxiously exploring mortality and alienation as social critique, especially within the Russian middle class, his meditations seeming to emerge from the worldview of the hedgehog, the principles of a unified system. In my reading, it is precisely this dichotomy, which Berlin referred to as a “crack,” that ultimately led Tolstoy to realize that while he may have been naturally endowed with a fox-like temperament, his true desire was to become a hedgehog.

Tellingly, Berlin begins “The Hedgehog and the Fox” in antiquity: “There is a line among the fragments of the Greek poet Archilochus which says, ‘The fox knows many things, but the hedgehog knows one big thing.’ ” One of Nietzsche’s most trenchant observations—“Only something which has no history is capable of being defined”—helps us fully appreciate how usefully open Berlin’s far-reaching interpretations of history were and how consistent his lifelong philosophical mission, demonstrated by the numerous subjects of his interest, among them Marx, Locke, Voltaire, Berkeley, Hume and Johann Georg Hamann.

His entire body of work, in my view, was fluidly synthesized in his magisterial 1965 Mellon lectures, The Roots of Romanticism, delivered at the National Gallery of Art in Washington and broadcast in the same year by the BBC (now compiled as a book and available in a video playlist on YouTube). By tracing the genesis of the counter-Enlightenment while distilling its substance through various manifestations, Berlin brought to light the ways in which appeals to certain impulses during the rise of Romanticism were violent reactions against rationalist dogmas, especially when the bureaucratic forms of those dogmas grew complacently static. His arguments show how the aspirations and attitudes of thinkers like Kant, Rousseau, Diderot, Goethe, Fichte and Blake, among many others, led to multifaceted and wildly unexpected outcomes in the twentieth century: nationalism, existentialism, democracy, totalitarianism, and ideas at the fore in the present, about passionate individualism, self-fulfillment and exaltation in political and cultural life.

In the lectures, Berlin fondly quotes Kant: “Out of the crooked timber of humanity no straight thing was ever made.” As he was keenly aware of human imperfection, from which everything that lies within the in-between space is to be perceived as a profoundly personal refutation, Berlin was also aware that human ideas are open to widely varying interpretation, vulnerable to distortions that can lead to endless unexpected and perverse consequences. These beliefs were formed by Berlin’s upbringing and migration, his life as the product of two worlds, his mind equipped with immense curiosity but always sensitive to the push and pull, Sturm und Drang, between ideas and their applications. Holding his ground in such a space meant committing personally to self-introspection and to a view of human behavior as understood through adaptable theory rather than insular analysis.

As the world becomes more unpredictable in its complexity, so have nationalism and racism, for neither had ever died. Whether or not we are convinced by Berlin’s assertion of the treacherous and insidious effects Romanticism had on modern thought, we find at least his highly personal frames of reference timely, instructive and useful. It was the Romantics who proclaimed artists to be the creators of the original, those to whom value was not given by their predecessors but rather made from nothing each time. Two thinkers in particular focused Berlin’s lifelong thinking: Giambattista Vico, who held that one can know the truth only in what one makes, and Johann Gottfried Herder, who believed Volksgeist (the “spirit of the people” or “people’s culture”) to be among the most elemental and powerful human forces, a shared pride in what we create and a sense of belonging with the communities where we feel most at home. Herder believed in the value of cultural self-possession and viewed Volksgeist as a nonaggressive ideology. But of course we’ve seen what happens when a culture’s self-belief is undermined, offended or suppressed by external powers. It naturally lashes back, often with great fury and velocity, like a severely bent twig upon release.

Throughout the course of his professional life and in the afterlife of his writings, Berlin has been the subject of great misreadings, misunderstandings and criticism. He was a philosopher whose belief system was often seen as too labile. But in my own reading of Berlin over many years, I have come to identify deeply with his idea that humans are largely the creations of others, with whom we form coherent unities. Individuals are formed by education and by language. Language is made collectively by past and present members of communities of peoples who have resisited and remain able to resist political or aesthetic dogma.

Berlin’s intellectual contributions are pertinent to our current crisis insofar as they shed light on how we understand that present hostilities, just like those in the past, are direct results of prolonged oppression and humiliation inflicted by oppressors upon the oppressed. In the United States, as a recent example, we have seen the dignity of labor and of vocational skill, the lives of working-class Americans, become woefully impugned, undervalued and ignored, as those in power, on both right and left, battle on largely meaningless turf—supposed losses of national glory, grievances over excesses of globalization, amplifications of difference for the sake of power. The emergence of China as a superpower and Russia’s aggression to reclaim what it considers its providential rights, along with the rise of other authoritarian states, pose real problems. Given these, I believe Berlin was prescient in elevating the uncompromising spirit of artists, who by their very nature, unlike political and financial power brokers, embrace failure as an essential part of growth. This is, again, the in-between space, where Berlin, along with confederates like Hannah Arendt and Meyer Schapiro, shared a profound admiration for the artist’s “inner freedom” as a forever pre-condition.

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Phong H. Bui is an artist, writer and independent curator and a co-founder and the publisher and artistic director of The Brooklyn Rail, Rail Editions, River Rail and Rail Curatorial Projects.