The alleged relativism of Isaiah Berlin

Abstract

A recurring criticism of Isaiah Berlin is that he is a relativist. This essay argues that such criticisms are misplaced, as they fail to account for Berlin’s views about a common human horizon and the sense of reality. Berlin distinguishes his position from two forms of relativism – epistemological and cultural – and argues that the first entails self‐contradiction, while the other precludes mutual understanding. In response, he highlights the importance of a human horizon which involves shared moral values, and provides for the possibility of mutual comprehension. Such comprehension is attained by the use of the sense of reality, which is taken to illuminate the differences and similarities between those of different beliefs.

Keywords:

• Isaiah Berlin
• moral pluralism
• epistemological relativism
• cultural relativism
• human horizon
• sense of reality
• mutual understanding
• shared values

Acknowledgements

I would like to thank Richard Bellamy, Henry Hardy and Alan Patten for their constructive criticisms of early drafts of this paper.

Notes

1. Among those that have suggested that Berlin’s views entail – or are complicated by – relativism are: John Gray, Roger Hausheer, Michael Ignatieff, Ronald McKinney, Michael Sandel, Yael Tamir, and Maria Baghramian and Attracta Ingram. See: Baghramian and Ingram 2000, p. 3; Gray 1996, p. 155; Hausheer 1980, p. xlix; Ignatieff 1998, p. 286; McKinney 1992, p. 405; Sandel 1984, p. 8; Tamir 1991, p. 158.

2. Ryan Patrick Hanley is one of the few scholars who has noted the importance of the ‘sense of reality’ for Berlin. However, where Hanley focuses upon the importance of this idea for Berlin’s criticisms of historicism and the limits of social science I am instead interested in how Berlin specifically marshals the sense of reality to defend his view of pluralism. See: Hanley 2004, pp. 327ff.

3. Compare: ‘Of course there is a common human nature, otherwise men in one age could not understand the literature or the art of another, or, above all, its laws’ (Berlin 2000b, p. 8)

4. ‘The sense in which the most learned and accurate psychologist, working purely on the basis of accumulated scientific data, and of hypotheses bolstered up by these can describe and predict the behaviour of the human being in a concrete situation, from hour to hour and day to day, is very different from that in which someone who knows a man well, as friends and associates do, can do so … A medical chart or diagram is not the equivalent of a portrait such as a gifted novelist or human being endowed with adequate insight … could form; not equivalent … because [the former] confines itself to the publicly recordable facts and generalisations attested by them, [which means that] it must necessarily leave out of account that vast number of small, constantly altering, evanescent colours, scents, sounds, and the psychical equivalents of these, the half noticed, half inferred, half gaze‐at, half unconsciously absorbed minutiae of behaviour and thought and feeling which are at once too numerous, too complex, too fine and too indiscriminable from each other to be identified, named, ordered, recorded, [and] set forth in scientific language.’ (Berlin 1996b, p. 23)

5. Berlin makes such a comparison in 1996b, p. 33 and 2000c, p. 140.

6. Compare: ‘Judgment, skill, sense of timing, grasp of the relations of means to results depend upon empirical factors, such as experience, observation, above all on that “sense of reality” which largely consists in semi‐conscious integration of a large number of apparently trivial or unnoticeable elements in the situation that between them form some kind of pattern which of itself “suggests”… the appropriate action. Such action is, no doubt, a form improvisation, but flowers only upon the soil of rich experience and exceptional responsiveness to what is relevant in the situation – a gift without which neither artists nor scientists are able to achieve original results.’ (Berlin 2000c, pp. 139–140) Also: ‘So passionate a faith in the future, so untroubled a confidence in one’s power to mould it, when it is allied to a capacity for realistic appraisal of its true contours, implies an exceptionally sensitive awareness, conscious or half‐conscious, of the tendencies of one’s milieu, of the desires, hopes, fears, loves, hatreds, of the human beings who compose it, of what are impersonally described as social and individual “trends”.’ (Berlin 1980, p. 11.)

7. Berlin tells Jahanbegloo something very similar. See Jahanbegloo 1992, pp. 38–39.