The Day After

Summary

An interview for the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation programme As It Happens, broadcast on 6 November 1997, the day after IB died

Cbc What was the most remarkable thing about Isaiah Berlin?

Cohen I have never known anyone who was so alive as he was, nor anyone who even came close. He celebrated life throughout all his waking moments, and he attracted everybody around him because he exuded life. He was a prism through which people's ideas, conceptions, motivations took on enormous brilliance and sparkle in the exposition that he was able to give of them, whether they were ordinary people that he happened to know, and about whom he would relate entertaining anecdotes, or great thinkers of the past, whose ideas he expounded by impersonating the thinkers whose ideas they were, so that what we got was not a Dryasdust description of a logical structure, but a presentation of the great personality as a human being whose ideas reflected his preoccupations, anxieties, hopes and fears.

When he lectured, and he was most famous as a lecturer – he was, what very few people are, a great lecturer – he wouldn't use notes. He’d bring notes because he was anxious that maybe he wouldn't succeed in carrying off the lecture spontaneously without them, but he invariably didn't look at the notes; instead, he spoke to you in the first person, as though he were Voltaire, or Rousseau or Marx, or Mill, and he didn't say ‘He thought this, he thought that, he said this’ (and so forth) but ‘I look around me and what do I see? I see men struggling, striving, enjoying etc., and here is what I think about all that.’ So, in that fashion, he could get you to understand why people whose ideas might be very different from your own thought the way they did, and he could render those ideas attractive. He could render even very repugnant ideas attractive, he could show you why fascists, or crazed terrorists, thought the way they did. It didn't mean he was sympathetic to those ideas, but he showed you how it was conceivable for a human being to think in that way. And so he was a great, you could say, animator.