The Legacy of Open Thought

Summary

Even during his lifetime Isaiah Berlin was a controversial thinker. The orthodox view was that he owed his fame to his personal qualities – above all his remarkable gift for conversation, his exemplary liberal temperament and his unusual capacity for empathy – rather than to his academic achievements; that it was his sparkling, inspirational gift as a speaker that made him ‘Britain's most celebrated public intellectual’ and an ‘iconic figure’. Even before his death the accusation was made that, although he was able to enter the minds of even the most obscure figures of European intellectual history, he was not an original theorist, but a brilliant narrator of modern political history and its philosophical background. On this view, however, this talent, tied as it was to his idiosyncratic personality and experiences, died with him, and cannot be artificially reactivated or imitated. And his unique liberal sensibility cannot be passed on to succeeding generations, being impossible to teach or to learn. As far as straight philosophy and political theory are concerned, others have done much better than him; so there is no lasting Berlinian legacy.

I

I was born too late to have met Isaiah Berlin in person. I know him only from his writings, from his letters, and from many conversations with people who have had the good fortune to meet him and to study with him. So I am not best placed to assess the claim that it is primarily his personality that explains his fame. However, it should be borne in mind that his kind of conversation – intense debate about human beings and their activities – ought in any case to play a central role in the humanities, which are after all the study of mankind. Conversation is one of the most important didactic tools in the study of human culture; from my own experience as a university lecturer I know that open debate in seminars is indispensable in encouraging students to think independently, to question comfortable received opinion, and to find a justified standpoint of their own instead of merely parroting what they have heard in lectures. I always tell my students that the most important form of instruction at university is not the lecture, to which they merely listen, but the seminar, which is a structured form of conversation. The humanities are essentially a matter of dialogue.