Thanks to all of you who’ve contributed to this issue of Commensal, especially to the four of you making your maiden speeches. Thanks for your patience to those of you who wrote to me some weeks back and have had to await C89 to receive a reply.
I’m indebted to Vijai Parhar for suggesting a different font for my comments. I’ve simply used Arial Narrow (rather than ordinary Arial). Not very imaginative, I admit.
The issue of "endless replies" still looms large. I received a friendly letter from one SIG member who said he was somewhat put off by the difficulty of following the narrative from month to month. It’s certainly the case that I have an advantage over the rest of you here, in that what I’m commenting on is in the same issue. Incidentally, is there any objection to this practise ? Maybe you’d prefer it if I kept quiet and simply printed what came in; submitting "original" stuff or commenting a month in arrears like the rest of you ? Please let me know if you have strong views on the matter.
Getting back to the form of submissions - one option suggested is that I group commentary by subject matter, rather than leave it in the sequence submitted; ie. comments on the same passage in the previous issue would appear together, irrespective of the commentator. Also, comments should include the kernel of what it is they’re commenting on. Another suggestion is that I call "time" on any topic after a couple of rounds of debate.
I’m not keen on formal rules myself, and am definitely not trying to discourage submissions from anyone, but I think it’s important that we try to stick to a few basic principles :-
LONDON, Nov. 6 (Reuters) - British philosopher Sir Isaiah Berlin, one of the century's greatest thinkers, has died aged 88 after a protracted illness, Oxford University said on Thursday.
An official at the university said Berlin, a prolific author and historian of political thought, had died on Wednesday night. Family friends said he had been in and out of hospital since July.
"We are very sad to lose such an eminent scholar, who made such an enormous contribution to philosophy and to the values for which we stand," Dr Colin Lucas, Vice-Chancellor of Oxford University, said in a statement.
Berlin was best known for his writings on liberty, nationalism and socialism, including such works as Four Essays on Liberty and The Crooked Timber of Humanity.
One of Berlin's main contributions to philosophy was the idea of "value pluralism", the idea that human beings are so different that there can be no one overall set of human values.
He developed the idea in his essay "Two Concepts of Liberty", where he coined the idea of "negative" and "positive" liberty to make the distinction between liberal and repressive concepts of freedom.
Berlin, an avowed anti-Communist, said negative liberty was the freedom from enslavement by others while the idea of positive liberty could be used as the pretext for abuse.
"It is this -- the 'positive' conception of liberty: not freedom from, but freedom to -- which the adherents of the 'negative' notion represent as being, at times, no better than a specious disguise for brutal tyranny."
He said the work "really came from being maddened by all the Marxist cheating which went on, all the things that were said about 'true liberty' , Stalinist and communist patter about 'true freedom'".
Berlin, who was born in the Latvian capital Riga to Jewish parents in 1909 and moved to Britain in 1919 after witnessing the first months of the Russian revolution, was a key figure in the intellectual movement against communism during the Cold War.
"I was never pro-Communist. Never... anyone who had, like me, seen the Russian revolution at work was not likely to be tempted," he told the British magazine Prospect in September.
"I realised that the dictatorship of the proletariat meant sheer despotism."
Berlin faded from fashion in the 1960s as other thinkers moved into the limelight but followers say his basic message never lost its relevance.
"He's not a political thinker so much as a moralist who insists on the irreconcilability of goods such as liberty or mercy -- you can only have one at the expense of the other. Every time you choose you lose," biographer Michael Ignatieff said earlier this year.
"Isaiah's emphasis is on conflict, tragedy and loss -- these are very much themes which have a salience now that they may not have had say 25 years ago."
Berlin, who spent most of his academic career at Oxford, inherited his father's love of Russian literature, which inspired him to produce one of his most famous works -- The Hedgehog and the Fox.
In the essay, devoted to Russian author Lev Tolstoy, Berlin put forward the idea that there were two kinds of thinkers.
"There exists a great chasm between those, on one side, who relate everything to a single central vision...and, on the other side, those who pursue many ends, often unrelated and even contradictory," he said.
"The first kind of intellectual belongs to the hedgehogs, the second to the foxes."
Berlin, treasured by friends and colleagues as a modest and warm man as well as a brilliant conversationalist, decided to give up philosophy after World War Two in favour of political thought.
"Philosophy can only be done by very clever people. It's rather like mathematics. To be a second-rate mathematician is no good. I didn't think that I'd ever be good enough," he told BBC radio.
"In the end, I thought it wasn't for me because I didn't lie in bed awake at night thinking of solutions to agonising philosophical problems."
Berlin worked for the British intelligence service during the Second World War and was then posted as a diplomat to Moscow, where he met such famous writers as Anna Akhmatova and Boris Pasternak.
He was knighted in 1957, a year after he married Aline de Gunzbourg, the French-born daughter of a Russian Jewish banker.
After reading your last e-mail it struck me that my first entry in the journal was through the question asked by Roger Farnworth. This provided a gate for me to enter. If a question was asked each issue, would this give new-comers a window of opportunity to join the ranks of contributors ? It did work in my own case. Would it be viable ? Is it too much to expect the "new comers or shy people" to leap in to the deep end of philosophical discussion ?
A good idea. Rather than me set the questions, maybe you out there could submit questions you want opinions on ? After all, it’s easier to ask a question than to answer one !
Alternatively, there are several points deserving of comment in the Isaiah Berlin obituary above.
Finally, the closing date for submissions to the January 1998 edition of Commensal (C90) is 15th December 1997.
Best wishes,