Excerpt from The Pursuit of the Ideal by Isaiah Berlin

At a certain stage in my reading, I naturally met with the principal works of Machiavelli. They made a deep and lasting impression upon me, and shook my earlier faith. I derived from them not the most obvious teachings – on how to acquire and retain political power, or by what force or guile rulers must act if they are to regenerate their societies, or protect themselves and their States from enemies within or without, or what the principal qualities of rulers on the one hand, and of citizens on the other, must be, if their States are to flourish – but something else. Machiavelli was not a historicist: he thought it possible to restore something like the Roman Republic or Rome of the early Principate. He believed that to do this one needed a ruling class of brave, resourceful, intelligent, gifted men who knew how to seize opportunities and use them, and citizens who were adequately protected, patriotic, proud of their State, epitomes of manly, pagan virtues. That is how Rome rose to power and conquered the world, and it is the absence of this kind of wisdom and vitality and courage in adversity, of the qualities of both lions and foxes, that in the end brought it down. Decadent States were conquered by vigorous invaders who retained these virtues.

But Machiavelli also sets side by side with this the notion of Christian virtues – humility, acceptance of suffering, unworldliness, the hope of salvation in an afterlife – and he remarks that if, as he plainly himself favours, a State of a Roman type is to be established, these qualities will not promote it: those who live by the precepts of Christian morality are bound to be trampled on by the ruthless pursuit of power on the part of men who alone can re-create and dominate the republic which he wants to see. He does not condemn Christian virtues. He merely points out that the two moralities are incompatible, and he does not recognise an overarching criterion whereby we are enabled to decide the right life for men. The combination of virtù and Christian values is for him an impossibility. He simply leaves you to choose – he knows which he himself prefers.

The idea that this planted in my mind was the realisation, which came as something of a shock, that not all the supreme values pursued by mankind now and in the past were necessarily compatible with one another. It undermined my earlier assumption, based on the philosophia perennis, that there could be no conflict between true ends, true answers to the central problems of life.

Then I came across Giambattista Vico’s Scienza nuova. Scarcely anyone in Oxford had then heard of Vico, but there was one philosopher, Robin Collingwood, who had translated Croce’s book on Vico, and he urged me to read it. This opened my eyes to something new. Vico seemed to be concerned with the succession of human cultures – every society had, for him, its own vision of reality, of the world in which it lived, and of itself and of its relations to its own past, to nature, to what it strove for. This vision of a society is conveyed by everything that its members do and think and feel – expressed and embodied in the kinds of words, the forms of language that they use, the images, the metaphors, the forms of worship, the institutions that they generate, which embody and convey their image of reality and of their place in it; by which they live. These visions differ with each successive social whole – each has its own gifts, values, modes of creation, incommensurable with one another: each must be understood in its own terms – understood, not necessarily evaluated.

The Homeric Greeks, the master class, Vico tells us, were cruel, barbarous, mean, oppressive to the weak; but they created the Iliad and the Odyssey, something we cannot do in our more enlightened day. Their great creative masterpieces belong to them, and once the vision of the world changes, the possibility of that type of creation disappears also. We, for our part, have our sciences, our thinkers, our poets, but there is no ladder of ascent from the ancients to the moderns. If this is so, it must be absurd to say that Racine is a better poet than Sophocles, that Bach is a rudimentary Beethoven, that, let us say, the Impressionist painters are the peak which the painters of Florence aspired to but did not reach. The values of these cultures are different, and they are not necessarily compatible with one another. Voltaire, who thought that the values and ideals of the enlightened exceptions in a sea of darkness – of classical Athens, of Florence of the Renaissance, of France in the grand siècle and of his own time – were almost identical, was mistaken. Machiavelli’s Rome did not, in fact, exist. For Vico there is a plurality of civilisations (repetitive cycles of them, but that is unimportant), each with its own unique pattern. Machiavelli conveyed the idea of two incompatible outlooks; and here were societies the cultures of which were shaped by values, not means to ends but ultimate ends, ends in themselves, which differed, not in all respects – for they were all human – but in some profound, irreconcilable ways, not combinable in any final synthesis.

After this I naturally turned to the German eighteenth-century thinker Johann Gottfried Herder. Vico thought of a succession of civilisations, Herder went further and compared national cultures in many lands and periods, and held that every society had what he called its own centre of gravity, which differed from that of others. If, as he wished, we are to understand Scandinavian sagas or the poetry of the Bible, we must not apply to them the aesthetic criteria of the critics of eighteenth-century Paris. The ways in which men live, think, feel, speak to one another, the clothes they wear, the songs they sing, the gods they worship, the food they eat, the assumptions, customs, habits which are intrinsic to them – it is these that create communities, each of which has its own ‘lifestyle’. Communities may resemble each other in many respects, but the Greeks differ from Lutheran Germans, the Chinese differ from both; what they strive after and what they fear or worship are scarcely ever similar.

This view has been called cultural or moral relativism – this is what that great scholar, my friend Arnaldo Momigliano, whom I greatly admired, supposed both about Vico and about Herder. He was mistaken. It is not relativism. Members of one culture can, by the force of imaginative insight, understand (what Vico called entrare) the values, the ideals, the forms of life of another culture or society, even those remote in time or space. They may find these values unacceptable, but if they open their minds sufficiently they can grasp how one might be a full human being, with whom one could communicate, and at the same time live in the light of values widely different from one’s own, but which nevertheless one can see to be values, ends of life, by the realisation of which men could be fulfilled.

‘I prefer coffee, you prefer champagne. We have different tastes. There is no more to be said.’ That is relativism. But Herder’s view, and Vico’s, is not that: it is what I should describe as pluralism – that is, the conception that there are many different ends that men may seek and still be fully rational, fully men, capable of understanding each other and sympathising with and deriving light from each other, as we derive it from reading Plato or the novels of medieval Japan – worlds, outlooks, very remote from our own. Of course, if we did not have any values in common with these distant figures, each civilisation would be enclosed in its own impenetrable bubble, and we could not understand them at all; this is what Spengler’s typology amounts to. Intercommunication between cultures in time and space is possible only because what makes men human is common to them, and acts as a bridge between them. But our values are ours, and theirs are theirs. We are free to criticise the values of other cultures, to condemn them, but we cannot pretend not to understand them at all, or to regard them simply as subjective, the products of creatures in different circumstances with different tastes from our own, which do not speak to us at all.

There is a world of objective values. By this I mean those ends that men pursue for their own sakes, to which other things are means. I am not blind to what the Greeks valued – their values may not be mine, but I can grasp what it would be like to live by their light, I can admire and respect them, and even imagine myself as pursuing them, although I do not – and do not wish to, and perhaps could not if I wished. Forms of life differ. Ends, moral principles, are many. But not infinitely many: they must be within the human horizon. If they are not, then they are outside the human sphere. If I find men who worship trees, not because they are symbols of fertility or because they are divine, with a mysterious life and powers of their own, or because this grove is sacred to Athena – but only because they are made of wood; and if when I ask them why they worship wood they say ‘Because it is wood’ and give no other answer; then I do not know what they mean. If they are human, they are not beings with whom I can communicate – there is a real barrier. They are not human for me. I cannot even call their values subjective if I cannot conceive what it would be like to pursue such a life.

What is clear is that values can clash – that is why civilisations are incompatible. They can be incompatible between cultures, or groups in the same culture, or between you and me. You believe in always telling the truth, no matter what: I do not, because I believe that it can sometimes be too painful and too destructive. We can discuss each other’s point of view, we can try to reach common ground, but in the end what you pursue may not be reconcilable with the ends to which I find that I have dedicated my life. Values may easily clash within the breast of a single individual; and it does not follow that, if they do, some must be true and others false. Justice, rigorous justice, is for some people an absolute value, but it is not compatible with what may be no less ultimate values for them – mercy, compassion – as arises in concrete cases.

Both liberty and equality are among the primary goals pursued by human beings through many centuries; but total liberty for wolves is death to the lambs, total liberty of the powerful, the gifted, is not compatible with the rights to a decent existence of the weak and the less gifted. An artist, in order to create a masterpiece, may lead a life which plunges his family into misery and squalor to which he is indifferent. We may condemn him and declare that the masterpiece should be sacrificed to human needs, or we may take his side – but both attitudes embody values which for some men or women are ultimate, and which are intelligible to us all if we have any sympathy or imagination or understanding of human beings. Equality may demand the restraint of the liberty of those who wish to dominate; liberty – without some modicum of which there is no choice and therefore no possibility of remaining human as we understand the word – may have to be curtailed in order to make room for social welfare, to feed the hungry, to clothe the naked, to shelter the homeless, to leave room for the liberty of others, to allow justice or fairness to be exercised.

Antigone is faced with a dilemma to which Sophocles implied one solution, Sartre offers the opposite, while Hegel proposes ‘sublimation’ on to some higher level – poor comfort to those who are agonised by dilemmas of this kind. Spontaneity, a marvellous human quality, is not compatible with capacity for organised planning, for the nice calculation of what and how much and where – on which the welfare of society may largely depend. We are all aware of the agonising alternatives in the recent past. Should a man resist a monstrous tyranny at all costs, at the expense of the lives of his parents or his children? Should children be tortured to extract information about dangerous traitors or criminals?

These collisions of values are of the essence of what they are and what we are. If we are told that these contradictions will be solved in some perfect world in which all good things can be harmonised in principle, then we must answer, to those who say this, that the meanings they attach to the names which for us denote the conflicting values are not ours. We must say that the world in which what we see as incompatible values are not in conflict is a world altogether beyond our ken; that principles which are harmonised in this other world are not the principles with which, in our daily lives, we are acquainted; if they are transformed, it is into conceptions not known to us on earth. But it is on earth that we live, and it is here that we must believe and act.

The notion of the perfect whole, the ultimate solution, in which all good things coexist, seems to me to be not merely unattainable – that is a truism – but conceptually incoherent; I do not know what is meant by a harmony of this kind. Some among the Great Goods cannot live together. That is a conceptual truth. We are doomed to choose, and every choice may entail an irreparable loss. Happy are those who live under a discipline which they accept without question, who freely obey the orders of leaders, spiritual or temporal, whose word is fully accepted as unbreakable law; or those who have, by their own methods, arrived at clear and unshakeable convictions about what to do and what to be that brook no possible doubt. I can only say that those who rest on such comfortable beds of dogma are victims of forms of self-induced myopia, blinkers that may make for contentment, but not for understanding of what it is to be human.

The full essay is here.

Excerpt from Chapter VI (Beginnings of Scientific Technique) of The Scientific Outlook by Bertrand Russell

“We are accustomed, in our own day, to protests against the empire of machinery and eloquent yearnings for a return to a simpler day. In all this there is nothing new. Lao-Tze, who preceded Confucius and lived (if he lived at all) in the sixth century B.C., is just as eloquent as Ruskin on the subject of the destruction of ancient beauty by modern mechanical inventions. Roads and bridges and boats filled him with horror because they were unnatural. He speaks of music as modern high-brows speak of the cinema. He finds the hurry of modern life fatal to the contemplative outlook. When he could bear it no longer he left China, and disappeared among the Western barbarians. He believed that men should live according to nature — a view which is continually recurring throughout the ages, though always with a different connotation. Rousseau also believed in the return to nature, but no longer objected to roads and bridges and boats. It was Courts and late hours and the sophisticated pleasures of the rich that roused his ire. The sort of man that seemed to him an unspoiled child of nature would have seemed to Lao-Tze incredibly different from those that he calls ‘the pure men of old.’ Lao-Tze objects to the taming of horses, and to the arts of the potter and carpenter; to Rousseau the carpenter would seem the very epitome of honest toil. ‘Return to nature’ means, in practice, return to those conditions to which the writer in question was accustomed in his youth. Return to nature, if it were taken seriously, would involve the death by starvation of some 90 per cent of the population of civilized countries. Industrialism as it exists at the present day undoubtedly has grave difficulties, but they are not to be cured by a return to the past, any more than were the difficulties from which China suffered in the time of Lao-Tze, or France in the time of Rousseau.

Science as knowledge advanced very rapidly throughout the whole of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, but it was not until near the end of the eighteenth century that it began to affect the technique of production. There was less change in methods of work from Ancient Egypt to 1750 than there has been from 1750 to the present day. Certain fundamental advances had been slowly acquired: speech, fire, writing, agriculture, the domestication of animals, the working of metals, gunpowder, printing, and the art of governing a large empire from a centre, though this last could not attain anything like its present perfection before the invention of the telegraph and steam locomotion. Each of these advances, because it came slowly, was fitted in, without too much difficulty, to the framework of traditional life, and men were at no point conscious of a revolution in their daily habits. Almost all the things that an adult man wished to speak about had been familiar to him as a child, and to his father and grandfather before him. This had, undoubtedly, certain good effects which have become lost through the rapid technical progress of modern times. The poet could speak of contemporary life in words that had become rich through long usage, and full of colour through the embedded emotions of past ages. Nowadays he must either ignore contemporary life or fill his poems with words that are stark and harsh. It is possible, in poetry, to write a letter, but difficult to speak over the telephone; it is possible to listen to Lydian airs, but not to the radio; it is possible to ride like the wind upon a fiery steed, but difficult, in any known metre, to go much faster than the wind in an automobile. The poem may wish for wings to fly to his love, but feels rather foolish in doing so when he remembers that he could order an aeroplane at Croydon.

…The most essential characteristic of scientific technique is that it proceeds from experiment, not from tradition. The experimental habit of mind is a difficult one for most people to maintain; indeed, the science of one generation has already become the tradition of the next, and there are still wide fields, notably that of religion, into which the experimental spirit has hardly penetrated at all. Nevertheless it is this spirit which is characteristic of modern times as contrasted with all earlier ages, and it is because of this spirit that the power of man in relation to his environment has become, during the last hundred and fifty years, so immeasurably greater than it was in the civilization of the past.”

The full book can be found here.

Excerpts from Chapter XXII of Down and Out in Paris and London by George Orwell

“People have a way of taking it for granted that all work is done for a sound purpose. They see somebody else doing a disagreeable job, and think that they have solved things by saying that the job is necessary. Coal-mining, for example, is hard work, but it is necessary—we must have coal. Working in the sewers is unpleasant, but somebody must work in the sewers. And similarly with a plongeur’s work. Some people must feed in restaurants, and so other people must swab dishes for eighty hours a week. It is the work of civilization, therefore unquestionable. This point is worth considering.

Is a plongeur’s work really necessary to civilization? We have a feeling that it must be ‘honest’ work, because it is hard and disagreeable, and we have made a sort of fetish of manual work. We see a man cutting down a tree, and we make sure that he is filling a social need, just because he uses his muscles; it does not occur to us that he may only be cutting down a beautiful tree to make room for a hideous statue. I believe it is the same with a plongeur. He earns his bread in the sweat of his brow, but it does not follow that he is doing anything useful; he may be only supplying a luxury which, very often, is not a luxury.

As an example of what I mean by luxuries which are not luxuries, take an extreme case, such as one hardly sees in Europe. Take an Indian rickshaw puller, or a gharry pony. In any Far Eastern town there are rickshaw pullers by the hundred, black wretches weighing eight stone, clad in loin-cloths. Some of them are diseased; some of them are fifty years old. For miles on end they trot in the sun or rain, head down, dragging at the shafts, with the sweat dripping from their grey moustaches. When they go too slowly the passenger calls them bahinchut. They earn thirty or forty rupees a month, and cough their lungs out after a few years. The gharry ponies are gaunt, vicious things that have been sold cheap as having a few years’ work left in them. Their master looks on the whip as a substitute for food. Their work expresses itself in a sort of equation—whip plus food equals energy; generally it is about sixty per cent whip and forty per cent food. Sometimes their necks are encircled by one vast sore, so that they drag all day on raw flesh. It is still possible to make them work, however; it is just a question of thrashing them so hard that the pain behind outweighs the pain in front. After a few years even the whip loses its virtue, and the pony goes to the knacker. These are instances of unnecessary work, for there is no real need for gharries and rickshaws; they only exist because Orientals consider it vulgar to walk. They are luxuries, and, as anyone who has ridden in them knows, very poor luxuries. They afford a small amount of convenience, which cannot possibly balance the suffering of the men and animals.

…

I believe that this instinct to perpetuate useless work is, at bottom, simply fear of the mob. The mob (the thought runs) are such low animals that they would be dangerous if they had leisure; it is safer to keep them too busy to think. A rich man who happens to be intellectually honest, if he is questioned about the improvement of working conditions, usually says something like this:

‘We know that poverty is unpleasant; in fact, since it is so remote, we rather enjoy harrowing ourselves with the thought of its unpleasantness. But don’t expect us to do anything about it. We are sorry for you lower classes, just as we are sorry for a, cat with the mange, but we will fight like devils against any improvement of your condition. We feel that you are much safer as you are. The present state of affairs suits us, and we are not going to take the risk of setting you free, even by an extra hour a day. So, dear brothers, since evidently you must sweat to pay for our trips to Italy, sweat and be damned to you.’

This is particularly the attitude of intelligent, cultivated people; one can read the substance of it in a hundred essays. Very few cultivated people have less than (say) four hundred pounds a year, and naturally they side with the rich, because they imagine that any liberty conceded to the poor is a threat to their own liberty. Foreseeing some dismal Marxian Utopia as the alternative, the educated man prefers to keep things as they are. Possibly he does not like his fellow-rich very much, but he supposes that even the vulgarest of them are less inimical to his pleasures, more his kind of people, than the poor, and that he had better stand by them. It is this fear of a supposedly dangerous mob that makes nearly all intelligent people conservative in their opinions.”

The full book is here.

Confirmation Bias in Science: How to Avoid It by Chris Lee

“I was at a conference presenting…results to our peers. We don’t get much in the way of bonus points for doing this: the university barely recognizes conferences as scientific output. And trumpeting your results to the world gives everyone else a chance to beat you—an experimental demonstration beats a theory paper any day of the week. Still, I was there. Why?

The answer is simple. Our science becomes stronger as more scientists interact with it. Before, we had faced a few objections from a total of four to six people (the referees for the papers). Now, I was facing a room full of experts who had, before the meeting, expressed great interest in our results. If there was a hole in the model, this would be the occasion for me to fall into it. Was there a hole?

The question session was fast and lively. And, yes, after the session, a senior scientist approached me and told me in no uncertain terms why our idea would not work—that sound you heard was me falling down the hole in our model. He was, and still is, right. 

What was my reaction to that? First, I had to understand his objection. Then, I had to consider if it was a fundamental problem. In short, I discussed it with him and my colleagues. I did not—as creationists, homeopaths, or global warming skeptics do—ignore the objection and continue onwards. Nor did I react as if I had been personally attacked—despite having put my heart and soul into this work, and really, really wanting it to succeed.

Thankfully, the story doesn’t end there. Although he was right, it turns out that we can beat his objection as well. However, it certainly changes how we plan to do the experiment. Some of the choices that we had thought were relatively free are rather restricted. If we had not exposed our ideas to more criticism, we would never have known, and it is likely that our planned experiments would never have succeeded.

The key point is that everyone at the conference wants us to succeed. They want us to find a way to make this particular improvement. But they are also skeptical that we can make their microscopes see smaller objects. Their skepticism is what helps us get to our goal faster. And this is true of every field of science. Every criticism hurts like hell, but after the bruises have healed, we find that our results are more accurate.

This is the difference between doing science from the inside and observing it from the outside. We attack each other’s ideas mercilessly, and those attacks are not ignored. Sometimes, it turns out that the objection was the result of a misunderstanding, and once the misunderstanding is cleared up, the objection goes away. Objections that are relevant result in ideas being discarded or modified. And the key to this is that the existence of confirmation bias is both acknowledged and actively fought against.”

The full article is here.

The Captive (from Part II of Vol. V of In Search of Lost Time) by Marcel Proust

Full volume (albeit with a slightly different translation) is here.

The Mona Lisa by Leonardo Da Vinci

Some information regarding this work of art is here.

Excerpt: Claude Frollo (Chapter II of Book IV) from Notre-Dame de Paris (aka The Hunchback of Notre Dame) by Victor Hugo

The full chapter can be found here.

The full book can be found here.

Psyche Revived by Cupid’s Kiss by Antonio Canova

This winged young man, who has just landed on a rock where a girl lies unconscious, is the god Eros – Cupid in Latin – and can be recognized by his wings and his quiver full of arrows. The girl’s name is Psyche. Cupid’s mother Venus, the goddess of Beauty, demanded that Psyche bring back a flask from the Underworld, strictly forbidding her to open it.

Psyche’s curiosity got the better of her; and no sooner had she breathed in the terrible fumes than she fell into a deep, deathlike sleep. Seeing her lying motionless, Cupid rushed to her and touched her gently with the tip of his arrow to make sure that she was not dead. This is the moment caught by the sculptor: Cupid lifts his beloved Psyche in a tender embrace, his face close to hers. Psyche lets herself sink slowly backwards, languorously taking her lover’s head between her hands.

Antonio Canova took his inspiration from a legend recounted by Latin author Apuleius in the Metamorphoses. At the close of the tale, the gods decide in council to grand Cupid Psyche’s hand in marriage, thus according her immortality and making her the goddess of the Soul.

(This excerpt comes from The Louvre’s website. For more information regarding this sculpture, click here.)