Nature, Freedom, and Responsibility: Ernst Mayr and Isaiah Berlin - eminent scientists from early 20 century - Abstract

Social Research, Winter, 2000 by Strachan Donnelley

Berlin is particularly interested in exaggerated claims of philosophical, theological, and metaphysical knowledge and all forms of deterministic theses scientific, philosophical, theological, or other (1969:41 ff., 118 ff.). The foremost deterministic threat of our day is, of course, the scientific determinism of the physical sciences and their sociological and psychological behavioristic brethren. Their fateful pronouncements and pronouncers are also Mayr's targets of criticism, and it is curious and perhaps instructive that Berlin does not avail himself of the Darwinian naturalist's critique of Newtonian physicalism or determinism. (Despite Berlin's vast knowledge, how well did he know the field of evolutionary biology, particularly as interpreted by the naturalism? Do we have here another instance of a failure to think together humans and nature?) Nonetheless, Berlin, with or without this potent ally, will not accept the subterfuge of any form of determinism, "hard" or "soft." My life may be ruled by the molecules of my body, or I may be free to choose courses of action, my choices themselves determined by causes independent of me, but the one is no better than the other. Genuine human agency and freedom (that is, self-initiated choice and action)--and thus genuine moral responsibility--are denied. Either we have genuine freedom of' choice and bodily action, however circumscribed by natural, psychological, or sociological causes, or we do not (1969: xiii, 64 n.).

Berlin is convinced neither philosophically nor morally by the determinists, and his critiques are characteristically undergirded by one grand, overarching, "hedgehog" idea. Determinists of all stripes, agendas, and motivations try to smooth out a very messy human world. In the name of rational knowledge, the moral law, God, historical destiny, or some cosmic mystical force, these grand simplificateurs deny what is evident to any judicious empirical reading of human life and cultural history: that the ends (goals), values, and characters of human individuals, communities, and cultures are innumerable, often inherently in conflict with one another, and cannot be reconciled in theory or practice (1969: 45 ff., 169 ff.). (We should recall here the messy, dynamic diversity of Darwin's and Mayr's evolutionary and ecological nature.) Nevertheless, a dominant theme of traditional Western thought, whether scientific, philosophical, or theological, has been to deny this fundamental fact of human reality and cultural and political life. Ultimate truths, values, and goods, it is held, cannot clash among themselves. All "positive" realities must form a seamless harmonious whole, a "perfection"--at the beginning or end of history, in heaven, or in a Platonic realm of eternal forms--somewhere, lest human life and worldly reality make no final, intelligible sense (8 ff., 55 ff., 128 n., 145 ff., 167 ff.).

Berlin will have none of it. "The harmony of the spheres" (the perfection of all good things) may be a deep and incurable metaphysical need, but it is demonstrably at the heart of considerable metaphysical, theological, philosophical, scientific, political, and moral mischief as well as historical human tragedy, not the least in the twentieth century. In the name of human dignity, worth, and responsibility, Berlin would rather have us stare historical worldly reality squarely in the face and accept, affirm, and morally respond to human diversity and inevitable conflicts in all their individual, communal, and cultural guises. This is Berlin's famous empirically and historically informed pluralism, his firm stand against all those past, present, and future who would try to straighten out the "crooked timber of humanity" and deny the inevitability of human mortality, finitude, vulnerability, conflict, and tragedy. Incurable metaphysical desires need not doom us to political and moral immaturity (1969:80 ff., 172). Rather, we ought to face responsibly the worldly life and human nature that we have been dealt by the actual historical course of things, human and natural.