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

Social Research, Winter, 2000 by Strachan Donnelley

In sum, for Mayr and Berlin the worldly future is by necessity unpredictable and yet to be determined. This is the gift of historical becoming, of contingency and circumscribed human choice. In principle we cannot have prior moral answers for we know not what. However, the worldly future will emerge out of a historical past, with its evidence, more or less discernible, of the permanent interests of an evolving nature and humankind. Our freedom and responsibility, ever morally flexible, must ensure that these twin permanent interests survive and flourish together in the human and natural flux.

Moreover, it is significant in this convergence of philosophical thought that the moral centers of gravity of Berlin and Mayr mirror one another. Above all else, Berlin stands up for "negative liberty": the requisite room for individuals by historical trial and error to become their unique, fully human selves, humanly free and responsible. Mayr has his own form of "negative liberty" at the center of his naturalistic moral universe. There must be enough biological diversity--unique individuals, populations, ecosystems, and bioregions--for evolutionary and ecological processes to flourish. All of life, human and other, needs room to become its particular self. Pluralistic variety and worldly responsibility set against monocultural straightjackets and simplistic answers are at the heart of both Berlin's and Mayr's calls to moral action. A road is open for bringing together humans and nature in a comprehensive moral worldview, no matter how much further we need to travel.

Nature, Freedom, and Responsibility Revisited

Up to this point I have stressed the commonalities, similarities, and convergences of the thought of Mayr and Berlin. What about their differences? Can the differences instruct us further in a philosophical interpretation of the interconnections of nature, freedom, and responsibility? I think they can.

I have already noted Berlin's relative lack of attention to Darwinian evolutionary biology and natural science in general. They did not seem to fit the broad interests of Berlin the philosopher and the historian of ideas. Why? A clue, I think, can be found in Berlin's attention to Vico and Herder, and Vicoian science in particular. For Vico, contra Descartes and Newton, we can only comprehend and empathetically understand the human, that which is made, accomplished, and suffered by human beings. Nature, the "billiard balls in motion" of Newton, must forever remain opaque and impenetrable to us. We can have only an "externalist" knowledge of nature, whereas we can have an "internalist" understanding of human affairs precisely because we ourselves are human and know what it is like to be human from the "inside" (Berlin, 1998: xxix, 340 ff.). Like knows like, and we have nothing in common with physicalist nature except our mechanistic, nonsubjective organic bodies. Broadly speaking, Berlin marches under this Vicoian banner, is intensely interested in all things human, and is only passingly interested in nature.