Non Plura, Sed Unum: Isaiah Berlin's Pluralism of Truth

Trust me--if you saw the guy,
you'd be glad I used a painting!

In a brilliant essay from twelve years ago, Isaiah Berlin gives a thematic rehearsal of the ideas on which he had spent his life. One of these is an ontological pluralism, which secures his lifelong espousal of Liberal politics.

Berlin sees liberal tolerance as arising naturally out of the conviction that there simply is not one truth out there to know. He begins an intriguing intellectual history by noting that for the fathers of the Enlightenment, the rapid advance of the physical sciences elicited the belief that all truth was in principle knowable and might soon be known (the discourse of Descartes on method comes to mind here).  These men were monists, holding that all truth was one truth--itself valid for all people in all times and places. Although, to be sure, there were differences in how that truth might be apprehended (by introspection for Rousseau and Voltaire, by pure reason for Descartes and others), what was apprehended held the truth about reality as it always and everywhere is.

For Berlin, the house of monism begins to crumble with the work of Giambattista Vico, the great Italian, who in spite of his own piety (a devout Catholic) scattered seeds of a post-Christian pluralism by discovering what Berlin calls "culture," the combined influence of contingent social realites in which one is brought up and taught to think. From Vico's work, Berlin proceeds to the work of German poet JG Herder, who theorized that each culture has its own 'center of gravity'--its own points of reference within which its particular questions make sense. Berlin credits him with the idea that we cannot merely read the questions and answers of each age univocally; instead, we must observe that the truth of other ages and peoples and our own simply are different.

From this discovery of the pluriformity of truth, all sorts of new ideas arose. The Romantics, Berlin notes, believed that truth was plural because truth was not found but created. "From this sprang all kinds of diverse movements — anarchism, romanticism, nationalism, Fascism, hero-worship," (10), etc.... Although Berlin himself credits none of these ways of thinking, he does acknowledge that in this way has the idea that we could discover one immutable, omnipresent, atemporal truth been scrubbed out for good. And so much the better, he argues, for our most cherished liberal values depend for their continuance upon the truth there is no one truth. The "idea that variety is a good things, that a society in which many opinions are held, and those holding different opinions are tolerant of each other, is better than a monolithic society in which one opinion is binding on everyone [...] nobody before the eighteenth century could have accepted that" (13). Indeed, "monism is at the root of every extremism."

But just here is where the otherwise-brilliant Berlin falters.  For one thing, it seems that here he actually gives two genealogies of extremism — one clear and precise, and the other muddy and impressionistic. Extremism, as he has already convincingly shown, becomes possible only in a world in which people create their own values, in which nationalism or the State can set the value agenda and there be no expectation that any truth will be found to contradict the newfound one. It is from an ontological pluralism that the possibility for extremist thought comes; for ontological pluralism brings with it no possibility for one party's truth to be evaluated by another against any common understanding.

For another, in his zealous anchoring of the virtues of Liberal toleration to a final pluralism of truth, Berlin undercuts the basis for the toleration he wishes. He observes, for example, that in the case of a Nazi, he recognizes it as a human pursuit, an objective ("that is why pluralism is not relativism") value that a human being can hold, even though it might also be right to go to war against it.  Berlin is especially conflicted here, for he needs to hold together a "pluralism" of truth with the idea that some ideas are truly dangerous.  If he can recognize Nazism as something that could be a truth, while also asserting that we should go to war against it, then a pluralism of truth in no way underwrites the "toleration and liberal consequences" (13) that he believes follow from the validity of pluralism.

But it is not altogether clear which he stresses here. He notes that "I find Nazi values detestable, but I can understand how, given enough misinformation, enough false belief about reality, one could come to believe that they are the only salvation" (12). To me, it seems he merely understands how it could seem true to a Nazi, in which case he has not shown truth to be plural at all, merely people's grasp of it. And on this score, it seems to me, it is much easier to build a tolerant society. In both of the thinkers he draws from to propound his theory of pluralism, there is still a lingering sense of something uniting us — a common humanity or "some central essence" that connects human nature and endeavor.  It is hard for me to distinguish this significantly from the conviction of the Fathers of Enlightenment that there is a truth that is true in all times and places.

This may not be bad news though, for the link between monism and totalitarian repression of disagreement is not yet clear to me at any rate. All that is required is that we recognize the feebleness of our grasp, and for this it seems to me Vico's and Herder's work prepare us quite well. They show the different axes upon which all cultures seek out the things commonly sought by societies. We cannot naively assume our questions are those of other cultures, or vice versa. But we can, and should, assume that the truth from which true answers could be given to their answers and ours is one truth. And given the finitude of our grasp of that truth, we are able both to admit of a plurality of opinions on the matter and to withhold any sense of legitimacy to extremist solutions. It is the oneness of truth that underwrites a plurality of seekers; in fact, the oneness of the truth allows our recognition that what others are doing is seeking in the first place.