It was this basic idea that gave rise to the notion of natural law and the search for harmony. People had been aware of certain inconsistencies – Aristotle, for example, observed that fire burned in the same way in Athens and Persia whereas moral and social rules varied. Nonetheless, down to the eighteenth century people still assumed that all experience in the world was capable of harmonisation once enough data had been collected.17 The example Berlin gave to underline this point were the questions ‘Should I pursue justice?’ and ‘Should I practise mercy?’ As any thoughtful person could see, situations could arise when to answer ‘Yes’ to both these questions (which most people would go along with) would be incompatible. Under the traditional view, it was assumed that one true proposition could not logically contradict another. The rival contention of the romantics was to cast doubt on the very idea that values, the answers to questions of action and choice, could be discovered at all. The romantics argued that some of these questions had no answer, full stop, period. No less originally, they argued further that there was no guarantee that values could not, in principle, conflict with one another. To argue the contrary, they insisted, was ‘a form of self-deception’ and would lead to trouble. Finally, the romantics produced a new set of values, in fact a new way of looking at values, radically different from the old way.18
The first man to glimpse this new approach was Giambattista Vico (1668–1744), the Neapolitan student of jurisprudence we first met in Chapter 24 and who, with stunning simplicity, sabotaged Enlightenment ideas about the centrality of science. In 1725, it will be recalled, he published Scienza Nuova, in which he claimed that knowledge about human culture ‘is truer than knowledge about physical nature, since humans can know with certainty, and hence establish a science about, what they themselves have created.’ The internal life of mankind, he said, can be known in a way that simply does not – cannot – apply to the world man has not made, the world ‘out there’, the physical world, which is the object of study by traditional science. On this basis, Vico said, language, poetry and myth, all devised by man, are truths with a better claim to validity than the then central triumphs of mathematical philosophy. ‘There shines the eternal and never failing light of a truth beyond all question: that the world of civil society has certainly been made by men, and that its principles are therefore to be found within the modifications of our own human mind. Whoever reflects upon this cannot but marvel that the philosophers should have bent all their energies to the study of the world of nature, which, since God made it, He alone knows: and that they should have neglected the study of the world of nations, or the civil world, which, since men made it, men could come to know.’19
Very important, if very simple, things followed from this, said Vico, but man had been too busy looking outside himself to notice. For example, people share a nature and must therefore assemble their cultures in similar or analogous ways.20 This made it possible, even imperative, he said, for careful historians to reconstruct the thought processes of other ages and the phases they go through.21 He thought it was self-evident that in any civil society men should hold certain beliefs in common – this is what common sense was, he thought. And he found that there were three important beliefs that were shared everywhere. These were a belief in Providence throughout history and in all religions, in the immortal soul, and a recognition of the need to regulate the passions.22 Man, he said, has expressed his nature throughout history and so it must follow that the record of myth and poetry ‘is the record of human consciousness’.23 In saying all this, Vico transformed the human sciences, promoting them so that they were on a par with the natural sciences.
Vico’s innovations were not picked up elsewhere for several decades, and it was not until Kant that the new approach began to catch on. Kant’s great contribution was to grasp that it is the mind which shapes knowledge, that there is such a process as intuition, which is instinctive, and that the phenomenon in the world that we can be most certain of is the difference between ‘I’ and ‘not-I’.24 On this account, he said, reason ‘as a light that illuminates nature’s secrets’ is inadequate and misplaced as an explanation.25 Instead, Kant said, the process of birth is a better metaphor, for it implies that human reason creates knowledge. In order to find out what I should do in a given situation, I must listen to ‘an inner voice’. And it was this which was so subversive. According to the sciences, reason was essentially logical and applied across nature equally.26 But the inner voice does not conform to this neat scenario. Its commands are not necessarily factual statements at all and, moreover, are not necessarily true or false. ‘Commands may be right or wrong, corrupt or disinterested, intelligible or obscure, trivial or important.’ The purpose of the inner voice, often enough, is to set someone a goal or a value, and these have nothing to do with science, but are created by the individual. This was a basic shift in the very meaning of individuality and was totally new.27 In the first instance (and for the first time), it was realised that morality was a creative process but, in the second place, and no less important, it laid a new emphasis on creation, and this too elevated the artist alongside the scientist.28 It is the artist who creates, who expresses himself, who creates values. The artist does not discover, calculate, deduce, as the scientist (or philosopher) does. In creating, the artist invents his goal and then realises his own path towards that goal. ‘Where, asked Herzen, is the song before the composer has conceived it?’ Creation in this sense is the only fully autonomous activity of man and for that reason takes pre-eminence. ‘If the essence of man is self-mastery – the conscious choice of his own ends and form of life – this constitutes a radical break with the older model that dominated the notion of man’s place in the cosmos.’29 At a stroke, Berlin insists, the romantic vision destroyed the very notion of natural laws, if by that was meant the idea of harmony, with man finding his place in accordance with laws that applied across the universe. By the same token, art was transformed and enlarged. It was no longer mere imitation, or representation, but expression, a far more important, far more significant and ambitious activity. A man is most truly himself when he creates. ‘That, and not the capacity for reasoning, is the divine spark within me; that is the sense in which I am made in God’s image.’ This new ethic invited a new relationship between man and Nature. ‘She is the matter upon which I work my will, that which I mould.’30
We are still living with the consequences of this revolution. The rival ways of looking at the world – the cool, detached light of disinterested scientific reason, and the red-blooded, passionate creations of the artist – constitute the modern incoherence. Both appear equally true, equally valid, at times, but are fundamentally incompatible. As Isaiah Berlin has described it, we shift uneasily from foot to foot as we recognise this incompatibility.