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4.0 out of 5 stars
A Good Summation, July 11, 2001
This review is from: The First and the Last (Hardcover)
"The First and the Last" contains Isaiah Berlin's earliest surving extended piece of writing ("First"), his final essay ("Last") summarizing his intellectual path and development, and brief tributes by Noel Annan, Stuart Hampshire, Avishai Margalit, Bernard Williams, and Aileen Kelly.
The tributes give us a faint glimmer of the man: his humanity and generosity, his passion for music, especially opera, and his extraordinary devotion to friends and students. "You have beautiful black eyes," Greta Garbo once said to Berlin. In Oxford circles Berlin was as renowned for his vivid talk and character as for his ideas. However, these recollections only hint at Berlin's expressiveness and luminous personality. In this regard, Michael Ignatieff's illumnating biography provides a more rounded treatment and measure of the man.
"First" is a prize winning story entered in a children's magazine competition when the Berlin was twelve years of age. The short story concerns a murderous bolshevik commisar named Uritsky, whose motto is "the purpose justifies the ways". Aside from revealing his precocity, the story is meant to illustrate Berlin's lifelong thematic struggle with absolutism in all its forms.
Berlin's last essay "My Intellectual Journey" is the principal and only substantive essay in this volume. It traces the the main themes of Berlin's intellectual journey, from his early interest in verificationism and phenomenalism, his discovery of Vico and Herder, his treatment of Romanticism, his famous formulation of two senses of "Liberty", and his contrast of monism with political pluralism. The writing is lucid and serves as a good synopsis of Berlin's political pluralism, which he summarizes as "a product of reading Vico and Herder, and of understanding the roots of Romanticism, which in its violent, pathological form went too far for human toleration".
Noel Annan once compared Berlin's writings to a Seurat, "a pointilliste who peppers his canvas with a fusillade of adjectives, epithets, phrases, analogies, examples, elucidations and explanations so that at least a particular idea, a principle of action, a vision of life, emerges before our eyes in all its complexity." The force and brilliance of Berlin's writings is found elsewhere. Nevertheless, "The First and the Last" is worth reading. For it is the one and only place where we find Berlin's own summation of his intellectual development alongside a modest tribute by his friends and admirers.
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5.0 out of 5 stars
From twelve to eighty- seven The first and the last pieces of Isaiah Berlin's writing, August 1, 2006
This review is from: The First and the Last (Hardcover)
The small story which opens this volume written when Berlin was twelve, one year after his arrival in England,intimates at themes which will concern Berlin all his life, his repulsion towards violence and tyranny, his fundamental conviction that present suffering cannot be justified by Utopian vision.
The major essay at the work written in Berlin's last year of life is a kind of small summary of his own intellectual development. He begins with the philosophical atmosphere of Oxford in the thirties, the questions raised by the Logical Positivists in regard to Veriification, his own inner intuition that Reality was much broader than the kind of narrow procedures for verifying it being debated at the time. He then talks about his own writing of the Marx biography, introduction to the Enlightentment predecessors who would be so important for his thought. The multi- culturalism of Vico and the cultural nationalism of Herder also are given their parts in his development. He stresses in all this his own resistance to the one conviction which had moved much philosophical and religious thought through the centuries, the idea that there is one certain answer to the great problems, one Universal Truth discoverable by all.
Berlin's pluralism and his defense of Liberty are also briefly outlined. There is after all no political thinker who insisted more than him that not only do cultures and individual have conflicting values, but the individual too within his own world of ideal ends finds usually the conflict of values. Again he is the fox resistant to the single Ideal Hedgehog Answer and Truth. He is the champion of freedom and openness to the new answers the Future will bring.
The volume contains also essays of tribute by Stuart Hampshire, Avishai Margalit, Bernard Williams, and Aileen Kelly.
It also has a brief introduction by Henry Hardy, the great student, friend, editor and companion of Berlin. It is to Hardy that we owe this volume, and the editing of most of the great collection of Berlin's essays.
This is a wonderful small volume dedicated to the thought of one of the most humanely wise of twentieth- century thinkers.
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