Three Critics of the Enlightenment [Paperback]

Isaiah Berlin (Author)

Book Description

Publication Date: February 3, 2000

Isaiah Berlin analyses the ideas of three deeply original but unregarded thinkers, and demonstrates their disturbing relevance to the central issues of today's world.

Editorial Reviews

From Library Journal

All three essays in this collection have appeared elsewhere at other times in the past 40 years; Berlin himself proposed publishing a trilogy of essays on Herder, Vico, and de Maistre in 1960, though that book never appeared. This is the first time that these three particular essays have been published together. Hardy, one of Berlin's literary trustees, has made editorial revisions on the Vico essay for its appearance here; the Herder essay is essentially the same as it appeared in The Proper Study of Mankind. The Hamann study has an additional foreword written by Berlin in 1994 for the German edition. Berlin saw Vico, Herder, and Hamann as antipathetic to the underlying ideas of the French Enlightenment, and in these three essays, he delineates the reasons for that antipathy. In them, and particularly in Hamann, Berlin sees the first cogent criticisms of the movement. He also clarifies what he feels is misdirected in each writer's thinking and what effect their ideas had on the thought of the centuries that followed. Hardy has performed a sterling service here by reviving these three essays and collecting them in one volume. Not only does it provide some access to the thought of the three writers, but it helps to place them more properly within the intellectual movements of their own times. Recommended for academic libraries with programs in philosophy, the history of ideas, and Western intellectual development.DTerry C. Skeats, Bishop's Univ. Lib., Lennoxville, Quebec
Copyright 2000 Reed Business Information, Inc. --This text refers to an alternate Paperback edition.

Review

Isaiah Berlin's main preoccupation throughout his productive life was understand the nature of the modern reaction against the Enlightenment. These essays on Vico, Herder, and Hamann belong with his other profound and influential studies of the leading figures of what he called the Counter-Enlightenment. But they are also crucial for anyone hoping to understand Berlin's own analysis of modern life and politics, which has received increasing attention in recent years. Anyone interested in Berlin or those he studied will find this an essential volume. (Mark Lilla, University of Chicago ) --This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.

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Product Details

• Paperback: 393 pages
• Publisher: Random House (February 3, 2000)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0712664920
• ISBN-13: 978-0712664929
• Product Dimensions: 9.1 x 6.5 x 1.3 inches
• Shipping Weight: 1.1 pounds
• Average Customer Review: 3.0 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (2 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #3,732,906 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

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54 of 66 people found the following review helpful:

3.0 out of 5 stars "The Magus of the North" in THREE CRITICS, October 13, 2000

By 

James C. O'Flaherty (Winston-Salem, North Carolina United States) - See all my reviews

This review is from: Three Critics of the Enlightenment: Vico, Hamann, Herder (Paperback)

My review is limited to the study of Johann Georg Hamann in the present volume, and the three star rating applies to it alone. Combining Isaiah Berlin's books on Vico, Hamann and Herder under one cover was a felicitous idea of Berlin's editor and literary executor Henry Hardy. The position which these thinkers share: their anti-Cartesianism, their emphasis on history, tradition, language and mythology may now be seen through the considerably different lenses they employ. I feel compelled, however, to register a caveat. When the present Hamann study appeared in book form in 1993, I expressed my reservations about it in a letter to the "New York Review of Books," to which Berlin replied. I lamented the fact that he had ignored modern Hamann scholarship, and had clung to the interpretation of Hamann as an irrationalist, especially that espoused by Rudolf Unger in his 1911 book,"Hamann und die Aufklaerung,"ignoring modern discussions of the "dialectic of the Enlightenment." Specialists in the field now consider Unger's interpretation outdated, and see Hamann as a champion of one side of the Enlightenment, albeit a severe critic of its other, extremely rationalistic, side.

The question of Hamann's relation to the Enlightenment turns on the conception of reason. I have maintained that Hamann employed a mode of reason distinct from that of the rationalistic Enlighteners as well as from that of his friendly adversary,Kant. In order to designate that mode, I adopted a term once used by Kant in referring to Hamann's thought,i.e., "intuitive reason," or, in the original German, "anschauende Vernunft." I accepted the term as an apt one for Hamann's mode of thought, however Kant felt about it. Further, I have demonstrated how it can be linguistically distinguished from the traditional logico-mathematical mode of thought in my book "The Quarrel of Reason with Itself"(1988),and elsewhere. It is one which Berlin rightly sees as akin to Dilthey's "verstehen," which Berlin also rejects. He lists a group of philosophers whose conception of reason matches his own: Jeremy Bentham, J.S. Mill, Franz von Brentano, William James, Bertrand Russell and the "Vienna Circle." Most of these thinkers are about as far removed from any kind of "verstehen" as possible. Who then, besides Hamann, may be said to have employed what I have called "intuitive reason"? The prime examples are the great epistemological heirs of Hamann: Goethe and Nietzsche. Goethe belongs here because of his refusal to analyze the "Urphaenomen." Hence, his anti-Newtonian stance. Nietzsche, especially in "Zarathustra," which I have analyzed closely from the standpoint of intuitive reason in "Nietzsche and the Judaeo-Christian Tradition"(1985).

Having stated my reservations concerning Berlin's interpretation of Hamann, I must say, however, that we can be grateful that he has helped mightily to rescue that German philosopher from the obscurity to which he has been unjustly relegated by those who remain under the spell of the strictly rationalistic wing of the Enlightenment. Berlin, in spite of his basic lack of empathy with Hamann, not only recognized his importance, but was always fascinated by him. He was an early and enthusiastic subscriber to "The Hamann News-Letter," which I edited and published in the early 195O's and 196O's. Further, his correspondence with me regarding Hamann over a period of three and a half decades shows an unflagging interest in the man who both attracted and repelled him. In a letter to me of June 25,1972, he wrote: "My passion for Hamann is undiminished." Not too surprisingly, there are certain passages in the present book in which Berlin seems, unwittingly, to move toward a certain degree of empathy,hence to a kind of "verstehen." But such passages are few, and many others are unjustly harsh. Nevertheless, for all its shortcomings, Berlin's study of Hamann is valuable for introducing the reader, especially the anglophone reader, to the historically important pre-Romantic figure, known as "The Magus of the North," without whom the development of German Romanticism would be unthinkable, and whose insights increasingly bear fruit today, especially in theology and philosophy. As Berlin has said: "Hamann repays study."

26 of 38 people found the following review helpful:

3.0 out of 5 stars (Addition to my already posted review), February 4, 2001

By 

James C. O'Flaherty (Winston-Salem, North Carolina United States) - See all my reviews

This review is from: Three Critics of the Enlightenment: Vico, Hamann, Herder (Paperback)

Following that dictum, I might point out that, especially in two areas of contemporary concern, Hamann's thought is highly relevant: Oswald Bayer has shown in Autoritaet und Kritik (1991) that Hamann's hermeneutics -- antedating by two centuries Derrida's reflections on intertextuality -- provides the basis for a devastating critique of deconstruction by subverting the French thinker's concept of the "center," and demonstrating where the true center ("Mitte") is to be located. Further, there is presently a lively discussion among scholars of Hamann's critique of Kant's famous essay: "What is Enlightenment"? Berlin's present study would have done more justice to Hamann's thought by discussing such developments as these and others, which were available during his lifetime.