Enlightenment

Berlin's counterargument focused specifically on those "derivative" countries, offering Giambattista Vico (1668–1744), Johann Georg Hamann (1730–1788), Johann Gottfried von Herder (1744–1803), and Immanuel Kant (1724–1804) as the bearers of a genuine, indigenous, and innovative agenda alternative to the mainstream Enlightenment of France and Britain. Vico rejected the existence of a timeless, universal natural law that could be explained by mathematics or logic. Mathematics was certain only because it was a human invention; it did not correspond to an objective structure of reality. Mathematics was a method only, not a body of truth, and while it could explain what happened in the world, it could not explain why or to what end. Human beings had no access to the final causes or purposes of nature. What they could know were human truths, human behavior, and human motives. These human truths were particular, not universal—that is, each nation developed its own standards of beauty, truth, and goodness. Because different nations asked different questions of the universe, they came up with different answers.

Hamann represented the distinctly antirational strain of Berlin's Counter-Enlightenment. For Hamann too truth was particular, never general. As a human invention, reason was a tool for the arrangement and classification of data to which nothing in reality corresponded. The true language was divine: Nature, plants, animals, and society were the symbols by which God communicated with his creatures. To understand was to be communicated with, either by people or by God. True knowledge was direct perception—experience—not logical proof. Only love, the most intimate form of direct experience, could demonstrate anything. Through the medium of Herder, Berlin placed a hermeneutic of empathy at the center of his Counter-Enlightenment. To understand something was to understand its individuality and unique development. Only by entering into the experience of another, through the imagination and rigorous scholarship, could one understand the organic structure of society. Berlin emphasized what he (not Herder) called the "incommensurability of cultures" that "should flourish side by side like so many flowers in the great human garden."

Kant's autonomy of the will represented the fourth aspect of Berlin's antirational Counter-Enlightenment. Figures of the Counter-Enlightenment recognized that the model of the universe espoused by Cartesianism, rationalism, and natural law was inherently deterministic (in that all motion was caused by previous action and conformed to specific natural laws) and fatalistic (no action could violate those natural laws). Applied to society, such a view divested human actors of their moral responsibility. If all action was regulated by nature, then an individual could blame the system of the universe for any evil perpetrated by himself. In response, Kant held that only as independent actors—not acted upon by previous or external forces—could human beings be considered moral agents.

All of this amounted to a tacit apology for hermeneutics: the emphasis on language as the defining characteristic of a nation; cultural particularism and the uniqueness of each; the attempt to understand by entering the experience of another in an act of empathy. Even if the methods and assumptions of the Counter-Enlightenment differed from the mainstream rationalists, the goals and values described by Berlin nevertheless sound distinctly similar to those described by Pappe: cosmopolitanism, pluralism, tolerance, and social reform. Indeed to those who championed the Enlightenment from the end of World War II to the 1970s, eighteenth-century social thought was a convenient platform from which to display their own liberal sensibilities.