by Beatriz Silva
“November is a mournful month in the history of Palestine,” Edward Said began his eulogy in memory of Sir Isaiah Berlin in 1997 (box 60, folder 23, Series II. 2). With the news of Berlin’s passing came an outpour of newspaper articles written by the philosopher’s admirers, friends, and scholars, honoring the man who remains one of the major liberal thinkers of the Cold War. Said’s text, published in the pan-Arab newspaper Al-Hayat, went relatively unnoticed. In the first few paragraphs, the Columbia University professor remembers a man with whom he shared intellectual roots: a skilled orator and a philosopher with an astonishing breadth of knowledge that extended well beyond philosophy. The second part of the text takes an introspective turn, as Said confesses to the reader: “None of us [Palestinians]—and I do not excuse myself at allwere able to engage with Berlin on the question of Palestine.” With this reflection, Said hints at an aspect of Berlinian scholarship that persists inadequately addressed: the British philosopher’s unwavering commitment to the state of Israel and, most importantly, his dismissal of the experiences of Palestinians since 1948. In highlighting what has tended to be written off as a mere footnote in Berlin’s life, Said suggests a re-evaluation of the Oxford don’s liberal theory by asking: who was Isaiah Berlin’s liberalism for?
The two intellectuals met for the last time at a London restaurant in 1996. “Unfailingly cordial,” as Said described Berlin’s treatment of himself, “he called out to me and insisted on chatting briefly with me about the eighteenth-century Italian philosopher Vico.” Berlin and Said’s shared interest in Giambattista Vico indicates that the two academics shared more in common than one might expect. Their immigrant experiences in the Anglophone world were, without a doubt, different in important ways. Born in the Russian Empire, Berlin fled political instability and antisemitism at a young age, moving to London with his family in 1921. He became an assimilated, celebrated philosopher who walked the corridors of power in Washington DC during World War II, and a close friend and confidant of major political figures—notably Israel’s first President, Chaim Weizmann. From a different generation, Edward Said was born in Jerusalem to a Palestinian-Lebanese mother and a Palestinian father with American citizenship. In the lead-up to the Nakba and the creation of the state of Israel in 1948, he would move to Cairo, back to Ramallah, then to Beirut, and finally to the United States. Said became a preeminent voice in the Palestinian diaspora. Unlike Berlin, his sense of identity remained hardly resolved throughout his life. “Out of place,” as Said put it himself, the Literature Professor was uncertain as to where he belonged. Despite their differences, both thinkers were products of Western higher education, members of an intellectual elite, and self-proclaimed enthusiasts of high culture. In the late 1970s, when both Said and Berlin were engaging with Vico’s ideas in their work, the American Professor wrote a review of Vico and Herder: Two Studies in History of Ideas: a seminal text that made Berlin’s name for canonizing the so-called “counter-enlightenment” thinkers of the eighteenth-century. Said described the manuscript as an “extraordinarily lucid, sensitive, and tendentious exposition” (box 78, folder 12, Series II. 4). At a time when the natural sciences and rationality triumphed over divine providence, the Italian philosopher represented to both a man who insisted on placing human subjectivity at the forefront of knowledge creation. Language, text, and symbolism still played a central role in the making and interpreting of reality. “One of the true founders of the social sciences,” Berlin and Said’s appreciation for Vico’s humanist impulses reflected their own.
In great part as a result of Berlin’s influential expositions, Giambattista Vico is known today as the father of “historicism.” The notion that history is a result of narrative formation and human interpretation—that what matters is “not what evidence is there, but rather what evidence you can invent,” as Said proposed—was compelling to both immigrant intellectuals. However, it led them into separate directions in their own time. As B. A. Haddock argued in 1980, and others have pointed out since, interpretations of Vico in the twentieth century often run into methodological difficulties. The Neapolitan thinker has been studied by a range of schools of thought, from structuralists and Marxists to existentialists and even empiricists. For Berlin and Said, narrative-making in history takes particular significance when one considers the issues that separated the two: the state of Israel, national identity, and the exilic condition of Palestinians from the mid-twentieth century.
Eight years after publishing Vico and Herder, in 1984, Berlin recounts in a letter to Scottish literary critic Karl Miller that he had been cautioned not to read the latest issue of the London Review of Books, for he risked canceling his subscription over the text of a Columbia Professor. The issue in question featured Said’s seminal “Permission to Narrate,” a text that explores the one-sided coverage of the 1982 Lebanon war and where the author condemns American media for not allowing Palestinians the space to describe and document their experiences of colonization and dispossession. Vico provided an avenue through which Said articulated his perspective of reality, particularly in his emphasis on the centrality of narration: “Facts do not at all speak for themselves, but require a socially acceptable narrative to absorb, sustain and circulate them,” he contended. Here, he alludes to the fact that Palestinian exile since 1948 had not produced a narrative deemed convincing enough by the world’s great powers to propel some sort of acknowledgment or recognition. In the Palestinian case, unquestionable facts represented by all means a “non-narrative” in the Western public sphere. Said would continue to mention Vico as a source for his humanism, arguing in a 2003 piece for Le Monde diplomatique that it was in this philosophical tradition that one could find pathways for true equality between Israelis and Palestinians.
Although Berlin never expressed surprise that Said had a markedly different perspective than his when it came to Israel, he was in no way sensitive to the latter’s Vico-inspired argument. “It is clear to me that the Arabs of Palestine have suffered an injustice,” he wrote in a letter exchange with Edward Mortimer in 1983, “the question therefore is whether the misery of the Jews, and the danger to them in Muslim as well as Christian countries, did not outweigh the wound inflicted upon the Arabs.” To the British philosopher, brought up by a devoted Zionist mother, nationalism had saved the Jewish populations when assimilationist policies in the interwar period had failed. With the creation of the state of Israel, Jewish populations were now “straight-backed,” as he describes in Jewish Slavery and Emancipation, with a home for themselves like other European nations. As Fania Oz-Salzberger observes, it is no secret that Berlin had an exceptionally secure sense of belonging grounded on his relationship with his Jewishness, which was uniquely tied to Israel. Informed by his childhood and personal experiences, Berlin attached great importance to the idea of the home and the human need to belong not simply to survive, but to thrive. As proposed by Avishai Margalit, “home” was not just a state of mind in this context, but it warranted a material, geographical space—the homeland. This belief runs throughout Berlin’s reflections about the Jewish condition and his texts on nationalism. In this sense, the British philosopher was not interested in “counter-enlightenment” and romantic thinkers on strictly scholarly terms or out of pure intellectual curiosity. Berlin grew to adhere to the premises undergirding modern nationalism. In “The Bent Twig: A Note on Nationalism,” Berlin expresses his ambivalent reading of nationalism, both denouncing the dangers of this modern ideology for its propensity for radicalism (its “brutal and destructive side”) and representing it as an inevitability, even as a source of salvation for minorities in Europe and beyond (“a pathological form of a self-protective resistance”). But if there was a part of Berlin that understood nationalism as a recent phenomenon, even as a “form of false consciousness,” the philosopher ultimately surrenders to it. In building his own nationalistic narrative, Berlin exceptionalized the Jewish experience to the point where accepting that others could be subjugated to the same conditions that had led to the marginalization of the Jewish people was no longer possible. In this zero-sum logic, each “group” should look out for themselves—and Berlin was a Zionist.
Edward Said must have been a perplexing figure to the Oxford don: capable of de-stabilizing the solid ground under which Berlin’s theoretical and personal views laid, pushing the limits of his “tempered liberalism” over the edge. Writing to Arthur Schlesinger in 1993, Berlin describes Said’s criticism of the Oslo Accords: “ […] ridiculous, like most of what he says and writes. It proves that sincerity and weak-mindedness and vanity can all go together.” The aversion Berlin developed over the decades to Said mirrors the one he had towards another monumental figure in twentieth-century political thought, Hannah Arendt. As Kei Hiruta persuasively demonstrates in Hannah Arendt and Isaiah Berlin: Freedom, Politics and Humanity, it was Arendt’s different way of conceiving of her own Jewishness that triggered Berlin’s contempt the most. If the Russian-born thinker always found Arendt’s “fanatical” and opinionated disposition off-putting, it was from the 1940s onwards—and especially after she covered the Eichmann trials in the New Yorker—that he developed an outward animosity towards the German-born philosopher. Beyond differences in temperament, as Hiruta posits, Berlin’s hostility to Arendt stems from how the philosopher understood the Jewish condition in relation to other historical instances of statelessness, dispossession, and genocide, as well as his personal insecurities as someone working safely from the United States throughout most of the 1940s. Arguing that the Jewish condition and the events of the Holocaust should not be read within “normal moral categories,” Berlin found Arendt arrogant and disrespectful toward the victims of the Shoah. How Arendt and Said deployed and articulated their cultural identities presented a form of counter-narrative that did not align with Berlin’s monolithic understanding of what it meant to be “Jewish.”
In Liberalism in Dark Times, Joshua Cherniss suggests that Berlin’s pluralism was combined with an “ethical” outlook of humanism: “ […] humanism prizes and promotes a disposition of ‘humanity’ […] as a guide to moral deliberation. ‘Humanity’ is what allows us to recognize another as similar to us in crucial ways.” One can plausibly ask how Berlin’s anti-cosmopolitanism and dismissive attitude towards struggles that demanded a reckoning with his own convictions might change how we conceive of his “humanist” liberalism. Certainly, Berlin was far from the exception when it came to the position of liberal intellectuals concerning Israel-Palestine throughout the second half of the twentieth century. Said recalled his disappointment when meeting with the great French intellectuals of the day in 1979, realizing that the only Arab cause that garnered sympathy around the table was that of the Algerians. In contrast, Berlin was primarily involved in ongoing debates about the predicaments of the state of Israel. Arie M. Dubnov suggests it is necessary to employ a “dual lens” to understand Berlin’s “liberal” and “Jewish” nationalist commitments in their historical context. However, rather than reading these two aspects of Berlin’s thought as separate from one another conceptually and analytically, Said posed the opposite question. Writing about the British philosopher for the last time, he asked what one should make of Berlin’s liberalism considering—not despite—the latter’s unwillingness to utter the word “Palestinian:” “The contradiction in all this is plain: that Berlin was a liberal, a man of fairness and compassion, of civilized moderation in everything except where Israel was concerned.”
Beatriz Silva is a master’s student completing a double degree in International and World History at Columbia University and the London School of Economics.
Edited by Artur Banaszewski
Featured Image: Photograph of Edward Said. Courtesy of the University Archives, Rare Book & Manuscript Library, Columbia University Libraries.
