BOOKS
293
of Independence rests on "undeniable" and "self-evident" truths. In
American intellectual history Berlin 's categories do not seem to work
well. Indeed some of the most profound American expressions of
freedom came from a writer who offered both a "positive" message for
overcoming alienation by virtue of mind's ability to realize its "divine
self," and a "negative" strategy for resisting the encroachments of the
state by virtue of mind's ability to take its own stand against the
molestations of society-Thoreau 's
Walden
and
Civil Disobedience.
Berlin remains convinced that Machiavelli's wisdom lies not in dis–
covering the reality of power but in recognizing as an "insoluble
dilemma" that there are no real answers to basic problems and thus
"those who wished to survive had to tolerate error." "This,"
Ber:~n
observes, "is the dagger of which Meinecke speaks, with which Machi–
avelli inflicted the wound that has never healed. " One might add that
Lincoln helped heal that wound by bringing back into politics the very
Christian moralism that Machiavelli had purged from his theory of
statecraft. "God cannot be for and against the same thing at the same
time, " Lincoln wrote on the eve of the Civil War. On moral issues like
slavery Machiavelli's "realism" may tolerate evil as well as error. "We
have to fight this battle upon principle and upon principle alone, "
Lincoln reminded America.
Students of American culture may also find it difficult
to
share
Berlin 's enthusiasm for Giambattista Vico, the hero of the volume of
essays. Berlin celebrates Vico's startling claim that while we cannot
know the world of nature because it is God-made, we can know the
human and social world in so far as we have created it.
It
is not only
that the founding fathers saw no distinction between the laws of nature
and those of God. More troublesome is the fact that the natural world
remains accessible to scientific investigation only to the extent that its
animistic and spiritual attributes have been demystified, while the
man-made world remains almost inscrutable precisely because human
activity refuses to reveal its ambiguous motives and purposes . A
Vichian would regard as incomprehensible the natural behavior of the
white whale, not the tortured imagination of he who pursued it. Vico
needs to be revised by Melville: with God dead, man is the problem,
and that is the deeper "wound."
JOHN PATRICK DIGGINS
