ISAIAH BERLIN
17
ists. I can easily think of performing artists who are not in the least
neurotic. Nevertheless, there is an
art
that springs from wounds:
Dostoevsky, Kafka, Pascal, Rousseau are extreme examples of artists
of this well-known type.
Krauze:
Or even Tolstoy. . .
Berlin:
Tolstoy, indeed. I mean,
if
a competent psychoanalyst had treated
any of these people, I don't know what we would have got in the way
of literature; or if Beethoven had been psychoanalyzed in his youth; or
Mozart for that matter. Knowledge does not always increase freedom.
If
you know that you have cancer, the knowledge is useful but it does
not liberate. You try realistically to do what you can. But perhaps you
would have been happier if you had not known. Ignorance can be
bliss. I am not pleading against either knowledge or happiness, I
merely wish to point out that not all values are necessarily compatible.
I am not saying, of course, that all ultimate values collide. They
do not. But they do so often enough to create a dilemma, and the
question then arises as to what to do. This happens every day. When–
ever you have limited resources, there is going to be a problem.
Should we build a church or a cinema? Spend our resources on an
artificial lung for the gifted X, or save the ordinary Y and Z from
starvation? Choices often involve loss. Should I satisfy the pious or
people who love this particular form of art, save the talented painter
and poet, and ignore the others-or merely offer them my sympathy?
Some thinkers have supposed that in a perfect world this
wouldn't happen. I cannot see that.
If
we speak of a perfect world,
such conflicts must not occur in it-and
if
the incompatible values are
no longer incompatible, they come to be recognizable-we do not
know what such a world would be like.
If
these ends are still human
ends, some of them may collide in whatever world we can imagine as
a possible human world. How can we imagine a world in which total
spontaneity and efficiency, or the imagination of a Homer and of a
civilized philosopher, go together? Hence we have to resort to what in
English are called
trade-qffs.
So much liberty for so much equality, so
much organization for so much spontaneity; and this, of course, is not
very acceptable to people because.. .
Krauze:
It's not glorious enough... .
Berlin:
It
is not glorious, not exciting. Young men are not deeply inspired
by the ideal of a perpetually uneasy equilibrium, which is the only
thing that can keep things going without grave suffering and injustice.
How much mercy for how much justice? Who shall decide? Some say
