26
PARTISAN REVIEW
Germany: Kant, Fichte, Hegel, the opposite tradition. Then I
discovered Saint-Simon and Fourier, Owen and Sismondi, and
learned about conflicts between Marxism and anti-Marxism in
the latter years of the century. All this was quite different from the
kind of problems in the theories of knowledge or logic, or what–
ever it might be, in which I was professionally engaged as an
Oxford philosopher. That's what really started me off on that his–
torical path, I think. After that I never looked back.
In the end I think I ceased being a professional philosopher
because I found-I think I say this in print somewhere-that I
had a strong desire to know more at the end of my life than I knew
at the beginning. Philosophy is not a subject that leads to an
increase of knowledge about the world-to an increase of insight,
of understanding, of self-knowledge, perhaps. But it is not a
cumulative discipline. No scientist needs to read ancient science.
Physicists do not
have
to read previous physicists. They can start
in the present, at the point reached by physics. A physicist doesn't
need to know the history of physics to be a good physicist. A
writer doesn't have to know of previous writing; a modern histo–
rian does not have to have read ancient historians in order to be a
good historian; he can be so without having read Herodotus,
Thucydides, Tacitus; great historians as they are, they are not
sine
quibus non
for an historian of the nineteenth century anywhere. In
the case of philosophy that is not so. We do not say that there's no
need to read Plato, to read Aristotle, because they are obsolete,
because we have gone far beyond them. The questions Plato
asked are still being asked today. The answers are different, the
methods, the approach, the discussion are different, but the ques–
tions, to some extent, persist. You cannot say: We know more
than Plato did; as philosophers we know more philosophy; we
have no need to read our ancestors-Hume, Kant, Spinoza–
we've got beyond them, they have done their indispensable work,
but their day is over. However modern we are, however anxious
we are to liberate ourselves from the past, we cannot help living in
their intellectual shadow: the relevance of major thinkers
remains. But I , for my part, had a subjective desire to know about
something in the cumulative way, to know more at the end of my
life than when I was young. The history of ideas provided that.
Krauze:
What are you working on at this moment?
Berlin:
Nothing of importance. I still have one more book to write
