J.S. Mill Essay, Research Paper
Content
Essay One: John Stuart Mill and the Ends of Life 2
Essay Two: Political Ideas in the Twentieth Century 7
Essay Three: Two Concepts of Liberty 11
Essay Four: Historical Inevitability 16
ssay One: John Stuart Mill and the Ends of Life .
In this essay Berlin focuses his attention upon one concrete figure, J. S. Mill. Berlin supposes that Mill is one of the greatest theorists of liberty that has ever lived. Mill believed that it is neither rational thought, nor domination over nature, but freedom to choose and to experiment which distinguishes men from the rest of nature. He regarded liberty as more precious than life itself, because life without freedom seems to him like a miserable dwarf-man s existence. Like Nietzsche, he often used the word dwarf in order to show the consequences of human suppression.
Berlin s essay contains three parts: first comes Mill s biography, because it seems that some of his ideas are turned against his father s educational methods. The second part is dedicated to liberty and variety, the third – to such important topic as tolerance. Firstly, the story of John Stuart Mill s extraordinary education. His father, James Mill, like his teacher Bentham and the French philosophical materialists, admitted man as a natural object and considered that a systematic study of the human species could and should be established on firm empirical foundations. He believed that he had grasped the principles of the new science on man.
He was firmly convinced that any man educated in the light of it, brought up as a rational being by other rational beings would be preserved from ignorance and weakness. These are two sources of unreason in action and thought, that was alone responsible for the miseries and vices of mankind. James Mill decided to preserve his son from these ills and brought up little John Stuart in isolation from others – less rationally educated children. His only companions were his own brothers and sisters. The boy knew Greek by the age of five, algebra and Latin by the age of nine. He was fed on some special intellectual diet, which was prepared by his father. No religion, no metaphysics, little poetry were allowed to reach him, because Bentham called them accumulation of human idiocy and error. It was supposed that music could not so easily misrepresent the real world, therefore music was permitted to learn. The experiment was really successful, and at the age of twelve he already possessed the learning of an especially erudite man of thirty. But even with a little knowledge of psychology we may guess what happened. Actually his mind was over-developed and his emotions were violently suppressed. His father had no doubt of the value of this experiment. But in his early adolescence he went through an agonizing crisis. He felt a lack of purpose, a paralysis of will and a terrible despair. He asked himself a simple question: he had been taught to believe in the Benthamite ideal of universal happiness, but if this ideal were realized, would this in fact fulfil all his desires? With horror he acknowledged that it would not. What then was the true end of life? He saw no purpose in existence: everything in the world now seemed dry and bleak. He even thought that he was totally devoid of feeling – a monster with a large part of normal human nature atrophied. Why must he continue to live? He felt that he had no motives for continuing to live. One day he read the memoirs of one French writer and began to cry. This convinced him that he was capable of emotions and with this his recovery began. It took a form of slow revolt against the view of life inculcated by his father and the Benthamites. His views of the nature of man, his history and his destiny were transformed, but by temperament he was not rebellious. He loved and deeply admired his father, and was convinced of the validity of his main philosophical tenets. He stood with Bentham against dogmatism, transcendentalism, obscurantism and all that resisted the march of reason, analysis and empirical science. To those beliefs he held firmly all his life. He continued to admit that happiness was the sole end of human existence, but his conception of what concerned it was very different from Bentham s position, for what he came to value most was neither rationality, nor contentment, but diversity, versatility, fullness of life spontaneity of a man, a group, a civilization. He hated narrowness, uniformity, persecution, the crushing of individuals by the weight of authority or of public opinion. Perhaps this was natural compensation for his own drilled, emotionally shrivelled childhood and adolescence.
Let us pass over the next part of Berlin s essay – variety and liberty. I will try to investigate why men curtail the liberties of others.
Men want to limit the liberties of other men:
a) because they wish to impose their power on others,
b) because they want conformity they do not wish to think differently from others, or others to think differently from themselves,
c) because they believe that to the question of how one should live there can be only one true answer; we may discover this answer with intuition or direct revelation, or a form of life or unity of theory and practice
Mill denies the first two motives as being irrational, because they stake out no intellectually argued claim and therefore incapable of being answered by rational argument. He admitted that men are not infallible, they may have errors. Mill notes that a new experience, a new argument can in principle always alter our views, no matter how strongly held. To shut doors is to blind yourself to the truth deliberately .1 It may well be that without full freedom of discussion the truth cannot emerge, but he also believed that human knowledge was in principle never complete and therefore always fallible and there was no single universally visible truth. We can never tell where greater truth or happiness may lie. There are no limitations of the nature of men, for example there might be very high improbability of men s becoming immortal or growing as tall as Everest. Each man, each nation, each civilization might take its own road towards its own goal, not necessarily harmonious with those of others. Men are altered, and the truths in which they believed are altered, by new experiences and their own actions which he calls experiments of living . Mill believes that man is spontaneous, he has freedom of choice and he moulds his own character. Mill assumes that finality is impossible and that we need fair play to all sides of truth, but he gives bad argument to verify the need of variety that in an imperfect state of the human mind the interests of the truth require a diversity of opinions . He urges us to keep doors open to change.
Mill already perceived that in the name of philanthropy, democracy and equality a society was being created, the majority of men were being converted into industrious sheep . 2 Mill was against those, who for the sake of being left in peace to cultivate their gardens, were ready to sell their fundamental human right to self government. It seems that these characteristics of our lives today he could have recognized with horror. He avoids uniformity, when we read the same things, listen to the same things, see the same things, go to the same places, have our hopes and fears directed to the same objects, have the same rights and liberties and the same means of asserting them. He remarks that it is the habit of our time to desire nothing strongly. Its ideal of character is to be without any marked character, to maim by compression like a Chinese lady s foot. Mill predicts standardization of life as negative tendency of industrialization. To my mind the solution might be in admitting variety, tolerance and freedom to expand itself and perhaps then it will be the lesser harm for mankind. Interesting that one the one hand Mill advocates democracy, on the other hand he criticizes it. He wondered whether centralization of authority and inevitable dependence of each on all and surveillance of each by all would not end by grinding
1 I.Berlin J.S.Mill and the ends of life // Four essays on liberty p. 187.
2 Ibid., p.194.
all down into a tame uniformity of thought, dealings and actions, and produce automatons in human form and liberticide. Tocqueville had written pessimistically about the moral and intellectual effects of democracy in America. Mill agreed. He said that even if such power did not destroy, it prevented existence. It compressed, enervated, extinguished and stupified a people and turned them into a flock of timid and industrious animals of whom the government is a shepherd. The only cure for this is more democracy, which can alone educate a sufficient number of individuals to independence, resistance and strength. Without the right of protest and the capacity for it, there is for Mill no justice.
He believed if all mankind minus one were of one opinion, and only one person were of a contrary opinion, mankind would be no more justified in silencing that one person than he, if he had the power would be justified in silencing mankind. He fought against all kinds of suppression both totalitarian and by public opinion. According to Mill, an individual is not accountable to society for his actions, insofar as these concern the interests of no person but himself. The only reason for which power can be rightfully exercised over any matter of a civilized community against his will is to prevent harm to others. Mill insists upon that you can indeed stop bad men from perverting society with false or pernicious views, but only if you give men liberty to deny what you yourself call bad is such, otherwise your conviction is founded on mere dogma and it is not rational. He notes that mankind will be greater gainers by suffering each other to live as seems good to themselves, than by compelling each to live as seems good to the rest. Mill supported the sexual freedom. He declared that what any person might freely do with respect to sexual relations should be deemed to be an unimportant and purely private matter which concerns no one but themselves. For him man differs from animals as a being capable of choice, one who is most himself in choosing and not being chosen, the rider and not the horse. Mill longed for the widest variety of human nature and character. He saw that this could not be obtained without protecting individuals from each other and above all from the terrible weight of social pressure, and this led to his demands for toleration. The variety is impossible without tolerance.
And so, thirdly, the tolerance. What was really amazing to me reading J.S. Mill, was the fact that toleration implies a certain disrespect. He declared that when we deeply care, we must dislike those who hold the opposite views. He asked us not necessarily to respect the views of others very far from it only to try to understand and tolerate them; only tolerate; for without conviction, without some antipathetic feeling, there was, he thought, no deep conviction; and without deep conviction there were no ends of life. Without tolerance the conditions for rational criticism are destroyed. He supports reason and toleration at all costs. To understand is not necessarily to forgive. We may argue, attack, reject, condemn with passion, but we can not suppress or stifle: for that is to destroy the bad and the good, and is tantamount to collective moral and intellectual suicide. Sceptical respect for the opinions of our opponents seems to him preferable to indifference. But even this attitude is less harmful than intolerance or an imposed orthodoxy, which kills rational discussion. But I might ask a simple question: where are the limits of tolerance? Is it limitless? I suppose not. But are demagogues and liars and blind fanatics always in liberal societies stopped in time, or refuted in the end? How high a price is it right to pay for the freedom of discussion? Very high, no doubt. Damage or probability of damage to the interests of others can alone justify the interference of society in the life of an individual. The actions of aforementioned demagogues and fanatics often involve damage, therefore they must be dealt with by society.
Mill believed that men are wise, enlightened and rational, if properly educated, they are capable of reasonable choice, but in fact it is merely an ideal. Approximately in the same time, but in quite different circumstances Dostoevsky had admitted that people by nature are weak, and only rare ones among them are capable of choice. Also Berlin maintained that the mass neurosis of our time is agoraphobia. Men are terrified of disintegration and of too little direction. They ask, like Hobbes s masterless men in a state of nature, for walls to keep out the raging ocean, for order, security, organization, clear and recognizable authority, and are alarmed by the prospect of too much freedom, which leaves them lost in a vast, friendless vacuum and desert.
J. S. Mill s theory is still one of the clearest, most candid and persuasive expositions of the point of view of those who desire an open and tolerant society. Reading Mill it seems that he is saying something true and important about some of the most fundamental characteristics and aspirations of human beings. Actually today the critics of Mill have on the whole exceeded the number of his defenders. Berlin claims that Mill had antiquated psychology and a lack talent to foresee anything of the future, but I believe that he perceived many contemporary tendencies like standardization, fear of freedom and conformity.
Essay Two: Political Ideas in the Twentieth Century
This essay was firstly published as an article in the American journal Foreign Affairs in 1949 during the last years of Stalin s regime. The politicians of Western Europe were interested in the ideology of the Soviet Union, therefore one part of this essay is dedicated to socialism as one of the main tendencies in the twentieth century. Even thirty years later Berlin claimed that general tendencies of this article are still actual and important. The creed of this essay is Trotsky s idea: Anyone desiring a quiet life has done badly to be born in the twentieth century. Indeed in the twentieth century the world has suffered two world wars, many revolutions and revolts. Not only particular individuals, but also whole generations have tragic destinies. Sometimes it seems that this is the age of violence, intolerance and cruelty. It seems to me significant that there were possible two totalitarian regimes – Fascism and Communism. I suppose we can not answer the question: why in the twentieth century totalitarianism was possible at all?
Berlin emphasizes that in the political thought there are two opposite tendencies: liberalism and socialism. They created two great liberating movements humanitarian individualism and romantic nationalism. Liberals believed in the unlimited power of education and the power of rational morality to prevail economic misery and inequality. Socialists, on the contrary, believed that without radical alterations in the control of economic resources and in society we cannot attain the sufficient solution. Conservatives and socialists believed in the power and influence of institutions and regarded them as a necessary safeguard against the chaos, injustice and cruelty caused by uncontrolled individualism. Anarchists, radicals and liberals looked upon institutions as such with suspicion. Berlin considers that on the one hand all movements in the twentieth century have origins, forerunners and imperceptible beginnings in the previous centuries, on the other hand there are sharp differences between the political movements of the twentieth century and, for example, the nineteenth century. But sometimes we can not realize where is a barrier which divides what is unmistakably past and done with from that which most characteristically belongs to our day. Many of the seeds planted in the nineteenth or eighteenth century have flowered only in the twentieth. In the nineteenth century there was a belief that the problems of individuals and of societies could be solved if only the forces of intelligence and of virtue could dominate over the ignorance and wickedness. They believed that human beings could solve all clearly understood questions with moral and intellectual resources at their disposal. No doubt different schools of thought gave different answers to these varying problems.
In the twentieth century there is a belief in non-rational solutions. Berlin stresses that one of the elements of the new outlook is the notion of unconscious and irrational influences, which conquer the forces of reason. Consequently the answers to problems exist not in rational solutions, but in the removal of the problems themselves by means other than thought and argument. The old tradition saw history as the battle – ground between the easily identifiable forces of light and darkness, reason and obscurantism, progress and reaction. Berlin acknowledges that Freud is the greatest healer and psychological theorist of our time. Freud has discovered that the solution to our problems we may seek not only in rational thought and consciousness, but also in irrational drives and the unconscious. Freud came to the conclusion that in the process of psychoanalytical therapy the problems that seem permanently important to the patient vanished altogether. They vanished because their psychological sources had been diverted or dried up. The problems which appeared at once overwhelmingly important vanish from the patient s consciousness like evil dreams and trouble him no more. It consists in altering the outlook that gave the problem an opportunity to originate. The person that doubts the validity of political institutions is thereby relieved of his burden and freed to pursue socially useful task. It means that the role of the reason or the intellect is not so powerful as we habitually think. Berlin considers that this change of attitude to the function and value of the intellect perhaps is the best indication of the great gap which divided the twentieth century from the nineteenth.