Liberalism and heroism: the terms defined and the tension stated

We may start by defining our terms, but this is no easy matter. Liberalism is a much-contested (and much-abused) concept, associated with a wide range of regimes, discourses, theories, policies, achievements, and disasters.Footnote ¹⁴ There is no single “liberalism,” but only many liberalisms. Nevertheless, the term is frequently and fruitfully associated with a political outlook that sets a premium on the promotion and preservation of individual freedom, understood primarily in terms of the ability “to make as many effective decisions without fear or favor about as many aspects of [one's] life as is compatible with the like freedom of every other.”Footnote ¹⁵ This commitment inspires several further features often associated with liberalism: insistence on placing limits on the power that any body of human beings, but particularly the state, can exercise; separation of the social and political worlds into distinct realms; the safeguarding of individuals’ opportunities to move from sphere to sphere; and a more general valorization of choice and mobility—and thus variety, open-endedness, and unpredictability.Footnote ¹⁶ Liberalism is closely allied to constitutionalism and representative government (which constrain and desanctify political powerFootnote ¹⁷), and to political, social, and ethical pluralism. These commitments involve a certain double-sidedness of disposition. On the one side, many variants of liberalism celebrate human potential, and express hopefulness about the possibility for growth and improvement (both individual and social) through the application of reason, knowledge, education, legitimate political institutions, sound economic policies, and the profusion and exchange of human differences.Footnote ¹⁸ On the other, many liberalisms are marked by an apprehensive view of politics and society; an awareness of the fragility of freedom, peace, and order; the vulnerability of individuals; the frailty of human wisdom and virtue; the terrible dangers of power, intolerance, fearfulness, and unreason; and the misguided confidence that one is in the right and can do no wrong.Footnote ¹⁹

Definition is scarcely easier with heroism, to which no really stable or consistent content can be adduced—save, perhaps, that heroes are exceptional.Footnote ²⁰ But what renders them such, and what the implications of this are, vary widely. Different cultures, epochs, and individuals identify very different values and virtues as heroic: Achilles, Galahad, Napoleon, Lincoln, Florence Nightingale, Che Guevara, and Rosa Parks represent rather different sorts of person. Heroes’ status and function(s) also vary widely. In terms of status, heroes may be exemplars, or exceptions: they may be seen as exemplifying qualities of which all human beings are capable, or as superhuman, defying the ordinary limits of human nature.Footnote ²¹ Heroes may be leaders or mavericks, but there is also a “demotic” conception in which heroism is located in the struggles of ordinary people to be more than ordinarily good. Heroes may serve as models to be emulated, illustrations of what it takes to achieve great things, inspirations who affirm the potential of humanity, idols to be worshipped—or warnings of the disaster that comes from excess.Footnote ²² The relationship of heroism to morality is ambiguous. Enormous in capacity or energy, heroes may commit enormities in action. By dint of being “great,” they may not be good—or may be beyond good and evil.

I have drifted, in the previous paragraph, from heroes to heroism—or from the figure and functions of heroes to a heroic ethos (I will return to this distinction). We can draw out an account of the latter by looking (in an admittedly stylized, simplified way) at the content of different historical conceptions of heroism. Let us start with the Greek heroic tradition—one distant from modern liberalism, in its presupposition of a fundamentally hierarchical order to the world, and a valuing of “honor, power, and fame” above all else.Footnote ²³ The classical tragic hero is defined by his (or her: remember Antigone—or Medea) refusal to yield; not only courage or pride, but endurance of extraordinary suffering, defines the heroic disposition.Footnote ²⁴ This is typically presented as an expression not of (moral) principle, but of thumos, or spiritedness.Footnote ²⁵ If the Christian or morally purist hero says, “Let justice be done though the heavens may fall,” the Greek hero seems inclined to declare, “Let my own will be done, or my own nature be affirmed, though the heavens may fall on me and all around me.” As Mark Fisher notes, Greek heroes’ unyielding ambition and stubborn pride made them “difficult friends and family members”—and dangerous (though also, in some circumstances, necessary) political leaders, just as their uneasy relationships with equality, juridical procedure, and compromise made them poor democratic citizens.Footnote ²⁶

This ancient Greek conception of heroism was one point of reference for Berlin. But his thinking about heroism was far more influenced by Romanticism. For Berlin, Romanticism was central to modern (European) conceptions of heroism—and the idea of heroism was central to Romanticism, at the very “heart” of which lay “the worship of the heroic martyr.”Footnote ²⁷ As with the ancient Greeks (or the protagonists of such epics as Beowulf or The Battle of Maldon), the capacity to endure, and propensity to inflict, suffering was a feature of Romantic heroes. Like these earlier warrior-heroic ethics, Romanticism valued “conflict, war, self-immolation against compromise, adjustment, toleration,” and “commitment, self-surrender and self-assertion against … prudence, calculation, realism.”Footnote ²⁸ But now heroism also came to be defined by qualities of integrity and devotion to an ideal; thus it is located in the subjective quality of feeling rather than the (objective) validity of the goal, and takes the form of “violent, continuous, irresistible expression of the inner vision” and worship of an “absolute principle,” through “utter defiance of all that obstructed and opposed a man in the worship of the inner light.”Footnote ²⁹ This had an ambiguous relationship to morality. For many Romantics, any self-assertive defiance, any commitment to some goal, whether properly moral or not, was heroic. Vehemence as such—or, in Nancy Rosenblum's phrase, “unconstrained self-assertion,” expressing a sense of “limitless power, possibility, and independence”—came to be the hallmark of the hero.Footnote ³⁰ This reached its most extreme form in the celebration, or transmogrification, of antiheroic figures as heroes: Faust, Karl Moor, Don Juan, Manfred (and his creator, Byron).Footnote ³¹

These (and other) historical notions of heroism hardly seem liberal. Liberalism—or, at least, the form of liberalism most often associated with Berlin and his contemporaries and immediate successors, and, arguably, with the larger project of liberal constitutionalism—offers not heroic liberation, but a “fearful, self-protective” defense of liberty. According to critics, and even some defenders, liberalism's tendency is to sap the militant spirit of heroism, diverting humanity from war to trade, from idealism to materialism, from self-sacrifice to narrow selfishness.Footnote ³² The heroic “ethos of endless, insatiable striving” violates the ethos of mutual respect among morally equal individuals that liberalism demands, and threatens the personal security and civic peace that liberalism seeks to secure.Footnote ³³ Where heroism is necessarily exclusive, liberalism aspires (or claims) to be inclusive; liberalism generalizes and reconciles, while heroism insists on uniqueness and demands deference (we are dealing here, of course, in ideal types, if not in caricatures). Liberalism thus seems inhospitable to heroism, and a heroic ethic seems unsafe for liberalism.Footnote ³⁴

Heroism as problem and resource in Berlin's liberalism

Berlin himself acknowledged, even emphasized, tensions between heroism and liberalism. He stressed the incompatibility between the cultural ideals of a “brutal, stern, oligarchical, ‘heroic’ society” (e.g. that of the Homeric Greeks), composed of “harsh and avaricious masters … ruling over slaves and serfs,” and those of modern societies,Footnote ³⁵ and linked “Romantic heroism” not only to “positive” conceptions of liberty, but to nationalism, imperialism, and—in its most “pathological” form—fascism and totalitarianism.Footnote ³⁶ Following Vico, he connected these differences in ethos to differences in both language and political regime, drawing a contrast between the “poetic” language of heroic, oligarchic societies and “the humane, prose-using democracies.”Footnote ³⁷ Indeed, democracy itself—particularly liberal, parliamentary democracy—threatened, as Sorel had warned, to undermine the very possibility of heroism, because it fosters (or aims to foster) a spirit of compromise, concessions, conciliation.Footnote ³⁸

Berlin clearly did admire the sincere, wholehearted pursuit of an ideal, undertaken through struggle and in the face of suffering, which he associated with heroism (and, more precisely, with Romantic heroism). His writings reveal a recurrent attraction to quixotic figures who swam “against the current,” particularly among the Russian intellectuals for whose “moral and intellectual heroism” he had such great admiration and affection.Footnote ³⁹ He found, and honored, this spirit both in obscure figures, such as the Catholic aristocrat Auberon Herbert,Footnote ⁴⁰ and in Churchill, whose wholehearted, reality-defying commitment to realizing a deeply held ideal enabled him to save Britain, and change history.Footnote ⁴¹ Yet this was not a way of being that Berlin himself endorsed. It is telling that, in titling the summation of his worldview “The Pursuit of the Ideal,” he chose the title ironically, insofar as the main burden of the essay is to warn against identifying any one single goal to pursue, or pursuing any single goal too single-mindedly. Against the heroic pursuit of some absolute ideal, the essay articulates a deliberately antiheroic program, defined by the need to “avoid extremes of suffering” by “promoting and preserving an uneasy equilibrium, which is constantly threatened and in constant need of repair.” Admittedly, this was not “the stuff of which calls to heroic action by inspired leaders are made,” and would seem “flat” to those desiring a heroic mode of life.Footnote ⁴² But, as Berlin had written decades earlier (not without irony or ambivalence),

Berlin here sets up an opposition between emotionally and aesthetically elevating heroism, and a morality defined by decency, respect for the rights of others, and self-restraint in conformity to shared norms of mutual forbearance and toleration. Having lived through the 1930s, and seen the ways in which the longing for heroic greatness had led his contemporaries to embrace antiliberal ideologies and behave with reckless disregard for others in their personal relations, he was keenly aware of heroism's divergence from, and danger to, “moral decency” (which he identified, in one late-life interview, as his favorite virtue).Footnote ⁴⁴ Berlin found this opposition between a humane, liberal ethos and that of martial heroism expressed by Ivan Turgenev (a figure with whom he often identified), quoting the declaration by one of Turgenev's characters that “I am devoted to … civilisation … this word … is pure and holy, while all the other words, ‘nationality’, for example, or—yes, or ‘glory’, smell of blood.”Footnote ⁴⁵ This sense of heroism's moral ambiguity extended to Churchill, whom Berlin described in print as a “mythical hero” and “the largest human being of our time.”Footnote ⁴⁶ Yet, on meeting Churchill, he reported being repulsed by the great man's “brutality, his contempt for the lesser breeds without the law, his lust for war, his odious doctrine about the need … for a permanent reserve of unemployed as a source of efficiency.”Footnote ⁴⁷ When he heard that Churchill had been defeated (by the immensely unheroic Atlee) in 1945, Berlin danced a jig.Footnote ⁴⁸

Berlin's self-description as a “natural hero-worshipper” was, indeed, qualified and ironic: as he went on to write, “I long for a flag: I should readily suppress truth, sign petitions supported by specious reasoning, attack old friends, behave like a partisan, if I found a cause or a leader I wholly believed in: perhaps I can only say this so confidently because I know I shall not find such a one: no feet to sit at.”Footnote ⁴⁹ He clearly perceived the tension between his penchant for hero worship and his liberalism—and recognized that he was incorrigibly inclined to both. But if he had doubts about his attraction to heroic figures, he also had misgivings about his own doubting, moderate, even timorous, character. According to his biographer, Berlin wished that he could have been “one of life's noble intransigents—those who did not bend, but made others submit to their will”: his heroes were mostly “fiery, implacable,” “hard, difficult, ‘impossible’ characters.”Footnote ⁵⁰ He often seems to have feared that he was what his hero Alexander Herzen saw in the novelist Turgenev: “a feeble ally, a reed that bent too easily before every storm, an inveterate compromiser.”Footnote ⁵¹ In declaring, “I think nothing true without endless qualifications,” he added, “I wish I were one of those monolithic characters with a clear conception of right and wrong and went steadily forward regardless of things, persons and ever-present possibilities of error, like Toscanini. That is why he is to me such a hero.”Footnote ⁵² Against the “neutrality of the attitude … timidity … insecurity, and terror of being committed, of saying something irrevocable” that he found in the work of Henry James, he declared his preference for “the rhetorical exclamations of the 19th century about love or honor & immortal properties, inner freedom, etc.”Footnote ⁵³ He also revolted against the anti-Romantic, cynical, and deflationary spirit he detected in Marx,Footnote ⁵⁴ and the “becalmed,” dispirited mood he found prevailing in postwar culture.Footnote ⁵⁵

Following the crises of the 1930s and the horrors of world war, the Holocaust, and Stalinism, Berlin feared two dangers. One was the force and allure of fanaticism—particularly collective, ideologically hardened fanaticism. The other was a turn to conscientious, humane, but narrow-minded technocracy. This might protect against the greatest of evils—the poverty and social discord that had afflicted democracies in the interwar period, and the horrors of totalitarianism. But it left too little room for human variety and enthusiasm. As he wrote in 1949,

In such an atmosphere, the very errancy of heroic souls might be politically beneficial. Writing of the “legendary hero” of the Israeli war of independence, Yitzak Sadeh, Berlin acknowledges Sadeh's moral shortcomings, but, against Sadeh's disapproving in-laws (including Berlin's own parents), emphasizes Sadeh's virtues of “reckless, lion-hearted courage,” vitality, generous feeling, rich imagination, and appetite for life and for action. Sadeh was “one of life's irregulars, wonderful in wars and revolutions and bored with peaceful, orderly, unexciting existence.”Footnote ⁵⁷ While too much of the spirit represented by Sadeh “would ruin any possibility of order,” some element of it “is something which no society should lack if it is to be free or worthy of survival.”Footnote ⁵⁸ Such evaluations reflect an ethical–aesthetic outlook: they reveal a sense of what is necessary to render a human life—and a society in which many human lives take shape and intersect—worthy of praise, pursuit, and defense. (This perspective carries with it a certain a looseness—a lack of a firm, defined line between morally acceptable and unacceptable degrees or forms of grandness of character—which will represent a significant weakness, even danger, in the eyes of many of Berlin's fellow liberals.Footnote ⁵⁹)

Berlin's desire to preserve some space for heroes and heroism in human life had a further aesthetic–ethical dimension. This lay in its connection to his preoccupation with the possibilities for human agency in history. Berlin believed that, if human beings were not able to make choices between alternatives for themselves, and translate these choices into actions that could affect the shape of their lives and the lives of others, then human moral judgments would be rendered incoherent or vacuous, and human life would be denuded of meaning and import. This desire to vindicate human agency is reflected in Berlin's first major work. In his biography of Marx (1939), he relished the paradox that Marx's impact, contrary to his own philosophy of history, revealed the power of individuals and their visions to shape history. It is also clear in his accounts of such world-historical figures as Churchill, Roosevelt, and Weizmann and his lengthy essay “Historical Inevitability” (1954) and other writings on the philosophy of history.Footnote ⁶⁰ Ethically, this opposition to determinism and attachment to human agency was connected to Berlin's rejection of “realism”—the exaltation of strength over and against scruples, and identification of victory with validity. Berlin associated this with the “big-battalions” view of history, which “derived morality from historical success,” and thereby encouraged the “identification of what works with what is good, of what is right with what succeeds,” and “that which crushes resistance, with that which deserves to crush resistance.”Footnote ⁶¹ Aesthetically, Berlin found the irregularity arising from human action deeply satisfying, and the idea of a fixed, orderly historical progression dreary. Thus “anything that upsets careful predictions, the general assumption that vast impersonal forces are guiding our faltering footsteps in directions unknown to us … pleases me immensely. There is no limit to my pleasure in the unforeseen and fortuitous.”Footnote ⁶² Or, more pithily, “I don't want the universe to be too tidy.”Footnote ⁶³

For Berlin, heroes are the great breakers of historical necessity (rather than the vehicles through which this necessity operates, as maintained by his polemical opponent E. H. Carr or communist orthodoxy); their emergence vindicates the possibility of individuals being agents, acting on the world and not merely being acted upon by “vast impersonal forces” before which they are prostrate. Accordingly, Berlin invoked the idea of historically transformative heroism against determinism. “If the notion of the hero who makes or breaks a nation's life springs from an illusion,” this remains a “persistent, obsessive and universal illusion, to which the experience of our own time has given powerful support”—even if that support came from cases of individuals whose historical impact one might deplore, such as Lenin or Hitler. In any case, Berlin ventured to hold this belief to be “not delusive, but a true view of society and history.” In at least some instances, heroic individuals act as “the authors of revolutions that permanently and deeply alter many human lives” and, by their interventions, make “what seemed highly improbable in fact happen.”Footnote ⁶⁴

Emphasis on individuals was central to Berlin's aesthetic evaluations as well as to his historical judgments; and he saw this as characteristic of liberalism. Thus he wrote that “Turgenev, and liberals generally, saw tendencies, political attitudes, as functions of human beings, not human beings as functions of social tendencies. Acts, ideas, art, literature were expressions of individuals, not of objective forces of which the actors or thinkers were merely the embodiments.”Footnote ⁶⁵ The focus of Berlin's work as a historian of ideas on individual figures, and his emphasis on the way in which they had altered the course of human thought and culture (often unintentionally, imperceptibly, or long after their deaths), thus manifested what, for Berlin, were deep ethical, and characteristically liberal, commitments.

An emphasis on the historical agency of individuals could foster a “great-man” theory of history just as brutal as the big-battalion view. It was thus important for Berlin to identify heroism with individual defiance of external necessity, but not with the imposition of one individual's (or some small elites of individuals’) will on others. Although he deeply wished to believe in the significance of individual action on history, Berlin did not define heroes in terms of their historical impact (as other defenders of freedom in history who turned to the figure of the hero did.Footnote ⁶⁶) Hence his attraction to, and emphasis on, Romanticism's exaltation of “unavailing individual protest, or heroic opposition, in the name of individual beliefs, to outside pressure, opposition which was not guaranteed to win, whose value, indeed, for earlier Romantics, consisted in the purity of the principles adopted or the disinterested passion with which they were defended, whether or not against great odds.”Footnote ⁶⁷ Tellingly, asked late in life “which military achievements do you admire most,” Berlin cited three examples of smaller, beleaguered forces defending their nations’ liberty against overwhelming odds: Marathon, the Maccabean revolt, and the Battle of Britain. In response to questions about his “favorite figure in history,” “favorite heroines in real life,” and “heroines in history,” Berlin named Lincoln, Hanna Senesh, and Mme Roland respectively; the latter two had suffered defeat and grisly death; the former was murdered shortly after achieving imperfect victory. (His “heroes in real life” he identified, simply, as “liberators.”Footnote ⁶⁸)

But how to distinguish defiant, even Quixotic, heroism from either bullying (which Berlin hated above all things: in the same questionnaire he declared that the historical figures he detested most were “bullies,” and the quality he detested most “heartlessness”Footnote ⁶⁹), or mere masochism? A (partial) answer can be found in Berlin's accounts of his own heroes—and particularly his characterization of his artistic heroes.

Artistic heroism and the pursuit of the aesthetic–ethical ideal

Berlin wrote very little about, and seldom expressed admiration for, martial heroes. Perhaps more surprisingly, while he published several accounts of political heroes,Footnote ⁷⁰ the individuals he tended to identify as heroes, or to describe in heroic or quasi-heroic terms, were typically not professional politicians (about most of whom Berlin was ambivalent),Footnote ⁷¹ but intellectuals and artists. And while his writings are replete with references to literature, especially Russian literature, Berlin often expressed his hero worship most ardently in his discussions of musical figures. Foremost among these musical heroes was the conductor Arturo Toscanini, whom a young, enthusiastic Berlin declared “the greatest man in the world,” later adding, “My admiration for him both as a person & as an artist I really cannot exaggerate.” This adulation of Toscanini, Berlin recognized, offered an outlet for his inclination to hero worship: “I like finding heroes very much … and Toscanini is obviously a good genuine one, & I can let myself go & collect picture postcards of him without restraint.”Footnote ⁷²

What was it that Berlin so admired in Toscanini? Partly it was his “unbending” strength of will, expressed both in his refusal to bend to tyrants, and in his obstinate pursuit of his musical vision (which could itself become tyrannical). But this strength of will was yoked to a moral vision: one consisting of “19th century ideals of human liberty” and humility before musical and moral ideals greater than oneself. It was because Toscanini was both proud and “almost painfully disciplined, painfully self-effacing before the desires of the composer,” that he was “the most morally dignified & inspiring hero of our time.”Footnote ⁷³ Finally, in Toscanini these moral qualities were inseparable from aesthetic aims, and invested them with a distinctive pathos: as Berlin's biographer states, Berlin found in Toscanini's performance of Fidelio (itself a great expression of “humanistic piety”Footnote ⁷⁴) “moral conviction and musical expression fused in a moment of awesome feeling.”Footnote ⁷⁵

Many of these same qualities were embodied in the Busch Quartet, Berlin's other great musical heroes of the 1930s (and after),Footnote ⁷⁶ whose performance of the repertoire in which they specialized—the Austro-German classics—was distinguished not simply by “artistic accomplishment” or “depth of understanding,” but by “the participation of these in a very definite moral attitude,” consisting in a “disinterested” “striving after an end.”Footnote ⁷⁷ They embodied an ideal of “absolute artistic incorruptibility, of unhesitating surrender to the composer, and … awareness of the value and dignity conferred by the work upon its executant,”Footnote ⁷⁸ as well as an “extreme purity and seriousness … [and] moral nobility.”Footnote ⁷⁹ Berlin connected this moral quality not only to aesthetics, but also to politics. For him the Busch Quartet embodied “the bourgeois virtues, the passionate working of the not to be transgressed against rights of the individual.” In the “extreme nakedness and colossal seriousness” of their playing, “all the frightful patter about self-realizing individuals & freedom in obedience to law appears unsullied & true.”Footnote ⁸⁰

This is surprising, since Berlin would condemn such “frightful patter” as a dangerous, antiliberal mystification or delusion in “Two Concepts of Liberty.” Yet for him, the Busch Quartet were able to combine single-minded dedication to an ideal with the preservation of individuality. One never forgot that they were “four free and distinct individuals, each with his own peculiar artistic attitude, which is distinguishable even while it contributes itself to the whole, each aware of the equal and independent rank of his instrument, which is allowed to rise to its full stature among the others,” in contrast to quartets in which “everything is surrendered to purchase symmetry and smoothness; the individual differences are not reconciled but eliminated, and the residue acquires an inevitable tinge of something passive and oppressed.”Footnote ⁸¹ Through a mix of dedication to a shared goal, which they all freely recognized, and respect for the individuality and equality of each member, the Busch Quartet was able to resolve the tension between collaboration and independence, subordination and freedom, in a way that Berlin's work, with its emphasis on the incompatibility of ideals, suggests is seldom possible, particularly among larger, more heterogeneous groups of individuals, and in the contentious realm of politics.

The Busch Quartet's was not the only way of resolving problems of conflict and choice, nor the only one that could attain heroic heights. Whereas for the Busch Quartet (and Toscanini) “there is no sense of deliberate choice between alternatives, of doctrine pressed home against encircling and eliminated possibilities,” in the playing of another artistic idol of Berlin's, the pianist Artur Schnabel, “the actuality which he develops moves forward in conscious opposition to the unrealised potentialities.” For the former, “there is no sense of conflict; the musical process is one of harmonious, natural, unquestioning self-revelation”; while with Schnabel, “conflict arises at every stage. What one admires is the genius disclosed in each decision.” Here, “The intellectual strain is much greater, the tension much severer, problems are presented and some are resolved, some not, but the urgency of all of them gives the whole process an aspect at once more tragic and more personal.”Footnote ⁸²

From this, I do not think it too much (though it is more than Berlin explicitly does) to generalize to a contrast between two types of heroism, both involving the overcoming of obstacles in dedication to some ideal. One—the Toscanini–Busch approach—involves a sense of singleness of purpose, the terribilità, or sense of “fierce and implacable necessity,”Footnote ⁸³ which Berlin found thrilling and elevating in great art. Whether in art or in life, this approach created an intense pathos, the nobility and coherence of which satisfied both aesthetic and ethical senses. Yet it also involved a denial—or at any rate a more or less momentary suspension of awarenessFootnote ⁸⁴—of the reality of pluralism, and it could inspire tremendous inhumanity and impose terrible suffering. On the other hand, the approach represented by Schnabel recognizes pluralism, and the imperfection of any choice, while nevertheless conveying an aesthetic thrill and an ethical achievement, in the pathos of an individual struggling with difficult decisions and making choices in the clear-sighted knowledge that these involve sacrifices. This recalls Caryl Emerson's incisive remark that, for Berlin, “honor is precisely the ability to live fully while being horribly torn between equally desirable but incompatible goods.”Footnote ⁸⁵

While Berlin did not characterize Schnabel in the same heroic terms as he did the Busch Quartet and Toscanini, the acknowledgment of choices made and alternatives forgone conveyed by Schnabel's playing connects to another virtue he emphasized in his aesthetic, and intellectual, heroes. This was honesty or truthfulness, understood as involving a steadfast resistance to wishful thinking and the lure of simplicity, self-restraint in imposing one's preferences and preconceptions on reality, and, at the same time, a dogged commitment to acknowledging what one finds to be true. Thus Berlin evoked “the heroic quality” of the Russian critic Vissarion Belinsky's “grimly undeviating, perpetually self-scrutinising honesty of mind and feeling,”Footnote ⁸⁶ and wrote of the Bengali poet, playwright, and polymath Rabindranath Tagore:

As this suggests, Berlin linked heroic honesty both to artistic activity and to a political stance which courageously resisted “magnetisation” to extremes or surrender to partisan orthodoxies,Footnote ⁸⁸ without abandoning commitment to ideals, or to the role of moral witness, for which artists and intellectuals were particularly suited. Berlin's characterizations of his artistic heroes repeatedly evoke a heroic struggle to remain true both to their own ideals and perceptions, and to the experiences that they have endured. He praised the recently deceased Joseph Brodsky for being “unswervingly” and “uncompromisingly” dedicated to his values,Footnote ⁸⁹ and Brodsky's poetic mentor Anna Akhmatova as an “unsurrendering human being,” who through her art and her manner of living bore witness both to “humane values” and to the sufferings inflicted on her, and upon the Russian people, by the Soviet state.Footnote ⁹⁰ Berlin thus associates artistic heroism with two quite distinct forms of honesty or integrity: a cultivation of inwardness and individuality—being true to oneself and defending one's inner world—and responsiveness to reality and fidelity to experience.

This returns us to the tension, as well as the potential for mutual reinforcement or enrichment, between liberalism and heroism—and the relationship of both to aesthetics. We may, with audacious stylization, identify contrasting heroic and liberal aesthetics (that is, affective and expressive modes of being, which motivate certain sorts of conduct of life, shaping the way in which ideas are expressed and lived). The former impels toward action and self-assertion, and dispositions or responses of defiance and endurance. The latter impels toward receptivity, dispassion, reasonableness, and sober self-restraint.Footnote ⁹¹ As exemplified by Berlin through the figure of Turgenev, this aesthetic of “liberalism and moderation … took the form of holding everything in solution—of remaining outside the situation in a state of watchful and ironical detachment, uncommitted, evenly balanced.”Footnote ⁹² At the same time, Berlin noted that a liberal aesthetic often has a Romantic–heroic element as well: it enjoins not only receptivity, self-questioning, and openness, but the self-respect to stand one's ground, to cultivate, remain true to, and claim rights for oneself and for others. It took, Berlin insisted, “a good deal of courage” for liberals “to resist magnetization by either polar force” in a conflict, since the “middle ground is a notoriously exposed, dangerous and ungrateful position. The complex position of those who, in the thick of the fight, wish to continue to speak to both sides is often interpreted as softness, trimming, opportunism, cowardice.”Footnote ⁹³ The refusal to simplify the situation, or oneself, requires its own form of noble constancy. Even Turgenev (sometimes) “showed courage, the courage of a naturally timorous man determined to overcome his terrors”Footnote ⁹⁴

Both dimensions—of defiance and self-assertion, and openness and self-restraint—are necessary to the development of a liberal culture: a culture marked by the coexistence of individuals who recognize one another as fellow individuals, with the mutual respect for individuality exhibited by the Busch Quartet—albeit without the unity of aim that chamber artists are able to sustain.Footnote ⁹⁵

Coda: liberalism, aesthetics, and heroic exemplification

Berlin's focus on heroism in artistic activity evades crucial problems of politics, which involves a sort of interpersonal subordination and coercion—and, at extremes, violence—that need not present themselves in the realm of art. (As terrifying as Toscanini could be, he had no police force or army at his call.) Artistic decisions and performances do not shape the “basic structure” within which individuals live and peoples strive; artists may starve for their art, but they do not cause the starvation of populations. It is also, as Berlin recognized and emphasized, dangerous to treat politics as an aesthetic endeavor—or at least to do so after the fashion of those Romantics who came to envision great political leaders as artists creatively reshaping human “material” to their will, thus imposing a tyranny of “art over life”—or of the creative will (or ego) of some individuals over others.Footnote ⁹⁶

While he rejected this sort of political aestheticism, Berlin did engage in a strategy of aestheticizing the heroic ethos, in order to reconcile it to liberalism. He did so in a triple sense. First, he relocated the heroic ethos to the narrowly aesthetic realm, as a feature of both the content and the production of works of art. Second, his writings invite us to reconceive what it means to be heroic in terms of qualities exhibited in aesthetic as opposed to political activity: heroism is identified with serving ideals in an expressive or communicative capacity, rather than mastering human beings.Footnote ⁹⁷ Third, Berlin underscores the limits and dangers of a heroic ethos by identifying its merits as aesthetic, not moral: the example of heroes may be sublime, inspiring, beautiful, while also being recognized as morally questionable—particularly in politics, where consequences are particularly far-reaching and potentially dire, and responsibility for consequences is accordingly more compelling relative to individual expression.Footnote ⁹⁸ Yet this only went so far: Berlin's own conception of art, as being concerned with the expression or communication of character, visions, and beliefs,Footnote ⁹⁹ and his conception of ethics as being concerned with the broad question of how to live a life, “what to be and do,”Footnote ¹⁰⁰ rather than moral duty narrowly conceived, meant that aesthetics and ethics were not wholly distinct.

In articulating a liberalism that was as much ethical–aesthetic as it was narrowly political, Berlin drew on notions of heroism in two senses. My discussion has largely centered on how he dealt with what we might call “the heroic,” or a heroic ethos. But, as noted above, the figure of the hero can be defined functionally rather than in terms of content: as a commanding, exemplary figure. It is, indeed, this sense that Berlin (often) seems to have in mind when he describes himself as a natural hero-worshipper: he was inclined to look to the inspirational example of individuals rather than to the reassurances of doctrine. Appropriately, heroic exemplification as a mode of inspiration and guidance is not theoretically developed by Berlin; it is instead illustrated incidentally, when Berlin describes Albert Einstein as living “an exemplary life” in the sense of “being, and being seen to be, one of the most civilized, honorable, and humane men of his time.” Einstein presented “a heroic image of a man of pure heart, noble mind, unusual moral and political courage, engaged in unswerving pursuit of the truth, who believed in individual liberty and social equality.” He thereby embodied “a combination of human goodness with a passion for social justice and unique intellectual power, in a society in which many seemed to live by the opposite values.”Footnote ¹⁰¹

This may have its own uncomfortable implications for liberalism. To be guided by admiring responses to the example of others endows such “heroes” with a power that clashes with the egalitarianism, legalism, rationalism, and skepticism toward authority favored by many liberals. But this approach—of exemplification on the one side, and (discriminating rather than unquestioning) admiration on the other—also has advantages from a liberal perspective. It can invest liberal ideals with an emotional, motivational force that more impersonal, theoretical forms of liberalism struggle to evoke; it affirms the value of individuality, to which so much liberalism is committed; and it offers a mode of political and moral pedagogy that may convince by inspiration instead of indoctrination, and resonance rather than logical necessity. It may also enrich liberalism, repairing the rationalism, proceduralism, and institutional orientation that may hinder not only the inspirational force, but also the capacity for political understanding, of liberal theory.

Berlin's scattered discussions of heroism, and his own sense of the heroic, point to the need to balance Romantic and liberal sensibilities and dispositions of individual pride, defiance, and self-assertion with humility, moderation, and self-restraint. Doing this is a terrifically difficult task; Berlin's own work suggests that there are no easy recipes or solutions. But his practice of identifying and evoking heroes does contribute something to this goal. First, it does so by fostering a sympathetic appreciation of others, so that unheroic sensibilities can see the value of heroic ones, and those with aspirations toward heroism can see that heroism takes many forms, including humble endurance and truthfulness. Second, it may inculcate respect for the human impulse to swim against the current, to pursue some self-chosen ideal, to insist on one's own complex and crooked humanity in the face of overwhelming odds and enormous pressures. Insofar as this is a compelling vision of heroism, those ideological and political systems that dishonor and crush such capacities (i.e. totalitarianism) will be revealed to be ugly; those ways of life and dispositions of character (we may call them liberal) that honor and foster such capacities will be revealed to be not merely safe, but potentially noble and beautiful.