Doomed to choose...

Seamus Perry, pluralism, and poetry

Berlin was a brilliantly effervescent and life-affirming figure, but the consequences of his pluralism can sometimes seem pretty dark. ‘We are doomed to choose,’ he says. ‘And every choice may entail an irreparable loss.’

Part of the fascination of pluralism lies in this extraordinary emotional range: Berlin’s pluralism, edged with tragic feeling, is utterly unlike the ebullient multifariousness of James’s universe: pluralism, for all its anti-monistic virtues, has become a problem. Berlin does not understate the precariousness of the sorts of decision which are the only ones possible: it is all a matter of ‘promoting and preserving an uneasy equilibrium’, he says, one ‘which is constantly threatened and in constant need of repair’. Williams puts it even more starkly: ‘We have no coherent conception of a world without loss.’ This is a consequence of the pluralism of that world, a world full of necessarily unrealised possibilities.

Of course Berlin was a political philosopher, but in a way, as Williams astutely remarked, his real interest was not in polities but in personalities: ‘the tension between conflicting values in one consciousness’. From this perspective, I am struck by a phrase in Berlin’s great book Four Essays on Liberty in which he refers to ‘the moral or emotional or intellectual collisions, the particular kind of acute mental discomfort which rises to a condition of agony from which great works of the human intellect and imagination have sprung’. What might this pluralist ‘agony’ have to do with works of imagination? Berlin was a deeply literary person and keenly responsive to the literary thinking of his time. (Four Essays is dedicated to Stephen Spender.) But it is William Empson whom I would adduce here as a literary context for Berlin’s pluralism. In a book published in 1951, while discussing the theories of I.A. Richards, Empson comments: ‘It may be that the human mind can recognise actually incommensurable values, and that the chief human value is to stand up between them.’ To ‘stand up between them’ is not exactly to harmonise or reconcile or resolve those plural values, but somehow to keep yourself upright while remaining cognisant of both. It is very much in the spirit of Berlin’s unsteady balancing act, and speaks to something that the young Empson had written years before: ‘Life involves maintaining oneself between contradictions that can’t be solved by analysis.’

From Seamus Perry’s recent LRB lecture. In my view, critics like Mikhail Bakhtin and Viktor Shklovsky and maybe even György Lukács offer more useful ways to understand this cluster of Jamesian-Berlinian ideas (pragmatic pluralism?) and their ability to “explain” literature. English critics love Empson too much, and here he comes close to simply reasserting negative capability. In fact, he goes beyond Keats and makes it (speculatively) the “chief human value”! (Isn’t that a creeping back towards a make-shift monism?) And of course this was essential to Empson’s ambiguity method.

But if we are going to take these ideas seriously, surely they need to be used for some purpose? The simple standing between values sounds so vacant… what happened to the idea that literature might actually be useful? Perry does account for this, but in ways that seem rather narrow to me:

This sort of inner conflict, this ‘acute mental discomfort’ of which Berlin speaks, could push you over the edge; but there may be something to hand: poetry. ‘The effort of writing a good bit of verse has in almost every case been carried through almost as a clinical thing,’ Empson says, writing with what feels like an autobiographical reference. ‘It was done only to save the man’s own sanity.’ Or, as he put the same point in a letter, ‘poetry is insincere unless it is clinical, resolving conflicts in the author and thus preventing him from going mad.’ Auden, in his less categorical moments, would have thoroughly agreed that poetry might emerge from the difficult experience of a diversity of goods. ‘Art arises,’ he writes in a later essay, ‘out of our desire for both beauty and truth and our knowledge that they are not identical.’ We want things two ways, which analysis says we cannot have; but for a moment a poem lets us, in a way that discursive prose, for instance, cannot.

This is surely one of the uses and functions of poetry, but it seems to shrink from the concrete aspect of life. What would Samuel Johnson make of it all? “Books without knowledge of life,” he said, “are useless; for what should books teach but the art of living?”

Battle between Carnival and Lent, 1559, Pieter Bruegel the Elder, Kunsthistorisches Museum