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  3. When the late Isaiah Berlin was knighted, a friend joked that the honour was

When the late Isaiah Berlin was knighted, a friend joked that the honour was

游客2023-12-05  17
问题     When the late Isaiah Berlin was knighted, a friend joked that the honour was for his services to conversation. The distinguished theorist of liberalism was indeed a brilliant talker and feline gossip. Readers of Berlin’s letters will find that same bubbling flow of malice, wit and human insight on the written page.
    A first set of letters came out five years ago. To coincide with Berlin’s centenary year—he lived from 1909 to 1997—his literary executor, Henry Hardy, and a team of co-editors have now brought out a second fat volume. The verbal pressure is higher still, for in 1949 Berlin began dictating to a machine.
    Biographically the letters take the reader through Berlin’s professional ascent from clever young don to Oxford professor, public educator and transatlantic academic star. They track the consolidation of his social position as an intellectual jewel of the post-war British establishment. Three or four footnotes a page introduce perhaps 1,000 or more politicians, public servants, academics, musicians and socialites whom Berlin knew or talked about. For that alone, his letters are a unique record of a bygone milieu.
    Berlin did not write on oath. He ladles praise on correspondents only to dismiss them in letters to others as gorgons or third-raters. During the Suez crisis in 1956 he writes to the wife of the Prime Minister, Sir Anthony Eden, that her husband has shown "great moral splendour". The next letter, to Berlin’s stepson at Harvard, calls the British action "childish folly". His capsule judgments are sometimes apt, sometimes sneering. He calls Sir Peter Strawson, an eminent contemporary philosopher, provincial.     Berlin is sharper still on his own thin-skinned self. He belittles his large philosophical gifts, finds publication an agony and worries to correspondents that his work is rot.
    Mr. Hardy says that these letters represent perhaps a fourth of those Berlin wrote in 1946-1960. There are none back to him. So here is Berlin in his own ironical voice, as selected by editors. A reader only of these letters may well ask why Berlin had such grateful pupils and devoted friends. And why was he among the foremost liberal thinkers of the age? A selection of old and new tributes, The Book of Isaiah, also edited by the tireless Mr. Hardy, partly answers both questions.
    Thinkers such as John Rawls defended liberal principles with more argument. Among historians of ideas, Quentin Skinner did more to professionalise their discipline. No one had Berlin’s gift for dramatising and personalising abstract ideas.
    Berlin kept returning to three core convictions. Freedom from constraint by others(negative liberty)is more urgent or basic, he argued, than freedom to realise your potential(positive liberty). The left distrusted that distinction and the right misappropriated it, while philosophers continue to pick it over. He thought, secondly, that liberalism fails if it cannot validate the universal need to belong.
    But perhaps Berlin’s strongest conviction was that the basic commitments—to friendship and truth, fairness and liberty, family and achievement, nation and principle—clash routinely and cannot be smoothly reconciled. Thinkers and politicians should admit the conflicts, Berlin implied, and not blanket them with doctrine or tyrannically attempt to subordinate some concerns to others.
    The first two of those ideas crop up here and there in these letters. In personal form, that third conviction—that people are to be taken in full, not in formulae—runs throughout, and was surely one source of Berlin’s charm. More volumes of letters are to follow. Readers will wonder what self-mocking Berlin would have made of this growing monument. He was an erudite wit at the dinner table and, as the reader now sees, in his letters. But he was a thinker first, and for his thought there is no substitute for his essays. [br] According to the passage, Berlin would NOT agree on the idea that______.
选项 A、philosophers should stay away from politics
B、the commitment to liberty is not always higher than to family and friendship
C、people are complicated and should not be oversimplified
D、philosophical theories can be made more interesting
答案 A
解析 推断题。从第四段伯林对苏伊士危机期间英国首相艾登的行为予以置评来看，他是关心政治的，可推测他不认为哲学家应当远离政治，故正确答案为[A]。根据第九段首句可知，伯林坚信“人们对友谊与真理、公平与自由、家庭与成就、民族与原则等事物所承担的基本义务常会彼此冲突，并且不可顺利地调和”，而且主张人们承认这些冲突，而非加以掩盖或试图使其中的某些忧虑屈从于另一些，由此可见，伯林并不认为某些义务是永远高于另一些义务的，第十段也进一步说明，伯林认为人必须全面地加以理解，不能简化为一堆公式，因而[B]和[C]都是符合伯林学说的，故排除；第七段末句指出伯林的特长在于他将抽象观念戏剧化、拟人化地加以表现的禀赋，可推测他应当认为抽象的哲学可以变得生动有趣，故[D]也应当为伯林所赞同的，因此排除。
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