February 1, 2004
Artforum and Isaiah Berlin
Reading the very long "Global Tendencies: Globalism and the large-scale exhibition" roundtable discussion in the November 2003 Artforum led me back to Isaiah Berlin's "The Pursuit of the Ideal", collected in The Proper Study of Mankind. (The link will hopefully take you to the first page of the essay via Amazon.com's "Look Inside the Book" feature.)
"Members of one culture can, by the force of imaginative insight, understand (what [Giambattista] Vico called entrare) the values, the ideals, the forms of life of another culture or society, even those remote in time or space."
"It is what I should describe as pluralism--that is, the conception that there are many different ends that men may seek and still be fully rational, fully men, capable of understanding each other and sympathising and deriving light from each other...."
"Claims can be balanced, compromises can be reached: in concrete sitautions not every claim is of equal force....The best that can be done, as a general rule, is to maintain a precarious equilibrium that will prevent the occurrence of desperate situations, of intolerable choices--that is the first requirement for a decent society."