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ah yea this is the interview where he says it (01:26:00): “i rewrote [the book] every year [for five years]. it went from 600 pages to 98 pages in the last two rounds of revision, and i decided i had to publish it or else it might stop existing”
2 replies01:36:00 “i don’t think there are pre-given, determinate, real human interests… the point of the book is the last sentence - which no one ever reads or comments on. ‘don’t think of this as science or in terms of categories of truth, think about this in terms of degrees of enlightenment’“
01:33:00 “everyone says to me: ‘you’re very pessimistic, very bleak, you give no hope. you have no positive project.’ i’m not a priest; my job is not to give people hope - i’m trying to understand something. i loathe to censor the results i come to jolly people along.”
it’s the very standard philosophy-bro response but i think it means a lot more in the context of the development of a critical theory.
there are so many sickeningly saccharine lefty analyses that are activistic and flacidly gesturing at a positive vision of the future. it’s placative and wishful thinking and misdirects their entire project.
01:44:00 “everyone kept telling me there was this great philosopher immanuel kant[…] i spent 10 years of my life reading and teaching kant. i’m afraid i had the experience every time i read his books that i found his views less plausible and more repellant. why would anyone subject themselves?”
02:07:00 “[the essays in each book] form a kind of mosaic. they aren’t intended to be a strictly reasoned argument from a to b nor necessarily completely coherent. rather they’re intended to be grouped around general topics approached indirectly and illuminated peripherally”
02:25:00 “kant is a form of resistance to the french revolution, and rawls is the ideology of the thatcher-reagan reaction against the progressive forces of ‘45-‘75.”
02:32:30 “we live in a world that is pervaded by lots of assumptions that we can’t fully abstract ourselves from because they’re too much of the air we breathe - they’re a part of the language we speak. although we don’t agree with the implications, if we abstract we make ourselves incomprehensible”
i want to go back and summarize a crucial section around 00:52:00. paraphrasing: “my ideas haven’t changed much since 1971. there is one area that is the exception, and that’s the centrality of the concept of freedom. i thought all these philosophers were talking about the same thing;
there were differences in conception, there were disagreements but there was supposedly one subject matter there that was central and persistent. in the 80s i tried to write a book on that, and failed completely and moved away from that view.
berlin says that people project all the good features of human life positive freedom and it becomes an inflated, distended mess - i wish he would have realized the same is true about freedom as a whole. as i was analyzing the different concepts of freedom for my book, i found 12
(authenticity, self realization, self governance, development of one’s powers, self control, autonomy, unobstructed action, unobstructed wants, unobstructed rationality, unobstructed powers, not deliberately obstructed, etc.). if you lay these out, you don’t get a nice dualistic berlinian picture,
you get a whole array of things. why don’t i simplify my life and talk about these concepts in their own right rather than projecting them into the concept of freedom and pulling them out again? why don’t i save myself the step?
i also became increasingly impressed with something nietzsche says: that freedom is the goal of the slave. it’s a mistake to think that you can universalize from a particular case of desire for freedom from this to a global concept of freedom.