Nature, Freedom, and Responsibility: Ernst Mayr and Isaiah Berlin - eminent scientists from early 20 century - Abstract

Intersection and Overlap

Berlin's radical suspicion of all doctrines that proclaim an ultimate harmony of all good things, in whatever human dimension, intersects and overlaps Mayr's "Darwinian" critique of all forms of cosmic teleology, Newtonian determinism, and philosophical essentialism. What are we to make of this intersection and overlap, this emphatic return to the everyday world of human beings and broader organic life?

Berlin's skepticism and pervasive critiques are aimed at saving the phenomena of ordinary historical and cultural human life--above all the freedom of choice and action and attendant responsibilities that determine the course of our lives and our futures individually, communally, and culturally. Mayr's critical philosophical and scientific explorations characteristically are meant to appreciate, understand, and promote the diversity of organic life and historical evolutionary and ecological processes. These twin aims are correlative. Moreover, the striking analogies of Berlin's and Mayr's fundamental worldviews, when purged of inherited metaphysical pretensions, ideological agendas, and discernible conceptual errors, are philosophically and morally telling. Both Mayr and Berlin are left with a dynamic world of historical becoming, populated with diversely charactered individuals and communities, facing a future in principle unpredictable. Their worlds are different: the world of animate nature and evolutionary ecological life, and the world of human cultural activity, laced with human significance and meanings unknown for the most part to non-human nature. Nevertheless, the fundamental lineaments or basic ontological structures of these worlds are analogous, if not the same. This correspondence should not surprise us, once we have cleared our heads of inadequate worldviews. We humans are manifestly and undeniably natural organisms, historically and ecologically evolved, human organisms that have carved out and created our own cultural life while remaining within wider evolutionary and ecological nature and processes. On this, both Berlin and Mayr, I think, would agree.

The similarities and the analogies go further. Recall Mayr's crucial move to populational thinking and populational individuals, particular and unique genetically and phenotypically, interconnected and interacting, the ultimate focus of evolutionary and ecological processes. Once Berlin has critically swept away the recurrent metaphysical conception and pretension of a divided human self, higher (true) and lower (worldly)--the higher self belonging to the harmony of all good things (reason, the moral law, God, historical destinies, etc.)--and once he returns to our ordinary, empirical, everyday selves, he finds similarly characterized individuals: diverse, particular, unique, interconnected and interacting, individuals whose sense of themselves as active, free, responsible human agents depends on how many opportunities and avenues of worldly action are open to them and how these opportunities and avenues are valued by their human, cultural milieu (1969:130 n., 131 ff., 154 ff.). In the background to this deeply social conception of individual human life are unmistakable echoes of Mayr's biological individuals leading a natural, interconnected, communal and worldly life in particular ecological niches. The only difference is the "human difference"--an important difference indeed with respect to cultural capacities, realized achievements, and moral action--but a difference that does not change the basic ontological structures of individuals, community interactions, and the historical world.