BERLIN, ISAIAH, AGAINST THE CURRENT. ESSAYS IN THE HISTORY OF IDEAS, OXFORD, OXFORD UNIVERSITY PRESS, 1981.

(COLMEX)
Berlin fue un terico social y poltico, filsofo e historiador de las ideas. Naci en 1909 y muri en 1997. Aunque naci en Letonia, en aquellos tiempos parte del imperio ruso, desde muy temprana edad emigr junto con sus padres a Inglaterra, escapando del antisemitismo sovitico. La introduccin que trabajar fue escrita por Roger Hausheer, especialista en Berlin. Llaman la atencin los tres primeros epgrafes con los que comienza el libro: A man of clear errs grievously if he imagines that whatever is seen confusedly does not exist: it belongs to him, when he meets with such a thing to dispel the mist, and fix the outlines the ague form which is looming though it.J.S. Mill (p. XIII) La obra de Berlin puede diferenciarse de la de otros historiadores de las ideas por sus estudios enfocados en Vico, Hess y Sorel. El estudio profundo del siglo XIX lo convirti en un especialista de la poca, a la que consider como clave para entender las nociones del siglo XX. But what makes these essays so strikengly original and exciting is the sense we are given of the gradual birth of seminal new ideas, of the emergence since the mid-eighteent century of some of the great cardinal notions of the modern world. (p.xiv). Hausheer proporciona una idea muy interesante sobre lo que es la historia de las ideas: There is a growing feeling that investigation of what men had thought and felt and then the basic ideas in terms of which they have seen themselves and framed their aspirations, may provide a more luminous source of light in the study of man than the established social, political and psychological, sciences for all that many of these have developed and apparatus of specialized terminology and the use of empirical, quantitative methods. (p.xvii) Justamente este prrafo nos da idea de que el mismo surgimiento de la historia de las ideas se fundamenta en este siglo, y tal vez slo haya podido ser posible a partir del desarrollo de las ciencias polticas y de la psicologa. La cita prosigue: The history of ideas, because it attempts (among other things) to trace the birth and development of some of the ruling concepts of a civilization or culture through long perios of mental change and the reconstruct the image men have of themselves and their activities, in a given age and culture, probably makes a wider variety of demands upon its practitioners that almost any othe discipline, or at least demands whiich are special, and often painful (p.XVII) Hausheer propone en un prrafo un requisito bsico para la investigacin en historia de las ideas:

the capacity to enter into and understand from inside forms of life wholly different from his own(p.XVII) Hausheer prosigue: An though the analogy is far from perfect, the history of ideas at its best may be able to do for culture what psychoanalysis claims to be able to do for the individual: to analyze and lay bare the origins and nature not, it is true, of motivation and hidden springs of behavior, but of the after implicit, deeply embedded formative ideas, concepts and categories some of which are more provisional and open to historical change than could have seemed possible before the last half of eighteenth century- by means of which we order and interpret a mayor part of our experience, above all in the peculiar human spheres of moral, aesthetic and political activity; and in so doing enlarge both our self-knowledge and our sense of the scope of our creative liberty (p.XVIII) Huasheer descubre un punto comn entre la mayora de los filsofos de todas las escuelas: That reality, whatever mere appearances may indicate, to contrary, is in essence a rational whole where all things ultimately cohere (p.XVIII) El siguiente prrafo me puede servir como una justificacin al inicio de mi tesis en el siglo XIX al considerar al mtodo cientfico cartesiano, como nica forma de acceso a la realidad. La psicologa vista tal vez como hbrido ciencia-filosofa que contribuir con las actividades de un Estado positivista en crear una verdadera ciencia poltica: They suppose that there exists (at least in principle) a body of discoverable truths touching all conceivable questions, both theorical and practical that there is, and can be, only one correct method or set of methods for gaining access to these truths and that these truths, are universally valid. (p. XVIII) Contina: Their procedure usually takes the following form: they first identify a privilege class of indubitable entities of incorrigible propositions, claiming an exclusively logical and ontological status for these and assigns appropriate methods to their discovery, and finally, with a gusto that has deep psychological roots in the instinct for both order and destruction reject as not real or confused, or at times non sense what cannot translated into the type of entity or proposition which they have chosen as the impregnable model. (p.XVIII) A mi parecer la postura de Berlin pose paralelismos con la obra de Thomas Khun, Las revoluciones cientficas. En mi tesis creo firmente a esta poca, el siglo XIX, como un periodo de institucionalizacin de la experiencia sobre la psicologa y el adolescente. El mundo del adulto es el mundo hegemnico:

Berlins keen sense of irreducibility wide variety of kinds of experience and types of proposition and of the impossibility of expressing them in or translating them out into one type of proposition or of analyzing all the contents of the universe in terms of one basic kind of entity or stuff is here given free expression in the spheres or logic and epistemology. Things are as they are, and we do well not to analyse away what makes them uniquely themselves. (p.XIX) Uno de los trabajos ms sobresalientes de Berlin tienen que ver con Emmanuel Kant: The basic empirical content of what a culture saw and Heard, thought and felt might change but Little, if at all but some of the models in terms of which it was viewed might be transformed. Many of these models collide with one another; and some are rendered obsolete by their failure to account for a sufficient number of facets of experience to be replaced by others which while they may be more accommodating, often close some of the doors opened by the models they replaced. (pp. XXI-XXII) Justamente esta este es el estado de la cuestion que pretendo analizar en la primera o segunda parte de la tesis. La confusin esta en mezclar la parte terica sobre propuestas de aproximacin a la historia de las ideas y a la historia conceptual o/y poner un ejemplo historiogrfico de cmo las obras se han aproximado al tema. Los conceptos y palabras son considerados como parte de un proceso de ordenamiento y concrecin de nuestra experiencia. Nuevamente una justificacin de la importancia de la obra de Rousseau adems de ser uno de los primeros tratados sobre los adolescentes: Perhaps the profoundest and more far reaching shift in general ideas since the Reformation and one still powerfully active in our world today is the revolt, which first became articulate in the second third of the eighteenth century at first in Italy and then with gathering force in the German speaking world, of succession of antinomian thinkers against the central rationalist and scientific traditions of the west (p.XXIV)
Contexto de Rousseau: a)Periodo de ruptura b)Regulaciones RAE

What all these rationalist thinkers shared was the belief that somewhere, by some means, a single coherent, unified structure of concerning questions of both fact and value was in principle available. (p. XXVI)

They sought all-embracing schemes universal unifying frameworks, whitin which everything that exist could be shown to be systematically i.e. logically or causallyinterconnected, vast estructures in which there should be no grass left open for spontaneous, unattended develop should be, at least in principle wholly explicable in terms of immutable general laws. (p. XXVI)