[In the following tribute, McCabe asserts that one of Berlin's outstanding qualities was his attempt to understand, rather than to master, his subject.]

Isaiah Berlin's greatest contribution to the world of ideas may have been his exemplary commitment to the ideal of genuine understanding over mere intellectual mastery. More than most philosophers, he understood not only that mastery of a subject is not synonymous with deep understanding, but also that the pursuit of the first may imperil the second. The drive for intellectual mastery grows out of the assumption that the world is ultimately made for us and that the disciplined exercise of a properly trained mind can make all things clear: the deepest fabric of reality, the unvarying structures of human consciousness, the proper end of human activity. It is a comforting idol, but a false and distorting one. Whatever contemporary philosophers think on the question of whether the world was designed for our purposes, most recognize (partly as a result of Berlin's efforts) that our ways of conceptualizing, the very tools of organized thought, are shot through with contingency reflecting our particular time in history and our distinctive forms of life.

But for Berlin, this ideal of mastery and its underlying hubris about human reason were not only intellectually unsound, but potential sources of great cruelty as well. As he suggested in his famous essay “Two Concepts of Liberty,” the “one belief, more than any other, responsible for the slaughter of individuals on the altars of the great historical ideals” is the belief that somewhere there exists a single definitive answer to the question of how human beings should live. He was thinking of Hitler and Stalin: he was warning of Pol Pot and Milosevic.

For Berlin, then, there were both intellectual and moral reasons to replace the ideal of mastery with the more humane and demanding one of understanding. Humane, because it allows greater space for such things as feelings, sensitivities, and traditions; demanding, because anyone who is willing to open himself to the world's diversity, and who forgoes the urge to reduce it to the neatness of the philosopher's categories, must always be prepared to have his deepest beliefs undermined and to find that he knows less than he thought. The result of this sort of inquiry is likely to be not a single magisterial work setting forth a system, but instead, as in Berlin's case, a constantly startling body of essays on a dazzling array of issues and thinkers, rays of light illuminating areas that we either had not attended to carefully or had misunderstood by imposing our own sets of problems and expectations. If any one theme dominates Berlin's work, it is his commitment to the truth of pluralism—to the view that a fulfilling human life can take many forms, and that there is no single formula to guide the choices we make about which goods to pursue either individually or collectively. What this commitment implies is that the goal of understanding those who think and act differently from us must always be prior to that of jan idea of enormous impact in contemporary moral and political philosophy.

But though the ideal of mastery is ultimately ill-conceived, the qualities that dispose one for apparent success in it are, unfortunately, doled out more liberally than those conducive to deep understanding. The former include cleverness, an obsession with scoring points in argument, and a willingness to sacrifice humane engagement in the name of analytic rigor. What is needed for real understanding, for making the strange coherent and revealing the complexity in the familiar, is not only deep learning and an expansive intellect, but also qualities like charity, compassion, and humility. That Berlin could yoke these traits to a felicity of expression and analytic skills of the highest order ensures that his influence will be felt in humanistic studies for decades to come. For many of us who style ourselves intellectuals and seek better to understand the human world, he will remain a model we strive vainly, but happily, to emulate.