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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Pielorinho" data-source="post: 470073" data-attributes="member: 259">I agree with you, to a degree, although I think I lean toward the "fox" end of the spectrum myself.  Berlin would probably disagree with you.Another one of his central ideas is interesting and may shed more light on the discussion.  (Moderators:  this passage will discuss Christianity briefly; I believe it'll do so in a copacetic fashion, but if not, I'll gladly change it)  He talks about Macchiavelli's discussion of Christian versus Pagan Roman's ethics.  Christians value humility, self-sacrifice, chastity, repentance; Pagan Romans value bravery, strength, loyalty, shrewdness.  Macchiavelli himself prefers Pagan Rome's values to Christiandom's values, and believes that the two sets of values are incompatible with one another -- but in doing so, he states that there's no objective way to choose one set of values over the other.Berlin is fascinated by this idea, and believes that there are a lot of values in the human realm, some of which contradict one another, and we can't definitively choose one set over the other.  A starving artist has a family to feed:  should he take a well-paying menial job to support his family, or should he complete his masterpiece that will enrich humanity?  Different people will answer this question differently, and passionately, based on their incompatible, irreducible values; we cannot choose between them.My point in all this?  First, Berlin is a fox <img src="https://cdn.jsdelivr.net/joypixels/assets/8.0/png/unicode/64/1f642.png" class="smilie smilie--emoji" loading="lazy" width="64" height="64" alt=":)" title="Smile    :)"  data-smilie="1"data-shortname=":)" />.  I think he is a paragon of a chaotic-good person, by this system, inasmuch as he doesn't have one set of values he holds as sacrosanct.  Were he to say, "Some people believe the starving artist should feed his family -- and they are fools, for beauty is the essence of living, and art is born only from suffering," he'd be (contrary to what the traditional axis would suggest) much more lawful.Second, his philosophy has (I think) a contradiction that foxes/chaotic folk often run into -- especially the chaotic-good ones.  Although he thinks that there's no real way to judge one set of values over another (for the most part -- he makes problematic exceptions for Nazis etc.), that belief itself is a judgement of "lawful" values, of hedgehog values.  When you say that "law and chaos are equally balanced in their positive and negative aspects," Berlin might disagree with you, but only to the degree that he himself, advocating a chaotic worldview, is lawful about his advocacy <img src="https://cdn.jsdelivr.net/joypixels/assets/8.0/png/unicode/64/1f642.png" class="smilie smilie--emoji" loading="lazy" width="64" height="64" alt=":)" title="Smile    :)"  data-smilie="1"data-shortname=":)" />.  However, if chaotic folks aren't allowed a minor inconsistency, who is?Third, the professor who introduced me to Berlin back in 1998 would weep an ocean if he ever came across this thread.I'll close with a quote from Goethe, a wonderfully chaotic quote, of which Berlin is fond:  "From the crooked timber of humanity nothing straight was ever made."Daniel</blockquote>

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