In a
famous essay, the Fox and the Hedgehog, Isaiah Berlin creates a taxonomy of
thinkers based on a line from Archilochus: ‘The
fox knows many things, but the hedgehog knows one big thing.’ The thinkers who
know one thing are, in Berlin’s view, systematic thinkers. All thought tends to
the center, among them, the one big thing that explains the world. The Foxes
are anti-systematic. They are essayists, explorers of the intersections of
thought and experience, from the scope of which they take it no principle can
absorb experience without something stubborn and unabsorbed remaining from that
experience – what Thomas Nagel calls the quality of “what it is to be like”…
Now evidently,
Berlin is using the hedgehog image as a way into talking about the mindset of
certain writers, and in particular, of Tolstoy. Tolstoy has to an extreme
degree the fox’s virtue, which is to understand the difference made by
experience, by what it is to be like – and he has to an extreme degree the
hedgehog’s vice, which is a thirst for the god’s eye view that will not rest
until everything has been settled according to some central principle.
However, what gets a
little lost here is why Archilochus chose the hedgehog, of all creatures, to
represent the systematic viewpoint – if Berlin’s interpretation is right.
There is, perhaps,
another way of looking at the hedgehog’s emblematic meaning. In Schlegel’s
Fragments – which is, among other thing, a defense of the Fragment as a genre
of philosophical knowledge - the
hedgehog, Igel in German, reappears – perhaps in some reference to
Archilochus’s line:
“A fragment must be
like a tiny artwork, wholly sundered from the surrounding world and complete in
itself like a hedgehog.”
What Schlegel’s
image proposes is not that the one great thing the hedgehog knows absorbs the
world – rather, it separates a tiny, particular experience from the world and
completes it. The paradoxical stress, here, is between the fragment and perfect
or complete closure [in sich selbst vollendet sein]. While Berlin’s does not
begin his essay by asking about what it is, in the hedgehog, that leads to the
“one big thing’ he knows, Schlegel – whether consciously referencing
Archilochus or not – returns to the ethological, or perhaps I should say ethnological, base of the comparison. [After
I wrote this, I discovered that Anthony
Grafton had been here before me – noticing this echo, too, in an essay on
fragments in the classical tradition]
Stephen Gould,
writing about Archilochus’s image, quotes Erasmus’s latin translation, which
preserved the image in the humanist curicculum: multa novit vulpes, verum echinus unum magnum. Gould also,
rightly, goes to Pliny for some sense of what the hedgehog meant to the
ancients. However, Pliny deserves to be quoted at length, for it is in Pliny
that we get a sense of the hedgehog figuring in a certain kind of game or work
– that of hunting. This aspect is neglected in Gould’s essay.
“When
they perceive one hunting of them, they draw their mouths & feet close
togither, with all their belly part, where the skin hath a thin down: & no
pricks at all to do harme, and so roll themselves as round as a foot-ball, that
neither dog nor man can come by any thing but their sharpe-pointed prickles. So
soon as they see themselves past all hope to escape, they let their water go
and pisse upon themselves. Now this urine of theirs hath a poisonous qualitie
to rot their skin and prickles, for which they know well enough that they be
chased and taken. And therefore it is a secret and a special pollicie, not to
hunt them before they have let their urine go; and then their skin is verie
good, for which chiefly they are hunted: otherwise it is naught ever after and
so rotten, that it will not hang togither, but fall in peeces: all the pricks
shed off, as being putrified, yea although they should escape away from the
dogs and live still: and this is the cause that they never bepisse and drench
themselves with this pestilent excrement, but in extremitie and utter despaire:
for they cannot abide themselves their own urine, of so venimous a qualitie it
is, and so hurtfull to their owne bodie; and doe what they can to spare
themselves, attending the utmost time of extremitie, insomuch as they are ready
to be taken before they do it.”
This
habit of the hedgehog – or at least this trait attributed to the hedgehog –
puts us closer to the particular knowledge possessed by the hedgehog, in
Archilochus’s verse. It is knowledge in a field – the field of hunting – and
the hedgehog, far from being the systematic master, is the victim, the object
of the chase. The domain of hunting seems to be behind the
fables that Archilochus uses as his references – fables now obscure to us,
although we still know the stock of them labeled with the name of their
supposed author, Aesop.
One of the reasons
Berlin poses the question of Tolstoy’s philosophy of history and how seriously
we are to take it is that he is concerned, as one of the premier Cold War
intellectuals, with Marx’s philosophy of history. What he wants to know is whether
it is possible to get the hedgehog’s view of history outside of the reification
of history – that is, outside of an explanation of causes (attributed to
“history’’) that is merely an affirmation of effects. The nineteenth century in
which he places Tolstoy was hypnotized by the verb, ‘determine’. That x
‘determines’ y seemed to say something more profound about y’s connection to x
than to say x causes y. Determine – in German, Bestimmung – announces a power
relationship that quickly slides into myth – the myth of the relation between
creator, who shapes, and the creature, who lives within the creator’s lines,
the creator’s survey plat.
“History alone – the
sum of empirically discoverable data – held the key to the mystery of why
what happened
happened as it did and not otherwise; and only history, consequently, could
throw light on the fundamental ethical problems which obsessed him as they did
every Russian thinker in the nineteenth century.What is to be done? How should
one live? Why are we here?What must we be and do? The study of historical
connections and the demand for empirical answers to these proklyatye voprosy1 became fused into
one in Tolstoy’s mind, as his early diaries and letters show very vividly.”
Berlin is moving his
pieces forward in the essay in broad, easy gestures, which has the advantage of
making his essay accessible and interesting, and the disadvantage that comes
from refusing to nitpick: that is, gliding over certain philosophically
important issues. In particular, the junction of empirical and positivist does
a lot of work for Berlin in the essay, even as one has to question its
self-evidence. Positivism was not simply about the empirical – it was about
progress. It was about a pattern in history that is above the empirical, the scatter
of facts. Similarly, the romantic
protest against the great
anti-metaphysical writers of the eighteenth century was not, as Berlin actually
knew, simply a rejection of science. Schlegel was not rejecting science so much
as questioning its universal application – the fragment, in Schlegel’s view,
presents a sort of monadic block to the statistical method of science. It
doesn’t transcend the empirical – far from it. It dwells in the empirical, it
weighs down experience with all its force, it presents its ‘bristles’ to the
world like a hedgehog. And it does so in the consciousness that it is being
hunted. For science, here, is no neutral social mechanism – it is used with
definite aims.
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