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- Author: Isaiah Berlin, Henry Hardy, and Michael Ignatieff
- Full Title: The Hedgehog and the Fox
- Category: #books
- It is not merely that the fox knows many things. The fox accepts that he can only know many things and that the unity of reality must escape his grasp. The critical feature of foxes is that they are reconciled to the limits of what they know. As Berlin puts it, ‘We are part of a larger scheme of things than we can understand. […] we ourselves live in this whole and by it, and are wise only in the measure to which we make our peace with it.’3 A hedgehog will not make peace with the world. He is not reconciled. He cannot accept that he knows only many things. He seeks to know one big thing, and strives without ceasing to give reality a unifying shape. Foxes settle for what they know and may live happy lives. Hedgehogs will not settle and their lives may not be happy.
- We can be reconciled to our ‘sense of reality’4 – accept it for what it is, live life as we find it – or we can hunger for a more fundamental, unitary truth beneath appearance, a truth that will explain or console.5 Berlin contrasted this longing for unitary truth with a fox’s sense of reality. He was adamant that even a fox’s knowledge could be solid and clear as far as it went. We are not in a fog. We can know, we can learn, we can make moral judgements. Scientific knowledge is clear. What he disputed is that science or reason can give us a final certainty that cuts to the core of reality. Most of us settle for this. Wisdom, he writes, is not surrender to illusion, but rather an acceptance of the ‘unalterable medium in which we act’, ‘the permanent relationships of things’, ‘the universal texture of human life’.6 This we can know, not by science or by reasoning, so much as by a deep coming to terms with what is.
- The grandeur of hedgehogs is that they refuse our limitations. Their tragedy is that they cannot be reconciled to them at the end. Tolstoy was ruthlessly dismissive of every available doctrine of truth, whether religious or secular, yet he could not abandon the conviction that some such ultimate truth could be grasped if only he could overcome his own limitations.
- For there exists a great chasm between those, on one side, who relate everything to a single central vision, one system, less or more coherent or articulate, in terms of which they understand, think and feel – a single, universal, organising principle in terms of which alone all that they are and say has significance – and, on the other side, those who pursue many ends, often unrelated and even contradictory, connected, if at all, only in some de facto way, for some psychological or physiological cause, related to no moral or aesthetic principle. These last lead lives, perform acts and entertain ideas that are centrifugal rather than centripetal; their thought is scattered or diffused, moving on many levels, seizing upon the essence of a vast variety of experiences and objects for what they are in themselves, without, consciously or unconsciously, seeking to fit them into, or exclude them from, any one unchanging, all-embracing, sometimes self-contradictory and incomplete, at times fanatical, unitary inner vision. The first kind of intellectual and artistic personality belongs to the hedgehogs, the second to the foxes; and without insisting on a rigid classification, we may, without too much fear of contradiction, say that, in this sense, Dante belongs to the first category, Shakespeare to the second; Plato, Lucretius, Pascal, Hegel, Dostoevsky, Nietzsche, Ibsen, Proust are, in varying degrees, hedgehogs; Herodotus, Aristotle, Montaigne, Erasmus, Molière, Goethe, Pushkin, Balzac, Joyce are foxes.
- Utterly unlike her as he is in almost every other respect, Tolstoy is, perhaps, the first to propound the celebrated accusation which Virginia Woolf half a century later levelled against the public prophets of her own generation – Shaw and Wells and Arnold Bennett – as blind materialists who did not begin to understand what it is that life truly consists of, who mistook its outer accidents, the unimportant aspects which lie outside the individual soul – the so-called social, economic, political realities – for that which alone is genuine, the individual experience, the specific relation of individuals to one another, the colours, smells, tastes, sounds and movements, the jealousies, loves, hatreds, passions, the rare flashes of insight, the transforming moments, the ordinary day-to-day succession of private data which constitute all there is – which are reality.