Michael Ignatieff:
“… 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.’ 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.
All of us, Berlin suggests, have elements of both fox
and hedgehog within us. The essay is an unparalleled portrait of human
dividedness. We are riven creatures and we have to choose whether to accept the
incompleteness of our knowledge or to hold out for certainty and truth. Only
the most determined among us will refuse to settle for what the fox knows and
hold out for the certainties of the hedgehog….”
Aesop’s Fable:
“A Fox, swimming across a river, was barely able to
reach the bank, where he lay bruised and exhausted from his struggle with the
swift current. Soon a swarm of blood-sucking flies settled on him; but he lay
quietly, still too weak to run away from them.
A Hedgehog happened by. “Let me drive the flies away,”
he said kindly.
“No, no!” exclaimed the Fox, “do not disturb them!
They have taken all they can hold. If you drive them away, another greedy swarm
will come and take the little blood I have left.”
Moral: Better to bear a lesser evil than to risk a
greater in removing it.”
Isaiah Berlin , ‘The Hedgehog and the Fox', 1953:
“There is a line among the fragments of the Greek poet
Archilochus which says: ‘The fox knows many things, but the hedgehog knows one
big thing.’2 Scholars have differed about the correct interpretation of these
dark words, which may mean no more than that the fox, for all his cunning, is
defeated by the hedgehog’s one defence. But, taken figuratively, the words can
be made to yield a sense in which they mark one of the deepest differences
which divide writers and thinkers, and, it may be, human beings in general. 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…”
Artist: Charles Branum Barsotti (1933-2014)
