This post is the second in a series which will explore the principles of Neither/Nor, in this case that every idea, concept, philosophy has a history. Listen here for background. First post: “Dichotomies I: Tolstoy as Educator.”
In Caryl Emerson’s amazing and aforementioned Russian literature class, one of the first pieces we read was the philosopher Isaiah Berlin's 1953 essay “The Hedgehog and the Fox.” Today I’ll discuss Berlin’s tendency towards dichotomies, their seductive influence, and how dichotomizing can change cognition and perception.
Dichotomies — and, I’ll later argue, all concepts — acutely alter our metaphorical landscape, which is the foundation for all of our perceptions, thoughts, and actions. Once accepted, dichotomies produce what appear to be straightforward and obvious truths. Tolstoy’s use and abuse of categories (e.g., “war” and “peace”) is quite different from Berlin’s. But Berlin’s provides a particularly vivid illustration of the effect of introducing new categories.
His piece is now remembered more for its central dichotomy — between its titular “hedgehog” and “fox” — than for its treatment of Tolstoy’s historiography. Berlin originally wished to title it “Lev Tolstoy’s Historical Scepticism,” but his editor, George, Baron Weidenfeld, proposed the more populist and inviting “The Hedgehog and the Fox.” This seems to have served his purposes, as with this title the essay brought Berlin to the attention of the public, and remains among his most famous essays. But Berlin retained the subtitle “An Essay on Tolstoy’s View of History,” to keep clear his central concern. He does not just remark on the divide between intellectual specialists and generalists, though he does so explosively; at its heart, he seeks to treat an important and neglected aspect of Tolstoy’s War and Peace. In this piece, however, I’ll focus on dichotomies.
Before we turn to Tolstoy and his history, then, what do these animals typify for Berlin? I always found it a little hard to keep the two mammals straight, so to run the risk of repetition, the distinction is between foxes (who know many things) and hedgehogs (who know one big thing).
Early on in the essay, Berlin boldly asserts that “there exists a great chasm” between two types of writers and thinkers, i.e., those who write and think through a single unifying vision (hedgehogs), and those who write and think in wandering fashion, wherever their varied interests might lead (foxes). The pairing comes from a remnant of a 7th Century BC Greek poem:
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.’ 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.
Thus begins Berlin’s great essay (emphasis mine). If you’d like to read it, here’s a PDF.
How irresistible is Berlin’s certainty, his confidence that “there exists a great chasm”!
And yet existence makes me wonder... What does it mean to exist, anyway? The OED has it coming from classical Latin existere, exsistere: “to appear, to rise from the dead, to come forward, present oneself, to prove to be (of a given character), to come into being, arise.” Notice how physical, how sudden and frightening the word is in its metaphorical origins, as opposed to its apparently abstract and metaphysical sense today: “existence.” For the Romans, for something to exist is for something to rise from the dead, for something to stand out, for something to burst forth into view, whereas for us, it has taken on an abstract, objective, observation-independent sense. But in the older sense of existing, Berlin’s chasm “appears” to us, “presents itself” or “comes forward” — only after Berlin “marks” it with those words which elicit his vivid image of a chasm, miasma rising over its wide sides.
Does Berlin’s chasm “exist” in the new, independent-of-observation or metaphysical sense? This seems to be what he wants us to believe. Does Berlin not furrow this chasm in our perception with his writing? Does he not bring it into existence in the old, coming-into-view sense? Does he discover it — or invent it? The query here is: Does a great chasm pre-exist his essay, or does Berlin quarry this chasm himself?
Not that this linguistic means of producing a chasm makes a chasm any less divisive. A geological chasm presents itself to us through experience, through perception; through that novel sense, sight, so much younger and more divisive a sense than touch or sound. Berlin’s words will divide up authors in a way we would not otherwise have done — Dante as opposed to Shakespeare, Dostoevsky as opposed to Pushkin — producing a chasm akin (by metaphor) to the kind we tentatively approach when crossing a terrain.
We see Berlin’s letters on the page, and sight of them in a certain order conjures up an abstract notion, through a known word, which in turn produces for us an already known experience of a feature of terrain. There are more steps through the linguistic route than through the experiential — from known letters, to a known word, to a known idea, to a known image — and the image might be fainter. But notice that for the word to work depends on one’s experience — of having seen a chasm.
Each link, inculcated into us by culture, must function transparently in order for this effect to work. If any link draws attention to itself, the effect falters or fails.
The word “chasm” evokes in us an image of an abyss, an image of a yawning fissure too wide to cross or bridge. And although Berlin asserts that such a chasm “exists” (presumably in the new, metaphysical sense), he takes an active role in its appearance through his use of Archilochus’ line, despite his deceptively passive voice: “The words can be made to yield a sense…”
His circumlocution hides a type of violence. Berlin presses poetry into service, forces it to “yield a sense.” To yield is to pay — “yield” is from proto-Germanic *geldan-, “to pay or be of worth;” from Proto-Indo European gheldan, “to pay,” preserved only in German and Balto-Slavic. Berlin makes the ancient fragment pay. He mints a bright new meaning from the shrapnel of old and obscure words.
What, then, is truth? A mobile army of metaphors, metonyms, and anthropomorphisms—in short, a sum of human relations which have been enhanced, transposed, and embellished poetically and rhetorically, and which after long use seem firm, canonical, and obligatory to a people: truths are illusions about which one has forgotten that this is what they are; metaphors which are worn out and without sensuous power; coins which have lost their pictures and now matter only as metal, no longer as coins.
— Nietzsche, “On Truth and Lies in a Nonmoral Sense,” (1873)
Berlin coins this difference, writing “taken figuratively,” which is to say that he mints new metaphor from coins, i.e., the words “hedgehog” and “fox,” which are of obscure provenance, and of unknown original meaning and value. And the animal metaphor remains unfamiliar enough that in most conversations I have to explain to (or remind) my interlocutor what exactly Berlin means by “hedgehog” and by “fox.” Coining a term mints new meanings, making words call attention to themselves, and in this sense it is poetry; but the rest of language — the prose — depends, for its function, on the old familiar senses of words.
“…in which they mark one of the deepest differences…” But do the words mark an extant difference? “Mark” comes from an Old English word for “boundary, limit; sign, landmark,” ultimately from a proto-Indo European word for “boundary, border.” Nature comes to humankind unmarked (Pyrrho’s adiaphora); it is we who mark nature.
Words are made to mark just as they are made to yield.
Berlin perseveres, developing these differences across the divide which he himself has dissevered:
These last [i.e., foxes] 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.
I do not myself intend, at least not in this essay, to dissect Isaiah’s division of writers. I leave it as an exercise to the reader to determine what Nietzsche’s central idea might be. Berlin never says — and I can think of a dozen possibilities.
Instead, I write about this now to invite you to notice how, if you accept Isaiah’s assertion that this divide “exists” — and if you notice no objection on your part, your acceptance may well have been unconscious — then you’ve moved inexorably past the question of whether or not this “chasm” “exists.” You have consented, wittingly or unwittingly, to take this as part of the landscape.
You may, from there, find yourself ineluctably drawn in by a desire to determine whether his categorizations are correct, whether he has placed writers on the right side of this now apparently extant divide. You may even be tempted to categorize your own inclinations, as I was and am tempted to categorize mine — I regard myself as a fox, even an “arch-fox,” as Berlin calls Pushkin. Again, I’m inviting you to notice not Berlin’s divisions but your own incipient desire to divide.
Notice also that Berlin in these first few paragraphs leaves out Tolstoy, on whose categorization the whole essay hinges. Berlin will go on to argue (an assessment, incidentally, with which I agree completely) that Tolstoy is a fox who strives his whole life to become a hedgehog — and in the end he fails. In other words, a deep conflict exists in Tolstoy between his own talent and inclination towards staggering diversity, and his belief in — and commitment to — a single moral truth.
That Spanish woman who lived three hundred years ago, was certainly not the last of her kind. Many Theresas have been born who found for themselves no epic life wherein there was a constant unfolding of far-resonant action; perhaps only a life of mistakes, the offspring of a certain spiritual grandeur ill-matched with the meanness of opportunity; perhaps a tragic failure which found no sacred poet and sank unwept into oblivion. With dim lights and tangled circumstance they tried to shape their thought and deed in noble agreement; but after all, to common eyes their struggles seemed mere inconsistency and formlessness; for these later-born Theresas were helped by no coherent social faith and order which could perform the function of knowledge for the ardently willing soul. Their ardor alternated between a vague ideal and the common yearning of womanhood; so that the one was disapproved as extravagance, and the other condemned as a lapse.
— George Eliot, Middlemarch (1871)
Previously, on Dichotomies: