The Hedgehog and the Fox
Sir Isaiah Berlin, (1953) excerpt
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 defense. 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, organizing 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 by 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, Balzak, Joyce are foxes.