Isaiah Berlin’s “The Hedgehog and the Fox” is one of this century’s most famous essays — a virtuoso performance in which Berlin lays down his convenient distinction between two basic intellectual personalities, foxes and hedgehogs. Berlin’s main topic is Tolstoy’s historical thinking in light of Joseph de Maistre’s but the categories he introduces in order to explain Tolstoy are thriving on their own, like characters who have escaped from a novel and set up housekeeping. He based the distinction on Archilochus’ familiar fragment, “The fox knows many things, the hedgehog one big one.” According to Berlin, the intellectual world divides into fox-type thinkers and hedgehog types, and there is a “great chasm” between them. The foxes have many ideas and “pursue many ends, often unrelated and even contradictory.” The hedgehogs “relate everything to a single central vision.” The distinction is now well established. Does it make sense?
Berlin (not coincidentally) knew many things himself, and it will always be a pleasure to follow him as he strolls spryly through the intellectual landscape pursuing many ends, often unrelated and even contradictory. His work is a noisy party where you meet lots of interesting people. His range and depth are wonderful. His elegant dove-gray prose is always graceful and neatly tailored. His best sentences rise in long mesmerizing plumes, like smoke streams elaborating themselves at the glowing tips of after-dinner cigars in Oxford dining halls. “The Hedgehog and the Fox” is a tour de force.
But when the piece is done and you have finished applauding, the impression grows on you that you have been had. On inspection, Berlin’s logic is sketchy and his conclusions unsupported. It isn’t clear what a fox or a hedgehog really is. The weaknesses of the scheme show up clearly when you try to apply it to thinkers Berlin himself doesn’t discuss and you get lost immediately.
Consider for the sake of argument two wildly different Renaissance men: Vladimir Nabokov and Michelangelo. Nabokov, like Berlin, is a Russian expatriate who is in vogue this year, the centennial of his birth. Michelangelo is in vogue every year. Both men are exceptional for the grand scope of their interests and accomplishments, and their magisterial command of detail. Berlin’s scheme fails on both. If we follow his guidance, we misdiagnose them both as foxes, and they were both blatant hedgehogs.
Berlin is in fact consistently pro-fox, anti-hedgehog. No wonder; he associates hedgehogs with the idea that “truth is one and undivided, and the same for all men everywhere at all times” (as he writes in another context, in “Giambattista Vico and Cultural History”); foxes he associates with the tolerant, humane pluralism that he admires above all other virtues. His biases, however defensible, distort his view of the human mind. He doesn’t probe for the deep streams that underlie and unify an artist’s varied work. He doesn’t investigate the hovering visions (cloud by day, fire by night) that beckon an artist forward — as Racine is drawn, in Robert Lowell’s poem, “through his maze of iron composition, by the incomparable wandering voice of Phedre.” He doesn’t confront the astonishing fact that when a man seeks unity in nature, he usually finds it. Unity is a basic human desire: We seek sexual union, and often a form of social union with the community or nation. Scientists seek unity in nature and monotheists in God. But Berlin dislikes hedgehogs and disdains to investigate what one might call the “unity drive.” He knows many things — but he misses many, too. And he never succeeds in proving that there is any such thing as a “fox.”
What makes a so-called fox? For Berlin the quintessence of foxness is meticulous, concrete observation of real life in all its dazzling variety. A fox is a happy browser in life’s shopping mall; a hedgehog dashes in with a shopping list, grabs what he needs, and dashes out. Thus, we know that Tolstoy is a fox because, says Berlin, “he perceived reality in all its multiplicity. . . . No author who has ever lived has shown such powers of insight into the variety of life.” A hedgehog, on the other hand, scans the world through the narrow gunsight of his preconceptions. He is interested only in such facts as confirm his pet, pat theory, whatever it is. Marxists are Berlin’s paradigm hedgehogs: They can only sustain their Marxist beliefs by ignoring all contrary evidence.
But just because a fox perceives many things doesn’t mean he thinks many thoughts — and the idea that no single-minded hedgehog can be a good observer is demonstrably wrong. A hedgehog might allow his one big idea to skew his vision, but he might also seek out observations that contradict his theory, for the sake of refining and testing it. Devout religious believers are as likely as anyone to dwell on the multifarious reality of evil. Scientists with new theories seek counter-examples. A great scientist such as John Von Neumann or Richard Feynman has a hedgehog lust for deep, unifying themes — and yet Von Neumann and Feynman were each superbly observant, had wide interests and voracious appetites. They each spent a lifetime observing keenly, tying loose ends together, and pursuing fundamental unities. That’s what science is: a fox eye plus a hedgehog brain. Berlin’s scheme leaves too little room for science.
It also leaves too little room for people who think in pictures instead of (or in addition to) words. For Berlin, a hedgehog’s big idea is something he “believes in,” “advocates,” “preaches.” But you might be a hedgehog whose big idea, being a picture, can’t be put into words and can’t be advocated or believed in; can only be perceived. It’s not surprising that writers and not painters, architects, or sculptors are the only artists who appear in “The Hedgehog and the Fox.”
Berlin’s refusal to consider the image-thinker goes to the flawed heart of the hedgehog-fox dichotomy. What does it mean to pronounce someone a fox? That there is no single unifying idea behind his work? — or only that we can’t find one? Is “fox” an actual personality type or only a convenient way to say, “We give up”?
Michelangelo was a sculptor and painter and architect of unique, transcendental greatness; also a distinguished poet and a fine engineer. For Berlin, the sheer range of his interests ought to qualify him as a fox. And listen to Vasari praising the detail and individuality of the figures in the Sistine Chapel lunettes: “It would take too long to describe the many beautiful and different poses and gestures. . . . It is impossible to recount the diversity of details in these pictures, such as their garments, their facial expressions, and countless extraordinary and original inventions.” This passage calls to mind Isaiah Berlin praising Tolstoy’s foxness, “the celebrated lifelikeness of every object and every person” in Tolstoy’s created world.
Yet Michelangelo was the quintessential hedgehog. Charles de Tolnay says so in the first paragraph of his famous study. “Throughout his life,” Tolnay writes, Michelangelo “seems to have been haunted by a single vision.”
If Berlin insists that we tell him what that single, haunting vision was — we’re stuck. It can’t be reduced wholly to words. Yet we miss something crucial in Michelangelo’s work if we don’t look for it anyway.
Michelangelo’s unifying vision has something to do with man’s soul struggling through the gross, beautiful medium of his body to master the spiritual chaos of the universe. The image Michelangelo associates with this theme has to do with vivid, organized motion around a definite center. Many of his single figures (a Jonah, Moses, God as He creates Adam) are caught in the act of powerful movement. The crowd scenes in the Last Judgment and Pauline frescoes are famous for whirlpool motion around a focal figure or axis. The same themes exist in more “abstract” media. The strange architectural masterpiece of the Laurentian Library staircase “seems to run down and spread,” Tolnay writes, “like a cascade of lava” — captured motion. An ordinary flight of stairs is a line between two points, but Michelangelo’s staircase has a focus: three up from the bottom, a stair-tread broadens into a complete oval. The rest of the structure subtly gathers around this point, as if the staircase were tendering between thumb and forefinger some exotic oval jewel. At the Campidoglio in Rome, Michelangelo surrounds the ancient bronze of Marcus Aurelius at the plaza’s center with an oval shield of pavement. The shield is patterned with a radiating starburst that creates, at its fingertips, a lovely symmetry of outward-moving ripples. Michelangelo’s pattern converts Marcus Aurelius from a lifeless tent pole, the center of a static composition, to the motion-creating dropped pebble in a rippling pool.
We could go all through Michelangelo’s work picking out manifestations of his underlying big idea. That would be fruitless. The hunt for the hedgehog’s big theme ought to be done judiciously and not pushed too far. (Berlin’s idea that a hedgehog must necessarily be inflexible and dogmatic is wrong.) We ought to be willing to settle for a series of clues that show the way (like the converging sides of an unfinished obelisk) to a top-point — the one big unifying vision — that remains unrealized; that may never exist outside the artist’s mind.
But if the search is judicious, it can be crucial to our understanding of the artist’s work. Berlin claims that hedgehoggery brings about “not many levels of consciousness but reduction to some single level.” Yet our goal in recognizing Michelangelo’s unity of purpose is not “reductionist,” not to reduce or flatten his achievements to a series of variations on a theme. Our goal is to see his work more clearly by understanding, for example, the relationships among the Campidoglio’s patterned pavement, the oval tread in the Laurentian Library staircase, and Jesus at the center of the Last Judgment, realigning the whirling cosmos forever. By hearing surface details and big basso themes simultaneously, the hedgehog-seeker operates at “many levels of consciousness”; acknowledges the many forms that a thought might take.
Berlin might not have minded classifying Michelangelo as a hedgehog. Nabokov is a different story; given Berlin’s approach, it’s hard to see how Nabokov could be anything but a fox. His biographer Brian Boyd mentions Berlin’s dichotomy and quotes a Nabokov acquaintance: “In Berlin’s terms, he was the fox, not the hedgehog.” Nabokov had several careers: writer, critic, and scholar; lepidopterist; chess-problem designer. His two best and best-known novels, Lolita (1955) and Pale Fire (1962), seem radically unlike. One is the love-tale of a murderer, the other a poem with a bizarre and hilarious pseudo-scholarly commentary.
On the other hand, both Lolita and Pale Fire tell the story of an arrogant, handsome, unsavory, self-absorbed sexually deviant European literary scholar who has settled in America, fallen in love with a native (Humbert with Lolita, homosexual Kinbote with the elderly poet John Shade) — and himself been the object of unrequited love. Both books center on murder and the gradual unraveling of disguises. Both main characters become fugitives, and their love-objects wind up dead. Like twins separated at birth, the two books even share strange minor plot twists — each protagonist hides a crucial manuscript on his person (Humbert his diary, Kinbote Shade’s poem) at the time of another main character’s death. Thus, two dazzling-cold masterpieces in different shapes and colors (ruby Lolita, topaz Pale Fire) that are lit from below (inspired and inflamed) by one blazing knot of ideas. We are reminded of Tolney quoting Proust on Michelangelo’s hedgehogness: “The great artists,” Proust wrote, “have never made more than a single work, or rather they have never done more than refract through different settings the same beauty.”
Nabokov was a writer and lepidopterist — seemingly unrelated occupations, but aspects (for Nabokov himself) of one basic urge. He explains in his autobiography, commenting on lantern slides he encountered in childhood: “What loveliness the glass slides as such revealed when simply held between finger and thumb and raised to the light — translucent miniatures, pocket wonderlands, neat little worlds of hushed luminescent hues! In later years, I rediscovered the same precise silent beauty at the radiant bottom of a microscope’s magic shaft.” He is an image-thinker, and the unifying themes that captivate him are pictures. He is fascinated by the image of a certain type of microcosm, which draws him to novel-writing and butterfly science. In his formidably peculiar novel Ada (1969), Nabokov refers to “the rapture of her identity, placed under the microscope of reality.” To Berlin (who is enraptured by Tolstoy’s gift for “expressing the specific flavour, the exact quality of a feeling”), the “microscope of reality” is the fox’s favorite instrument. The fox specializes in the rapture of individual identity. But Nabokov is a master of the telling, concrete detail; and the microscope is the symbol of his hedgehoggery, a unifying theme hovering over the complex, opalescent surface of his life’s work.
How do the strands come together? As usual, we do better to catch a glimpse of the grand unifying theme than to run it into the ground and insist on finding its fingerprints everywhere. But Nabokov himself gives us a clue. “A colored spiral in a small ball of glass,” he writes in his autobiography, “this is how I see my own life.” Spirals first interested him in childhood, and came to haunt him as he recognized the spiraling course of his own life — from Russia to England to Germany to France to America to Switzerland, always spiraling onward, never circling back. His characters tend to be fugitives too. A spiral is (in a way) an unraveling circle, and “unraveling” (as of disguises) is a central theme of Nabokov’s fiction. He deals not in love triangles but in love spirals: Haze loves Humbert loves Lolita loves . . . Even his microscope shaft is a circular porthole with a view that spirals inward — growing closer and deeper as you click round the spiral of lenses to everhigher magnifications. (There is a photograph that shows Nabokov at a lab bench, cradling just this type of microscope tenderly in both hands.) Nabokov’s spiral is a perfect example of the pictorial big idea that might haunt a hedgehog — which Berlin misses entirely.
We are left with a basic difference of approach. When we encounter the scattered fragments of an artist’s work, should we try to piece them together? Even knowing that we might never succeed? — might have to settle for a handful of slightly larger fragments, might never reconstruct the whole? Or should we skip the attempted reassembly, declare foxhood, and move on?
My own guess is that there is no such thing as a fox; there are only different types of hedgehog — actual and incipient hedgehogs, obvious and less-obvious hedgehogs, contented and struggling hedgehogs. A man may have many facets, interests, skills, and appetites — but he has only one personality. Believers and atheists divide over the question of whether man was created in God’s image or God in man’s. But everyone assumes implicitly that nature was created in man’s image. The soul in its unity looks at the world in its endless variety and wants to see its own unity mirrored back. Wants to discover that, just as a man’s varied actions reflect one mind or soul or personality, so also the moon’s orbit and a falling leaf, a ball bouncing and water warming in the sun reflect one small, tidy packet of basic laws and forces. One of the craziest hypotheses in human history; also one of the most pregnant and productive.
The “hedgehog drive,” to seek unity — the drive that has so much to do with science, art, and monotheism — resembles the sex drive in certain ways. Stronger in some people, weaker in others. Rarely absent altogether. Dividing mankind into hedgehogs and foxes makes no more sense than dividing us into sexual and asexual people. True foxes (and asexuals) are too flukish to form the basis of any rational dichotomy. A fox has a unity drive so weak as to be non-existent. Are there such people? Perhaps, but not very many. The hedgehog-fox dichotomy conceals the truth under a false equation between incommensurables. There are infinitely many degrees of hedgehogness, but only one way to be purely sexless or an outright fox.
Berlin’s essays continue to be read and valued, and deserve to be. But his fox-and-hedgehog view of human thought has done harm. Notice how Nabokov’s brilliant, superbly well-informed biographer refuses to acknowledge the man’s hedgehog tendencies although the facts are intriguing and stare him in the face. Although a Nabokov-invented narrator quotes with approval a Nabokov-invented novelist in The Real Life of Sebastian Knight (1941): “All things belong to the same order of things, for such is the oneness of human perception, the oneness of individuality, the oneness of matter. . . . The only real number is one.”
By inventing the fox, Berlin built a handy escape hatch into scholarship and criticism; an easy out. It’s always harder to locate the delicate, sometimes subtle, sometimes even ineffable themes that tie an artist’s work together than to declare foxhood and leave it at that. But the search for unity (if it is patient and not peremptory, judicious and not dogmatic, relentless but not dictatorial) is the search for truth. Every man has the right to be assumed a hedgehog until proven foxy, even Isaiah Berlin.
David Gelernter is a contributing editor to THE WEEKLY STANDARD.
