305. Hedgehogs and Foxes

According to philosopher Isaiah Berlin, people think in one of two different ways: They're either hedgehogs, or foxes. If you think like a hedgehog, you'll be more successful as a communicator. If you think like a fox, you'll be more accurate.

Isaiah Berlin coined the hedgehog/fox dichotomy (via Archilochus)

In Isaiah Berlin's 1953 essay, "The Hedgehog and the Fox," he quotes the ancient Greek poet, Archilochus:

The fox knows many things, but the hedgehog knows one thing.

Berlin describes this as "one of the deepest differences which divide writers and thinkers, and, it may be, human beings in general."

How are "hedgehogs" and "foxes" different?

According to Berlin, hedgehogs relate everything to a single central vision. Foxes pursue many ends, often unrelated or even contradictory.

If you're a hedgehog, you explain the world through a focused belief or area of expertise. Maybe you're a chemist, and you see everything as chemical reactions. Maybe you're highly religious, and everything is "God's will."

If you're a fox, you explain the world through a variety of lenses. You may try on conflicting beliefs for size, or use your knowledge in a wide variety of fields to understand the world. You explain things as From this perspective, X. But on the other hand, Y. It's also worth considering Z.

The seminal hedgehog/fox essay is actually about Leo Tolstoy

Even though this dichotomy Berlin presented has spread far and wide, his essay is mostly about Leo Tolstoy, and the tension between his fox-like tendencies and hedgehog-like aspirations. In Tolstoy's War and Peace, he writes:

In historic events the so-called great men are labels giving names to events, and like labels they have but the smallest connection with the event itself. Every act of theirs, which appears to them an act of their own will, is in an historical sense involuntary and is related to the whole course of history and predestined from eternity.

In War and Peace, Tolstoy presents characters who act as if they have control over the events of history. In Tolstoy's view, the events that make history are too complex to be controlled. Extending this theory outside historical events, Tolstoy also writes:

When an apple has ripened and falls, why does it fall? Because of its attraction to the earth, because its stalk withers, because it is dried by the sun, because it grows heavier, because the wind shakes it, or because the boy standing below wants to eat it? Nothing is the cause. All this is only the coincidence of conditions in which all vital organic and elemental events occur.

Is Tolstoy a fox, or a hedgehog? He acknowledges the complexity with which various events are linked – which is very fox-like. But he also seems convinced these events are so integrated with one another that nothing can change them. They're "predetermined" – a "coincidence of conditions."