I've been wanting to write about Isaiah Berlin's The Hedgehog and the Fox: An Essay on Tolstoy's View of History<\/a> for a while, primarily because it can be the basis of a nice cocktail party question: \"Are you a fox or a hedgehog?\" Some select excerpts<\/a> from Berlin's essay lay out the distinction that he makes between hedgehogs and foxes:<\/p>\n 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<\/i> 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, Moli\u00e8re, Goethe, Pushkin, Balzak, Joyce are foxes. <\/p><\/blockquote>\n Are you a fox or a hedgehog?<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" I’ve been wanting to write about Isaiah Berlin’s The Hedgehog and the Fox: An Essay on Tolstoy’s View of History for a while, primarily because it can be the basis of a nice cocktail party question: “Are you a fox … Continue reading