Everyone who’s anyone knows Isaiah Berlin’s essay, “The Fox and the Hedgehog”, written around the postulate that “the fox knows many things, but the hedgehog knows one big thing.” It’s a good essay, although too famous for its own good. I would not presume to dispute the divine wisdom of Archilochus. But I’ve always thought that, applied to academic philosophy, the following would be more apt: the fox knows a variety of medium-sized things, the hedgehog knows an extremely large number of small things. Generalists, specialists. And having Big Ideas is yet a third thing. Having One Big Idea isn’t like slipping through the dappled forest, lightly, alertly. But it also isn’t waddle, hunker, clench. Waddle, hunker, clench. Write a tight little article, in which you anticipate 14 objections to your point and answer them, one by one. Defending yourself by preemptively making it too much bother for a potential predator to attack you from any conceivable angle is a classic academic tactic, but not a Big Idea thing.
Nietzsche agrees with me. “To be prickly towards what is small, seemeth to me wisdom for hedgehogs.” (Zarathustra,49.2)
What we need is a theory of how, sometimes, hedgehogs, in my sense, can soar – can cover a lot of ground, despite their anatomic unsuitability for dashes through the forests of thought.
Perhaps sometimes they sprout wings! Or perhaps they stick, like burrs, to some larger, fast-moving thing. They were in the right place at the right time to get picked up and carried along.
Also, we need a better animal to stand for the One Big Idea style: fiddler crab? Bull moose?
Also, there are the angler fish: philosophers who seem to have One Big Idea, but it’s a lure, a trap, in dark waters. Nietzsche, Wittenstein. Behind the glowing ‘Idea’ is the philosopher’s personality itself. He will eat you up!
Nietzsche on foxes – well, their hunting – is also interesting. From “Schopenhauer As Educator”:
Then there is a certain drive to dialectical investigation, the huntsman’s joy in following the sly fox’s path in the realm of thought, so that it is not really truth that is sought but the seeking itself, and the main pleasure consists in the cunning tracking, encircling and correct killing. Now add to this the impulse to contradiction, the personality wanting to be aware of itself and to make itself felt in opposition to all others; the struggle becomes a pleasure and the goal is personal victory, the struggle for truth being only a pretext. Then, the man of learning is to a great extent also motivated to the discovery of certain ‘truths’, motivated that is by his subjection to certain ruling persons, castes, opinions, churches, governments: he feels it is to his advantage to bring ‘truth’ over to their side.
So you have foxiness, to catch foxes. But it is related to a kind of hedgehogish derpiness – prickly defensiveness re: one’s priors.
I’ve been here before, admittedly. I am a bit of a hedgehog, though I like to think of myself as so foxy. Who isn’t? Who doesn’t?
{ 33 comments }
Bill Benzon 07.14.15 at 1:37 am
“Also, we need a better animal to stand for the One Big Idea style: fiddler crab? Bull moose?”
Dragon, unicorn, pony?
John Holbo 07.14.15 at 1:44 am
“And a pony” philosophies are actually something else. There are lots of very elaborate philosophies that have the form: we juuuuuust need one final ingredient to make this work. And, patently, that final ingredient is not going to materialize.
oldster 07.14.15 at 1:51 am
cf. anomalous ponyism.
John Holbo 07.14.15 at 2:01 am
Hmmm, now that I think about it: ‘and a ponyism’ is different from ‘unicornism’. The former indicates an arbitrary degree of modesty. Say, Rawlsianism. You are imagining something way too idealistic to be real. But you are refusing to imagine something even more idealistic, lest it be unreal. Unicornism is for the more extreme cases: we’ve got Being, we’ve got Becoming. Now all we need is to discover something that is both, yet neither! And we’ll have a working metaphysics!
Josh Jasper 07.14.15 at 2:50 am
Dinsdale!
ZM 07.14.15 at 3:04 am
“What we need is a theory of how, sometimes, hedgehogs, in my sense, can soar – can cover a lot of ground, despite their anatomic unsuitability for dashes through the forests of thought.”
The Wired Hedgehog with a smart phone?
andrew_m 07.14.15 at 3:30 am
You are describing Charles Darwin, so: Beagles
cwalken 07.14.15 at 4:42 am
Camels. Only they know the hundredth name of God.
John Holbo 07.14.15 at 5:07 am
I just remembered that Z. contains another ironical meditation on limited scholarship and animal metaphors appropriate thereto.
Zarathustra discourses with ‘the conscientious one’, whom he accidentally steps on in the swamp, where he is studying leeches:
‘”Better know nothing than half-know many things! Better be a fool on one’s own account, than a sage on other people’s approbation! I—go to the basis:
—What matter if it be great or small? If it be called swamp or sky? A handbreadth of basis is enough for me, if it be actually basis and ground!
—A handbreadth of basis: thereon can one stand. In the true knowing-knowledge there is nothing great and nothing small.”
“Then thou art perhaps an expert on the leech?” asked Zarathustra; “and thou investigatest the leech to its ultimate basis, thou conscientious one?”
“O Zarathustra,” answered the trodden one, “that would be something immense; how could I presume to do so!
That, however, of which I am master and knower, is the brain of the leech:—that is my world!
And it is also a world! Forgive it, however, that my pride here findeth expression, for here I have not mine equal. Therefore said I: ‘here am I at home.’
How long have I investigated this one thing, the brain of the leech, so that here the slippery truth might no longer slip from me! Here is my domain!
—For the sake of this did I cast everything else aside, for the sake of this did everything else become indifferent to me; and close beside my knowledge lieth my black ignorance.”‘
Incidentally, ZM, if you are still (or were ever) seriously wondering whether there is irony in Z, I think this passage might be a good example. Although perhaps you will deem it absurdity instead.
Cthonicus 07.14.15 at 5:40 am
Bacteria have only one idea, and it can be very large indeed.
A virus is more like a star researcher dependent on their interns and graduate students. A big idea, but someone else is needed to do the work.
ZM 07.14.15 at 5:53 am
I think I will change my Hedgehog’s name to Sonic The Hedgehog
At uni we are taught as students that you need good general knowledge of your discipline’s subject, but you also need to specialise in a particular area where you develop specialist knowledge.
“Incidentally, ZM, if you are still (or were ever) seriously wondering whether there is irony in Z, I think this passage might be a good example. Although perhaps you will deem it absurdity instead.”
I certainly don’t think it is ironic. Nietzsche was just the rude sort of person that would try to step on someone’ s head so the passage is probably biographical rather than ironical.
When I was nineteen someone impolitely tried to stand on my head after their concert, this was after they previously took my Robert Burns book without asking and then gave it back impolitely by waving it at the whole room, and before the concert they refused to intervene in an argument my self and my friend were having with a young man who couldn’t tell a goat from a baby cow.
This was neither ironic or absurd, it was just very bad manners and inconsiderate.
John Holbo 07.14.15 at 6:14 am
“Nietzsche was just the rude sort of person that would try to step on someone’ s head”
This is false. Nietzsche was, by all accounts, scrupulously polite and well-mannered in his personal life.
Have you considered it might actually be Robert Burns’ fault?
ZM 07.14.15 at 6:29 am
I have not read any biography of Nietzsche so I suppose possibly he was just very impolite in his writing while being always very polite in real life.
I thought possibly he might have stepped on the conscientious one whilst butterfly catching, as that could take him near swamps being an outdoors pursuit.
I never knew that Nietzsche was influenced by Robert Burns, as you say, so I could not have concluded that it was Robert Burns’ fault.
Robert Burns was not all that polite as you can tell by him writing a poem about a woman having lice in her hair at church, so possibly in the period where you say Nietzsche was influenced by Robert Burns, this led to Nietzsche departing from his previous very well mannered behaviour to try to trample on people in swamps whilst nominally butterfly catching.
Once he returns to scrupulous politeness again, I guess all he could do was just write memoirs about trampling people in his books.
John Holbo 07.14.15 at 7:24 am
“whilst butterfly catching”
It’s true that there are a few butterflies in Zarathustra, but I think you place too much weight on one mistranslation of one title. Frolicking science really isn’t on. Wipe that mental picture.
“I never knew that Nietzsche was influenced by Robert Burns”
I am quite sure he was not. I was speculating – most unreasonably – that perhaps Burns influenced your rude and thieving concert-goer.
“As eager runs the market-crowd,
When “Catch the thief!” resounds aloud;”
Was it an especially wild concert?
ZM 07.14.15 at 7:53 am
No it was not a very wild concert at all. It was quite small at a venue called The Punter’s Club in Fitzroy.
The pianist Liam Hayes politely waltzed with the drummer Jim White’s mother so as you can see it was not wild at all.
ZM 07.14.15 at 7:54 am
I am disappointed that Nietzsche was not influenced by Robert Burns as I could have added that into my Pastoral Influence On The Philosopher Friedrich Nietzsche topic.
Adam Roberts 07.14.15 at 1:17 pm
There’s the notion that the last person who knew ‘everything’ was X (let’s say, Francis Bacon), and that such knowledge Is No Longer Possible. We’re all specialists now, of necessity: people look at Wilson’s “Consilience” and pooh-pooh it by virtue of its very ambition. I wonder when that notion was first articulated? It probably goes back further than we think.
Nym w/o Qualities 07.14.15 at 1:50 pm
JH @4. For unicornism, cf. Underpants Gnomes and TED-talk-ism (“Step one is having an idea. Step two is implementation. I’ve already got us past step one.”).
ZM 07.14.15 at 2:43 pm
“I was speculating – most unreasonably – that perhaps Burns influenced your rude and thieving concert-goer.
“As eager runs the market-crowd,
When “Catch the thief!†resounds aloud;—
The person who took my book without asking and later tried to step on my head wasn’t a fellow concert goer, it was the singer.
I suppose your speculation that it was Robert Burns’ fault could possibly be true in relation to my book being taken without asking, if he already was a great fan of Robert Burns and had memorised that particular poem so when he saw my book the lines you quote about “Catch the thief!” popped into his head and there and then he decided to take my book without asking so someone would shout “Catch the thief!” thus re-enacting the poem — except nobody did shout “Catch the thief!” so he just gave it back impolitely and later tried to step on my head.
But I have not heard of Robert Burns ever trying to step on someone’s head, or writing about trying to step on someone’s head, — so if you think I should blame a writer for that event then possibly it was Nietzsche’s fault as this example you have given is the only literary case of stepping on someone I have heard of — but in my case luckily I ducked just in time when I saw a shoe looming above my head.
John Holbo 07.14.15 at 3:38 pm
“the only literary case of stepping on someone I have heard of”
I think there is a fair amount of stepping on people in world literature, no?
Do dragons count?
https://fr.wikipedia.org/wiki/Saint_Michel_et_le_Dragon#/media/File:St_Michael_Raphael.jpg
ZM 07.14.15 at 3:55 pm
No I don’t think dragons count since it is not at all the same a Saint fighting a fearsome dragon then stepping on its neck as taking a 19 year old concert goer’s book without asking then trying to step on her head. Quite different.
Ronan(rf) 07.14.15 at 6:08 pm
How is it possible that someone couldn’t tell the difference between a baby cow and a goat?
bianca steele 07.14.15 at 6:20 pm
As it happens, I had that conversation with my six year old last week when we were watching Jurassic Park, which I resolved when we saw a close up of the hooves. (I think she’s too young to know it’s supposed to be scary.)
Bryan 07.14.15 at 9:34 pm
The tapeworm knows one big thing.
Shelley 07.14.15 at 10:27 pm
I’ve never understood that. Who (for example) is a hedgehog?
John Holbo 07.15.15 at 1:14 am
“No I don’t think dragons count since it is not at all the same a Saint fighting a fearsome dragon then stepping on its neck as taking a 19 year old concert goer’s book without asking then trying to step on her head. Quite different.”
Well, I wasn’t trying to establish strict moral equivalence . I do concede that the incidence in world literature of stepping on 19-year old concert goers after stealing their books is mild.
Bruce Wilder 07.15.15 at 2:33 am
Shelley @ 25: Who is a hedgehog?
And, why can’t they share?*
*This terrible joke won a prize at Edinburgh Fringe some years ago.
floopmeister 07.15.15 at 3:47 am
No it was not a very wild concert at all. It was quite small at a venue called The Punter’s Club in Fitzroy.
In my memory of the 90’s ‘Wild’ and the ‘Punters Club’ are synonymous :) Went to some seriously intense gigs there…
ZM 07.15.15 at 5:40 am
floopmeister,
The Punter’s Club was about the only venue we got kicked out of for being underage in the 90s. In probably ’95 we turned up at about 3 or 4 in the afternoon for a Ben Lee gig later that night and proceeded to make ourselves at home by sitting on the floor as if we were at an all ages show in Richmond. When we were soon asked for ID and then asked to leave we were very surprised and in our discussions about this unfortunate turn of events decided it must have been because we’d put on too much makeup that day.
Ronan(rf)
“How is it possible that someone couldn’t tell the difference between a baby cow and a goat?”
I could not for the life of me think, and when after trying to argue from authority that since we lived in the country we would know the young man still insisted a goat was a baby cow, I couldn’t think what to do other than insult him, this did not work to change his mind either.
John Holbo 07.15.15 at 6:37 am
“I could not for the life of me think, and when after trying to argue from authority that since we lived in the country we would know the young man still insisted a goat was a baby cow, I couldn’t think what to do other than insult him, this did not work to change his mind either.”
This was my experience in the other, trolling thread, ZM. Only with Nietzsche for the country, irony for the goat, and crude teleology for the baby cow. I am sorry that I insulted you, ZM. For it did not change your mind! It was just I felt my authority, when it comes to separating philosophical livestock, should count for something. We learn from our mistakes, I hope.
ZM 07.15.15 at 8:03 am
I will happily accept your apology John Holbo, as my finer feelings were not too much offended in this instance so there’s no point in holding a grudge.
I will also promise I shall never immortalise for posterity your insulting me for not agreeing Nietzsche is ironic, as I know how terribly upsetting this is as after I eventually complained in writing to the person that tried to step on my head they just immortalised for posterity my insult to the-young-man-who-took-a-goat-for-a-baby-cow — but I certainly did not want me insulting people immortalised for posterity, plus they did not immortalise for posterity how they took my book without asking and then tried to step on my head, so it was very misrepresentative.
floopmeister 07.15.15 at 11:56 pm
The Punter’s Club was about the only venue we got kicked out of for being underage in the 90s. In probably ’95 we turned up at about 3 or 4 in the afternoon for a Ben Lee gig later that night
Well we now know the difference in our ages! :) My first real gig was the Cult in the Seaview ballroom in St Kilda (if I remember correctly) some time in the 80’s…
ZM 07.16.15 at 10:08 am
Oh, I haven’t heard of that venue. My first gig was also in St Kilda to see The Lemonheads at The Palace in 1994 for the It’s A Shame About Ray tour. That was a much more wild concert as my friend and I were near the front and she lost one of her shoes as someone must have stood on her foot and the shoe slipped off.
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