Isaiah Berlin - The Hedgehog and the Fox

Where did Tolstoy get this doctrine of underlying truth from? This is the second of Mr Berlin’s ideas: he got it from Maistre. Mr Berlin shows that many of the historical details come from Maistre’s correspondence [sc. Soirées ]. More than that, Maistre, the reactionary aristocrat, was sceptical of the modern world. He doubted all its values, yet he knew there was no going back. Tolstoy carried this forward into complete ‘negativism’. 1He tore to pieces all the easy explanations of his contemporaries and hinted that he alone had the answer; yet he neither revealed nor even found it. This is a view of history only in a very abstract sense. The poor workaday historian is out of his depth. History is the record of how people behaved, and we ought to be content with it. At least it is all we have. If you want something more, you must ask the old-style philosopher, now almost extinct in this country. And at this point, Mr Berlin obliges us. The divine afflatus descends upon him. The sentences get longer and longer, the thought soars higher and higher, and what had begun as an essay in literary criticism ends as an utterance of the Delphic Apollo. 1

THE OWL AND THE PUSSY-CAT

John Bowle

With apologies to Mr Isaiah Berlin,

to the hedgehog, and to the fox

For those who will seek them out there are two kinds of animals said to frequent the English countryside. 2On the one hand, strange two-legged creatures – round, fluffy, generally silent; predacious yet shy, airborne in a queer noctambulous way, credited by biologists with nocturnal vision, wise, ghostly, mysterious, detached; on the other, four-footed creatures, equally voracious; but sly, not shy; seasonally amorous and then vocal; endowed with queer self-sufficiency and even endearing charm, yet fundamentally and deeply involved in the ephemeral world of phenomena – strugforlifers , 3militant, engaged.

Into these divisions – the detached and the engagé – all the great philosophers may perhaps be divided. Hegel, of course, with his strange clouded eloquence, his vivid yet artificial metaphors – the Innigkeit of his Vierjahrzeitung, was indubitably an owl – an owl of Minerva, beneath whose wings the Weltgeschichte of the Weltanschauung went streaming and undulating, 1twisting and turning in incredible and conscious spirals and swirling billows and baroque convolutions into an eternity of silence. But destined, just because of its inner urge, to contradict and transcend the earthly frustration which the other, polar, 2animal symbolises. Du Plessis-Saaregemines, that feverish and unjustly neglected thinker, 3in contrast, was plainly a cat. From the taut and muscular upspring of his analytic prose – searching, profound, yet practical for an ice-cutting yet atavistic solution – from the feline determination to pursue the end by any means, from the padding of velvet paws which marks the lithe Gallic rhythm of his prose, from the precision of his negligent – yet quite accurate – pounce. Walking always alone along avenues of a profound introspection, yet preoccupied in a balanced ratio of constructive contradiction with brute fact, this astoundingly dim philosopher could always, with his sharp baleful insight, see the trees as well as the wood – even sense, pulsating beneath the autumn leaves his delicate tread would scarcely ruffle, the complex, elaborate but indubitably murine life to which he was the embodied fate.

Drawing by Edward Lear from ‘The Owl and the Pussy-Cat’,

Nonsense Songs, Stories, Botany, and Alphabets (London, 1871)

If we may revert to our original contradiction, symbolised by these discrepant creatures, what is its meaning for us? Hegel or Du Plessis – or neither? If, in the sweep and acceleration of our argument, we take the simile, wring its neck, wring it out, ring 1our bells, our hands and our hearts, what is the last drop of significance we may catch? It may well be this. Despite the profound contradiction between the Owl and the Pussy-Cat – the detachment, the fluffy, evasive, ovanescent, subjective, twilit, ephemeral quality of the Owl; the earth-bound, deeply sensual, tile-conditioned, cynical, objective mode of experience of the Cat – may we not find – as between Hegel and Plessis – some common affinity which distinguishes them both at least from ourselves? If this distinction can be made, the contradiction resolved, we may combine Hegel with Plessis, Kant with Hume, Bergson with Moore, Existentialism with Logical Positivism and the Dialectic with Pareto. Our entire speculation will have proved utterly and fruitfully relevant.

For if, in search of this something – common to them, yet not common to us – enjoyed by them but of which we are all a priori deprived, intuited by both, but to ourselves unattainable, we proceed, at night, into an obscure wood, what, within the experiences of Oblonsky’s body–mind, do we feel? We feel bewilderment, exhaustion, annoyance, irrelevance. Better far, we think, to remain within the confines of our native experience – in the world of gramophone and dictaphone, of heater and typewriter, of loofah and sofa. Better for us, we feel, as we stumble in the dark nocturnal haunts of both animals, the world of light. For in spite of our ingenuity, our empirically conditioned antecedents, our psychophysical intuition, our knowing sidelong insight, we are forced to conclude that in comparison with the Owl and the Pussy-cat – and with the philosophers they represent – we find, within that dark ambience which is their raison d’être, their modus operandi, their very mode of being and becoming, our own vision to be totally and utterly, happily and gloriously opaque. 1

STUCK THERE IN ALL SOULS

I went over to Oxford a couple of weeks ago to talk to the philosopher Isaiah Berlin, who wrote that book on Tolstoy – the hedgehog one. I told him my conception of the movie [of War and Peace ], and he said it sounded wonderful. He’d been going to give me a few minutes at 11 a.m., and at 4 p.m. we were still jabbering away. […] I told Berlin he was the showman, not me, and he told me I was the philosopher, not him. A great guy, and I don’t see how he missed. I mean, stuck there in All Souls.

Mike Todd 1

MICHAEL IGNATIEFF TALKING TO IB

IB It was a joke, you know; I never meant it seriously. There was a man called Lord Oxford, who is alive, 2and a pious Catholic, living in the country, whom I knew in Oxford in the 1930s. He suddenly quoted the line from Archilochus which said that, and then we played games, late 1930s, about hedgehogs and foxes; and that’s how it came into my head, purely as a jeu d’esprit . […] And then I suddenly thought, in Tolstoy’s case, how he was a very good case of both.

29 April 1989

IB You say ‘Berlin appears to be a fox who wishes he were a hedgehog.’ Never have I wished that. Never. Why would you think that? I’m a fox who’s quite content to be a fox. That’s what I say about Tolstoy, that he’s a fox who thought he was a hedgehog; that’s rather different, and that’s what I’m accused of by Perry Anderson, of being a fox who is really a hedgehog, because I have got a large central idea, […] there is something unifying, and that’s quite wrong, but there’s something which I’m being accused of, whatever it is. […] What kind of a hedgehog am I in your view? What is my unitary vision, which I strive after? Not pluralism or liberalism, all these conflicting values and all the rest of it. That’s not an obsessive vision. I don’t reduce everything to that.

MI No, my point about you not being a hedgehog is the obvious one, that I don’t think someone who is a liberal pluralist can be a hedgehog, by definition. […] I meant something different by ‘hedgehog’: I think I meant […] a deep emotional interest in those who have a central vision, and a perplexity, a psychological interest in that kind of achievement.