The fox looks every which way when he runs across the fields, but the hedgehog focuses almost exclusively on his burrow.
So which was Leo Tolstoy, the author of
War and Peace (Modern Library Classics)
?
Along the way to examining this quetion, Isaiah Berlin raises some big questions himself about the nature of history, human experience, and whether our world is knowable.
This is a terrific essay, very clear and lucid. Isaiah Berlin's reasoned argument is a delight to the modern reader. It does not lose anything by being over 50 years old--in fact the whole discussion takes on a timeless quality. When you are reading Isaiah Berlin, you are under the spell of a great thinker and a great writer.
Berlin takes his title from the fragment of the Greek poet, Archilochus which says: "The fox knows many things, but the hedgehog knows one big thing." Berlin concludes that Tolstoy is both together.
Human will and the progress of history cannot be explained by a specific line of scientific inquiry and discovery but by an expanded awareness of the flow of life experience. That's what Tolstoy is getting at according to Berlin.
"And the most important and most pervasive of these is the crucial line that divides the surface from the depths--on the one hand the world of perceptible, describable, and analysable data, both physical and psycological, . . . and on the other, the order which, as it were, contains and determines the structure of experience, the framework in which it--that is, we and all that we experience--must be conceived as being set, that which enters into our habits of thought, action, feeling, our emotions, hopes, wishes, ourways of talking, believing, reacting, being . . ."
We are all immersed in this medium, the flow of life. Tolsoty pportrays this vividly in certain passages of
War and Peace (Modern Library Classics)
. His heroes Pierre, Prince Andrey and others arrive at moments of realization.
There are strong similarities between an epiphany about the flow of life and history and the realizations reached by Rousseau, Wordsworth, and Emerson.
A deep knowing of the flow of life was holistic, the "one big thing" which Tolstoy, the fox, was tending towards, though despite this "hedgehog" idea, Tolstoy always remains the fox because of his mastery of detail of the world in all its particulars. Tolstoy shows great mastery of concrete, particular details and descriptions, and the nuances of character.
Of course, in later life Tolstoy became converted to a form of Christianity based on the Sermon on the Mount. In
The Kingdom of God is Within You & What is Art? (New Edition)
(see my review), a book which influenced Gandhi and Martin Luther King, Tolstoy explains these views at great length, arguing there for pacifism, and presenting a deep-seated antipathy toward government of any kind, and the Orthodox Church as currently constituted.
Isaiah Berlin, who was born in Riga, Latvia and moved to St. Petersburg, Russia where, as a child, he witnessed the Russian Revolution. Berlin was a political philosopher and historian of ideas. He is considered one of the greatest minds of the Twentieth Century. He is especially well-known for his argument against ideological totalitarianism of every kind in
Four Essays on Liberty (Oxford Paperbacks)
.
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