The Greek poet Archilochus used to say that "the fox knows many things, but the hedgehog knows one very important thing." That is to say: the fox —an animal that traditionally represents cunning— masters thousands of tricks, but the hedgehog needs only one to defend itself from its predators without resorting to violence: to curl up its body and form a ball of spines. Erasmus of Rotterdam, commenting on Archilochus's proverb in his Adagia, explains that the fox is forced to devise constant stratagems to escape from hunters, while the hedgehog blindly trusts in the only one it has.These differences between both animals inspired Isaiah Berlin to write the famous essay titled The Hedgehog and the Fox, in which he classifies thinkers, artists, and humanity in general into two categories.The hedgehog contemplates reality with a synoptic perspective that leads it, inevitably, to simplify and systematize it. It is coherent, dogmatic, and linear. It is convinced that, beneath the different appearances, beats a single universal principle that imbues diversity with coherence and order. It disregards peripheral details, demanding that everything fit into a chain of reasons. For it, two plus two inexorably makes four. In this category we would find Plato, Lucretius, Dante Alighieri, Pascal, Hegel, Fyodor Dostoevsky, Friedrich Nietzsche, Ibsen, or Proust.On the contrary, the fox is essentially analytical and moves like a fish in water in a complex world where not everything fits. It gladly accepts the inherent contradictions of the world's plurality without trying to confine diversity to a single theory. As examples, Berlin mentions Herodotus, Aristotle, Montaigne, Erasmus, Shakespeare, Molière, Goethe, Pushkin, Balzac, or Joyce. I would also include Unamuno, Juan de Mairena, and, very especially, William James, who wrote: "I have been forced to give up logic justly, wholly, and irrevocably […]. Reality, life, experience, concreteness, immediacy – use whatever word you please – exceed our logic, overflow it, and surround it" (A Pluralistic Universe).
Isaiah Berlin develops this dichotomy in an essay on Leo Tolstoy, where he concludes that the writer was by nature a fox, even though he firmly believed he had to be a hedgehog. However, by systematically ordering the plurality of worldviews in such a way, does Berlin himself not behave like a fox striving to act as a hedgehog?Stephen Jay Gould, who considered Berlin an intellectual hero, evokes these two animals in Once Upon a Time There Was a Fox and a Hedgehog to illustrate how science and humanities can interact, moving from habitual suspicion to concord. Another admirer of Berlin, Ronald Dworkin, also resorts to it in Justice for Hedgehogs, which is possibly his seminal essay. Dworkin seeks to articulate a theoretical system to guide us in the world, a challenge that, as we already know, troubles the hedgehog but not the fox, who lives comfortably among unconnected judgments and opposing values, because he naturally accepts that in life we face problems that we can only solve with partial certainties and relative truths. The hedgehog, on the other hand, is incapable of living without a closed and unambiguous moral order.Schopenhauer taught us that spiky animals also have to learn to be prudent (although he did not apply the lesson himself, as he was a proud hedgehog his whole life). He explains that, on a frosty day of a harsh winter, a group of hedgehogs tried to huddle together to warm each other up; in doing so, they pricked each other with their quills and were forced to separate again. They soon suffered from the biting cold once more and huddled together again, this time with more caution. They spent a good while approaching and distancing themselves, oscillating between the cold and the pain, until they finally found the ideal distance that allowed them to transmit warmth without hurting each other. This fable, which summarizes the art of coexistence, is Schopenhauer's most famous. We find it in Parerga y Paralipomena" and it concludes with this reflection: "In the same way, the desire for company pushes men to seek each other out, but their numerous defects separate them again".Wittgenstein often cited this fable, Freud held it in high regard, and Luis Cernuda was inspired by it when he wrote: "Like hedgehogs, as you know, men one day felt their cold. And they wanted to share it. Then they invented love. The result was, as you know, like that of hedgehogs".
