The Hedgehog and the Fox: An Essay on Tolstoy's View of History

by Isaiah Berlin

It is not merely that the fox knows many things. The fox accepts that he can only know many things and that the unity of reality must escape his grasp. The critical feature of foxes is that they are reconciled to the limits of what they know. As Berlin puts it, ‘We are part of a larger scheme of things than we can understand. […] we ourselves live in this whole and by it, and are wise only in the measure to which we make our peace with it.’1

A hedgehog will not make peace with the world. He is not reconciled. He cannot accept that he knows only many things. He seeks to know one big thing, and strives without ceasing to give reality a unifying shape. Foxes settle for what they know and may live happy lives. Hedgehogs will not settle and their lives may not be happy.

We are riven creatures and we have to choose whether to accept the incompleteness of our knowledge or to hold out for certainty and truth. Only the most determined among us will refuse to settle for what the fox knows and hold out for the certainties of the hedgehog.

Wisdom, he writes, is not surrender to illusion, but rather an acceptance of the ‘unalterable medium in which we act’, ‘the permanent relationships of things’, ‘the universal texture of human life’.1 This we can know, not by science or by reasoning, so much as by a deep coming to terms with what is.

The grandeur of hedgehogs is that they refuse our limitations. Their tragedy is that they cannot be reconciled to them at the end.

Jasper Ridley

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THERE IS A LINE among the fragments of the Greek poet Archilochus which says: ‘The fox knows many things, but the hedgehog knows one big thing.’

Tolstoy’s interest in history began early in his life. It seems to have arisen not from interest in the past as such, but from the desire to penetrate to first causes, to understand how and why things happen as they do and not otherwise, from discontent with those current explanations which do not explain, and leave the mind dissatisfied, from a tendency to doubt and place under suspicion and, if need be, reject whatever does not fully answer the question, to go to the root of every matter, at whatever cost.

‘The leaves of a tree delight us more than the roots’,6 with the implication that this is nevertheless a superficial view of the world.

History does not reveal causes; it presents only a blank succession of unexplained events.

History, as it is normally written, usually represents ‘political’ – public – events as the most important, while spiritual – ‘inner’ – events are largely forgotten; yet prima facie it is they – the ‘inner’ events – that are the most real, the most immediate experience of human beings; they, and only they, are what life, in the last analysis, is made of; hence the routine political historians are talking shallow nonsense.

To try to ‘understand’ anything by rational means is to make sure of failure.

these are the trivial ‘flowers’ of life, not the ‘roots’.

obscurum per obscurius.

The obscure through the more obscure - explaining something obscure in terms of something more obscure

We know too few facts, and we select them at random and in accordance with our subjective inclinations.

Nevertheless he longed for a universal explanatory principle; that is, the perception of resemblances or common origins, or single purpose, or unity in the apparent variety of the mutually exclusive bits and pieces which composed the furniture of the world.

No one has ever excelled Tolstoy in expressing the specific flavour, the exact quality of a feeling – the degree of its ‘oscillation’, the ebb and flow, the minute movements (which Turgenev mocked as a mere trick on his part) – the inner and outer texture and ‘feel’ of a look, a thought, a pang of sentiment, no less than of a specific situation, of an entire period, of the lives of individuals, families, communities, entire nations.

Tolstoy’s genius lies in a capacity for marvellously accurate reproduction of the irreproducible, the almost miraculous evocation of the full, untranslatable individuality of the individual, which induces in the reader an acute awareness of the presence of the object itself, and not of a mere description of it, employing for this purpose metaphors which fix the quality of a particular experience as such, and avoiding those general terms which relate it to similar instances by ignoring individual differences – the ‘oscillations’ of feeling – in favour of what is common to them all.

He remained an admirer of Rousseau, and late in life still recommended Émile as the best book ever written on education.

Rousseau’s noble savage.

‘homme de beaucoup de mérite’

Maistre’s ‘Expliquez pourquoi ce qu’il y a de plus honorable dans le monde, au jugement de tout le genre humain sans exception, est le droit de verser innocemment le sang innocent?’,

‘Expliquez pourquoi ce qu’il y a de plus honorable dans le monde, au jugement de tout le genre humain sans exception, est le droit de verser innocemment le sang innocent?

Translation Explain why the most honorable thing in the world, in the judgment of all mankind without exception, is the right to inocently shed innocent blood

non in commotione Dominus;

We are part of a larger scheme of things than we can understand. We cannot describe it in the way in which external objects or the characters of other people can be described,