There is a tendency in the human mind to want to embrace either unity or multiplicity, but not both. According to Archilochus’s distinction, ‘a fox knows many things, but a hedgehog one important thing’, a distinction made famous by the philosopher Sir Isaiah Berlin, who applied it to categorise (approximately) many great artists and thinkers as hedgehogs or foxes. Yet the intellect requires both. On the one hand, the knowledge of many things is of no use if it is not capable of being held together in a coherent framework; on the other, the single great thought requires unfolding and
...more
