Notes on "The Hedgehog and the Fox"

In continuing to think of what it means to be a “dabbler”, I went to Isaiah Berlin’s book The Hedgehog and the Fox. Upon initially hearing the premise of his essay, that creative and intellectual people can be divided in two categories, one that is extremely focused on a single idea and the other that attends to several ideas, I instinctively (and falsely) thought that the former was the fox, the latter the hedgehog. I imagined the fox as some kind of predator, concentrating on capturing on her prey while the hedgehog might be more of floater, dipping in and out of activities and pursuits.

Berlin begins by drawing on a line from the Greek poet Archilochus who forwards the claim that “the fox knows many things, but the hedgehog knows one big thing”. He proceeds to analyze this statement by classifying “writers and thinkers” into these two divides: the hedgehog who spends her life directed by and fixated on “a single central vision… a single, universal, organizing principle”, and the fox who “pursue[s] many ends, often unrelated and even contradictory”. He goes on to explain that foxes think and create on multiple levels picking “experiences and objects” without looking to taxonomize them in such a way that they should fit a pre-conceived idea of what they are to mean and how the are to communicate.

It seems that for Berlin, there is not one category that is superior to the other but that the great thinkers fit into both. While it may seem that the hedgehog, because of her focus, would be more successful, it is impossible to attribute great achievement to be a product of solely one of these creative personalities. His essay goes to on assert that Tolstoy is the exception to this formula (however flexible) and to illustrate why this is the case. But I would like to return here to where we started: the dabbler.

What comes to mind here is the concept of the bricoleur (originally used by anthropologist Claude Lévi-Strauss) as she who generates a meaningful unit, a creative product from a variety of materials, often found matter or debris. When I think of the person who creates a bricollage, the nearest term, for me, is the French word  “débrouillard” which loosely translates as someone who is resourceful, perhaps someone who has DIY morals. But it seems to me the bricoleur is more than this. She is a collector of sorts, perhaps even an artful hoarder who assembles a variety of objects, I prefer the word “things”, and repurposes them in a cluster or congregation that in turn forms a whole, a new and more complex thing. I think here of contemporary artist Sarah Sze’s installations in the American Pavillion at the 2013 Venice Bienniale given the title “Triple Point”. By assembling together a myriad of things (plants, office supplies, photographs, furniture etc.), her bricollages are vivid and animated. Berlin’s claim that the fox need not view a thing through the singular lens of one established idea could be understood then as the opening of a space for objects to exist on their own or for themselves. In this way, Sze’s work can be seen as facilitating such a space whereby things can exist as a multivalent plurality, touching upon several different ideas and meanings at once.

Sze is perhaps just one illustration of how the fox might be illustrated, but I think it is fruitful to further this example. Its seems that perhaps today, the fox is not just someone who is open to a variety of ideas, but someone who seeks to pursue these ideas through a variety of media. I might even go as far to say that artistic culture today fosters the development of foxes more than hedgehogs in the estimation allocated to those who pursue inter-disciplinary projects and activities. Perhaps today, such a division between the hedgehog and the fox could not be made with so much intent. Perhaps we are all, all at once, both hedgehogs and foxes. Perhaps the fluidity relationship is a reflection of the constant oscillation between these two protagonists in our own personal and mercurial trials to assemble for ourselves a self as well as to create something we feel to be meaningful.