23: The Hedgehog Knows One Big Thing

23 

The Hedgehog Knows One Big Thing 

Just for fun and out of intellectual curiosity, the renowned Oxford philosopher Isaiah Berlin wrote an essay inspired by one line attributed to the ancient Greek poet Archilochus who died in 645 BC: “The fox knows many things, but the hedgehog knows one big thing.” Isaiah’s essay, published in book form as The Hedgehog and the Fox, is both enlightening and entertaining; and just for the fun of it, I’d like to explore his application of the hedgehog/fox metaphor to my own writing in today’s spiritual musing… 

I hadn’t heard of Isaiah Berlin’s book The Hedgehog and the Fox until a month or so ago when Colin Wilson made reference to it in his talk with Jeffrey Mishlove on his program Thinking Allowed, and I knew immediately what Colin Wilson meant when he said that he belonged to the category of hedgehog writers, because that’s how I saw myself also.

“I’ve written the same book seventy times over,” said Colin Wilson; which put him squarely in the hedgehog camp of writers, because according to Isaiah Berlin hedgehog writers focus on one all-embracing idea for understanding life. They possess a “…central vision, one system less or more coherent or articulate, in terms of which they understand, think and feel—a single, universal, organizing principle.” And for Colin Wilson that one all-consuming central preoccupation was, in Jeffery Mishlove’s words, “reconciling this issue of the heights of consciousness and the depths of despair.”

Berlin made no huge claims for his hedgehog/fox metaphor, calling it a “starting-point for genuine investigation,” with the added benefit of being an “enjoyable intellectual game” by which one could classify writers and thinkers into either camp, as he did by placing Plato, Dante, Pascal, Proust, Dostoevsky, Nietzsche, Ibsen, and many other classical writers into the hedgehog camp; and Aristotle, Shakespeare, Montaigne, Goethe, and  Joyce among others in the fox camp of writers and thinkers, but focusing his attention upon Tolstoy.

According to Berlin’s application of the metaphor, fox writers pursue many ends, often unrelated, “seizing upon the essence of a vast variety of experience and objects for what they are in themselves, without, consciously or unconsciously, seeking to fit into, or exclude them from, any one unchanging, all-embracing…unitary vision.”

In short, Berlin defined a hedgehog writer as someone who relates everything to a single vision, an organizing principle that seems to cover all of history, or a single dynamic of polar opposites like Colin Wilson’s lifelong study of the depths and heights of human consciousness; and a fox writer, on the other hand pursues many ideas, not necessarily related, and often contradictory, like the great Russian novelist Leo Tolstoy.

Two camps, two types of writers; and according to this hedgehog/fox classification, I’m definitely a hedgehog writer because I have pursued one central idea my whole life; an idée fixe which can be summed up by the simple question, WHO AM I?

This became my organizing principle, and everything I did in my life was colored by my efforts to find the answer to this haunting question. I didn’t talk about it openly, because this would have been a foolish thing to do, unless one was Shirley MacLaine who confessed in I’m Over all That, “no matter where I went I was always looking for myself” and always brought it up in interviews simply to expand social self-awareness; but whether one talks about it or not everyone will one day ask the question, WHO AM I? 

There were many things in my life that I longed for, and many avenues that I wanted to explore; but because of my hedgehog preoccupation, I focused my attention on what I felt would help me answer my haunting question. So I was fox-like by inclination, because of my many interests; but I was a hedgehog by instinct, because I had to find my true self.

This caused me considerable anxiety, because I couldn’t have it both ways; until I made a commitment one day and vowed to find my true self or die trying. And the more I focused on my idée fixe, the more laser-like attention I brought to my quest; which confirmed Isaiah Berlin’s hedgehog/fox metaphor, because the hedgehog writer would be better disposed to a deeper insight into his preoccupying single interest than the fox writer who has many interests, because the hedgehog writer is by instinct a centripetal thinker (tending to move toward a center), and the fox writer is a centrifugal thinker (tending to move away from a center); but whether hedgehog or fox, both types  play out life’s drama of becoming who they are according to their own nature, thereby fulfilling their essential purpose in life.

Of course, this presupposes that life has an essential purpose; but it was because of my hedgehog conviction that I managed to answer the question WHO AM I? which granted me an insight into life’s essential purpose of realizing our true self, as I articulated in The Pearl of Great Price that tells the story of my self-discovery.

 But this is a personal realization, and I don’t expect the world to see it; because, as Gurdjieff used to say, “There is only self-initiation into the mysteries of life,” and the only way to confirm that our purpose in life is to become our true self would be to initiate oneself into the sacred mystery. This is what the ancient alchemists meant when they said, “Man must finish the work which Nature has left incomplete.”

I’m glad that I was born to be a hedgehog, then; because it compelled me to devote my life to finding my true self and write about my journey, and as many regrets as I may have for not satisfying the longings of my many interests (I’d still love to be a Jungian therapist specializing in past-life regression therapy), I’ve accomplished what I came into this world to do; and I couldn’t ask for more. 

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