Reading at whim, but not at random

[scout]

My reading is not quite directionless, but the needle on my compass is very jumpy and I usually just go with it, very willing to explore side trails — the journey is the reward, and it’s all part of the journey, right? And sometimes the side trails reveal something that will shift my loosely held direction.

Not long ago I was reading an essay in the Los Angeles Review of Books, “The Last of the Hedgehogs,” about Rene Girard, a thinker whose thinking intrigues me but I barely understand. The essay opens thus:

IN 1953, ISAIAH BERLIN published his long essay “The Hedgehog and the Fox,” outlining his now-famous Oxbridge variant on there are two kinds of people in this world. He drew the title from an ambiguous fragment attributed to the ancient lyric poet Archilochus of Paros: “The fox knows many things, but the hedgehog one big thing.” Written with the aim of pointing out tensions between Tolstoy’s grand view of history and the artistic temperament that saw such a view as untenable, Berlin’s essay became an unlikely hit, although less for its argument about Russian literature than for its contention that two antithetical personae govern the world of ideas: hedgehogs, who view the world in terms of some all-embracing system, seeing all facts as fitting into a grand pattern; and foxes, those pluralists or particularists who refuse “big theory” for reasons either intellectual or temperamental. [emphasis added]

OK, I had a very vague idea of where Isaiah Berlin sits in the intellectual firmament, and I had heard the fragment about the fox and the hedgehog repeatedly but did not really know what it meant. The bolded part was the first explanation I’d seen. It caught my eye initially because of the “pluralists or particularists” part, given that I am very interested in William James, have a basic understanding of his claim that the universe is plural, and at this point in my life am very much not engaged in the search for all-embracing grand patterns.

That was enough to convince me that I should read Berlin’s essay … eventually. So I looked around for a copy, could only find it in book form, sighed and paid the ten dollars to load it onto my Kindle. But didn’t read it right away. Which meant that I might not read it anytime soon, or not at all — I am fairly aware of the last twenty or thirty Kindle books I’ve bought, but as I buy new ones the older ones drift off the screen and out of mind. The intent to read the book is a separate thing, but it can easily fade away too.

Then I read this in @joanwestenberg’s latest essay:

The experts who performed best tended to be what Tetlock called “foxes” rather than “hedgehogs,” borrowing from Archilochus’s ancient distinction. Hedgehogs know one big thing and apply it everywhere, while foxes know many small things and adapt flexibly. The hedgehogs were frequently the most intelligent and articulate members of the sample. They also consistently overestimated their own accuracy and failed to update their beliefs when predictions went wrong.

Intelligence, it seems, can produce a particularly fraught form of intellectual pride. You’ve been right so many times before, in so many situations, in ways that others couldn’t match.

Ooh, I like this. I’m especially fascinated at how sideways things can go when experts operate out of their field of expertise — and when the rest of us give credence to what they say simply because they’re expert at something.

So I remembered Berlin’s essay and decided to read it. The book has a nice, short introduction by Berlin’s biographer, which does such a good job of explaining the hedgehog/fox idea that I have to resist quoting the entire thing. But here’s a decent chunk of it [all emphases added]:

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.’ 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 can be reconciled to our ‘sense of reality’ – accept it for what it is, live life as we find it – or we can hunger for a more fundamental, unitary truth beneath appearance, a truth that will explain or console. Berlin contrasted this longing for unitary truth with a fox’s sense of reality. He was adamant that even a fox’s knowledge could be solid and clear as far as it went. We are not in a fog. We can know, we can learn, we can make moral judgements. Scientific knowledge is clear. What he disputed is that science or reason can give us a final certainty that cuts to the core of reality. Most of us settle for this. 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’. 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. Tolstoy was ruthlessly dismissive of every available doctrine of truth, whether religious or secular, yet he could not abandon the conviction that some such ultimate truth could be grasped if only he could overcome his own limitations.

Plenty for me to digest there! And I haven’t even gotten to the essay yet! Well, yes I have, I’ve read the first twenty pages, and it is a fascinating take on the thinking of an unusual guy (Tolstoy). But I think the three passages I’ve quoted are more than enough to get Berlin’s point about how we approach reality, and I expect the essay will tell me more about Tolstoy but not more about that.

As I mentioned elsewhere I think I am one of William James’s “once-born”, someone who from the get-go instinctively found the universe a hospitable and unmysterious place, curious to know more but willing to settle for what was within my capacity to understand, not bothered by incomplete or inconsistent knowledge. That makes me a natural born fox. I spent a lot of time gravitating towards hedgehogs, listening to what they had to say, willing to grant that they might be right and I might be wrong and that I should just embrace their framework wholesale, simply accepting the parts I didn’t understand.

I even tried doing that. But I could never get past asking one question: is this working? After all, if it was the Truth, it should work, right? And whenever I concluded that things weren’t working, I jettisoned the thinking and moved on — not rejecting it, just deciding that it was at worst wrong and at best useless, and therefore OK to leave behind.

Anyway, an example of how reading at whim has taken me somewhere unexpected that will strongly influence future reading and thinking. I want to finish that essay. And I want to re-read some of what James wrote about pragmatism and a pluralistic universe with this deeper understanding in mind.

[cquenelle]

Based on your descriptions, I would have to say that “fox” and “hedgehog” are ways of thinking about the world, but no actual person thinks about the world in only one way. We think in different ways at different times and in different realms of experience. The business world, social interactions, politics. We might think one realm has an overarching truth, but another realm doesn’t. People might think like a hedgehog one day and like a fox the next. They are useful labels for ways of thinking, and ways of seeing.

In the modern world our sense of identity has come so unmoored that we grasp for labels to apply to ourselves and others to try to collectively understand how we feel.

[scout]

Agreed. But it’s fun to consider people you know, thinkers you admire or dislike, public figures of all sorts, and wonder about their guiding principle — are they predominantly hedgehog or fox? From Michael Ignatieff’s introduction:

What began life as a common-room parlour game in the late 1930s – an Oxford undergraduate introduced him to the shimmering and mysterious sentence in the Greek original and Isaiah took it up to divide his friends into hedgehogs and foxes – Berlin then turned into the structuring insight for a great essay on Tolstoy. It has now passed into the culture as a way to classify those around us and to think about two basic orientations towards reality itself.

And I think it’s fair to say that thinkers who devote themselves to exploring and developing a coherent worldview, at least publicly, tend to align themselves with one or the other. Berlin himself says this [emphases added]:

But, taken figuratively, the words can be made to yield a sense in which they mark one of the deepest differences which divide writers and thinkers, and, it may be, human beings in general. For there exists a great chasm between those, on one side, who relate everything to a single central vision, one system, less or more coherent or articulate, in terms of which they understand, think and feel – a single, universal, organising principle in terms of which alone all that they are and say has significance – and, on the other side, those who pursue many ends, often unrelated and even contradictory, connected, if at all, only in some de facto way, for some psychological or physiological cause, related to no moral or aesthetic principle. These last lead lives, perform acts and entertain ideas that are centrifugal rather than centripetal; their thought is scattered or diffused, moving on many levels, seizing upon the essence of a vast variety of experiences and objects for what they are in themselves, without, consciously or unconsciously, seeking to fit them into, or exclude them from, any one unchanging, all-embracing, sometimes self-contradictory and incomplete, at times fanatical, unitary inner vision.

Being a writer after my own heart, he is quick to offer concrete examples.

The first kind of intellectual and artistic personality belongs to the hedgehogs, the second to the foxes; and without insisting on a rigid classification, we may, without too much fear of contradiction, say that, in this sense, Dante belongs to the first category, Shakespeare to the second; Plato, Lucretius, Pascal, Hegel, Dostoevsky, Nietzsche, Ibsen, Proust are, in varying degrees, hedgehogs; Herodotus, Aristotle, Montaigne, Erasmus, Molière, Goethe, Pushkin, Balzac, Joyce are foxes.

To your point, I agree that people end up as a mixture in practice, but I like to think about whether that is because one or the other is more useful in a particular situation, or that one represents the person’s aspirations while the other represents their inclinations. Tolstoy is the example Berlin considers, a fox by nature who is a hedgehog wannabe, who desperately wants a Unified Theory of Everything but sees endless evidence that such is not the case. The example I think about constantly is Montaigne, who thought and wrote and lived his life as a fox, undermining hedgehog thinking in all his writings.

Back in my Christian days we would bat about the concept of “functional atheist”, someone who in their own mind embraced the faith fully, but in everyday practice was indistinguishable from an unbeliever. Another saying (not unique to Christians) was “If you want to see what someone believes, study their checkbook and their calendar.” That is, what people actually believe can be quite different from what they think they believe, not from duplicity but more a sort of aspirational delusion — we want to be a certain way enough to think that we are in fact that way, and anything in our behavior that says otherwise is a slip, an all-too-human falling short of our ideal.

I try to be clear-headed about my aspirations, acknowledging that I am not fully realized though prone to slip, but deliberately trying to become a certain sort of person who still has a long way to go. And looking over my years of working on my character with hedgehogs and foxes in mind, I notice that usually what got me into trouble and deflected me from the path was hedgehog thinking. It was clearest in my Christian days — I wanted there to be a One True Way of looking at the world, which I could discover and embrace and use to dictate my actions and thinking. That was not only a mistake, it often blinded me to evidence staring me in the face that the world was not that way. But my curiosity always got the best of me, and I steadily piled up evidence that hedgehog thinking wasn’t for me, not only unworkable in my life but a bad fit with reality as I was experiencing it. Meanwhile, every time I gave up on some certainty about how the world is, my head cleared and my life improved.

All this to say: even though we are all a mongrel breed, a mixture of hedgehog and fox, one approach may be better than the other for becoming a person in the world, and therefore worth nurturing in ourselves. Most people seem to chase after hedgehog thinking. I vote fox, and am working towards being one by nature, acting and thinking and being without certainty while always curious about what is going on around me.