To R. Errera of the publishers Calmann-Levy, 23 January 1973
The Hedgehog and the Fox – Le Hérisson et le renard: essai sur le philosophie d’histoire de Léon Tolstoi, which, whatever its merits, is, I suspect, the most widely read of all my books, both in England and in America […].
To Leon Edel, 17 September 1985
[T]he idea [in Edmund Wilson’s diary] that the last bit of my essay on Tolstoy is really autobiographical and that, ‘like all serious Jews’, I long to be a hedgehog is simply not true […].
Edmund Wilson had written:
I told [A. J. P.] Taylor, when it was over, that I had misunderstood Isaiah. ‘He’s very easy to misunderstand,’ said Taylor shortly and tellingly. I had not then seen, in the New Statesman, Taylor’s review of The Hedgehog and the Fox, which had rather cast a shadow on Isaiah. I talked to Taylor about the book as we were coming out of the lecture, and he said that he felt that Isaiah, when he couldn’t get into his subject, tried to carry things off ‘with a burst of words’, and that this was what he had said. There is something in this, I think – I had felt the evening before, when the conversation became philosophical, as I had sometimes felt with Isaiah before, that one feels him at moments scraping bottom when he has sailed into the shallows of his mind; but it is evident that Taylor, in the plain English tradition, cannot appreciate what they call at Oxford ‘the Delphic side’ of Isaiah, which is also the prophetic Jewish side. I thought that the end of the Tolstoy essay, which for Taylor is a mere torrent of words, was actually quite successfuclass="underline" he is talking about his own problems: he lives much the life of the fox but, like all serious Jews, aspires to the unity of the hedgehog.1
A. J. P. TAYLOR’S REVIEW
Isaiah Berlin dwells in that strange borderland, the history of ideas, especially of ideas displayed in literature; and one sometimes feels that he has more ideas than all the historical authors whom he sets out to illuminate. Voltaire no doubt had him in mind when he wittily remarked, ‘it is neither literature nor ideas nor history’.2 Something rather in the nature of an intellectual firework display, appropriately published in November, Mr Berlin is lavish with his gifts. In this little book of eighty pages, he starts enough themes to last another man a lifetime, though by now he is doubtless off on quite a different scent.
His essay treats ostensibly of Tolstoy’s view of history. But it starts with a penetrating idea on Tolstoy himself. Let us divide writers into hedgehogs and foxes. ‘The fox knows many things, but the hedgehog knows one big thing.’ The foxes chase after everything in the world, never aiming at a single point, never acquiring a single vision. The hedgehog is dedicated and dominated, for him everything must revolve round a centre. It is easy to agree that writers fall into the two classes of those for whom the heavens have opened and those for whom they have not. Pushkin, for example, was a fox; Dostoevsky a hedgehog. But what is Tolstoy? Mr Berlin gives a brilliant answer which carries him through most of his essay: Tolstoy was by nature a fox, who believed in being a hedgehog. He had an incomparable gift for creating a picture of real life, building it up from endless details of individuals and events; and when he was off his guard he sometimes implied that if we could know every tiny happening, we would understand the causes of events. But when he pulled himself up and became conscious, he regarded this view as wicked. Somewhere there must be the secret of the universe, which was more than the sum of its parts. This secret always evaded him; and he became the more destructive of the answers given by others, because he had failed to find one for himself.
The experienced reader of War and Peace will find this a convincing explanation. War and Peace is a work of propaganda, as well as the greatest historical novel ever written. It aims to show that men are never in control of events and indeed that the more they seek to control them, the more futile they become. Napoleon is the butt of War and Peace; Kutuzov, waiting for events to decide things for him, its saint. But Tolstoy cheated on the historical record, as Mr Berlin makes clear. He suppressed anything which told in Napoleon’s favour; and he drew a picture of Kutuzov which, as he himself knew, bore no relation to the real man. The Kutuzov of War and Peace is not a historical figure. He is a symbol of the truly wise man who senses the underlying nature of the universe. He is what Tolstoy wanted to be and never succeeded in becoming.
Where did Tolstoy get this doctrine of underlying truth from? This is the second of Mr Berlin’s ideas: he got it from Maistre. Mr Berlin shows that many of the historical details come from Maistre’s correspondence [sc. Soirées]. More than that, Maistre, the reactionary aristocrat, was sceptical of the modern world. He doubted all its values, yet he knew there was no going back. Tolstoy carried this forward into complete ‘negativism’.1 He tore to pieces all the easy explanations of his contemporaries and hinted that he alone had the answer; yet he neither revealed nor even found it. This is a view of history only in a very abstract sense. The poor workaday historian is out of his depth. History is the record of how people behaved, and we ought to be content with it. At least it is all we have. If you want something more, you must ask the old-style philosopher, now almost extinct in this country. And at this point, Mr Berlin obliges us. The divine afflatus descends upon him. The sentences get longer and longer, the thought soars higher and higher, and what had begun as an essay in literary criticism ends as an utterance of the Delphic Apollo.1
THE OWL AND THE PUSSY-CAT
John Bowle
With apologies to Mr Isaiah Berlin,
to the hedgehog, and to the fox
For those who will seek them out there are two kinds of animals said to frequent the English countryside.2 On the one hand, strange two-legged creatures – round, fluffy, generally silent; predacious yet shy, airborne in a queer noctambulous way, credited by biologists with nocturnal vision, wise, ghostly, mysterious, detached; on the other, four-footed creatures, equally voracious; but sly, not shy; seasonally amorous and then vocal; endowed with queer self-sufficiency and even endearing charm, yet fundamentally and deeply involved in the ephemeral world of phenomena – strugforlifers,3 militant, engaged.
Into these divisions – the detached and the engagé – all the great philosophers may perhaps be divided. Hegel, of course, with his strange clouded eloquence, his vivid yet artificial metaphors – the Innigkeit of his Vierjahrzeitung, was indubitably an owl – an owl of Minerva, beneath whose wings the Weltgeschichte of the Weltanschauung went streaming and undulating,1 twisting and turning in incredible and conscious spirals and swirling billows and baroque convolutions into an eternity of silence. But destined, just because of its inner urge, to contradict and transcend the earthly frustration which the other, polar,2 animal symbolises. Du Plessis-Saaregemines, that feverish and unjustly neglected thinker,3 in contrast, was plainly a cat. From the taut and muscular upspring of his analytic prose – searching, profound, yet practical for an ice-cutting yet atavistic solution – from the feline determination to pursue the end by any means, from the padding of velvet paws which marks the lithe Gallic rhythm of his prose, from the precision of his negligent – yet quite accurate – pounce. Walking always alone along avenues of a profound introspection, yet preoccupied in a balanced ratio of constructive contradiction with brute fact, this astoundingly dim philosopher could always, with his sharp baleful insight, see the trees as well as the wood – even sense, pulsating beneath the autumn leaves his delicate tread would scarcely ruffle, the complex, elaborate but indubitably murine life to which he was the embodied fate.