Drawing by Edward Lear from ‘The Owl and the Pussy-Cat’,
Nonsense Songs, Stories, Botany, and Alphabets (London, 1871)
If we may revert to our original contradiction, symbolised by these discrepant creatures, what is its meaning for us? Hegel or Du Plessis – or neither? If, in the sweep and acceleration of our argument, we take the simile, wring its neck, wring it out, ring1 our bells, our hands and our hearts, what is the last drop of significance we may catch? It may well be this. Despite the profound contradiction between the Owl and the Pussy-Cat – the detachment, the fluffy, evasive, ovanescent, subjective, twilit, ephemeral quality of the Owl; the earth-bound, deeply sensual, tile-conditioned, cynical, objective mode of experience of the Cat – may we not find – as between Hegel and Plessis – some common affinity which distinguishes them both at least from ourselves? If this distinction can be made, the contradiction resolved, we may combine Hegel with Plessis, Kant with Hume, Bergson with Moore, Existentialism with Logical Positivism and the Dialectic with Pareto. Our entire speculation will have proved utterly and fruitfully relevant.
For if, in search of this something – common to them, yet not common to us – enjoyed by them but of which we are all a priori deprived, intuited by both, but to ourselves unattainable, we proceed, at night, into an obscure wood, what, within the experiences of Oblonsky’s body–mind, do we feel? We feel bewilderment, exhaustion, annoyance, irrelevance. Better far, we think, to remain within the confines of our native experience – in the world of gramophone and dictaphone, of heater and typewriter, of loofah and sofa. Better for us, we feel, as we stumble in the dark nocturnal haunts of both animals, the world of light. For in spite of our ingenuity, our empirically conditioned antecedents, our psychophysical intuition, our knowing sidelong insight, we are forced to conclude that in comparison with the Owl and the Pussy-cat – and with the philosophers they represent – we find, within that dark ambience which is their raison d’être, their modus operandi, their very mode of being and becoming, our own vision to be totally and utterly, happily and gloriously opaque.1
STUCK THERE IN ALL SOULS
I went over to Oxford a couple of weeks ago to talk to the philosopher Isaiah Berlin, who wrote that book on Tolstoy – the hedgehog one. I told him my conception of the movie [of War and Peace], and he said it sounded wonderful. He’d been going to give me a few minutes at 11 a.m., and at 4 p.m. we were still jabbering away. […] I told Berlin he was the showman, not me, and he told me I was the philosopher, not him. A great guy, and I don’t see how he missed. I mean, stuck there in All Souls.
Mike Todd1
MICHAEL IGNATIEFF TALKING TO IB
IB It was a joke, you know; I never meant it seriously. There was a man called Lord Oxford, who is alive,2 and a pious Catholic, living in the country, whom I knew in Oxford in the 1930s. He suddenly quoted the line from Archilochus which said that, and then we played games, late 1930s, about hedgehogs and foxes; and that’s how it came into my head, purely as a jeu d’esprit. […] And then I suddenly thought, in Tolstoy’s case, how he was a very good case of both.
29 April 1989
IB You say ‘Berlin appears to be a fox who wishes he were a hedgehog.’ Never have I wished that. Never. Why would you think that? I’m a fox who’s quite content to be a fox. That’s what I say about Tolstoy, that he’s a fox who thought he was a hedgehog; that’s rather different, and that’s what I’m accused of by Perry Anderson, of being a fox who is really a hedgehog, because I have got a large central idea, […] there is something unifying, and that’s quite wrong, but there’s something which I’m being accused of, whatever it is. […] What kind of a hedgehog am I in your view? What is my unitary vision, which I strive after? Not pluralism or liberalism, all these conflicting values and all the rest of it. That’s not an obsessive vision. I don’t reduce everything to that.
MI No, my point about you not being a hedgehog is the obvious one, that I don’t think someone who is a liberal pluralist can be a hedgehog, by definition. […] I meant something different by ‘hedgehog’: I think I meant […] a deep emotional interest in those who have a central vision, and a perplexity, a psychological interest in that kind of achievement.
IB Well, only because I’ve studied it, because Karl Marx was one and Tolstoy was one and so on; but no, I don’t think that’s right. I’ve got no either envy of or obsession by or terrible interest in people with a single vision; on the contrary, I think them very grand, important geniuses, but dangerous. […] I do think they can be geniuses of the first order. People who have a single vision of the universe, like Dante or Tolstoy […] – Tolstoy didn’t, in my opinion, but he wanted to – but there are people with this single view of the world, and they can be marvellous, but don’t tempt me, [n]or [do I] object to [them] terribly […]. I admire them and concede their importance or their genius. […] You must be thinking that I have somewhere a desire to put it all together. […] You might be right, because one doesn’t know oneself, but I’m telling you I never have felt a hedgehog in my life, or any temptation to be one. I’ve admired hedgehogs – Toscanini is a hero of exactly that kind. Akhmatova was a hedgehog. Oh, I’m impressed by them, I’m deeply moved by them, but not with them; and I don’t walk the same earth with them. [It’s a] leitmotif in my work – human desire for certainty is unshakeable, noble, incorrigible, highly dangerous; that’s all right. I don’t know about noble, I’m not sure it is; unshakeable, incorrigible and dangerous, yes; maybe it’s a case of noble noble, a case of ignoble ignoble. I don’t think Karl Marx was very noble: brave rather than dignified and worthy of respect. Noble?
29 April 1991
IB Then as a result of learning to dictate in Washington – I’ve always found it very painful to write – I began dictating here [in Oxford], and I found that infinitely easier; and so The Hedgehog and the Fox […] dictated in two days. That was because the Oxford Slavonic Studies [sc. Papers] – no, I had to deliver a lecture on a Slavonic subject, given to me by the Professor of Russian, whom I knew, Konovalov,1 a fellow of New College; and I delivered the lecture. He said, ‘Well, if you can write that, I’d like to publish it.’ So I wrote it out, then he rejected it. It was not in time. And then somebody intervened and it was saved. It was then published as ‘Notes about the Historical Scepticism of Lev Tolstoy’ [sc. ‘Lev Tolstoy’s Historical Scepticism’]. It was never read by anybody in that form. […] Somebody must have told [George] Weidenfeld. He looked at it and thought it was publishable. […] And then Weidenfeld said, ‘It’s not quite long enough. It doesn’t quite – a pamphlet could be a little longer.’ So
I made it a little longer – added some more – and that was that.
5 June 1994
LATER COMMENTARY
The following extracts are culled from the editor’s archive of material about Berlin. No attempt has been made to locate especially interesting passages from the enormous secondary literature on Berlin’s essay (an exercise for another day, perhaps).
[Berlin] discovered that he was a hedgehog with one big central idea only because everyone else was telling him it was there.