But in his charming and serious letter Mr Bowman raises or implies a number of questions about pluralism, reality and knowledge, only some of which can be addressed here. Some readers have taken our article to suggest that Berlin supports a currently fashionable view – sometimes called ‘pluralism’ – that at any given time scientists possess a number of theories that are mutually inconsistent but that, in light of the available data, are equally plausible, and that they enjoy the luxury of picking and choosing among them, whether on grounds of simplicity or ideology or aesthetic considerations. We think this interpretation of Berlin is based on a misreading of his work. His qualified defence of Vico and Herder commits him, it is true, to the pluralistic thesis that diverse cultures may each have their own ways of interpreting human experience. But this pluralistic thesis applies within history and the humanities, and is not the extreme relativistic view we have just outlined. Berlin is not claiming certainty for Vico and Herder, but he does think their views are more plausible than those of better-known thinkers such as Descartes and Voltaire and their modern successors.
Berlin is often interpreted as maintaining that the methods of the humanities and social sciences are not applicable to the subject matter of the natural sciences. He is said to hold that the historian may (or does) acquire knowledge by special acts of understanding or Verstehen. He makes no such claim. As we argued, Berlin is defending a number of separate theses which require distinguishing among such locutions ‘knowing that something is the case’, ‘knowing how to do something’, ‘knowing what it is to be something’ and so on. Berlin also calls our attention to the diverse cognitive skills that are needed, not only to confirm hypotheses, but even to understand them. We suggested some qualifications of Berlin’s views, but even if our qualifications are overlooked or rejected, we believe that he is best interpreted as holding, at most, that there are some ways of knowing some realities and alternative ones for knowing other aspects of other realities, and not the view implied by Bowman that there are alternative ways of knowing ‘reality’. […]
Reply by Isaiah Berlin
Mr Bowman in his polite and charming letter says that he accuses me of nothing, but nevertheless implies that my English version of Archilochus’ line about the fox and the hedgehog may have misrepresented his meaning; and adds that he does not know who is responsible for the translation. The facts are these: when I first came across the line in question in Diehl’s well-known edition1 (to which I was led by a passage about Archilochus in one of Herder’s literary essays),2 it seemed to me to be prima facie suitable as an epigraph to an article on Tolstoy’s view of history which I was then thinking of contributing to an Oxford periodical (I ought to add that the original title of the essay was ‘On Lev Tolstoy’s Historical Scepticism’;3 the present title was suggested by the publisher of it in book form).4 Since I am not a Greek scholar, I turned for advice on the exact meaning of the line to the three most authoritative Greek scholars personally known to me – Eduard Fraenkel, Maurice Bowra and E. R. Dodds – and asked them whether the most obvious meaning given by translators, some of whom Mr Bowman cites – that while the fox has many tricks, the hedgehog knows one, which protects him against all the fox’s stratagems – was the only valid meaning.
All three scholars, Fraenkel and Bowra by word of mouth, Dodds in a postcard (which, alas, after a quarter of a century, I cannot find) told me that the meaning of the fragment was not clear: that it might indeed mean what Mr Bowman (and I) supposed it to mean; but that the literal translation proposed by me seemed to them equally possible; and that consequently I should be justified in using it as an epigraph to my thesis on Tolstoy’s epilogue to War and Peace. Dodds added ‘little’ to ‘things’, and I accepted this.1 Needless to say I did not for a moment wish to suggest that such concepts as the one and the many, or monism and pluralism, or the ideas of Parmenides and his critics, could have been present in any form to the mind of Archilochus. I used his isolated line as a peg on which to hang my own reflections: the metaphor of hedgehogs and foxes was not, I warned the reader, to be driven too far; it was intended, at most, as an opening to my central theme – a hypothesis about the psychological roots of Tolstoy’s historical outlook. Still less did I mean to imply that foxes were superior to hedgehogs; this was (and is) not my view. I made no judgments of value. If Mr Bowman is right (whether he is I have no way of telling), and I have indeed misled the unwary about the meaning of a line in Archilochus, I can only plead in extenuation that I acted on what was the best advice obtainable by me at that time; and that if no more than the name of this writer – one of the earliest of European poets whose physical existence is not in doubt – has thereby been made known to many who might otherwise never have heard of him, that could, perhaps, be regarded as something to set against such doubts as Mr Bowman and others may feel about the soundness of the opinions on this topic of my eminent consultants.
I should like to take this opportunity to thank Mr Sidney Morgenbesser and Mr Jonathan Lieberson for their explanatory letter, with every word of which I entirely agree.
Isaiah Berlin
Oxford, England
CONCLUDING EDITORIAL NOTE
New light has more recently been cast on the possible meaning of the fragment by Ewen Bowie,1 who suggests that the line may come from a poem in the form of a dialogue between Archilochus and a woman he is trying to seduce. The line would be spoken by the woman, who is saying that the fox (Archilochus) may have many seductive wiles at his disposal, but she (the hedgehog) has one decisive device in her armoury, to curl up into a ball, preventing him from entering her (at any rate frontally). The Greek word for hedgehog may also have been used to refer to the female genitals, which would support this interpretation. Bowie’s hypothesis is based on two papyrus fragments (first published in 1954 and 1974) in which an iambic poem is built around a conversation between Archilochus and a woman he is seducing.1 That Archilochus is presented as the fox rather than the hedgehog is suggested by his apparent identification of himself with a fox in poems exploiting the fable of the fox and the eagle (fragments 172–181) and that of the fox and the ape (fragments 185–7).
Bowie’s hypothesis is reported in an article by Paula Correa, which concludes sagely: ‘For those who try to read [the fragment] today out of context, it rolls itself up like a hedgehog, and perhaps not even with all cunning may one disclose some of its meaning without doing it violence.’2
1 Interviewed in February 1993 for Andreas Isenschmid’s ‘Isaiah Berlin: Ein Porträt’, broadcast on 24 September 1993 by Swiss Radio DRS, Studio Zürich, channel DRS2.
1 Actually Oxford Slavonic Papers.
2 Maistre did not in the event appear in the subtitle.
1 Edmund Wilson, The Fifties: From Notebooks and Diaries of the Period, ed. Leon Edel (New York, 1986), 139.
2 Untraced.
1 See 11 above.