The word “essay” has a brilliant etymological journey. It is derived from essayer in French, meaning ‘to endeavour’ or ‘to attempt’ or ‘to do one’s utmost.’ An essay, in other words, is a humble, tentative effort. When we write essays we are simply trying to explain our thoughts, trying to share our feelings, trying to connect with others.
In the early 1950s, the philosopher Isaiah Berlin published a remarkable essay in which he argued that humankind (and therefore all writers and artists) could, broadly speaking, fall into two camps: the hedgehogs and the foxes.
The inspiration behind Berlin’s essay stemmed from a saying by the Ancient Greek lyric poet Archilochus of Paros:
‘The fox knows many things, but the hedgehog knows one big thing’.
On the one hand were those who were interested in a variety of subjects and who often used (or developed) multiple frameworks to make better sense of this world. On the other hand were those who remained more focused, using a single frame of reference. Bluntly put, the foxes knew something about almost everything, the hedgehogs knew almost everything about something.
“There exists a great chasm between those, on one side, who relate everything to a single central vision, … and, on the other side, those who pursue many ends, often unrelated and even contradictory, related to no moral or aesthetic principle.”
It is important to underline that Berlin did not pose these as mutually exclusive categories. His thinking was more complex. All human beings had a fox and a hedgehog in them—but in what amounts exactly?
After developing this theory, Berlin took a close look at the lives and works of various writers, poets and philosophers. He divided them into either foxes or hedgehogs.
Dostoyevsky: hedgehog
Shakespare: fox
Proust: hedgehog
Aristotle: fox
Plato: hedgehog
James Joyce: fox
Karl Marx: hedgehog
Goethe: fox
Dante: hedgehog
Erasmus: fox
Darwin: hedgehog
Would you agree with this classification?
If you have doubts, fear not, you are not alone. Isaiah Berlin himself was the first to question the validity of his own theory and typology. What made him doubt this useful but ultimately limited dichotomy was no other than Tolstoy.
Tolstoy was confusing, difficult to categorise. He was a fox by nature, by character, by disposition, and yet he badly and hopelessly wanted to become a hedgehog. Tolstoy was “a fox who all his life sought, unsuccessfully, to be a hedgehog".
Berlin believed that this fractured existence, this feeling of constantly being pulled in opposite directions had caused Tolstoy a lot of anxiety and pain.
What about Virginia Woolf? Mary Shelly? Agatha Christie? Jane Austen? Emily Dickinson? Mary Wollstonecraft? Charlotte Brönte? George Sand? George Eliot? Sappho? Hannah Arendt? Simone de Beauvoir? Are they hedgehogs or foxes?
Well, Berlin did not write about them. His gaze was completely focused on male writers and thinkers. And this in my opinion should not go unnoticed.
Over the years I found myself visiting Berlin’s thought-provoking essay, again and again. By nature I am closer to the foxes as I love to learn from multiple disciplines and keep the curiosity of mind alive. In my novels, I write about a range of issues. Literature, for me, is a bridge builder. I have always believed that the art of storytelling is far more transcendental than it is autobiographical. Our starting point is not “write what you know” (as they teach in creative writing classes) but “write what you feel in your heart”. The heart is much more inclusive than the mind. Literature is how we rebel, how we dismantle the walls, how we rehumanise those who have been dehumanised, how we bring the periphery to the centre, how we go beyond the frontiers into which we have been pushed often against our will and boxes in which we have been pigeonholed.
And yet every novelist knows that while you are working on a novel you have to become a hedgehog, and this, too, is something that Berlin has missed out. In order to write a novel you have to be a hedgehog. This is not only an intellectual journey, but a purely emotional connection as well, which requires a complete focus of attention. You have to zero in. You must zoom in.
I like hedgehogs and I fully respect their accumulation of knowledge and expertise. But I don’t like it if and when they retreat behind academic walls and turn themselves into atomised individuals or ‘aloof experts’.
I like foxes and I respect their endless curiosity of the mind, openness to learning. But I don’t like it when they conflate “information” with proper “knowledge” and “knowledge” with “wisdom”.
As climate crisis accelerates and social and economic and regional inequalities continue to deepen, as wars and conflict and displacement sadly shape international relations, it becomes more and more clear that we are all living in liquid times. democracy is far more fragile than it was assumed to be a few decades back. We have to understand that our stories and our silences are deeply interconnected in today’s world. We writers can no longer afford to be solely foxes or solely hedgehogs.
A new literary species is needed. Lamassu-like. Hybrid.
A new kind of storytelling for a new world.
Part fox, part hedgehog.
Hedgefox.
Very rightly put like only Elif Shafak can. We need to assimilate from everywhere with the openness of the fox and execute with focus like the hedgehog. The statement " bringing the periphery to the centre" is such a profound one.. i will remember and use it in my expressions...
Hedgefox perhaps? I appreciate your sense of universalism…things we share in common both good and awful.