The Hedgehog and the Fox: An Essay on Tolstoy's View of History
by Isaiah Berlin
In "The Hedgehog and the Fox," Isaiah Berlin explores the dichotomy between two types of thinkers: hedgehogs, who pursue a singular, unifying vision, and foxes, who embrace a multiplicity of experiences and perspectives. This framework serves as a lens through which Berlin examines Leo Tolstoy's approach to history and human experience. Central to Berlin's analysis is the assertion that while science can challenge the notion of freedom, it cannot eliminate the moral and artistic consciousness that defines humanity. Tolstoy's historical perspective emphasizes the chaos of human life, particularly evident in the context of war, challenging the metaphysical abstractions often employed by historians. He criticizes the tendency to ascribe causal significance to heroes or grand forces, advocating instead for a history grounded in concrete experiences and the complexities of individual and collective actions. This view aligns with Berlin's belief that genuine understanding arises from the empirical study of events rather than speculative theories. Ultimately, Berlin posits that Tolstoy's genius lies in his ability to capture the unique essence of human emotions and situations, illustrating the profound interplay between individual actions and the broader historical context. Through this examination, Berlin invites readers to reflect on the nature of knowledge, the limits of understanding, and the search for meaning within the chaos of existence.
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Science cannot destroy the consciousness of freedom, without which there is no morality and no art, but it can refute it.
This, for both Schopenhauer and Tolstoy, is the central tragedy of human life; if only men would learn how little the cleverest and most gifted among them can control, how little they can know of all the multitude of factors the orderly movement of which is the history of the world; above all, what presumptuous nonsense it is to claim to perceive an order merely on the strength of believing desperately that an order must exist, when all one actually perceives is meaningless chaos –a chaos of which the heightened form, the microcosm in which the disorder of human life is reflected in an intense degree, is war.
Of course, like all over-simple classifications of this type, the dichotomy becomes, if pressed, artificial, scholastic and ultimately absurd. But if it is not an aid to serious criticism, neither should it be rejected as being merely superficial or frivolous: like all distinctions which embody any degree of truth, it offers a point of view from which to look and compare, a starting-point for genuine investigation.
Tolstoy was perfectly right to protest that history is not made to happen by the combination of such obscure entities as the ‘power’ or ‘mental activity’ assumed by naïve historians; indeed he was, in Kareev’s view, at his best when he denounced the tendency of metaphysically minded writers to attribute causal efficacy to, or idealise, such abstract entities as ‘heroes’, ‘historic forces’, ‘moral forces’, ‘nationalism’, ‘reason’ and so on, whereby they simultaneously committed the two deadly sins of inventing non-existent entities to explain concrete events and of giving free reign to personal, or national, or class, or metaphysical bias.
Tolstoy’s interest in history began early in his life. It seems to have arisen not from interest in the past as such, but from the desire to penetrate to first causes, to understand how and why things happen as they do and not otherwise, from discontent with those current explanations which do not explain, and leave the mind dissatisfied, from a tendency to doubt and place under suspicion and, if need be, reject whatever does not fully answer the question, to go to the root of every matter, at whatever cost.
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.
History alone – the sum of empirically discoverable data – held the key to the mystery of why what happened happened as it did and not otherwise; and only history, consequently, could throw light on the fundamental ethical problems which obsessed him as they did every Russian thinker in the nineteenth century.
What is a lost battle?... It is a battle one believes one has lost. ...
Sometimes Tolstoy comes near to saying what it is: the more we know, he tells us, about a given human action, the moreinevitable, determined it seems to us to be. Why? Because the more we know about all the relevant conditions and antecedents,the more difficult we find it to think away various circumstances, and conjecture what might have occurred without them; and aswe go on removing in our imagination what we know to be true, fact by fact, this becomes not merely difficult but impossible.Tolstoy’s meaning is not obscure. We are what we are, and live in a given situation which has the characteristics – physical, psychological, social – that it has; what we think, feel, do is conditionedby it, including our capacity for conceiving possible alternatives, whether in the present or future or past. Our imagination and ability to calculate, our power of conceiving, let us say, whatmight have been, if the past had, in this or that particular, been otherwise, soon reaches its natural limits, limits created both by the weakness of our capacity for calculating alternatives – ‘might have beens’ – and (we may add by a logical extension of Tolstoy’s argument) even more by the fact that our thoughts, the terms inwhich they occur, the symbols themselves, are what they are, are themselves determined by the actual structure of our world. Our images and powers of conception are limited by the fact that our world possesses certain characteristics and not others: a world too different is (empirically) not conceivable at all; some minds are more imaginative than others, but all stop somewhere.
