Reply #52: It doesn't sound like foxes come off too well in Berlin's essay ...

[Jim__]

... although if you are a fox, you are in some good company. You can read the first 10 pages of Berlin's essay, then you have to pay.

A sample:

THERE is a line among the fragments of the Greek
poet Archilochus which says:' The fox knows many
things, but the hedgehog knows one big thing'. 1
Scholars have differed about the correct interpeta-
tion of these dark words, which may mean no more
than that the fox, for all his cunning, is defeated by
the hedgehog's one defence. But, taken figuratively,
the words can be made to yield a sense in which they
mark one of the deepest differences which divide
writers and thinkers, and, it may be, human beings in
general. For there exists a great chasm between
those, on one side, who relate everything to a single
central vision, one system less or more coherent or
articulate, in terms of which they understand, think
and feel--a single, universal, organizing principle in
terms of which alone all that they are and say has
significance--and, on the other side, those who pursue
many ends, often unrelated and even contradictory,
connected, if at all, only in some de facto way, for some
psychological or physiological cause, related by no
moral or aesthetic principle; these last lead lives,
perform acts, and entertain ideas that are centrifugal
rather than centripetal, their thought is scattered or
diffused, moving on many levels, seizing upon the
essence of a vast variety of experiences and objects for
what they are in themselves, without, consciously or
unconsciously, seeking to fit them into, or exclude
them from, any one unchanging, all-embracing,
sometimes self-contradictory and incomplete, at times
fanatical, unitary inner vision. The first kind of
intellectual and artistic personality belongs to the
hedgehogs, the second to the foxes; and without
insisting on a rigid classification, we may, without too
much fear of contradiction, say that, in this sense,
Dante belongs to the first category, Shakespeare to the
second; Plato, Lucretius, Pascal, Hegel, Dostoevsky,
Nietzsche, Ibsen, Proust are, in varying degrees, hedge-
hogs; Herodotus, Aristotle, Montaigne, Erasmus,
Molière, Goethe, Pushkin, Balzac, Joyce are foxes.

...

I do not propose in this essay to formulate a reply to
this question, since this would involve nothing less than
a critical examination of the art and thought of Tolstoy
as a whole. I shall confine myself to suggesting that the
difficulty may be, at least in part, due to the fact that
Tolstoy was himself not unaware of the problem, and
did his best to falsify the answer. The hypothesis I wish
to offer is that Tolstoy was by nature a fox, but
believed in being a hedgehog; that his gifts and
achievement are one thing, and his beliefs, and conse-
quently his interpretation of his own achievement,
another; and that consequently his ideals have led
him, and those whom his genius for persuasion has
taken in, into a systematic misinterpretation of what
he and others were doing or should be doing. No one
can complain that he has left his readers in any doubt
as to what he thought about this topic: his views on
this subject permeate all his discursive writings--
diaries, recorded obiter dicta, autobiographical essays
and stories, social and religious tracts, literary criti-
cism, letters to private and public correspondents. But
the conflict between what he was and what he believed
emerges nowhere so clearly as in his view of history
to which some of his most brilliant and most para-
doxical pages are devoted. This essay is an attempt to
deal with his historical doctrines, and to consider both
his motives for holding the views he holds and some of
their probable sources. In short, it is an attempt to take
Tolstoy's attitude to history as seriously as he himself
meant his readers to take it, although for a somewhat
different reason--for the light it casts on a single man
of genius rather than on the fate of all mankind.