Hedgehog and Fox

Sir Isaiah Berlin wrote a famous essay on Tolstoy's philosophy of history built around a metaphor from what was (before he published his essay) an obscure fragment (201) of the Greek lyric poet Archilochus: "The fox knows many things, but the hedgehog knows one big thing."

Berlin argued that "Tolstoy was by nature a fox, but believed in being a hedgehog…" (Berlin, Russian Thinkers, 24). No one has ever improved upon this verdict; but I would suggest that, by limiting its application to Tolstoy's philosophy of history, Berlin unnecessarily circumscribed its reach.

The tension between "hedgehog" and "fox"--that is, between a tawhidic apprehension of reality (see post of April 16, below) and what the Russian critic Mikhail Bakhtin termed a "polyphonic" one--is present, often in latent form, throughout Tolstoy’s mature literary output. Beginning at least as early as The Cossacks (1863), his artistic achievement was always already a "religious" one: Olenin's experience of tawhid in the stag’s lair (see post of March 21, below) is emblematic of the Russian author's lifelong desire to return to the "source" of all things, a source that he interpreted as Divine.

Tolstoy's artistic genius resides in the manner in which he was able to dramatically depict the titanic struggle that took place within his psyche between his natural "foxiness" and his aspirational "hedgehog." This same struggle is played out upon the grand stage of the Islamic tradition and is central to Muslim pietism (familiar to most Americans as Sufism).