The Hedgehog, the Fox, and the Magister's Pox Read online

  But my second usage pervades the book, although I try to keep explicit reminders to a bearable minimum (an effort demanding great forbearance, and courting probable failure in any case, from such a didactic character as yours truly). This second employment also sticks closely to the metaphorical meanings that have been grafted upon Archilochus’s image throughout history, especially since Erasmus’s scholarly exegesis. This usage became central to twentieth-century literary commentary when Isaiah Berlin—my personal intellectual hero, and a wonderful man who befriended me when I was a shy, beginning, absolute nobody—invoked the pairing of fox and hedgehog to contrast the styles and attitudes of several famous Russian writers. Ever since then, scholars have played a common game in designating their favorite (or anathematized) literati either as hedgehogs for their tenacity in sticking to one style or advocating one key idea, or as foxes for their ability to move again and again, like Picasso, from one excellence to an entirely different mode and meaning of expression. The game maintains sharp edges because these attributions have been made both descriptively and proscriptively, and people of goodwill (and bad will too, for that matter) can argue forever about either and both. (I must also confess that I named one of my books of essays An Urchin in the Storm, to designate my own stubborn invocation of Darwinian evolution as a subject to fit nearly any context or controversy. Hedgehogs, to Englishmen, are urchins.)

  Erasmus (and I am quoting from my 1599 edition of his Adagia) begins with the usual and obvious reasons for Archilochus’s famous contrast. When pursued by hunters, the fox figures out a new and sneaky way to escape each time: Nam vulpes multijugis dolis se tuetur adversus venatores (for the fox defends itself against the hunters by using many different guiles). The hedgehog, on the other hand, tries to keep out of harm’s way, but will use its one great trick if overtaken by the hunters’ dogs: the animal rolls up into a ball, with its small head and feet, and its soft underbelly, tucked up neatly and completely within the enclosing surface of spines. The dogs can do what they wish: poke the animal, roll it about, or even try to bite, but all to no avail (or to painful injury); for the dogs cannot capture such a passive and prickly ball, and must ultimately leave the animal alone, eventually (when the danger has passed) to unroll and calmly walk away. Erasmus writes: Echinus unica dun-taxat arte tutus est adversus canum morsus, siquidem spinis suis semet involuit in pilae speciem, ut nulla ex parte morsu, prendi queat. (The hedgehog only has one technique to keep itself safe against the dogs’ bite, since it rolls itself up, spines outward, into a kind of ball, so that it cannot be captured by biting.)

  Later on in this exegesis, Erasmus even adds an old tale of intensification, delicately mentioning only the outline of the story, and referring his readers to the original sources if they wish to know more. If this one great trick seems to be failing, the hedgehog often ups the same basic ante by letting fly a stream of urine, covering the spines, and weakening them to the point of excision. But how can this dramatic form of self-imposed haircut help the creature? Erasmus goes no further, but when we turn to Pliny and Aelianus (the two classical sources cited by Erasmus), we learn what a tough and determined little bastard this apparently timid creature can be. The ultimate urine trick, we are told, can work in three possible ways. First, with the spines excised, the animal can often slither away unnoticed. Second, the urine smells so bad that the dogs or human hunters may simply lose interest and beat a quick retreat. Third, if all else fails, and the hunters take him anyway, at least the hedgehog can enjoy his last laugh in death, for his haircut has rendered him useless to his captors (who, in a fourth potential utility, might also abandon him in frustration by recognizing this outcome in advance)—for the main attraction of the hedgehog to humans lies in the value of his hide, but only with spines intact, as a natural brush.

  The power and attraction of Archilochus’s image lies, rather obviously, in its two levels of metaphorical meaning for human contrasts. The first speaks of psychological styles, often applied for quite practical goals. Scramble or persist. Foxes owe their survival to easy flexibility and skill in reinvention, to an uncanny knack for recognizing (early on, while the getting remains good) that a chosen path will not bear fruit, and that either a different route must be quickly found, or a new game entered altogether. Hedgehogs, on the other hand, survive by knowing exactly what they want, and by staying the chosen course with unswerving persistence, through all calumny and trouble, until the less committed opponents eventually drop away, leaving the only righteous path unencumbered for a walk to victory.

  The second, of course, speaks to favored styles of intellectual practice. Diversify and color, or intensify and cover. Foxes (the great ones, not the shallow or showy grazers) owe their reputation to a light (but truly enlightening) spread of real genius across many fields of study, applying their varied skills to introduce a key and novel fruit for other scholars to gather and improve in a particular orchard, and then moving on to sow some new seeds in a thoroughly different kind of field. Hedgehogs (the great ones, not the pedants) locate one vitally important mine, where their particular and truly special gifts cannot be matched. They then stay at the site all their lives, digging deeper (because no one else can) into richer and richer stores from a mother lode whose full generosity has never before been so well recognized or exploited.

  I use the fox and hedgehog as my model for how the sciences and humanities should interact because I believe that neither pure strategy can work, but that a fruitful union of these seemingly polar opposites can, with goodwill and significant self-restraint on both sides, be conjoined into a diverse but common enterprise of unity and power. The way of the hedgehog cannot suffice because the sciences and humanities, by the basic logics of their disparate enterprises, do different things, each equally essential to human wholeness. We need this wholeness above all, but cannot achieve the goal by shearing off the legitimate differences (I shall critique Wilson’s notion of consilience on this basis) that make our lives so varied, so irreducibly, and so fascinatingly, complex. But if we lose sight of the one overarching goal—the hedgehog’s insight—underneath the legitimately different concerns and approaches of these two great ways, then we are truly defeated, and the dogs of war will disembowel our underbellies and win.

  But the way of the fox cannot prevail either, because too great a flexibility may lead to survival of no enduring value—mere persistence with no moral or intellectual core intact. What triumph can an ultimate chameleon claim if he gains not even the world, but only his basic continuity, at the price of his soul? Fortunately, and in the most parochial American sense, we know a model of long persistence and proven utility for the virtues in fruitful union of apparent opposites. This model has sustained us through the worst fires of challenge (both voluntary self-immolation from 1861 to 1865, and attempted external prevention at several times, beginning with the first battles of 1775).

  We have even embodied this ideal in our national motto, e pluribus unum, “one from many.” If the different skills and wondrous flexibilities of the fox can be combined with the clear vision and stubbornly singleminded goal of the hedgehog, then a star-spangled banner can protect a great expanse of maximal diversity because all the fox’s skills now finally congeal to realize the hedgehog’s great vision. Never before in human history has the experiment of democracy been tried across such a vast range of geographies, climates, ecologies, economies, languages, ethnicities, and capabilities. Lord knows we have suffered our troubles, and imposed horrendous and enduring persecutions upon sectors of the enterprise, thus sullying the great goal in the most shameful way imaginable. Yet, on balance, and by comparison to all other efforts of similar scale in human history, the experiment has worked, and has been showing substantial improvement in the course and memories of my lifetime at least.

  I offer the same basic prescription for peace, and mutual growth in strength, of the sciences and humanities. These two great endeavors of our soul and intellect work in different ways and cannot be
morphed into one simple coherence, so the fox must have his day. But the two enterprises can lead us onward together, ineluctably yoked if we wish to maintain any hope for arrival at all, toward the common goal of human wisdom, achieved through the union of natural knowledge and creative art, two different but nonconflicting truths that, on this planet at least, only human beings can forge and nurture.

  But I learned one other important lesson from reading Erasmus’s commentary, and by considering the deeper meaning of Gesner’s pictures. Erasmus does, following the literal lead of Archilochus’s minimality, depict the styles of the fox and hedgehog as simply different, with each strategy effective in its own way, and expressing one end of a full continuum. But Erasmus clearly favors the hedgehog in one crucial sense: foxes generally do very well indeed, but when the chips go down in extremis, look inside yourself, and follow the singular way that emerges from the heart and soul of your ineluctable being and construction, whatever the natural limits—for nothing beats an unswerving moral compass in moments of greatest peril.

  Erasmus, after praising the many wiles of the fox (as quoted above), then adds et tamen haud raro capitur—“yet, nonetheless, it is captured not rarely.” The hedgehog, on the other hand, almost always emerges unscathed, a bit stressed and put-upon, perhaps, but ultimately safe nonetheless. And thus intellectuals of all stripes and tendencies must maintain this central integrity of no compromise to fashion or (far worse) to the blandishments of evil in temporary power. We have always been, and will always be, a minority. But if we roll with the punches, maintain the guts of our inner integrity, and keep our prickles high, we can’t lose—for the pen, abetted by some modern modes of dispersal, really is mightier.

  Finally, I don’t mean to despise or dishonor the fox, and neither does Erasmus, despite his clear zinger, quoted just above, against this ultimate symbol of wiliness. For Erasmus ends his long and scholarly commentary with two stories about dialogues between the fox and another brother carnivore. The first tale of the fox and cat simply extends Erasmus’s earlier point about the hedgehog’s edge in episodes of greatest pith and moment. The two animals meet and begin to argue about better ways to elude packs of hunting dogs. The fox brags about his enormous bag of tricks, while the cat describes his single effective way. Then, right in the midst of this abstract discussion, the two creatures must face an unexpected and ultimately practical test: “Suddenly, amidst the dispute, they hear the voices of the dog pack. The cat immediately leaps up into the highest tree, but the fox, meanwhile, is surrounded and captured by the crowd of dogs.” Praestabilius esse nonnunquam unicum habere consilium (perhaps it is better to have one way of wisdom), Erasmus adds, id sit verum et efficax (provided that it be true and effective).

  But the second tale of the fox and panther saves our maligned character and shows the inner beauty of his flexibility, as illustrated by his avoidance of mere gaudy show for true dexterity of mind. Erasmus writes: Cum aliquando pardus vulpem pre se contemneret, quod ipse pellem haberet omnigenus colorum maculis variegatem, respondit vulpes, sibi decoris in animo esse, quod ille esset in cute.

  “When the panther disparages the fox by comparison to himself, because his [the panther’s] skin is so beautifully variegated with so many colored spots of all kinds, the fox responds that it is better to be so decorated in the mind than upon the skin.”

  And so I say to the sciences (where I reside with such lifelong pride and satisfaction) and to the humanities (whose enduring technique of exegesis from printed classical sources I try, in my own conceit, to utilize as the primary mode of analysis in this book): what a power we could forge together if we could all pledge to honor both of our truly different and equally necessary ways, and then join them in full respect, in the service of a common goal as expressed in old Plato’s definition of art as intelligent human modification and wondrous ornamentation, based on true veneration of nature’s reality. For then, as the Persian poet said:Oh wilderness were Paradise enow.

  Then wilderness (nature’s unvarnished tangle of wonders) would become a paradise (literally, a cultivated garden of human delight).

  The goal could not be greater or more noble, but the tensions are old and deep, however falsely construed from the start, and stirred up by small minds ever since. Thus the union of the fox and hedgehog can certainly be accomplished, and would surely yield, as progeny, a many-splendored thing called love and learning, creativity and knowledge. But we had best proceed, in this hybridization, by the resolution of a bad old joke about an animal not closely related to the hedgehog, but functionally equivalent in the primary manner of this discussion. How, using more decorous language than the joke enjoins, can two porcupines copulate? The answer, of course, is “carefully.”

  I

  THE RITE AND RIGHTS OF A SEPARATING SPRING

  1

  Newton’s Light

  THE EPITAPH CZAR OF WESTMINSTER ABBEY MUST HAVE DEMURRED, FOR the great man’s grave does not bear these intended words. But Alexander Pope did write a memorable (and technically even heroic) couplet for the tombstone of his most illustrious contemporary. Biblical parodies, perhaps, could not pass muster in Britain’s holiest of holies, both sacred and secular,1 for Pope’s epitome of a life well lived recalled the first overt order of the ultimate boss:Nature and Nature’s laws lay hid in night:

  God said, let Newton be! and all was light.

  Pope surely wins first prize for succinctness and rhyme, but we may cite any number of statements from the wisest of his contemporaries to the best of later scholars, all affirming that something truly special roiled the world of seventeenth-century thinkers, changing the very definitions of knowledge and causality, and achieving a beginning of control over nature (or at least predictability of her ways) that previous centuries had not attained or, for the most part, even sought. Although hard to define, and even denied by some, this transforming period has been awarded the two ultimate verbal accolades by a generally timid profession of academic historians: the definite article for uniqueness, and uppercase designation for importance. Historians generally refer to this watershed of the seventeenth century as the Scientific Revolution.

  To cite a key contemporary, a poet rather than a scientist, at least by current disciplinary allocations that would not then have been granted or conceptualized in the same way, John Dryden wrote in 1668:Is it not evident, in these last hundred years (when the Study of Philosophy has been the business of all the Virtuosi in Christendome) that almost a new Nature has been revealed to us? That more errors of the School [that is, of the medieval scholastic thinkers and followers of Thomas Aquinas, generally called Schoolmen] have been detected, more useful Experiments in Philosophy have been made, more Noble Secrets in Opticks, Medicine, Anatomy, Astronomy, discovered than in all those credulous and doting Ages from Aristotle to us? So true it is that nothing spreads more fast than Science, when rightly and generally cultivated.

  To cite one of the twentieth century’s most celebrated philosophers, A. N. Whitehead claimed, in Science and the Modern World, that “a brief, and sufficiently accurate description of the intellectual life of the European races during the succeeding two centuries and a quarter up to our own times is that they have been living upon the accumulated capital of ideas provided for them by the genius of the seventeenth century.”

  A broader range of views could be cited among historians of science, but few would deny that truly extraordinary changes in concepts of natural order—changes that we continue to recognize today as the familiar bases of modern sensibilities—occurred in seventeenth-century Europe, leading to the enterprise that we call “science,” with all attendant benefits, travails, and transformation in our collective lives and societies.

  In 1939, Alexander Koyré, the dean of twentieth-century students of the Scientific Revolution, described this seventeenth-century transformation as a “veritable ‘mutation’ of the human intellect . . . one of the most important, if not the most important, since the invention of the Cosmos by Gre
ek thought.” The Scientific Revolution, according to the eminent historian Herbert Butterfield (1957), “outshines everything since the rise of Christianity and reduces the Renaissance and Reformation to the rank of mere episodes, mere internal displacements, within the system of medieval Christendom.” And, in 1986, historian of science Richard S. Westfall stated: “The Scientific Revolution was the most important ‘event’ in Western history. . . . For good and for ill, science stands at the center of every dimension of modern life. It has shaped most of the categories in terms of which we think, and in the process has frequently subverted humanistic concepts that furnished the sinews of our civilization.”

  In the cartoonish caricature of a “one-line” primer, the Scientific Revolution boasts two philosophical founders of the early seventeenth century—the Englishman Francis Bacon (1561–1626), who touted observational and experimental methods, and the Frenchman René Descartes (1596–1650), who promulgated the mechanical worldview. Galileo (1564–1642) then becomes the first astoundingly successful practitioner, the man who discovered the moons of Jupiter, rearranged the cosmos with a raft of additional telescopic defenses of Copernicus, and famously proclaimed that the “grand book” of nature—that is, the universe—“is written in the language of mathematics, and its characters are triangles, circles, and other geometrical figures.” (Galileo’s status as martyr to the Roman Inquisition—for he spent the last nine years of his life under the equivalent of “house arrest,” following his forced recantation in 1633—also, and justly, enhances his role as a primary hero of rationality.) But the culmination, both in triumphant practice and in fully formulated methodology, resides in a remarkable conjunction of late-seventeenth-century talent, a generation epitomized and honored with the name of its preeminent leader, Isaac Newton (1642–1727), who enjoyed the good fortune of coexistence with so many other brilliant thinkers and doers, most notably Robert Boyle (1627–1691), Edmund Halley (1656–1742), and Robert Hooke (1635–1703).