“The fox knows many things, but the hedgehog knows one big thing”
This quote from the ancient Greek poet Archilochusis is often used to differentiate between people or situations that have contrasting (fox) macro/big picture and (hedgehog) micro/closely focused viewpoints.
Is there any indication of *what *precisely the hedgehog is supposed know in the context of the ancient example?
That if you don’t want a fox to at you you curl up and give him your spiky side.
Ahh… so it’s about sex.
The hedgehog curls up, and is thus very familiar with his own bellybutton.
I have never heard of this before today (I saw it in another thread here today, too).
It seems a very awkward phrase. Maybe in the Greeks’ time, hedgehogs had some kind of myth associated with them.
It’s known almost exclusively in recent years for being the title to the essay by Isaiah Berlin that’s the subject of the Wikipedia entry linked to in the OP (that is, the first of astro’s two links).
That one big thing can be any number of different big things. They might know that Jesus is the Way, the Truth, and the Light, and base their lives around that. Or maybe they know that the proletariat must overthrow their masters and rend the chains of capitalism. Or maybe they know that Monty Python is the pinnacle of humor and that quoting them is always funny.
The idea is that to them, all the world is a nail, given their sledgehammer of an idea. And they can cause a helluva lot of damage by hammering on flowers, eggs, and skulls, thinking they’re all nails.
Flipping it over, the hedgehog is an expert, while the fox is a dilletante.
“Knowing many things” is not always a good thing, if you know them all shallowly.
I’m guessing the hedgehog knows the fox’s whereabouts (“one big thing”) at all times so that he can stay away and not get eaten. The fox, who isn’t him/herself burdened by the attention of hungry predators, has the luxury of being able to think of other things. WAG.
When the hedgehog curls up in defense, he presents a large spined ball impenetrable but for an underground attack.
Despite his wiles the fox has yet to develop a shovel, or guard for his nose.
While this might capture the sense of the Isaiah Berlin Essay, the quote itself does not read that way to me (of course that’s probably just me). I think the missing piece is the way in which a particular situation or or life situation plays into whether to think like a fox or a hedgehog. To me anyway what’s being highlighted is the appropriateness and utility of both approaches depending on whether you are in the fox’s situation or the hedgehog’s.
First of all, Isaiah Berlin wasn’t trying to praise one sort of thinker and disparage another sort of thinker in using the quotation. He thought that there were a lot of important thinkers in each camp. You may think that one of the two types is better, but that’s your opinion, not Berlin’s. Second, it’s not clear what Archilochus meant by the quotation. All we have left from ancient Greek times that’s relevant to Archilochus is fragments of his writings and a few stories about him. It’s probably the case that he meant that the hedgehog had one very good defense strategy (i.e., rolling up in a ball), while the fox had many reasonably good attack strategies (i.e., his many wily tactics), but we can’t be certain. This was probably another example of a standard sort of analogy among people of classical and medieval times, which was to use the supposed traits of animals to classify the ideas of people (even in cases where we now know that these supposed traits are incorrectly attributed to the animals).
The one thing the hedgehog knows almost certainly has to be its “roll up into a spiny ball” defense strategy. If the saying meant anything else, it would have said “vole”, or “squirrel”, or some other animal without such a distinctive feature.
So you’re asking for the old fable? Wasn’t the fox bragging that he knew dozens of ways to evade the hounds, and the hedgehog said he only knew one? Then the hounds arrived. The hedgehog did his Ron Jeremy impersonation, but the fox hesitated trying to select which trick to use, and was caught. I thought that was one of Aseop’s 'tho.
Reading around Google a bit the most common explanation (which makes sense to me) is that foxes might approach different situations in a variety of different ways, but hedgehogs have one catch-all response: ‘roll up into a ball of spikes’. This is a metaphor for the world of thinkers; some approach the world with lots of different ideas and in different ways, some have one overarching idea which acts a prism through which they approach any problem they face.
I can’t tell which approach the quote is implying is the better one: the fox is usually seen as clever, crafty and successful, and taking different approaches to different problems seems to make sense. But then again hedgehogs are remarkably successful at defending themselves against predators in the wild with their one response (nowadays of course the presence of roads and cars suggests their single-solution approach to any problems isn’t the best way of going about things!). Also the structure of the quote strikes me as condemning the fox and applauding the hedgehog: "sure, x does blah-blah, and you might think that’s good… but look, y does blah-blah!’
These are all just my thoughts and some random wanderings through Google though, so I’d be interested to hear from someone who knows more about what Archilocusis meant.
From a TIME magazine explaining what Isaiah Berlin meant when he interpreted the quote:
And of course, as with most aphorisms and dichotomies, the whole concept is a gross oversimplification, and as such is not very useful as a tool.
e.g.
“The world is divided into two kinds of people: those who divide the world into two kinds of people,…”
To use a modern day example, (hypothetical), the fox is the one who knows the economic system is going to collapse and the hedghog is the one who knows about human rationality (or lack thereof). The fox knows many things - monetary policy, banks, property law, ect.
The hedgehog is naive but from his lowly and central position in the world, looks out and sees humans for what they really are; the hedgehog knew one thing since youth - that something should be but isn’t.
You may think that the one big thing (the hedgehog) is the better method, or you may think that the many small things (the fox) is better. Don’t attribute your opinions to Isaiah Berlin though. He was trying to differentiate the two methods of thinking, but he was not claiming that one method was better than the other.
We know almost nothing about Archilochus. Like a lot of ancient Greek writers, all we have is fragments of his wrtings and a few anecdotes about him. In interpreting the saying, all we have to go on are the standard attitudes in classical and medieval times about animals. The people is pre-modern times didn’t actually have any more detailed knowledge about animal behavior than we do know. They lived closer to animals in general, so they used them in their sayings more often, but they weren’t experts in animal behavior. Whether the fox and the hedgehog are anything like the saying claims they are is hard to tell, and in any case it’s irrelevant. It’s just an offhand observation, not a scientific claim about fox and hedgehog behavior.
astro writes:
> This quote from the ancient Greek poet Archilochusis is often used to
> differentiate between people or situations that have contrasting (fox) macro/big
> picture and (hedgehog) micro/closely focused viewpoints.
Well, no. In the standard interpretation of the saying, it’s not about big picture and closely focused viewpoints. It’s about the difference between having one very good idea which explains many things and having a lots of reasonably good ideas which each explain a single thing very well.