When the fox dreams of the hedgehog

Wanting one big idea while knowing many smaller things.

“Fox and the Hedgehog,” Samuel Howitt, 1756–1822 (Yale Center for British Art / Wikimedia Foundation)

I visited Paul Graham’s 2023 essay “How to Do Great Work” this weekend and stopped at this early instruction in “the recipe”:

“What are you excessively curious about — curious to a degree that would bore most other people? That's what you're looking for.”

I stared into the middle distance of my coffee shop for 15 minutes.

It was the word “excessively” that cooked my logical circuits, filled me with doubt. Was I “excessively” curious about anything? What if I wasn’t? What if I wasn’t!

I sensed an unwelcome moment of self-awareness rapidly approaching and engaged in defensive maneuvers, launching a few coping mechanisms as antihoming countermeasures.

I feel very ‘medium’-curious about tons of things, I told myself. I listed them in my head: Principles of news production, economics, labor power, platform power, information markets, game theory, political philosophy, the law, civic life, literature, etc. These curiosities are substantial enough to crowd out other pleasanter life stuff: There’s not a single restaurant recommendation or piece of celebrity gossip to be found in here, and I could medium-bore you to death lots of ways in the aggregate. (As this newsletter’s subscribers already know.)

Yet one “excessive” subject of curiosity eluded me.

I tried one of my other usual moves in times of uncertainty, which is to dig up an old treasure of the humanities in the implausible hope some long-dead writer had said something profound that had been overlooked in 21st-century thinking. (Why do I always look for the future by poking around ruins?)

Many others, I was sure, had been tormented by a lack of excess, and accordingly wandered to Isaiah Berlin’s 1953 essay “The Hedgehog and the Fox,” which was itself provoked by some humanistic archaeology. Berlin’s famous opening passage:

“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 '. Scholars have differed about the correct interpretation 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… The first kind of intellectual and artistic personality belongs to the hedgehogs, the second to the foxes.”

While Berlin was a serious 20th century writer, I know an airport-book personality test when I see one. This is why Berlin’s essay is better known for perpetuating the fox-and-hedgehog cliché than its actual subject (a thoughtful treatise on Russian novelist Leo Tolstoy). What’s so nefarious about Myers-Briggs setups is you can know they lack rigor — it’s palm reading for MBAs — and want to self-diagnose anyway.

Hedgehogs, in Berlin’s framework, are system-thinkers, unifiers, monists; foxes are nibblers, collectors, pluralists: the thinkers of one big idea versus the thinkers of the many smaller, visionaries against skeptics. I am a fox who wishes he were a hedgehog but simply isn’t, won’t be, never will be; a collector of clay shards that won’t add up to a pot.

If there are any consolations here, it’s that Tolstoy, to Berlin, was a fox similarly afflicted with a hedgehog dysmorphia syndrome. It’s the central torment that made the Russian so compelling:

“Tolstoy's sense of reality was until the end too devastating to be compatible with any moral ideal which he was able to construct out of the fragments into which his intellect shivered the world, and he dedicated all of his vast strength of mind and will to the lifelong denial of this fact.”

If Tolstoy had an “excess” in curiosity, it was a curiosity about everything. Berlin: “he could not swim with the tide without being drawn irresistibly beneath the surface to investigate the darker depths below; and he could not avoid seeing what he saw and doubting even that; he could close his eyes but not forget that he was doing so.”

Graham’s recipe for “great work” says, “Once you've found something you're excessively interested in, the next step is to learn enough about it to get you to one of the frontiers of knowledge.” Tolstoy’s advantage over the engineer was that, for the realist novelist, everything is the frontier. You just had to look around and notice carefully enough. You’d see you were already there.