The Borodino Battle. 1967 Sergei Bondarchuk's epic film "War and Peace."
This is a follow-up on my post about Isaiah Berlin’s essay. He quotes Greek poet Archilochus: “The fox knows many things, but the hedgehog knows one big thing.” Isaiah Berlin than divides writers and philosophers in two categories, either a fox or a hedgehog:
“Dante belongs to the first category [hedgehog], Shakespeare to the second [fox]; Plato, Lucretius, Pascal, Hegel, Dostoevsky, Nietzsche, Ibsen, Proust are, in varying degrees, hedgehogs; Herodotus, Aristotle, Montaigne, Erasmus, Moliere, Goethe, Pushkin, Balzac, Joyce are foxes.”
The centrifugal force ideas pull away from a center in multiple direction, this is a fox, a writer with broad themes and interests. The centripetal force ideas succumb to the gravitational pull of a center, this is a hedgehog, a writer or a philosopher who always gravitates towards his or her central theme. In the essay Isaiah Berlin is trying to understand if Leo Tolstoy is a fox or a hedgehog and he stumbles upon a contradiction:
“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 consequently 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.”
Tolstoy believed in a unified messianic idea (hedgehog), but he saw only chaos and randomness. As an artist he was compelled to be truthful and his entire voluminous work is crash testing his unified beliefs. But not a single time the ideas of Leo Tolstoy the mystic could stand up to the art of Leo Tolstoy the writer. Isaiah Berlin explains the contradiction:
“Yet what he believed in was the opposite. He advocated a single embracing vision; he preached not variety but simplicity, not many levels of consciousness but reduction to some single level – in War and Peace, to the standard of the good man, the single, spontaneous, open soul: as later to that of the peasants, or of a simple Christian ethic divorced from any complex theology or metaphysic; some simple, quasi-utilitarian criterion, whereby everything is interrelated directly, and all the items can be assessed in terms one another by some simple measuring-rod. Tolstoy’s genius lies in a capacity for marvellously accurate reproduction of the irreproducible, the almost miraculous evocation of the full, untranslatable individuality of the individual, which induces in the reader an acute awareness of the presence of the object itself, and not of a mere description of it, employing for this purpose metaphors which fix the quality of a particular experience as such, and avoiding those general terms which relate it to similar instances by ignoring individual differences – the ‘oscillations’ of feeling – in favour of what is common to them all. But then this same writer pleads for, indeed preaches with great fury, particularly in his last, religious phase, the exact opposite: the necessity of expelling everything that does not submit to some very general, very simple standard: say, what peasants like or dislike, or what the Gospels declare to be good.
This violent contradiction between the data of experience, from which he could not liberate himself, and which, of course, all his life he knew alone to be real, and his deeply metaphysical belief in the existence of a system to which they must belong, whether they appear to do so or not, this conflict between instinctive judgement and theoretical conviction – between his gifts and his opinions – mirrors the unresolved conflict between the reality of the moral life, with its sense of responsibility, joys, sorrows, sense of guilt and sense of achievement – all of which is nevertheless illusion – and the laws which govern everything, although we cannot know more than a negligible portion of them – so that all scientists and historians who say that they do know them and are guided by them are lying and deceiving – but which nevertheless alone are real. Beside Tolstoy, Gogol and Dostoevsky, whose abnormality is so often contrasted with Tolstoy’s ‘sanity’, are well-integrated personalities, with a coherent outlook and a single vision. Yet out of this violent conflict grew War and Peace: its marvellous solidity should not blind us to the deep cleavage which yawns open whenever Tolstoy remembers, or rather reminds himself – fails to forget – what he is doing, and why.”
Fantastic! Berlin writes that people think Gogol and Dostoevsky are crazy, with a split personalities, etc., but let me tell you who is really crazy while on the surface being simple and unified. This is exactly what I wrote in my Offbeat Biography of the Lubavitcher Rebbe Menachem Mendel Schneerson. The Rebbe was an introvert who saw only chaos and was deeply skeptical about people. But he spent his later life fighting himself. He was a fox pretending to be a hedgehog. A person who couldn’t stand any change, was deeply isolated, he called for an imminent and global revolution. Like Tolstoy his creative output was to desperately prove himself wrong. Like Leo Tolstoy he was a fox pretending to be a hedgehog. This tragic predicament was also described by Isaiah Berlin’s and Rebbe’s great grandfather the Alter Rebbe when he invented a beynuni. Perhaps due to the fact that Isaiah Berlin witnessed the October Revolution and he had the messianic family history, he instinctively understood the false premise of Jean-Paul Sartre and all the monotheistic revolutionaries.
