The hedgehog and the fox

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Some of the comments make me remind of an Isaiah Berlin’s best known essay in which he distinguishes between two archetypes: the hedgehog and the fox. “The fox knows many things; the hedgehog knows but one.” To paraphrase him in his 1953 essay— The Hedgehog and the Fox: "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'…[T]aken 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 princi…