Sunday, January 28, 2007

ISAIAH BERLIN WITHOUT REAL ANIMAL BASIC INSTINCT part 4

Berlin was a master of rhetoric and almost a cult figure. How else might we explain why his essay on "Hedgehogs and Foxes" hit the headlines so often. I will not go into detail of this essay ( easily found and on the net) but Berlin polarises hedgehogs and foxes in a vain attempt to promote value pluralism. In other words he wants to have his cake and eat it at the same time. He got away with it too. Any undergraduate with a good keen supervisor would have quickly been tied up in knots if such an essay had been put forward during a third year but Berlin was a cult figure and it helped his fame. A fox is like a cunning mover whereas the poor hedgehog is stuck into one main idea.

Berlin thinks Goethe and Balzac a fox. He thinks that the likes of a Tolstoy and any of the many one-big-idea-theme lot to be hedgehogs. I doubt this polarisation by Berlin is worth taking seriously unless we find it reasonable for play.

What would we say about our related bloggers like the Yellow DUCK. What is this type of being? Is the Duck like a fox?
Then we have the resident Tyger !!! Is this Tyger a "burning bright" light, immortal with SYMMETRY and a fearful presence - therefore akin to a hedgehog? - in dark times like this.

25 comments:

Anonymous said...

Quite correct,Zola.
We will have fun when this finally makes its way to Toby's (after his exams, presumably). We have lots of material to start us off.
I have already started diggin' out my 70's Moral Phil essays in perpetration. Post-antideluvian-modernism of the time.
More importantly, word on the wire is of a particular atrocity in LavenderLand.
Apparently, she was speaking with a very interested customer when he got lifted by the police - phone in one hand, apparatus in other - in his car, in a car park, whilst indulging her in a very animated conversation.
As one does.
You heard it here first.
More to come, I am sure.
(Reminded me of the story of a policeman who finds a young couple in a car in a quiet place.
What are you doing?
Just necking.
Well, get your neck back in your trousers......etc).
What favours the brave?.

zola a social thing said...

Agree Brer-Rabbi.
The historical inevitability remains in need of more opening up methinks and so too the rationality critiques but if I get my week sorted quickly after that travel stuff I can try to add a few bits here and there until we get to karl Marx ( which should really piss off some if we are lucky).

The Lavender saga. Umm. Is she a Justice of the Peace too?
Hope to be kept informed of this and I promise not to mention it on me site ... he he he.

Anonymous said...

Isaiah Berlin, neither hedgehog nor fox, but intellectual dogger?

zola a social thing said...

All praise to the wicked willy and I do not mean a certain bold or brave presScot although i suspect there is a link there too with LB somewhere.

They know the same pubs ....

oopps sori - you were talking about Berlin. Yes. An Oxford Dog.

zola a social thing said...

BTW : Yellow Duck this is your chance to bring in Herra Mann and his work. Hope you take it.

Anonymous said...

Just to get balls rolling, in places other than dark carparks...

What about Berlin's intellectual dogging? When Berlin peered into all those vehicles, voyeuristically watching thinkers in deep, intimate engagement with their subjects, maybe his spotlight was far too restricted; Berlin so full of his own passionate hot-air that he ended up steaming-up the windows from the outside; not seeing clearly the numerous positions these thinkers were trying out?

Plato, Pascal, Nietzsche, Marx - were they all, really, simple 'monistic' thinkers; only having 'one big idea'. Were they really only 'one trick ponies', to use a far more bloggy zoological metaphor.

Maybe it's just Berlin, cutting away all the 'foxy' variety, all the diverse pluralism, one can find in these thinkers. If you're really looking for it. All this, simply to advance his own one big idea - that the monist-pluralist divide is mankind's greatest.

"Every thinker is either a pluralistic fox or a monistic hedgehog." Surely only a hedgehog with wildly reductionist, all-embracing impulses, would ever say such a thing. Berlin the hedgehog? Berlin the one-trick pony? Berlin the one-prick-pony-who-hogs-hedges-simply-cos-he-cannot-see-high-enough-to-attempt-jumping-over-them. If you gets me drift.

Saying all that: YD with personality tests one moment, political analysis the next, a dash of matters linguistic, with reports on news from afar all thrown in - well, it could be judged a little foxy. Pikey's, on the other hand, tends more towards the hedgehoggy; with many of his posts hinging on that libertarian theme.


But then again, my spotlight could be dim. (And maybe too, I'd better get out of this car-park before the police turn-up).

zola a social thing said...

Like that I do.
Butwhatif : I agree so much that writers like henrik ibsen were much more than mere hedgehogs ( god damn it Ibsen was into gender issues before the likes of Berlin even knew they existed)and Karl Marx could never be more than a romantic realist fox after taking so much from hegel and aristotle - where we make our worlds but not in ways that we can totally control or know let alone choose.

On the other hand a Balzac, for all his wonderful varieties of the human condition did indeed have this human condition as the one-trick-pony.

Damn it butwhatif I'm here for an argument not a bloody agreement. Come give me something to chew on and bite.
Anyone agreeing with Zola needs their head testing.

Liked the one about misting up windows from outside.

zola a social thing said...

Butwhatif : I agree with your assessment of YD. Bit of a fox. Yes.

Tyger is more difficult although he borders on the hedgehog with leftist leanings ( but there again they are only in his dreams). He, like trousers, tends to dress to the right.

Now lavenderBlue? There is a difficult one to pin down. Benny Hill is clearly her pet fox ( see what I mean).

Pike Fisher - ok a hedgehog with a hope for doing better. Bit of a fox in there somewhere.

Sori Szwagi : all i can say is that our scitso-swagiman is a homeless mind but not ever one-dimensional.

Wat about the lurkin Merkin?
Dare not ask about Chris White because he is so young and open to impressions - but going for hedgehog in fox-like clothing.

Anonymous said...

Disagreement by the A-F load, two threads down, Zola.

Just wondering: What would a zolaogical metaphor look like?

Anonymous said...

Lavenderblue: a foxy lady. Just ask the guy in the carpark.

Reminds me of that Welsh Labour politician exposed wayback for cruising, who told the papers he was "badger watching." Cue one thousand tabloid jokes. (Contrast with George Michael: "I was cruising, it was all consensual, I left no mess behind. So what the fuck, News of the World, is your problem?")

Badgers, dogs and ponies - blame it all on IB.

zola a social thing said...

BTW : With deepest respect for Habermas there in germany I have heard he has been placed in the wicked context of a crocidile and an elephant.
The story goes that Adorno was at the riverside when a croc came out and bit the trunk of an elephant. Then Adorno noticed a voice next to him saying " sppossh yushinks tshis pfuny".

Wicked jokes even between profs of high culture.

Anonymous said...

Perhaps you are correct, perhaps you are not.

The identities of the duck and the tyger are, however, not determined by their own volition, but how their readership interprets them.

So we could be anything to anybody.

Anonymous said...

Wasn't that how the elephant got his trunk, O Best Beloved ?

Anonymous said...

Indeed,Yellow....
I read recently that,in China,male sex workers are called 'ducks'..........

Anonymous said...

Indeed,Yellow....
I read recently that,in China,male sex workers are called 'ducks'..........

Anonymous said...

ooops! I just doubled up, sori !

Anonymous said...

"The identities of the duck and the tyger are, however, not determined by their own volition..."

Blimey, YD really is losing all those ducktatorship impulses. Can't imagine Hitler mumbling such sentences, in last minute dress-rehearsals for the Nuremberg Rally.

Anonymous said...

"ooops! I just doubled up"

Me too, LB. On hearing those wicked rumours concerning the misfortune of your telephone friend.

Care to expand? Or could it all be too incriminating. Aiding and abetting, and all that.

zola a social thing said...

Berlin looked for one identity in the Ibsen world. Our fluffy duck seems to have more than one identity.
Maybe we must call our Duck a foxy duck with a small d and a small f.

Our LB is doubled up again. Just to prove the point.
Anyone for a threesome?

Anonymous said...

Never Yellow !!
I just thought you should know...in case you had the terrible misfortune to be approached..........
Things get misconstrued you know.
Even in the Beautiful Pond there are nasties lurkin'.

Anonymous said...

Later, BWI, under plain brown paper packaging........

zola a social thing said...

This all sounds like Ice Berlin to me.
Wonder what Toby will make of this all!!??

Anonymous said...

'I read recently that,in China,male sex workers are called 'ducks'..........'
aha - and he is yellow too. Eureka.

Wash-ha wong?.
no. 69 please. No lice.

Cummon Lavvy, time to do that feature article which has been so long in the making.

zola a social thing said...

Hello Brer.Rabbit
Flied or boiled ( lice that is)
LB is a precious you know.
Protect her I will.

zola a social thing said...

Would our Toby be a hedgehog with a sword?
Dangerous that.

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