Wagner and the Origin of Evil

Abstract

In a famous essay on Tolstoy's view of history, entitled “The Hedgehog and the Fox,” Isaiah Berlin began with a fragment of Greek poetry: “The fox knows many things, but the hedgehog knows one big thing.”1 Berlin rang a note of caution that the words of this fragment “may mean no more than that the fox, for all his cunning, is defeated by the hedgehog's one defense,” but he went on to suggest that they also may “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.” Berlin fleshed out this difference by proposing that the hedgehogs “relate everything to a single central vision, one system less or more coherent or articulate, in terms of which they understand and feel—a single, universal, organizing principle in terms of which alone all that they are and say has significance.” The foxes, by contrast, 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 single moral or aesthetic principle; these last [the foxes] lead lives, perform acts, and entertain ideas that are centrifugal rather than centripetal, their thought is scattered or diffused, moving on many levels, seizing upon the essence of a vast variety of experiences and objects for what they are in themselves, without, consciously or unconsciously, seeking to fit them into, or exclude them from, any one unchanging, all-embracing, sometimes self-contradictory and incomplete, at times fanatical, unitary inner vision.2