Sublime
An inspiration engine for ideas
‘Knowledge liberates,’ Isaiah Berlin writes in his ‘Two Concepts of Liberty’, ‘not by offering us more open possibilities amongst which we can make our choice, but by preserving us from the frustration of attempting the impossible.’
Adam Phillips • Missing Out: In Praise of the Unlived Life
Isaiah Berlin: “Freedom for the wolves has often meant death to the sheep.”
Priya Parker • The Art of Gathering: How We Meet and Why It Matters
“The Hedgehog and the Fox” by Isaiah Berlin divides the world into two types of people: hedgehogs, who are absorbed by one big idea, and foxes, who dance between many.
By way of an Oxford party, an Archilochus fragment, and Tolstoy’s epic, Berlin had stumbled upon two of the very best ways to become intellectually indelible. The first is to be Delphic, a trick known to oracles throughout time. The second is to be Aesopian: turn your ideas into animals, and they’ll achieve immortality.
John Lewis Gaddis • On Grand Strategy
Vikram Mansharamani • All Hail the Generalist
A hedgehog tends to “relate everything to a single central vision, one system, less or more coherent or articulate, in terms of which they understand, think and feel,” wrote Berlin. In contrast, a fox pursues “many ends, often unrelated and even contradictory,” and is skeptical of totalizing theories and causes. Plato and Nietzsche, for example, we
... See moreThe ancient Greek poet Archilochus once wrote: ‘The fox knows many things, but the hedgehog knows one big thing.’ Isaiah Berlin, who found this mysterious line in the surviving scraps of Archilochus’ poetry, famously used it as a metaphor to distinguish between two types of human being: people who know a little about a lot (the foxes) and people wh
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