On Experts in the Field of Biblical Studies

Nicholas Kristof has just written an excellent piece entitled “Learning How to Think.” It is full of lessons for anyone trying to figure out who to listen to and what credence to give to a particular theory in the field of biblical studies.

However, when all is said and done, I disagree with Kristof. He wants to point us in the direction of some experts rather than others. That is a lost cause.

As did Philip Tetlock before him, Kristof draws on Isaiah Berlin’s famous essay entitled The Hedgehog and the Fox – if this essay is unfamiliar to you, drop everything and read it. The Isaiah Berlin Virtual Library, a great initiative, will, one hopes, find a way to make the text available online.

For Tetlock and Kristof the important thing is this (I quote Kristof):

Hedgehogs tend to have a focused worldview, an ideological leaning, strong convictions; foxes are more cautious, more centrist, more likely to adjust their views, more pragmatic, more prone to self-doubt, more inclined to see complexity and nuance. And it turns out that while foxes don’t give great sound-bites, they are far more likely to get things right.

In short, Kristof gives us a statistical argument for preferring the work of slippery foxes to that of prickly hedgehogs. I don’t buy it. Hedgehogs, it is true, wed themselves to a single defining idea. The result, often enough, is false predictions.

Still, let us pass in review those Isaiah Berlin put in the “one big idea” hedgehog category: Plato, Lucretius, Dante, Pascal, Hegel, Dostoevsky, Nietzsche, Ibsen, and Proust. Are these authors, or Berlin’s most famous student, Charles Taylor, a self-identifying hedgehog, to be set aside in favor of those Berlin puts in the “complex, nuanced” fox category - Herodotus, Aristotle, Erasmus, Shakespeare, Montaigne, Molière, Goethe, Pushkin, Balzac, Joyce, and Anderson?

On the contrary, I prefer the magnificent error of a Plato to the reasonable synthesis of an Aristotle. I’ll take a bonehead like Luther, who moved mountains, over the reasonable Erasmus who earned everyone’s nod, but no one’s allegiance. A Pascal or Kierkegaard is always to be preferred to a balanced, see-all-sides philosopher – very few in the latter category are worth reading.

It is the case that truth in a mundane sense often lies in the “radical center.” I’ll grant Kristof and Tetlock that much. But before arriving at the center, explore the fringes. The center doesn’t even make sense except in the relation to the periphery which defines it.

In the field of biblical studies, who is a hedgehog? Who is a fox?

Berlin’s title references an aphorism attributed to the Greek poet Archilochus:

πόλλ' οἶδ ἀλώπηξ, ἐχῖνος δ'ἓν μέγα
The fox knows many things, the hedgehog one big thing.

Erasmus in his Adagia (1500) gives the expression in Latin:

Multa novit vulpes, verum echinus unum magnum.
The fox investigates many things, the hedgehog, to be sure, one big thing.

Comments

[Calvin]

John, you make an interesting point. Certainly we need to explore the fringes, but I would rather take Erasmus than Luther, and Aristotle clearly wins out in my book over Plato. Maybe it's because I find myself in the center often times, with plenty of self-criticism. I look at those extremists such as Luther, and I see plenty of things they did wrong, plenty of things they said may have been right, of course, to be fair.

Still, you're making an interesting point that I'm not sure I agree with.

[JohnFH]

Hi Calvin,

Perhaps you prefer James to Paul as well. The trouble is, extremists like Paul gives us not only Romans and Galatians, but also, 1 Corinthians 13 and Philippians 2. If James were not in the NT, would we really miss it?

I was hoping to spur some thought about analogies in the field of biblical studies.

Here's one. It's more important, I think, to read Wellhausen and Kaufmann, two extremists, than it is to read S. R. Driver, a centrist. But I would concur that the cautious Driver brings us to the center, where reason (but not necessarily truth) is to be found.

[Calvin]

Again, the contrast between "truth" and reason is interesting. I would guess that you'd place Lemche and Thompson as extremists on your scale, along with, perhaps Provan on the other side?

As it happens I do prefer James to Paul--and I think we'd miss it very much if he weren't there, Paul I could probably do without. ;-)

[JohnFH]

Of course, I was exaggerating about James for effect. It is a marvelous component of the New Testament, a corrective though by no means a replacement of Paul.

[Sam Norton]

"A Pascal or Kierkegaard is always to be preferred to a balanced, see-all-sides philosopher – very few in the latter category are worth reading." Amen to that - and I say that as an Aristotelean rather than a Platonist!

What I find most helpful is reading the extreme points of view (often so in politics) even if I find myself in the middle.

[Carl W. Conrad]

What I haven't figured out yet is why one should be obliged to be EITHER a fox OR a hedgehog; I know I've learned a lot from both, and I'm somewhat leery of simple identification of particular figures as decidedly one rather than the other. I recall that it was said of Alfred North Whitehead (one of the more recent major thinkers I've been very fond of), that he clearly thought of himself as a Platonist but ultimately developed a system that is more Aristotelian. I think it's a damn good thing we have both Plato and Aristotle in our tradition, so also the others lined up in binary pairs as hedgehogs and foxes respectively.

[JohnFH]

Whitehead is a fine example of someone who tried to build bridges between seemingly irreconcilable approaches to the both the real and the ideal.

So I am a both/and thinker, not in the sense of being a fox, but in the sense of someone who seeks to give both hedgehogs and foxes their due.