In his essay "The Hedgehog and the Fox", in which historian of ideas Isaiah Berlin seeks to describe Leo Tolstoy's understanding of history, he first explains the whimsical title, which goes back to the Greek poet Archilochos, of whom we read: "The fox knows many things, but the hedgehog knows one great thing." Berlin divided great minds into categories in this way, for example Dante as a hedgehog and Shakespeare as a fox, which he continued to do, assigning Goethe and Joyce to the foxes and Proust and Dostoyevsky to the spiny animals.
The distinction allowed Berlin to understand Tolstoy through the animalistic contrast. The Russian poet was by nature a fox who believed he was a hedgehog. Tolstoy's view of history can be found in his novel "War and Peace", in which personal life unfolds on a social anthill, which draws its strength from its opposites. Literary historians say that people are shown leading a conscious life "for themselves" like atoms and at the same time are unconscious carriers of the historical development in which Tolstoy embeds them.
Applied to science, one can say that the theme of dualism emerged in physics in the early 20th century, when Albert Einstein added the particle aspect to the wave description of light (for which he received the Nobel Prize). When it became apparent that the electron, which had previously only been understood as a particle, could also propagate in waves, duality had to be taken seriously philosophically, which was attempted above all by Niels Bohr, who received the highest award in his field of science the year after Einstein. Bohr advocated the idea of complementarity, which allowed things to be distributed in particle form in one place and at the same time in wave motion throughout space. Even though Bohr contributed many other ideas to physics, with complementarity he became its hedgehog, which Einstein the fox tried to get at with thousands of proposals without success. He rejected Bohr's "big idea" as a philosophy of reassurance, because with Bohr a subject can determine whether the object under consideration - light or an electron - appears as a broad wave or a positioned particle. Bohr's great idea gives the old atom a new meaning. It is no longer an indivisible entity in itself, it only represents a whole together with people, and this view shows how the world manages to hold together from within.
