The Hedgehog’s Vision: Nietzsche and Saussure as Thinkers of the One Big Thing

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Introduction

Isaiah Berlin’s famous essay The Hedgehog and the Fox (1953) proposes a simple yet fertile metaphor for classifying intellectual temperaments. Drawing on a fragment by the Greek poet Archilochus — “The fox knows many things, but the hedgehog knows one big thing” — Berlin distinguishes between those who, like foxes, pursue many separate ends, and those who, like hedgehogs, interpret everything through a single unifying vision.

This distinction, while not absolute or evaluative, sheds light on how certain thinkers transform their fields: by reinterpreting the world through one powerful, generative principle. Among such figures stand two philologists who never met but whose intellectual revolutions still shape modern thought — Friedrich Nietzsche and Ferdinand de Saussure. Each, in his own way, exemplifies the hedgehog’s temperament: Nietzsche through his radical revaluation of all values, and Saussure through his discovery that language is a system of differences without positive terms.

Isaiah Berlin’s Distinction: The Hedgehog and the Fox

For Berlin, the hedgehog “relates everything to a single central vision, one system, less or more coherent or articulate, in terms of which they understand, think and feel” (The Hedgehog and the Fox, p. 3). Foxes, conversely, pursue many unrelated ideas, delighting in multiplicity without seeking synthesis.

The hedgehog’s strength lies in focus — the power to illuminate the whole landscape of thought from one burning center. Plato, Hegel, and Nietzsche belong to this species of mind; Aristotle, Shakespeare, and Goethe to the fox’s. The contrast, Berlin insists, is heuristic: both types contribute indispensably to the progress of ideas. Yet the hedgehog’s unity often brings revolution, as it reorders the field around one decisive insight.

Nietzsche as a Hedgehog: The Revaluation of All Values

Though Nietzsche’s prose is aphoristic and fragmentary, his philosophy pivots on a single, consuming idea: the revaluation of all values. Beneath his critiques of morality, religion, science, and truth lies one fundamental conviction — that Western metaphysics has betrayed life by subordinating it to static ideals.

Nietzsche’s “one big thing” is the affirmation of life in its becoming, struggle, and creation. Concepts such as the will to power, the Übermensch, and eternal recurrence are not separate doctrines but expressions of this same insight: that existence has no transcendent justification, only the imperative to create and affirm itself. “To impose upon becoming the character of being — that is the supreme will to power,” he writes in The Will to Power (§617).

Everything Nietzsche attacks — the ascetic ideal, moral absolutism, metaphysical truth — he does so in the name of life. His thought is centripetal: all his fragments converge toward one axis of value. The hedgehog in him does not unify by reduction but by transfiguration — by reinterpreting the whole of philosophy, art, and morality through the single lens of vitality. Nietzsche’s “beyond good and evil” is thus not mere negation but a vision of existence as creative force, where meaning arises from affirmation rather than constraint.

Saussure as a Hedgehog: Difference as the One Big Thing

Half a century later, Ferdinand de Saussure transformed linguistics through a similarly unifying principle: difference. In the Cours de linguistique générale (1916), Saussure overturned the traditional view that language is a repository of names for preexisting things. Instead, he proposed that “in language there are only differences, without positive terms.”

From this radical insight follows a complete reconfiguration of linguistic science. Words have no intrinsic meaning; they derive their value from contrast. For example, the French verb louer can mean both “to rent” and “to hire,” while German distinguishes these meanings with two separate verbs: mieten (“to rent”) and vermieten (“to lease out”) [CGL] [161]. This discrepancy illustrates that linguistic units do not possess fixed, universal meanings. Instead, their value is defined relationally within the specific structure of a language.

The same logic governs grammar, the formation of the plural in German, as in Nacht : Nächte, shows that each term is defined by its oppositions within the system [CGL] [168]. Even the most elementary linguistic unit — the phoneme — is “a difference that makes a difference,” defined not by what it is but by what it excludes: “Speech sounds are first and foremost entities which are contrastive, relative and negative” [CGL] [164–165]. Whether analyzing word, rule, or sound, Saussure’s lens is constant: the structure of oppositions that makes communication possible.

Through this single idea, Saussure replaced the static idiom of entities with a dynamic system of relations. His hedgehog genius lay in perceiving that every linguistic phenomenon — from syntax to semantics — could be understood as an instance of difference, a play of values within a self-regulating system.

Two Hedgehogs, Two Revolutions

Nietzsche and Saussure share the hedgehog’s ability to condense a vast field into one generative principle. Both dismantled inherited assumptions: Nietzsche attacked the metaphysical belief in stable truth; Saussure, the linguistic belief in intrinsic meaning. Each substituted structure for substance — relation for essence.

Their revolutions, however, unfold in different registers. Nietzsche’s unity is existential and evaluative: he centers philosophy on life’s creative affirmation. Saussure’s unity is structural and cognitive: he centers meaning on difference. Yet methodologically they converge. Nietzsche dissolves moral and metaphysical absolutes into forces and perspectives; Saussure dissolves linguistic objects into networks of relations. In both cases, coherence replaces identity, movement replaces being.

Berlin’s hedgehog thus appears not as a monomaniac, but as a visionary who finds in one principle the key to a universe of relations. The “one big thing” becomes a generative matrix from which entire worlds of thought can unfold.

Conclusion: The Fertility of the One Big Thing

In Isaiah Berlin’s taxonomy, Nietzsche and Saussure epitomize the creative power of the hedgehog. Each discovered a principle so fertile that it redefined the boundaries of thought. Nietzsche’s revaluation of values shattered the metaphysical hierarchy of being and truth, while Saussure’s theory of difference laid the groundwork for structuralism and its philosophical descendants — from Lévi-Strauss to Derrida.

To “know one big thing,” for these thinkers, was not to simplify the world but to reveal its hidden architecture. Nietzsche’s “will to life” and Saussure’s “system of differences” each replaced essence with relation, restoring motion and creativity to domains long governed by abstraction. Their unity of vision demonstrates that the deepest revolutions arise not from accumulation, but from concentration — from seeing all things anew in the light of one transformative idea.

The hedgehog, then, does not reduce; it radiates. By insisting on coherence, it reorders complexity. Nietzsche and Saussure show that the “one big thing” can open the way to a plurality of meanings — not by multiplying them, but by grounding them in a single, luminous insight.

Bibliography

• Berlin, I. (1953). The Hedgehog and the Fox: An Essay on Tolstoy’s View of History. London: Weidenfeld & Nicolson.
• Nietzsche, F. (1968). The Will to Power (W. Kaufmann & R. J. Hollingdale, Trans.). New York: Vintage.
• Nietzsche, F. (2002). Beyond Good and Evil (R. J. Hollingdale, Trans.). London: Penguin Classics.
• Saussure, F. de. (1959). Course in General Linguistics (W. Baskin, Trans.). New York: McGraw-Hill.