Saussure and the Hedgehog’s Vision: Difference as a Catalyst in Language

The Hedgehog and the Fox. AI image

 

The Hedgehog–Fox Framework Recalled

Isaiah Berlin, in his celebrated essay The Hedgehog and the Fox (1953), opens with a fragment from the Greek poet Archilochus: “The fox knows many things, but the hedgehog knows one big thing.” Berlin uses this aphorism to distinguish two temperaments of thought. Hedgehogs interpret the world through a single, unifying idea that gives coherence and direction to everything they do. Foxes, by contrast, move across multiple domains, embracing diversity and contradiction without forcing reality into a single frame.

This distinction is not rigid or evaluative but a matter of intellectual orientation: the hedgehog seeks depth through unity; the fox, insight through multiplicity.

The metaphor has proven remarkably adaptable to the study of ideas. Philosophers, writers, and scientists alike can be situated along this spectrum. It can illuminate not only personal styles of thinking but also the evolution of disciplines themselves. In linguistics, for instance, Ferdinand de Saussure stands unmistakably on the hedgehog’s side. His “one big thing” — the notion that difference rather than substance is the foundation of language — reorganized the field around a single conceptual core. Most traditional linguists, by contrast, have been foxes, dispersing their insights into a plurality of empirical methods, theoretical frameworks, and subfields.

To revisit Saussure through Berlin’s lens is to see him not merely as the founder of modern linguistics but as a rare thinker who built an entire science around one principle so fertile that it generated a Copernican revolution.

Saussure as a Hedgehog: Difference as the “One Big Thing”

Saussure’s Cours de linguistique générale (1916) transformed the study of language by displacing substance — sounds, meanings, words — in favor of relations. Before him, language had largely been treated as an assemblage of positive entities: a vocabulary of fixed meanings, a set of grammatical rules, and so on. Saussure inverted this logic. “In language there are only differences,” he declared, “without positive terms”:

“In the language itself, there are only differences. Even more important than that is the fact that, although in general a difference presupposes positive terms between which the difference holds, in a language there are only differences, and no positive terms” (Saussure, 1916/1959, p. 120).

This was not merely a theoretical proposition but a redefinition of what language is. Its essence lies not in things but in contrasts, not in material sound or conceptual content, but in the system that renders expression intelligible.

From this single premise, Saussure reinterpreted every level of linguistic analysis. The lexicon is no longer a catalogue of words with intrinsic meanings but a network in which each term derives its identity from its distinction from others. 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 meanings of louer, mieten, and vermieten arise not from any inherent connection to pre-formed ideas but from their contrast with other terms in their respective systems.

Grammatical facts, too, reveal how language functions as a system of values. The formation of the plural in German, as in Nacht : Nächte, shows that each term is defined by its oppositions within the system:

“What is usually called a ‘grammatical fact’ corresponds in the final analysis to our definition of a linguistic unit. For there is always an opposition of terms involved. What is special is that the opposition happens to be particularly important, e.g. German plural formations of the type Nacht vs. Nächte… In isolation, Nacht and Nächte are nothing: the opposition between them is everything.” [CGL] [168]

Even phonetics — which might seem the most “substantial” layer of language — becomes, for Saussure, a system of differences. Language does not depend on any concrete quality in sound but simply on the distinction between them. From this perspective, the phoneme is a play of contrasts:

“Each language constructs its words out of some fixed number of phonetic units, each one clearly distinct from the others. What characterises those units is not the specific positive properties of each; but simply the fact that they cannot be mistaken for one another. Speech sounds are first and foremost entities which are contrastive, relative and negative.” [CGL] [164–165]

Whether identifying a linguistic sign, analyzing a grammatical fact like the plural, or examining the distinctive features of a phoneme, we encounter the same truth: these elements are defined not by what they are, but by what they are not. This vision makes Saussure a paradigmatic hedgehog who “knows one big thing” and interprets the entire linguistic edifice through a single conceptual lens. Difference becomes the organizing principle that unifies phonology, morphology, syntax, and semantics.

The Linguists as Foxes: Multiplicity of Approaches

If Saussure was the hedgehog who saw unity through difference, most linguists before and after him have been foxes — roaming the vast terrain of language without fixing on a single, governing principle. The traditional study of language, from classical philology to modern university curricula, tends to divide the field into distinct branches: phonetics, phonology, morphology, syntax, lexicology, semantics, pragmatics. Each discipline cultivates its own methods and objects of inquiry, as though language were a collection of separate organs rather than a single living organism.

This compartmentalization has yielded extraordinary empirical detail. The fox’s curiosity leads to specialized knowledge — the articulatory patterns that define vowels and consonants, the morphological processes that shape words, the syntactic structures that generate meaning. Yet this very specialization often obscures the interdependence that makes the whole intelligible. Phonology cannot be understood apart from morphology; morphology presupposes syntax; syntax shades into semantics. In practice, however, these domains are frequently treated as autonomous, their internal problems analyzed in isolation.

In this sense, the “fox-like” linguist exemplifies what Berlin called the pluralistic temper of understanding — an orientation that values diversity of methods over unity of vision. Each approach illuminates a fragment of language’s vast landscape, but rarely attempts to see the system as a coherent whole. Even today, university departments mirror this intellectual map: courses in phonetics and semantics coexist on syllabi yet seldom converge conceptually.

Saussure’s intervention thus appears radical not only for what it proposed but for what it displaced. His Cours called for a science that would treat these “parts” not as self-contained disciplines but as interrelated expressions of a single structure. His “one big thing” continues to offer a horizon against which these plural approaches can orient themselves, reminding us that beneath the multiplicity of linguistic inquiry lies a unifying web of relations that holds it together.

Conclusion: The Legacy of the Hedgehog

Seen through Berlin’s metaphor, Saussure’s intellectual singularity stands out against the classical diversity of linguistic inquiry. Like the hedgehog, he organized the world around a single, luminous idea — that difference, not substance, is the generative force of language. Every sound, word, and rule gains its value through contrast with others. From this vantage, language appears not as a heap of signs but as a living system of relations — dynamic, self-regulating, and perpetually renewed.

The linguists who preceded and succeeded him, the foxes, have multiplied perspectives, testing and transforming his insight across countless domains. Yet their very diversity affirms the vitality of Saussure’s “one big thing.” His Copernican revolution was not in finding another subject to describe but in changing the way description itself operates. In this sense, he remains the hedgehog of modern thought — not because he knew more, but because he saw more deeply into the single principle that continues to animate them all.

References

Berlin, I. (1953). The Hedgehog and the Fox: An Essay on Tolstoy’s View of History. London: Weidenfeld & Nicolson.
Saussure, F. de. (1916). Cours de linguistique générale. Ed. Charles Bally and Albert Sechehaye. Paris: Payot.
Lévi-Strauss, C. (1958). Anthropologie structurale. Paris: Plon.
Derrida, J. (1967). De la grammatologie. Paris: Minuit.