I wrote in the previous post about my inner tension between being a hedgehog and acting like a fox. It’s something I’ve thought about a lot recently, after largely recovering from a period in which I lost my intellectual self-confidence. I think in a speculative way and rather than affirm the virtues of that approach, I internalised the message that it was the trait of a fundamentally shallow dilettante. In part this was an excessive credulity about feedback I was getting at the time, in part it was a complex retreat from taking responsibility for my own career. It’s easier to avoiding making difficult decisions if you imagine that you’ve not got as much to contribute as you once assumed. Even if I hadn’t already put this behind me, the experience of rapidly grasping an entirely new field (and conveying that grasp in a practically orientated book) affirmed to me that how I think has value.
I cobbled together what I believe is a very useful framework for thinking about generative AI in higher education extremely quickly, as well as the outline of a broader sociology of it. I map things, I trace connections quickly and creatively, with the parallel risk that I’m sometimes prone to remaining on the surface. The problem I’m realising is not some deficiency in my thought. It’s not that I can’t go deeper, it’s that I struggle with the focus required in doing so. Leaving aside the question of whether this is almost entirely reducible to ADHD (the academic expression of an unavoidable propensity for side quests etc) I’ve been thinking about the fox and the hedgehog, categories from Isaiah Berlin’s famous essay, conveying a distinction between two styles of thinker:
For there exists a great chasm between those, on one side, who relate everything to a single central vision, one system, less or more coherent or articulate, in terms of which they understand, think and feel – a single, universal, organising principle in terms of which alone all that they are and say has significance – and, on the other side, those who pursue many ends, often unrelated and even contradictory, connected, if at all, only in some de facto way, for some psychological or physiological cause, related to no moral or aesthetic principle
As I wrote yesterday I clearly “relate everything to a single central vision, one system, less or more coherent or articulate, in terms of which [I] understand, think and feel” (a psychoanalytically inclined version of Margaret Archer’s account of reflexivity) yet I “pursue many ends, often unrelated and even contradictory”. I currently have in progress pieces of work on digital literacy, the history of digital sociology, theorising AI pedagogy, platform as explanatory framework, the ontology of digital scholarship, the REF 2021 and social media policies in higher education. I’ve written in the past on video game streaming, social movements, asexuality, academic practice, social media. I’m committed to writing on the platform university, the social ontology of GAI, sustainable educational technology design, productivity culture for academics and AI and posthumanism. I compulsively take on too many projects (again side quests) and my attempts to narrativise the things I’m drawn to usually feel to me like an artificial unity I’m imposing to reassure others that I know what I’m doing. I’m pretty sure there’s a hedgehog in me trying to studiously focus on a single thing, but the frenetic activity of the fox is making it extremely difficult,
The problem is that the internal tension is obviously generative, as they often are. To the extent I’m a speculative thinker, prone to enthusiastic conjecture and drawn towards emerging topics which have not yet been fully defined, there will always be a propensity towards being a fox. It’s a style of thought which leads to “many ends, often unrelated and even contradictory” which are “connected, if at all, only in some de facto way, for some psychological or physiological cause”. I’m drawn towards topics which grab my attention (superficially a psychological cause) but the reason they do this is because they impinge upon a “a single central vision” which is how I see the reflexive subject, thrown into the world and struggling to craft a meaningful life in conditions not of their own choosing.
To a certain extent this is all just a vast excess in self-interrogation but the vision is a function of that rather than reducible to it. I’m fundamentally driven by the gap between the control we can exercise and the control which is exercised over us, as well as how technology sits at this intersection and what it means for the shape of our lives. What Maggie Archer called the ‘vexatious fact of society’ as it is lived out by the individual subject in all their psychic complexity. My place in education is because I have a deep need to feel my work is useful in some way, it’s a rich site of empirical examples and it’s a crucial structural site through which that dynamic plays out. It’s a place where this tension between fox and hedgehog plays out less sharply than it did when I saw myself primarily as a sociologist.
Is there actually a contradiction here? I don’t think there is, but there are more or less constructive ways in which this tension can be expressed. I’m suggesting that creative confidence entails accepting these tensions in how you think, rather than imagining you can transcend them and become one thing or the other. To trust in your creative capacities you need to identify and accept the tensions underlying your creative process. This is how Charles Taylor describes his intellectual style in introduction to Philosophical Papers volume 2:
Despite the appearance of variety in the papers published in this collection, they are the work of a monomaniac; or perhaps better, what Isaiah Berlin has called a hedgehog. If not a single idea, then at least a single rather tightly related agenda underlies all of them. If one had to find a name for where this agenda falls in the geography of philosophical domains, the term ‘philosophical anthropology’ would perhaps be best, although this term seems to make English-speaking philosophers uneasy.
This suggests something aspirational to me. There can be the “appearance of variety” alongside “a single rather tightly related agenda”. To the extent I’ve experienced my intellectual style as a problem, it’s not the variety but rather the excess in that variety and the looseness of the single agenda underlying them all. The tension between variety and singularity, between the fox and the hedgehog, is immensely generative. The problem is finding an articulation that enables the promise of that generativity to be realised.
Mark Carrigan 