The great Isaiah Berlin famously divided thinkers into foxes and hedgehogs. He was inspired by Archilochus who said, “The fox knows many things; the hedgehog one big thing.” Looking back on some academically oriented acquaintances I made along the way, it seems habitual readers are like that too. Some read promiscuously, across genres; others have only one really big book. For sure, they may be avid readers who read many other books and authors, but there is always that one book, one author and one moment that kind of defined their life and gave it direction. I know people don’t read nowadays. Social media, virtual reality, the metaverse … whatever! I make no judgment. If you like to play computer games and make money off YouTube by live-streaming your plays, I perfectly respect that. Totally. But I am ageing and old-fashioned, and very bad at computers. A long-lost friend from college was mesmerised, in his youth, by Alexander Kojeve, a Sorbonne lecturer, mid-level bureaucrat at the European Economic Community, the forerunner of the European Union, and a suspected Soviet spy. Kojeve was the guy, incidentally, whom Francis Fukuyama stole from in The End of History and the Last Man , a book that was excruciating for both of us to flip through, let alone read. From the first paragraph of Kojeve’s Introduction to the Reading of Hegel , a collection of his legendary lectures at the Sorbonne in the 1930s, my guy was hooked. My ex-friend would go on to marry, then divorce a French girl, and translated another major work of Kojeve, which is widely used today. Why Daniel Defoe is the best and worst role model of homo economicus I can understand his Kojeve fascination. How can you not? From the first paragraph of the Introduction : “Man is Self-Consciousness. He is conscious of himself, conscious of his human reality and dignity; it is in this that he is essentially different from animals, which do not go beyond the level of simple Sentiment of self. Man becomes conscious of himself at the moment when – for the first time – he says ‘I’. To understand man by understanding his ‘origin’ is, therefore, to understand the origin of the ‘I’ revealed by speech.” It sounds even better in French, as they do. I could hear Richard Strauss’ Thus Spoke Zarathustra reaching a crescendo at that last sentence there. Later in Hong Kong, I took a philosophy course from a now-retired professor at a local university. I had heard some people dived off the deep end with Kant, but this guy jumped into the abyss. This may be an exaggeration, but only a slight one; if you were to ban him from mentioning the name Kant, he might not be able to sustain a philosophical conversation. But I don’t blame him. The Critique of Pure Reason contains an answer – for some people, the answer – to every metaphysical question ever asked. Space, time, infinity, truth, God … Kant has them taken care of. And along the way, he provides a foundation for Newtonian mechanics, Euclidean geometry and arithmetic. Too bad Kant spent his whole life in Konigsberg and never met his younger contemporary, Carl Friedrich Gauss, in Gottingen, who was already working out a non-Euclidean version of geometry. But my Hong Kong professor believes Kant’s philosophy, with a little more work, could take care of non-Euclidean geometry, quantum mechanics, relativity theory and transfinite arithmetic, too. I am mathematically challenged and have no opinion one way or another. I read somewhere too that Hegel supposedly anticipated Darwin and Wallace’s theory of evolution. I doubt it somehow. How a controversial socialist phrase became lost in translation Another ex-friend from college – yeah I know, I have poor social skills, can’t read facial clues, don’t know how to keep friends or make new ones – read Martin Heidegger’s Being and Time in its entirety when he was 16 and learned German from its repeated reading. When he told me about that matter-of-factly, without the slightest hint of pride or arrogance, I was shocked, awed and wildly jealous. He also got almost perfect SAT scores (for university admissions in the United States) with no preparation. Hannah Arendt, a student and lover of Heidegger, read The Critique of Pure Reason when she was 13. Jean Hyppolite, another great Hegel interpreter on par with Kojeve, learned German by working through The Phenomenology of Spirit, that supremely obscure book, with a French-German dictionary. The young genius Frank Ramsey helped Wittgenstein translate the latter’s Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus . He didn’t know German at first but by the time he finished, he was fluent. I would put my old friend up there with these guys for his precocity, except he wouldn’t stop talking about the big H while we were in school. That was until he got his PhD, became a professor and co-founded a philosophical movement that is, broadly, anti-Heideggerian. I guess he finally got over his Oedipus complex and slew his philosophical father. But, to get back to our original animals, I prefer Aesop’s fable of the fox and the hedgehog rather than Archilochus’. On this telling, a fox is swarmed by insects and a hedgehog offers to help. He declines, saying some other insects, probably worse ones, would just swarm in to take their place. Aristotle uses the story to describe the pointlessness of seeking to replace bad politicians with more of the same, or worse ones. Someone once wrote: “Who seeks a ruler to reverse/Calls in another that is worse.” A more recent version is from the legendary British rock group The Who: “Meet the new boss/Same as the old boss.”