Patrick Macdonald and Walter Carrington: A New Perspective

In 1953 Sir Isaiah Berlin wrote his masterly The Hedgehog and the Fox: An Essay on Tolstoy's View of History. It begins thus:

There is a line among the fragments of the Greek poet Archilochus which says: 'The fox knows many things, but the hedgehog knows one big thing.' Scholars have differed about the correct interpretation of these dark words, which may mean no more than that the fox, for all his cunning, is defeated by the hedgehog's one defense. But, taken figuratively, the words can be made to yield a sense in which they mark one of the deepest differences which divide writers and thinkers, and, it may be, human beings in general.

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, organizing 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 by no moral or aesthetic principle; these last lead lives, perform acts, and entertain ideas that are centrifugal rather than centripetal, their thought is scattered or diffused, moving on many levels, seizing upon the essence of a vast variety of experiences and objects for what they are in themselves, without consciously or unconsciously seeking to fit them into, or exclude them from, any one unchanging, all-embracing, sometimes self-contradictory and incomplete, at times fanatical, unitary inner vision. The first kind of intellectual and artistic personality belongs to the hedgehogs, the second to the foxes; and without insisting on a rigid classification, we may, without too much fear of contradiction, say that, in this sense, Dante belongs to the first category, Shakespeare to the second; Plato, Lucretius, Pascal, Hegel, Dostoyevski, Nietzsche, Ibsen, Proust are, in varying degrees, hedgehogs; Herodotus, Aristotle, Montaigne, Erasmus, Molière, Goethe, Pushkin, Balzac, Joyce are foxes.

Alexander teachers pay a lot of attention to their pedagogical genealogy, so to speak; when two teachers first meet, what they ask of each other most often is, "Where did you train?" It's a way of identifying oneself, identifying "the other," and setting up some (usually unspoken and convoluted) rules for a dialogue.

Alexander trained a few dozen teachers, of which several became trendsetters and significant teacher-trainers themselves; these include Wilfred and Marjory Barlow, Marjory Barstow, and Peter Scott. Two of the most influential of Alexander's trainees are Patrick Macdonald and Walter Carrington. The dialogue between these two great teachers has been fraught with difficulties, sometimes made thornier still by their dedicated, passionate, and often misguided disciples. (In this they remind one of the followers of the 19th-century composers Franz Liszt and Johannes Brahms; the two composers themselves found much to admire in each other's music, but their admirers and supporters took rather narrow, one-sided, and vituperative views of one another, making artistic issues secondary to personal ones.)

There are, indeed, substantial differences between the outlooks of Mr. Macdonald and Mr. Carrington. These differences, however, aren't those that many teachers tend to focus on, such as putting one's feet wide apart (Macdonald-style) or close together (Carrington-style), or leaning forwards (Carrington-style) or remaining vertical (Macdonald-style) when sitting and standing. I believe Sir Isaiah's essay provides useful clues to the true nature of their divergence. In this essay I aim to bring the concept of the fox and the hedgehog together with another philosophical measuring stick - which considers most people as being one of three types, fundamentalists, relativists, or skeptical humanists - to seek to understand the personalities and teaching styles of Mr. Macdonald and Mr. Carrington, and to propose a few practical ways in which teachers of different backgrounds may talk and work with one another.