While the hedgehog is not the cutest of creatures, being anti-social, ugly, thorny, and possessing an uncontrollable urge to shit on everything, and is in fact the worst sort of pet one could own outside of ferrets and lice, it may indeed lend us metahedgical insight. If this is so, however, it is not because the hedgehog justifies grandiloquent postmodern attacks on the Enlightenment (and everything associated with it by its critics). I submit instead that the hedgehog may serve as an analogy for incidental restrictions on our explanatory capabilities.
The hedgehog can be drawn out of its dark, smelly corner only by the most skilled hedgehog whisperers. Our poor understanding of its grotesque guttural communicative noises limits our capacity for interaction. And as most hedgehogs are mildly autistic, interaction among their own kind is itself uncommon. One is inclined to dismiss them as mistake of nature, an unfortunate assemblage of organic matter. By implication one might decide that indeed nothing of significance can be found within the hedgehog; any supposed meaning is merely constructed by those who fetishize the hog. However, we are justified in believing that beneath that repellent, spiny exterior lies some system of meaning. That the hog should act in any coherent way at all suggests an underlying intentional capacity.
The hog's tendency to remain in a dark smelly corner implies intentionality. Similarly, the extension of its scaly thorns around Jews and gays suggests that the hedgehog generally operates in a non-arbitrary manner. And while it does indiscriminately poop, this is better understood as a genetic inability to socialize. Our model of the hedgehog's internal semantic workings is no doubt incomplete, but this doesn't justify the inference that no such system exists.
The argument that hedgehogs present nothing more than a false appearance of meaning seems a poorly founded metahedgical claim. But there is a more serious charge that will be investigated later:
The hedgehog constitutes an oppressive regime.
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Generalization: lack of specialization.
ReplyDelete2006 January 17, Adam Nicolson, “Where have all our hedgehogs gone?”, in The Guardian:
What the biologists call the hedgehog's generalism, its lack of slick speciality, the way it noses for beetles, caterpillars, earwigs and worms, sometimes eating frogs, baby mice, eggs and chicks, its happy existence at the bottom of hedges and in people's back gardens, its inability to cope with very large, chemically denuded arable fields - in other words its fondness for the private, the scruffy and the marginal - all make it a measure of the state of the landscape's health as a whole.