In one sense all academics are the same: nerdy, motivated, project-oriented, drawn to ideas. But in another sense academia is a crazy quilt of variation. Some scholars like big overarching theories, others tiny empirical puzzles. Some feel most at home in the lab; others prefer the field, the armchair, or the archive. Some like to blaze trails in uncharted territory, while others would rather fine-tune the proposals of others. Some stick to one project at the time; others ping-pong between fifteen. And on and on [1].
How can we make sense of this variation? There have been scores of efforts to categorize human personality in general—from zodiac signs to Hogwarts houses, from the dubious Myers-Briggs to the venerable Big Five. Efforts to categorize intellectual personality are much scarcer. But there is at least one minor tradition of note: a way of categorizing thinking styles by appeal to animals. Here are three such schemes:
Ants, spiders, and bees. In The New Organon, published in 1620, Francis Bacon laid out a three-way scheme:
“Those who have handled sciences have been either men of experiment or men of dogmas. The men of experiment are like the ant, they only collect and use; the reasoners resemble spiders, who make cobwebs out of their own substance. But the bee takes a middle course: it gathers its material from the flowers of the garden and of the field, but transforms and digests it by a power of its own. Not unlike this is the true business of philosophy; for it neither relies solely or chiefly on the powers of the mind, nor does it take the matter which it gathers from natural history and mechanical experiments and lay it up in the memory whole, as it finds it, but lays it up in the understanding altered and digested. Therefore from a closer and purer league between these two faculties, the experimental and the rational (such as has never yet been made), much may be hoped.”
Leaving aside the question of whether Bacon got the natural history right, he certainly hit on an important dimension of academic personality: how much one relies on direct observations of the world versus reasoning alone. Bacon seems to advocate a kind of shuttling back and forth between these two modes—regular trips between lab and armchair—with work at one informing work at the other. Bacon’s choice of insects to describe these modes is apt. Ants, spiders, and bees are all in the business of building things that are impressive relative to their scale. And this is what scientists and philosophers often imagine themselves to be doing—building edifices of understanding.
Hedgehogs and foxes. A second scheme comes from Isaiah Berlin. It’s laid out in a (rather long) essay on Leo Tolstoy. Berlin describes his proposed split as “one of the deepest differences which divide writers and thinkers, and, it may be, human beings in general.” He continues:
“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.”
In the first camp (hedgehogs) Berlin places Dante, Plato, Dostoevsky, and Nietzsche, among others. In the second (foxes) he puts Shakespeare, Montaigne, Goethe, and Joyce. In contrast to Bacon’s ant-spider-bee scheme, Berlin doesn’t connect these personality types to actual animal behavior. Rather, he is developing a cryptic (“dark”) line from the Greek philosopher Archimedes—“The fox knows many things, but the hedgehog knows one big thing.”
Birds and frogs. A third scheme comes from Freeman Dyson. It was articulated in a (never actually delivered) lecture from 2008. His proposed classification is grounded in the discipline of mathematics but applies to other fields as well. He writes:
“Some mathematicians are birds, others are frogs. Birds fly high in the air and survey broad vistas of mathematics out to the far horizon. They delight in concepts that unify our thinking and bring together diverse problems from different parts of the landscape. Frogs live in the mud below and see only the flowers that grow nearby. They delight in the details of particular objects, and they solve problems one at a time” [2].
Einstein was a bird par excellence, as was Descartes; Bacon, meanwhile, was a frog (who fancied himself a bee). Dyson then switches to distinguishing Cartesians (bird-like) from Baconians (froggy), declaring Darwin and Curie to be Baconians. He proceeds to discuss a number of obscure (at least to me) mathematicians who fit these profiles.
A neat feature of Dyson’s scheme is that it fits with our way of conceptualizing understanding in terms of visual perspective. A bird, spending its time aloft, commands a “bird’s-eye view”; the frog’s eye view is much narrower but takes in more detail. There is an echo of the “miss the forest for the trees” expression here. But while that expression celebrates those who see the forest, Dyson—a proud frog—intends no such judgement: “It is stupid to claim that birds are better than frogs because they see farther, or that frogs are better than birds because they see deeper.” Math needs both, he argues.
There are, of course, other widely recognized dimensions of intellectual personality that have yet to be assigned an animal mascot. Some of these have existing labels—generalists vs specialists, splitters vs lumpers. Others remain unlabeled. To take just one example: there seems to be a divide between those who like types and taxonomies and those who prefer to trouble distinctions and problematize binaries.
Once we start to examine the space of intellectual personality, irresistible questions pop up. One is whether certain pairings of personality type make for especially fruitful collaborations. Are there particular recipes for intellectual magic, for scholarly synergy? Another question is whether personality variation in academia, on the whole, is dwindling. The academy used to be place where a thousand flowers could bloom. But with increased competition—and increased job demands—it may be that the folks who survive the academic gauntlet end up being…. alike. Certainly it’s now common for successful senior scholars to claim that they would never land or hold a job in today’s academic climate. (These folks are usually intellectual tortoises.). As Dyson noted, species diversity is enormously valuable in academia, just as it is in any other ecosystem. We need not just birds and frogs, but ants, bees, spiders, hedgehogs, foxes—and all those as-yet-unidentified species, too.
Notes
[1] Certain dimensions of intellectual personality broadly align with disciplinary taste. You’re likely to find lower “tolerance of ambiguity” among engineers than you are among literary scholars. Humans and psychologists probably tend to be more interested in people; physicists less so. For one study in this direction, see here.
[2] It’s interesting that Dyson observes, as a kind of after-thought, that frogs “solve problems one at a time.” It’s an empirical question whether those with a narrower focus tend to work on projects serially. It’s certainly not a correlation that I’ve noticed—but that doesn’t mean it’s not true.