Schopenhauer’s Hedgehog Dilemma

Hedgehog’s dilemma (an idea of Schopenhauer).

The great German thinker Arthur Schopenhauer (1788-1860) also explored the philosophical possibilities of the parable. One of his best known, and also the most debated, is the so-called Hedgehog’s Dilemma, written in 1851 for his work Parerga and Paralipómena: minor philosophical writings (Parerga und Paralipomena: Kleine philosophische Schriften).

Let’s see what this parable is about.
On a very cold day, two hedgehogs meet and simultaneously feel the need for warmth. To satisfy this need, they seek the bodily closeness of the other, but the closer they get, the more pain the spikes of the other’s body cause them. However, as you move away, the feeling of cold increases, so both hedgehogs must adjust until they reach an optimal distance.

The central idea of this parable by Schopenhauer is that the closer the relationship between two beings is, the greater the possibility of harming each other, while the more distant there are fewer possibilities for this to happen, although, as in the case of two hedgehogs, that end up getting killed by the cold, that is, suffering the inclemencies of the society in which we live.

The dilemma could be divided between those who are capable of dying of love, due to excessive closeness, or under social harshness in solitude.

But there is a third reading that overlaps the previous ones, and that may be the one that Schopenhauer initially imagined.
We can think that these hedgehogs of the German philosopher are not utopian spirits. They do not seek to die skewered or cold. They choose to accommodate themselves as best as possible to circumstances. In other words, neither of them supports extreme distance, but neither can an absolute approximation.

Human bonds, Schopenhauer seems to suggest, are woven with a much less noble thread than we would like to imagine. Man tends towards a banal but delicious form of stability. Those hedgehogs are not really looking for cold or heat, nor are they looking for salvation or abandonment, lethal proximity or irreversible distance, but rather the most bureaucratic and miserable thing we can imagine: they look for the most bearable.

It is convenient to take into account Schopenhauer’s parable on some particularly cold nights. As is known, low temperatures reduce the pain of the thorns.