Schopenhauer’s hedgehog’s dilemma: get hurt or freeze to death

The hedgehog’s dilemma is a famous paradox proposed by Arthur Schopenhauer in his work Parerga and paralipomena. In general terms, it talks about human relationships in their entirety. It addresses the distance or proximity that must, and can, be established in front of the other.

Schopenhauer used a parable to pose the hedgehog’s dilemma. This metaphor caught the attention of Sigmund Freud, who referred to it in his essay Psychology of the masses and analysis of the self. Likewise, several social psychologists have taken it up to explain some of the phenomena that occur in human interactions.

The paradox posed by Schopenhauer has become more relevant today. The world has gone through an unprecedented crisis that precisely refers to contact with others. However, the hedgehog’s dilemma goes even further: it exposes the complex coordinates through which independence, interdependence and autonomy move.

The hedgehog’s dilemma

As we already noted, Schopenhauer posed the hedgehog’s dilemma in the form of a parable. It says the following: it was very cold and a group of hedgehogs were shivering, while they looked at each other. They discovered that when they got closer to each other they felt warmer, so they began to get together.

They got so close that They began to feel that the thorns of others hurt them. The closer they got, the greater the damage these thorns caused them.

After a while, and seeing that they couldn’t stand the pain, they separated again. As expected, it was only a few minutes before they shivered from the cold again, feeling like they were freezing. They tried to get together again and the same thing happened. After one attempt and another they managed to find the optimal distance: not close enough to get hurt, nor so far away to freeze.

Get hurt or freeze to death

The hedgehog’s dilemma can be defined as the choice between getting hurt or freezing to death.. This paradox has been interpreted from psychoanalysis on several occasions.

Freud takes it up again to enrich one of the central approaches of his theory: affects are ambivalent. In all love there is hate and vice versa, that is, hostility and closeness. There are no pure affections.

Later, Jacques Lacan would interpret it differently, in light of his theses. He points out that Inside each person there is something that is unrecognizable to themselves.. Aspects that you do not like and cause rejection. To avoid discomfort, what we would do is project them outside.

Thus, what one rejects about oneself is imputed to the other. This builds a psychic border in which the interior and exterior are differentiated. Thus, self-hatred ends up being projected onto the other.

Acceptance and empathy

For social psychology, the correct solution would be to find the optimal distance, just as the hedgehog’s dilemma proposes: neither so close to others as to be injured, nor so far as to freeze to death. From the point of view of psychoanalysis, The contradiction posed in the hedgehog’s dilemma cannot be resolved, but it can be overcome..

In this case, we do not talk so much about calculating the distance as of love as the force capable of shaping that psychic border. It is love, understood as the renunciation of selfishness, that has made civilization possible. However, it is not a “raw love”, but an elaborate one. The first thing is self-love, which in this case is equivalent to accepting those aspects of oneself that one does not like.

For example, it is not you who hurts me when you refuse to give me something I need, but it is my need that hurts me. This type of acceptance would have an immediate effect: what we know as empathy and that would become one of the many faces of love. It is this empathy that allows us to get intimately close to the other, without hurting or being hurt.

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