It’s easy to see the survival advantage. It is important to distinguish the appetitive from the aversive. One berry is sweet and energizing; the other kills you. But the conceptual tools that attend human language turn categorical discernment into compulsion. Nouns require criteria of inclusion and exclusion, and in those many places where Nature fails to offer clear boundaries, we quickly add our own. The world is an exceedingly complex web of dynamically interacting and ever-changing multidimensionality, yet we prefer easy dichotomies. Even the idea of human (and species, more generally) is a tool of simplification, a mere linguistic designation that has no solid referent in the natural world.
Yesterday I took an online personality test based on the enneagram model, a typology consisting of nine personality types. I took the test because it wasn’t immediately clear from the type descriptions which of two adjacent types I fit into, “the investigator” or “the individualist.” According to my test results, I am more “investigator” than “individualist,” but not much more. My results came with a list of Barnum statements telling me things about myself that I already know, things that apply in larger or smaller portions to everyone else, regardless of personality type, things like “Although you enjoy the company of others, you also need alone time.”
Nature, of course, doesn’t recognize types. Nature is a-categorical. Nature acts with unbridled intimacy. Nature deals only with individuals. But this is a terrifying prospect. It is terrifying for the civilized to imagine a world of individuals, uncountable billions of individuals (uncountable trillions if we include the microscopic): each one irreducibly unique, each one impossible to dismiss as irrelevant. In a world of individuals, there can be no actionable classification, no categorical imperatives, no hierarchies of worth to serve as a guide.
