Classification

Abstract

In the previous chapter, we explored the problem of how one thing emerges from many. A related intellectual problem, how many things can be grouped into one, has also preoccupied scholars for many centuries. This is the problem of classification. Historically, arguments over classification did not explicitly contain the dynamical axes of differentiation/convergence that we have seen in the work of Durkheim. The tension between differentiation and convergence in biological classification arose only later, in the context of actual evolutionary theory, as we will see in the following chapter. For now, let us explore the conundrum of classification as it occurred before the late eighteenth century, in two interlocking problems: how to categorize, and how to draw boundaries. The problem addressed by the crowd theorists was a bottom-up problem: how individuals form a group. By contrast, the problem of the classification of animals and plants was the decidedly top-down problem of how (and even if) one should draw boundaries. Crowd theory contained the seeds of the essential tension in the question of how groups can be stabilized by counter-balancing forces operating at different levels. In the top-down problem of classification, it is hard to find any hint of a balance between push and pull – things being drawn into a group and yet held separate by orthogonal forces. Instead, we find only a sharp knife slicing from above at the Great Chain of Being.

Only connect.

E. M. Forster