CHAPTER 4: Making Differences: A Table of Learning

One of the central ways we make sense of experience is by making differences. The world presents itself without inherent order, and our impulse is to place things in piles, count them, and name them. In the act of creation, day is divided from night. Aristotle classifies just about everything. Shakespeare gives us the seven ages of man, Dante maps the circles of hell, Burton anatomizes melancholy.… In ways that Kant never intended by the phrase, we are driven by a “categorical imperative,” the irresistible impulse to place things in categories.

This is not an irrational impulse. Distinctions and taxonomies are tools for thought. We make distinctions for the same reasons we carve a turkey or write our books in chapters—to make the world more manageable. And it’s only natural that we further order our distinctions and categories into systems, tables, and taxonomies.