How Our Minds and Lives Get Organized, Part One

I have been conditioned by philosophy, which has been turned fundamentally into a knowledge affair, to look for the relations that actually obtain between and among things, ideas, etc, rather than looking for the relations that MIGHT obtain (or that might be interesting if they DID obtain), as artists do. The “Truth” with a capital “T” has made the world flat, and literal. Possibility is always more interesting than actuality, but we have lost the joy of uncertainty. (Where it still exists, it has taken the form of religious faith. NOT what I intend, at all.) Dewey was correct in making this criticism of contemporary philosophy, that all other ventures have been subsumed by epistemology. When cross-cutting taxonomies of the world can no longer compete for attention against the dominant taxonomy (which is itself organized around an epistemological principle of “discovery of the Truth”), we are truly faced with a loss of culture. There is more to life than Knowledge, and science is not the only way of understanding the world.

If the taxonomies and formal ontologies of the world are organized around the epistemological principle—the Relations That Obtain (RTO)—there is still an opening for cross-cutting taxonomies organized around the alternate taxonomic principle of the Relations That Might Obtain (RTMO). This is the engine of change in our culture. This is how originality is possible. There is a finite number of ways in which things DO relate to each other. The ways in which they MIGHT relate is, apparently, infinite.

In many cases, the way of describing people in terms of what kind of taxonomy they are engaged in creating may be a useful prism. All knowledge workers are worker bees on some taxonomy. Is this true of non-knowledge workers? What is the complete list of taxonomy types? Is the two-value RTO and RTMO classification exhaustive? How do RTO and RTMO stand in relation to each other? Is RTO logically prior to RTMO? Is it DEVELOPMENTALLY prior? Is that why so few people ever make it to RTMO? Or, are they two entirely independent ways of processing the world?