How Our Minds and Lives Get Organized, Part Two

As Larissa MacFarquhar has written of Harold Bloom, according to Bloom, “action requires an inhibition of consciousness—it requires turning away from possibilities, and in the moment of decision, blocking off all those mental motions that work against action, such as futility and ambivalence. The will to act, therefore, is a sign not that a man is full of force [as Nietzsche would have us believe] but that he is empty of human richness. ‘Knowledge kills action; action requires the veils of illusion…’” (from “The Prophet of Decline” by Larissa MacFarquhar in the 9/30/02 New Yorker Magazine.)

The bombastic nature of commerce has led Intellisophic.com to overstate the scope of its product. It seems that actionable knowledge must be the goal if a business like Intellisophic wants to provide a useful product to its clients, and only epistemological principles apparently can yield actionable knowledge. One more illustration of how the almighty dollar bleeds over from its proper sphere of influence to colonize every other sphere. Money is like an especially slow-acting, yet virulent, virus that eventually destroys itself by destroying its host environment. When everything is ruled by money, it will be impossible for money to yield any influence. By caring only for money, it seems likely that it will eventually be impossible to HAVE money.

I suspect that no truly COMPREHENSIVE taxonomy will ever be devised, although the impulse to create one is the same impulse as that which inspired Diderot and the other philosophes to undertake their encyclopedia project. I understand the desire to find a place for everything in order to comprehend it, but I also understand the desire to punch Aristotle in the nose for identifying and articulating this way of knowing things through their membership in categories.