This tendency to categorize has led to some good for humans (such as medical advancements and the ability to better categorize ideas about how we categorize… this sort of self-awareness is important, I think, because it seems to be a key when looking at rationalism in the human mind), and it has led to some bad for humans, especially socially (racism and classism). We often categorize with an ideal in mind, frequently referred to as “purity.” So, there is an ideal size, shape, smoothness, color, or mineral content in the rock, and the rock that possesses the greatest quantity of the valued quality is put at a pinnacle for the other rocks to aspire to. (Note that I’m aware of the Kantian bent to what I said earlier about categories and rationalism; I don’t necessarily mean it in that way, as I’m more concerned with self-awareness of the tendency to create categories than I am with the idea of pre-existing categories in the mind.)

Truly, and this is the point I’ve been working toward, I don’t know that this approach of ordering based on qualities is ever the best way to approach one’s analysis of the world. It’s certainly easier, but easier doesn’t mean better. It also becomes easier to confirm one’s idea of the world. For example, if a philosopher chooses a certain quality to which s/he has assigned value, the philosopher can look at the world and create a system (ultimately a hierarchy) that seems to confirm the value itself as an inherent quality in the world. Another way to look at this would be for a thinker to determine that the world is square, then to make a square frame and hold it up to the world and say, looking through the frame, “Indeed, the world is square.” This approach will cast light on some areas while many others will remain forever unilluminated.

In considering the question of what the alternatives may be, it’s important to be aware of just how much, and in what ways, we rely on categorizing patterns and frequencies in order to perceive and function within the world. We have a whole system of categorizing frequency of vibrations, some of which stimulate our eardrums, others the cones and rods in our eyes, some are detectable by equipment but (presumably most) others go undetected etc…; also, we think of our planet as rotating around the sun in day-long cycles, and we empirically confirm cause and effect through repetition of behavior, and on and on. Repetition and patterns can be very useful for organizing procedures that help us cure diseases and have an economy and not kill our plants, but it doesn’t do as well when there is no consistent frequency to be monitored (real or contrived). In this way, we have to separate how we see the world and what the world is that we are observing.

When we consider the definition of words like “art,”  ”justice,” and “race,” we are looking for a cyclical or recurring or predictable pattern that doesn’t exist. I think the most important question that cannot be answered conclusively by using categories is the question of whether we as humans have free will (by which I mean, for example, being responsible at a conscious level for the decision to move one’s arm, and not just being responsible for the act itself of moving the arm). This may be the most important question of all for neuroscientists (who seem to be saying we don’t have it), philosophers, theologians, and society itself, but if we have free will, we would have to prove it through some means that doesn’t involve categorizing human behavior, otherwise we can’t be certain we didn’t contrive a pattern in order to make it seem like we have free will (which is a fairly paradoxical notion). It would seem that it’s the behavior that occurs outside of any kind of repetition or pattern that would tell us the most about the presence of a free will in a person.

I realize that medicine and science can’t be expected to drop everything to embrace an approach that will make their efforts more difficult, but I think that philosophers can and perhaps should do so. Patterns are a convenient way to deceive ourselves. It seems to me that in the pursuit of a greater truth (that is still relevant to humanity) it would be beneficial to base our view of the world on something other. I haven’t figured out what this “something other” is (perhaps the answer is to be found somewhere between things like Heisenberg’s uncertainty principle and what an elementary particle like the neutrino has to teach us; I look forward to being told why or why not by someone far more scientifically knoweldgeable than I), but a big part of my interest in philosophy is the attempt to answer this question. I don’t consider answering it to be the point, though, at least not right now. It’s what is revealed by the attempt that is the point right now. Is the only alternative to order an aimless, entropic chaos? I see the value of order in society, even our contrived order enforced by laws and cultural taboos, but I’m not sure I see the value of a contrived order in all areas of philosophy or art (a field in which the inherent randomness of the world has been explored to great effect; see aleatoricism), or, ultimately, even in science.

If we can find a better “something other,” perhaps we can discover a better alternative to our contrived social order.

POST SCRIPT: It occurred to me after writing this that if you substitute rocks for the building blocks of music (which, in my case, is an accumulation of relationships of pitches, timbres, silences, velocities, durations etc…), the views I express here might shed some light on some of the musical choices I tend to make (i.e., my musical style). Also, we generally have to have some kind of repetition to qualify something as music (try to think of an example that’s otherwise). Even to have random chaos you must have some sort of overarching repetition, even if it consists of something other than pitches or timbre. In this way, there may be no separating what and how we percieve, as well as how we are able to recognize anything, and therefore, by extension, what and how we can create (which would render our description of the world to be a creation, no matter how objective we try to be; this is an old idea, of course, but I’m curious to explore it further in a musical sense, which I’m sure I’ll do more of later).

It also occurred to me that we often refer to the “cycle of life,” not in the usual biological sense, but as a social metaphor designed to bring us comfort in the knowledge that life is a cycle in which our deaths play a pivotal role. I think the proper biological sense, however, would be that we (as individuals and humanity as a whole) exist in a certain physical form for a while, see a process to its conclusion (life-to-death), and then cease to exist in that form for an eternity; this is true from instant to instant in a single life, as well as over the course of that life.