Of Squirrels and Philosophers

I've been especially busy the last few days since I've started preparing for Class War. Oh yeah, that's what they call the classification contest at the library conference. Cute, huh? This year's contest is actually Class War III. Mr. Phillips has competed in all of them so far. In the first Class War, his system came in third place. In Class War II, an improved (but still Lesser Perfect) system came in second. This year Mr. Phillips is determined to win first prize, armed with the GPS and a little help from you know who. Of course, I still think the man's totally out of his mind, thinking that I'm going to help him win this thing. I try to humor him, though. Even though I don't have any idea at all what I'm doing.

Today on my lunch break I was sitting in the park watching the squirrels. It occurred to me as I watched them that even animals must classify things, although their systems are much simpler than ours. I was thinking that those squirrels might have only two categories, "nut" and "not a nut". Must make life really simple. But then again, it might also make it really boring, at least for a human being. Maybe for a squirrel it's all right.

I suppose the complexity of life, or perhaps the ability to perceive complexity, is one of the things that makes life interesting. When you start to think about the whole of reality and the kaleidoscopic variety of things that compose it, it makes the world seem far richer than it might have seemed before. It also begins to seem a little overwhelming. It's like when you're the kid in the candy store, with enough money to buy one kind of candy, and you're suddenly confronted by more kinds of candy than you ever knew existed. It's thrilling and paralyzing at the same time. What do you choose? Or let's say you decide to try a different kind each week. Which one do you choose first? How do you know which one is your favorite until you've tried them all? Can you ever try them all? What if there are still other flavors that your local candy store doesn't carry? Maybe one of those is really your favorite? What if you never discover it?

I guess my point is that the sheer richness of the world is both a blessing and a curse. It's exciting to find oneself in such a teeming universe of multitudinous things, but it can also make one feel overwhelmed by options for potential experience and knowledge, and make one's actual experiences and knowledge seem a bit random. What you can do and see is always inadequate, a vanishingly small fraction of what there is. I'm beginning to think that philosophers and librarians are a bit alike in that they both seek somehow to comprehend the whole of reality, knowing that they can never actually know all there is to know (despite what children might believe about the librarian's omniscience), yet not content to limit themselves to one specialized subcategory of a subcategory of knowledge, the way today's university professors do. Philosophers (at least those who still seek to contemplate the whole of reality, rather than a sub-subcategory of it) and librarians (at least those who attempt to develop classification systems) would rather attempt to comprehend the whole thing, to try to figure out its dimensions and its structure, the relations among its various parts. Not that anyone--at least not anyone in his right mind--believes we can actually attain such knowledge completely. Omniscience is a divine quality, not a humanly possible one. Centuries ago, people used to think it was possible to master at least all human knowledge. Now we despair at even this task. But the philosopher and the librarian seek to comprehend the big picture, if not all the details, and perhaps metaphysics and classification are the closest we can ever approach to being real know-it-alls.