Introduction: The Importance of ‘Thinking Inside the Box’

Abstract

Organising things into categories is a way of mapping order onto the world, collecting similar things into sets and highlighting the distinguishing features that differentiate them. Yet, in addition to bringing order, categorisation elevates us beyond particular items of knowledge into the realm of abstract thinking; categories aid us in discovering universals, induction and speculative reflection. c ategorisation is a technique that both India and the West have used to make sense of many fields of knowledge, from the functions of the body, to the building blocks of language, the types and constituents of art, the range of emotions, types of cognition, the features that constitute minds or objects and the kinds of thing that exist in the universe. In these diverse fields of knowledge, categorisation has helped humans to get a conceptual ‘grasp’ on their environment. Jorge Luis Borges, whose reflections on categorisation appear a number of times in this volume, apparently professed a horror of the platypus because it defied all attempts at a neat, clear categorisation. But of course his horror was not really of the platypus but of what it represents: something so diverse and disordered that it resists our power to comprehend it. It is because we all share this discomfort with radical disorder, with particulars that cannot be assimilated into familiar universals, argued Umberto e co, that we find the habit of categorisation turning up again and again across cultures and through the ages ( e co 2000, 145), in the West evolving from Aristotle through to Aquinas and Kant, later in Husserl and his fellow phenomenologists, and falling under scrutiny in association with controversial areas such as set theory and nominalism. Indian thinkers recognised the importance of categorisation and put it to prolific use as a technique in philosophy as well as in the natural and social sciences that flourished in India from an early period. The Tarka Saṃgraha, an influential logic manual of the early-modern period, stated that ‘reasoning is impossible in the absence of a knowledge of the categories’ (Tarka Saṃgraha 10.24). i ndeed, it is partly for this reason that Nyāya, Hindu culture’s main logical tradition, was allied with the Vaiśeṣika school’s lesser-known but equally important metaphysical methodology – of listing reality in a series of all-encompassing basic types of existing thing. Vaiśeṣika was not alone; in text after text we see Indian