Drawn with a very fine camelhair brush
A commenter to a post of Dave Weinberger's left a link to an essay by Jorge Luis Borges, The analytical language of John Wilkins, which includes the quote which so amused Michel Foucault that it helped inspire his writing of The Order of Things (amazon.co.uk, amazon.com):
These ambiguities, redundancies and deficiencies remind us of those which doctor Franz Kuhn attributes to a certain Chinese encyclopaedia entitled 'Celestial Empire of benevolent Knowledge'. In its remote pages it is written that the animals are divided into: (a) belonging to the emperor, (b) embalmed, (c) tame, (d) sucking pigs, (e) sirens, (f) fabulous, (g) stray dogs, (h) included in the present classification, (i) frenzied, (j) innumerable, (k) drawn with a very fine camelhair brush, (l) et cetera, (m) having just broken the water pitcher, (n) that from a long way off look like flies.
The rest of the article makes it clear why the quote is significant: it looks ridiculous, so ridiculous that if it catches you at the right angle (it did me) it makes you laugh, hard and out loud, but it is ridiculous in <em>just the same way</em> as a lot of the classification schemes that we use all the time.
It is clear that there is no classification of the Universe not being arbitrary and full of conjectures
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