A category is very different from an individual within the category.  They’re different in kind-- a category is a universal, immaterial idea, while the individual is a particular, material thing.  The one can never be the other: a universal idea can’t be a particular thing.  This is obvious, so why am I saying it? because we confuse the category with its individual members all the time.  Hence my theme: despite all my categories to define him, the individual is still there, feral.

 

One type of confusion happens when we think that all individual members of a category are the same (or should be the same), when in reality, every individual is unique and not the same.  Amor Towles’ novel, A Gentleman in Moscow, has a (fictional) story about this.  The novel is set in a five-star international hotel in Moscow during the rise of communism.  The hotel restaurant has a large wine cellar with the best vintages in Europe… until the Party removes the labels from the wine bottles so that they’re all equal.  The only identifier now for each bottle is color: red or white.  Patrons of the restaurant are given a choice of red or white, period.  For that most individual of beverages, all reds are the same, all whites are identical. 

 

Another confusion happens when we reduce the individual to a category; we say that the individual is no more than its category.  According to William James, “The Shah of Persia refused to be taken to the Derby Day, saying ‘It is already known to me that one horse can run faster than another.’  He made the question, ‘which horse?’ immaterial” (from Necessary Truths).  To paraphrase the Shah: they’re all just members of the category, horse, so who cares which one runs faster!

 

A category can define a particular attribute of an individual, but the category can’t define the individual.  An individual is thick reality, whereas a category is Bilbo Baggins when he said, “I feel thin, sort of stretched, like butter scraped over too much bread.”  We love to put people in abstract categories like race, sex, class, what have you.  I check the boxes for your categories, and a computer spits out a bell curve that shows the probability of your likely outcomes.  The probabilities are true, but only to the extent that the category defines you, and that’s not much of an extent at all.

 

But hold on, we’re in the era of big data now and that changes everything, right?  It’s all about statistical probabilities.  Governments and corporate conglomerates aggregate my past choices in music, books, TV, everything, and they combine my choices with persons of similar to same choices.  From this data set, they derive a meta-probability, the mother of all categories, to predict my next choice.  They make the same assumption that Schrodinger spoke of regarding fog and water molecules (see my essay, Probability).  Scientists have physical laws that accurately predict the behavior of fog, and since fog is just an aggregate of individual water molecules, those laws should also predict the behavior of the individual water molecule, right?  Wrong, says Schrodinger, because individual molecules jump around randomly due to Brownian Movement.  The aggregate might be predictable to near 100% certainty, but the individual is still there, jumping around like a nut.

 

That’s why categories and probabilities only work when I apply them to other people, not me.  When I look inside, I feel so real, so complex and contradictory that I can’t be just a category.  Ever noticed how the purveyor of a category always talks about other people but exempts himself?  All of us, whether professor, pastor or criminal, exempt ourselves from the logical framework of our own theories.  Even me when talking of myself as a member of such-and-such a class, talking with profound virtue of my privilege (or my sin, same thing), secretly I’m carving out a one-man exception for me. 

 

A probability is domesticated; the individual is feral.  Think about us people: we’re spiteful.  People adapt, we communicate, we game the system.  If it’s an IQ test, we’ll figure out what the test maker thinks is intelligence.  If I try to predict you, you’ll figure it out and game me.  That’s why the stock market is impossible to predict.  We invest based on what we think other people are thinking, in an endless regression, such that my belief about what you believe will change your belief, making me wrong.  Even little amoeba defies our abstractions, because the individual amoeba is real, the world is complex, and both are evolving.  Little amoeba doesn’t obey probabilities; he fulfills his individual nature, trying to survive in a changing environment.

 

Here’s my point and my value statement: both individual and category exist (the first in material-reality, the second in mind-reality), so I must be clear which one I’m looking at.  I can see you, an individual, or I can see some category or class into which I’ve abstracted you.  Both perspectives are legitimate, but I shouldn’t mix them up.  I can put you in a category or class, but I must remember that you’re more than that.  You’re not reducible to the category. 

 

To paraphrase Martin Buber: an individual can be Thou; a category is It.  The individual steps forth in his singleness and he confronts me as Thou, beyond category.  “Beyond category”-- that’s how Duke Ellington praised the best of the best.  Duke said, “it isn’t necessary for categories.  I think that what people hear in music is either agreeable to the ear or not… You can take the most trite (song) and you give it to one of the great artists like Sinatra or Fitzgerald or Eckstine, and you probably get a gem of a performance.”