Celestial Emporium of Benevolent Knowledge's Taxonomy

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In "The Analytical Language of John Wilkins" (El idioma analítico de John Wilkins), Jorge Luis Borges writes:

"These ambiguities, redundancies, and deficiencies recall those attributed by Dr. Franz Kuhn to a certain Chinese encyclopedia called the Heavenly Emporium of Benevolent Knowledge. In its distant pages it is written that animals are divided into (a) those that belong to the emperor; (b) embalmed ones; (c) those that are trained; (d) suckling pigs; (e) mermaids; (f) fabulous ones; (g) stray dogs; (h) those that are included in this classification; (i) those that tremble as if they were mad; (j) innumerable ones; (k) those drawn with a very fine camel's-hair brush; (l) etcetera; (m) those that have just broken the flower vase; (n) those that at a distance resemble flies. The Bibliographical Institute of Brussels also exercises chaos: it has parceled the universe into 1,000 subdivisions..."[1]

Contents

[edit] Influences of the list

This list, whose "discovery" Borges attributes to Franz Kuhn, has stirred considerable philosophical and literary commentary.

Michel Foucault begins his preface to The Order of Things,

This book first arose out of a passage in Borges, out of the laughter that shattered, as I read the passage, all the familiar landmarks of thought—our thought, the thought that bears the stamp of our age and our geography—breaking up all the ordered surfaces and all the planes with which we are accustomed to tame the wild profusion of existing things and continuing long afterwards to disturb and threaten with collapse our age-old definitions between the Same and the Other.

Louis Sass has suggested, in response to Borges' list, that such "Chinese" thinking shows signs of typical schizophrenic thought processes. By contrast, the prominent linguist George Lakoff has pointed out that Borges' list is similar to many categorizations of objects found in nonwestern cultures. [2]

Keith Windschuttle, an Australian historian, cited alleged acceptance of the authenticity of the list among many academics as a sign of the degeneration of the Western academy. [3]

[edit] Attribution

Scholars have questioned whether the attribution of the list to Franz Kuhn is genuine. While Kuhn did indeed translate Chinese literature, Borges' works often feature many pseudo-learned references resulting in a mix of facts and fiction. To date, no evidence for the existence of such a list has been found. [4]

[edit] See also

[edit] References

  1. ^ pg 231, "John Wilkins' Analytical Language", translator Eliot Weinberger; included in Selected nonfictions: Jorge Luis Borges", ed. Eliot Weinberger; 1999, Penguin Books, ISBN 0-14-029011-7. The essay was originally published as "El idioma analítico de John Wilkins", La Nación, 8 February 1942, and republished in Otras inquisiciones
  2. ^ Brad Cox, Ph.D
  3. ^ Academic Questions September 15, 1997
  4. ^ LINGUIST List 7.1446: Borgesian joke
  • Louis Sass (1994 (1992)). Madness and Modernism: Insanity in the Light of Modern Art, Literature and Thought. Harvard University Press. ISBN 0-674-54137-5. 
  • cited in: Jones S (1999) Almost like a whale : the origin of species updated. Doubleday, London ; New York