Hardening of the Categories

Is there any ailment that is more limiting than this? Hardening of the Categories stunts imagination, thought, ideas and creativity. It ossifies the mind long before its time. Unlike its second cousin, hardening of the arteries, an attack of the categories version is not necessarily limited to the older population.

An early predictor and related ailment of this ravaging disease is premature categorization. This mental sibling is the habit of trying to impose structure on a set of ideas before they are fully ripe. Ideas need to be discussed so they can grow, mutate and create new ideas. They need to swirl around, be repeated and understood from various perspectives.

Ideas need to be inverted, rearranged, taken apart and put back together again. Only after the appropriate duration of ripening (and this can be different for every idea) should structure start to be imposed. In fact, the structure should emerge from the ideas themselves naturally rather than being forced.

Hardening of the Categories is a situation where a particular structure or worldview is cemented so tightly that there is no hope of allowing a new concept to enter the inner sanctum. In some cases this devolves into an anti-conceptual mentality where any degree of new abstraction, no matter how small, cannot affect the hardened concrete pavement, floors and supports of the singularly literal mind. In fact the very thought of doing so is frightening.

In contrast to this image of a hardened structure, a holistic framework is much more malleable and elastic. Sure, a framework has categories and abstractions. But the premises and abstractions and conclusions are somehow open enough to allow breathing room so that new paths can be explored and existing arteries and veins of thought can be refined and uplifted.

We should all guard against Hardening of the Categories. None of us is immune and sadly our immunity is likely to weaken as we get older. More reason to be especially alert, curious, open, engaged, focused and attentive so that the scourge of ossification does not inhibit the continuous evolutionary unfolding and actualization of our individual expressions of Mind.