Personality & Classification

If a person wants to be free in choosing his behavior, he needs to be free to consider it according to his own criteria, in which case how he situates items in his thinking is very important. To the extent items are situated according to conventional systems, the personality is less a producer than a product.

Suppose a person has 100 items. A journalist asks: ‘tell us about your collection.’ Or suppose after death the items are offered for auction as ‘his collection,’ numbered 1-100. How is the judgment of ‘collection’ grounded?

One way to pose the issue is by describing the difference between eclectic and random, where the diversity of the former is systematized while the latter is not.

What is the relation between the system of order we impose on our objects, and the system of order we call our personalities? Is doing something ‘out of character’ like owning an ugly toaster?

Why would a celibate monk decorate his hovel with photos of fornicating chickens? How different is the curiosity if the photos are mostly of pine cones and only one fornicating chicken?

No one possesses random objects. Objects in our lives are SORTED. I have two bowls on the sill. One is for morning cereal, the other is a 16th century heirloom that gathers light in wonderful ways. Knowing this tells you something, not everything, about me.

It may be a difficulty we have with public objects that we expect the same relation to pertain between them and the public collectivity as we find between an individual personality and its collected objects, see above.