Long ago, we traded the trees for tools, trying to bend the world to our will. We rose to our feet, ambling under the weight of an oversized brain that grew the opposable thumb we call thinking and made with it more tools — language to name what we saw, organizing principles for what we named, theories to explain it explain it all.

Among all of our technologies of thought, none has been more useful, more dangerous, more double-edged than the category — a living fossil of our hunter-gatherer days, impelling us to put things into little baskets of similitude, compulsively analyzing reality in order to classify and contain it.

The price we paid for our extraordinary cognitive capacity is a docile faith in the analytical mind as the most effective tool to wield at the problem of reality. This yearning for order amid the chaos of the universe, for something to allay the fundamental bewilderment of being alive, may be what makes us human; it may also be the root of our alienation from the rest of nature, for it is inherently antinatural: A century after Descartes severed the body from the mind, Linnaeus severed the organism from the ecosystem, dividing nature into discrete categories, dismembering the interdependence that makes this rocky planet a living world. Over and over we discover that the most resilient organisms in nature traverse the borders between kingdoms and blur the boundary between selves, just as the richest loves defy labels, and yet we continue living under Linnaeus’s spell. But as my astrophysicist friend Natalie Batalha observes in her wonderful Where Shall We Meet interview, “we humans like to put things in jars, we like to classify things, but what we’ve learned is that nature is quite continuous — you can’t neatly put things in jars.”

English novelist John Fowles (March 31, 1926–November 5, 2005) makes an impassioned case for the unjarring of life in his altogether wonderful 1979 arboreal memoir The Tree (public library). He writes:

I am a heretic about Linnaeus, and find nothing less strange, or more poetically just, than that he should have gone mad at the end of his life. I do not dispute the value of the tool he gave to natural science — which was in itself no more than a shrewd extension of the Aristotelian system and which someone else would soon have elaborated, if he had not; but I have doubts about the lasting change it has effected in ordinary human consciousness.

Evolution has turned man into a sharply isolating creature, seeing the world not only anthropocentrically but singly, mirroring the way we like to think of our private selves. Almost all our art before the Impressionists — or their St John the Baptist, William Turner — betrays our love of clearly defined boundaries, unique identities, of the individual thing released from the confusion of background. This power of detaching an object from its surroundings and making us concentrate on it is an implicit criterion in all our judgements on the more realistic side of visual art; and very similar, if not identical, to what we require of optical instruments like microscopes and telescopes — which is to magnify, to focus sharper, to distinguish better, to single from the ruck. A great deal of science is devoted to this same end: to providing specific labels, explaining specific mechanisms and ecologies, in short for sorting and tidying what seems in the mass indistinguishable one from the other. Even the simplest knowledge of the names and habits of flowers or trees starts this distinguishing or individuating process, and removes us a step from total reality towards anthropocentrism; that is, it acts mentally as an equivalent of the camera view-finder. Already it destroys or curtails certain possibilities of seeing, apprehending and experiencing. And that is the bitter fruit from the tree of Uppsalan knowledge.

A century after the German marine biologist Ernst Haeckel coined the word ecology and a decade before trailblazing Candian forester Suzanne Simard began her revelatory isotope research into the rhizomatic communication of trees, Fowles adds:

It also begs very considerable questions as to the realities of the boundaries we impose on what we see. In a wood the actual visual “frontier” of any one tree is usually impossible to distinguish, at least in summer. We feel, or think we feel, nearest to a tree’s “essence” (or that of its species) when it chances to stand like us, in isolation; but evolution did not intend trees to grow singly. Far more than ourselves they are social creatures, and no more natural as isolated specimens than man is as a marooned sailor or a hermit. Their society in turn creates or supports other societies of plants, insects, birds, mammals, micro-organisms; all of which we may choose to isolate and section off, but which remain no less the ideal entity, or whole experience, of the wood — and indeed are still so seen by most of primitive mankind.

Scientists restrict the word symbiotic to those relationships between species that bring some detectable mutual benefit; but the true wood, the true place of any kind, is the sum of all its phenomena. They are all in some sense symbiotic, being together in a togetherness of beings. It is only because such a vast sum of interactions and coincidences in time and place is beyond science’s calculation (a scientist might say, beyond useful function, even if calculable) that we so habitually ignore it, and treat the flight of the bird and the branch it flies from, the leaf in the wind and its shadow on the ground, as separate events, or riddles — what bird? which branch? what leaf? which shadow? These question-boundaries (where do I file that?) are ours, not of reality. We are led to them, caged by them not only culturally and intellectually, but quite physically, by the restlessness of our eyes and their limited field and acuity of vision. Long before the glass lens and the movie-camera were invented, they existed in our eyes and minds, both in our mode of perception and in our mode of analysing the perceived: endless short sequence and jump-cut, endless need to edit and range this raw material.

Wincing at his early life as “a pseudo-scientist, treating nature as some sort of intellectual puzzle, or game, in which being able to name names and explain behaviourisms — to identify and to understand machinery — constituted all the pleasures and the prizes,” Fowles laments how this orientation distracted him from “the total meaning and total experience of nature,” and adds:

The particular cost of understanding the mechanism of nature, of having so successfully itemized and pigeon-holed it, lies most of all in the ordinary person’s perception of it, in his or her ability to live with and care for it — and not to see it as challenge, defiance, enemy. Selection from total reality is no less necessary in science than it is in art; but outside those domains (in both of which the final test of selection is utility, or yield, to our own species) it seriously distorts and limits any worthwhile relationship.

We know this, not in the mind but in the marrow of our being — our own richest, profoundest, most transformative experiences elude classification, their essence unreachable by analysis, for it is a synthesis of myriad forces and phenomena only a fraction of which we are conscious of. To analyze such experiences is not to understand them more deeply but to grow alienated from them and from the part of ourselves that did the experiencing, the part wild with aliveness. Fowles writes:

Ordinary experience, from waking second to second, is in fact highly synthetic (in the sense of combinative or constructive), and made of a complexity of strands, past memories and present perceptions, times and places, private and public history… quintessentially “wild” in the sense [of] unphilosophical, irrational, uncontrollable, incalculable. In fact it corresponds very closely — despite our endless efforts to “garden,” to invent disciplining social and intellectual systems — with wild nature. Almost all the richness of our personal existence derives from this synthetic and eternally present “confused” consciousness of both internal and external reality, and not least because we know it is beyond the analytical.