The MANIAC

by Benjamín Labatut

Kant had written that science demands that we be able to think of nature as a totality. You start by classifying the simplest aspects of the world—the shimmering tendrils of a creeping vine, the iridescent body of a beetle—and follow by ordering these phenomena in species, then genus, then family, order, class, phylum, kingdom, and domain, working, all the while, under the premise that every conceivable wing, feather, root, rivulet, coil, and appendage will fall somewhere in that order, occupying its rightful place in a system that encompasses the entire universe, fruit of a wisdom so profound that it underlies and upholds the manifest and unmanifested forms of existence. But perhaps that wasn’t really the case, Nelly warned her audience; it may well be that nature is utterly chaotic, with no law able to subsume the apparent heterogeneity, no concept capable of whittling down its ever-increasing complexity. What if nature cannot be cognized as a whole? Our civilization had yet to come to terms with this terrifying possibility, and she very much doubted that it could, for it would be a death blow to science, philosophy, and rationality.