Analogy – ORIGIN from Greek ana– ‘up’ + logos ‘word, reason.’
Category – ORIGIN from Greek kategorein “to accuse, assert, predicate,” from kata- “down to,” + agoreuein “to declaim (in the assembly),” from agora “public assembly.”
Criteria – ORIGIN Greek kriterion, from krites, “judge”, from krinein, “to separate, judge”
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Analogy is the principle of comparison: the bare recognition that “this is like that” that precedes verbalization and action. It is above (ana-) words and reasoning (-logos).
The analogy manifests in named categories, which is a labeled analogy. The analogical recognition is pulled down (cata-) from private perception to the sphere of shared meaning, the judging public (-agora) and given a name.
When the analogy is dissected and analyzed (ana– ‘up’ + luein ‘loosened’) the parts understood as essential (Latin essentia, from esse “be”) to the analogy are called criteria of the category.
At this point, something strange often happens. The holistic sense of likeness experienced in the analogy is dismissed as a mere hunch that the category existed to be discovered. And what is the discovery, essentially? The category reconceived as a judgment determined by atomistic criteria.
The whole exists only nominally, and the category is taken to be essentially the constituent criteria. The engendering experience is forgotten.
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What that name of a category finally designates is only what is perceivable by the public. Often the original experienced analogy does not survive the vulgarization (Latin vulgaris, from vulgus “common people.”) of community (Latin communitas, from communis , “common”) thought.
The subtler and more elusive the experience — the more it demands of the perceiver — the more the meaning of the category will be degraded (Latin degradare, from de– “down, away from” + Latin gradus “step or grade”) and leveled down to the lowest common denominator (Latin denominat– “named,” from de– “away, formally” + nominare ‘to name’ (from nomen, nomin- “name”).
The mechanism of the degradation is the analysis of the category into criteria that the public is equipped to recognize. The elusive whole sensed in the originating analogy is picked apart into common pieces, then those common pieces are reassembled into the “true” category which was formerly “glimpsed through a glass darkly”. And this “true” category, having no standard of fitness to the original whole, displaces it.
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If commerce is going to take over the entirety of culture — and it seems to have no idea how not to — it is going to have to learn to accommodate forms of truth it has always automatically discounted in its accounts of reality because it found them difficult to dissect into objective units it could count.
If commerce cannot figure out how to understand wholes, and behaves as if it is only responsible for maximizing its own growth, it will continue behaving like a cancerous cell that maximizes its own growth at the expense of the living body.
How would a cancer justify itself? It would probably measures its own success in terms of growth.
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Some people have an intense aversion to being categorized. Is this cat-agoraphobia? — fear of having one’s being pulled down (cat-) to the level of what the public can recognize and label? It’s a form of agoraphobia on the intellectual plane.