one big gloopy unity
I recently picked up a copy of the New Fontana Dictionary of Modern Thought, but it has proven to be a most fiendish contraption, defying all my attempts to look up a concept. Just now, I picked it up to peruse of its defintion of historicism, and while looking for it, found myself reading through the definition for "history of ideas", then "history of language", which referenced me across to "discourse" and the "discourse of power", and then of course I had to make a trip over to "existential psychiatry" and see also "antipsychiatry", and right under that was, most curiously, "anti-quark, see under quark", which piqued so very much that I had to make a trip over to Q, whereupon I learned that the term "Quaker" is derived from their tendency to tremble in excitement whilst in the throes of religious afflatus, see "Pentecostalism", and of course had to inquire after that, and about halfway through that paragraph I suddenly realized that I had spent half an hour looking up historicism without actually, you know, looking it up. Fiendish, I say.
But oh, so compelling, the interconnectedness of things. It just goes to show that it's impossible to study only history, or only physics, or only literature. To compartmentalize the disciplines is to reify the mass of human knowledge - and to deny that we are all studying the same space from different vantage points. If I had the technical knowhow to construct a 3D representation of the referential paths one can take through a a dictionary of modern concepts - which, of course, is tantamount to a representational map of current human thought - I would most assuredly not be sitting here writing this post right now.
Incidentally, due to the writing of this post, I have still yet to look up historicism. Distractions! argh.