"Whenever one reads of the determination of the species, or opens a book on natural science and history, in whatever language, one inevitably comes across the name of Linne"
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Linne shows up the way an operating system shows up in every app: invisible until you notice you cannot function without it. Jensen is praising Carl Linnaeus not as a lone genius with a cabinet of curiosities, but as the man who made nature legible to modernity. The verb choice matters. You do not merely encounter Linne; you "inevitably" come across him. Jensen is describing a kind of intellectual gravity: once a culture commits to classifying life, Linnaeus becomes unavoidable infrastructure.
The specific intent is canon-building. Jensen, writing from a small Scandinavian nation with an outsized scientific legacy, elevates Linnaeus into a transnational figure whose authority crosses "whatever language". That line is doing quiet political work. Science, in Jensen's telling, is a cosmopolitan republic where Swedish Latinized names travel farther than empires. At the same time, the sentence flatters the reader's modern habits: if you read "natural science and history" at all, you're already inside the Linnaean worldview, treating nature as something that can be sorted, named, stabilized.
The subtext is more ambivalent than the reverence suggests. "Determination of the species" points to the era's obsession with fixing boundaries: what counts as a species, what counts as difference, what counts as order. Linnaeus delivered a tool kit that enabled discovery, but also a taxonomy mindset that can feel coercive, even ideological. Jensen's admiration recognizes the power of a naming system to remake reality: once you have the categories, you start seeing the world in them.
The specific intent is canon-building. Jensen, writing from a small Scandinavian nation with an outsized scientific legacy, elevates Linnaeus into a transnational figure whose authority crosses "whatever language". That line is doing quiet political work. Science, in Jensen's telling, is a cosmopolitan republic where Swedish Latinized names travel farther than empires. At the same time, the sentence flatters the reader's modern habits: if you read "natural science and history" at all, you're already inside the Linnaean worldview, treating nature as something that can be sorted, named, stabilized.
The subtext is more ambivalent than the reverence suggests. "Determination of the species" points to the era's obsession with fixing boundaries: what counts as a species, what counts as difference, what counts as order. Linnaeus delivered a tool kit that enabled discovery, but also a taxonomy mindset that can feel coercive, even ideological. Jensen's admiration recognizes the power of a naming system to remake reality: once you have the categories, you start seeing the world in them.
Quote Details
| Topic | Science |
|---|---|
| Source | Help us find the source |
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