Karl Popper in “What is Dialectic?” quoted by Velvet Robots. Kierkegaard obviously would have agreed, but it was Nietzsche -an aphorist more than a philosopher- who put it most concisely: “The will to a system is a lack of integrity.”
It is the immediate urge of every thinker, professional or casual, to extend his or her conclusions outward, to apply opinions to one subject and instance after another as though stamping envelopes, to build out of any impressions a world-sized worldview.
But the mind is not the world, though it may come close to containing it; and reason is not isomorphic to the laws of the universe, though almost everyone believes it is. Thus the will to a system is a lack of integrity in two senses: (1) it falsifies the nature of thought and exaggerates the power of cognition, creation, and analysis, and (2) it subordinates to reason all other categories of experience, and even the subject who experiences: this is the Existential critique of Hegel, that he crushes the human beneath the system (a critique that came long before Sartre, particularly in literature).
I love that Nietzsche considered giving in to the systematizing temptation a “lack of integrity” and that Popper wanted philosophers to be “much more modest in their claims.” Both display heroic honesty about the limits of their field, a rarity among intellectuals.
