The Reenchantment of the World (54 page)

, p. 236.

 

 

 

CHAPTER 7. Tomorrow's Metaphysics (1)

 

 

1. Philip Slater,
Earthwalk
(New York: Bantam Books, 1975), p. 233.

 

 

2. Gregory Bateson died in San Francisco in July 1980. He was working on
a successor to
Mind and Nature
, which may have explored the aesthetic
dimension that I discuss briefly in Chapter 9; but as it stands now,
the discussion of his work in Chapters 7 and 8 below turns out, very
unexpectedly, to be "complete."

 

 

A biography of Bateson appeared too late for me to read it for this work:
David Lipset,
Gregory Bateson: The Legacy of a Scientist
(Englewood
Cliffs, N.J.: Prentice-Hall, 1980).

 

 

3. The discussion of William Bateson's life given below is based on the
following sources: William Coleman, "Bateson and Chromosomes: Conservative
Thought in Science,"
Centaurus
15 (1970), 228-314; Beatrice Bateson's
memoir of her husband,
William Bateson, F.R.S., Naturalist
(Cambridge:
Cambridge University Press, 1928), pp. 1-160; and Gregory Bateson,
Steps
to an Ecology of Mind
(London: Paladin, 1973; New York: Ballantine,
1972), pp. 47-52 British edition, 73-78 American edition.

 

 

4. Morris Berman, "'Hegemony' and the Amateur Tradition in British
science,"
Journal of Social History
8 (Winter, 1975), 30-50. All
British science, however, was colored by this tradition down to the late
nineteenth century.

 

 

5. The full title is
Materials for the Study of Variation treated with
especial Regard to Discontinuity in the Origin of Species
.

 

 

6. What was lost to science when chromosome theory triumphed we can
only guess. Bateson's idea of the transmission of tendency has been
revived in the work of Gregory Bateson, C. H. Waddington, and a few other
biologists who have been able to argue successfully for the existence
of Lamarckian mimicry -- something that simulates the inheritance of
acquired characteristics. But by and large, the world of materialistic,
orthodox biology is leading, ineluctably, to the potential horrors of gene
manipulation and recombinant DNA -- horrors that might have been avoided
had Bateson's views prevailed in the 1920s. Cf. Barry Commoner, "Failure
of the Watson-Crick Theory as a Chemical Explanation of Inheritance,"
Nature
226 (1968), 334.

 

 

7. Victorian model-building, including the vortex atom, has been the
subject of a large literature, including a very critical overview by the
French historian Pierre Duhem in chapter 4 of his
Aim and Structure of
Physical Theory
, trans. Philip P. Wiener (Princeton: Princeton University
Press, 1954; orig. French edition 1914). Further material can be obtained
in works by and about William Thomson (Lord Kelvin), P. G. Tait, James
Clerk Maxwell, Oliver Lodge, Joseph Larmor et al. Cf. Robert Silliman,
"William Thomson: Smoke Rings and Nineteenth-Century Atomism,"
Isis
54 (1963), 461-74.

 

 

8. W. and G. Bateson, "On certain aberrations of the red-legged partridges
'Alectoris rufa' and 'saxatilis,'"
Journal of Genetics
16 (1926), 101-23.

 

 

9. Cf. Gunther S. Stent,
The Coming of the Golden Age
(Garden City,
N.Y.: The Natural History Press, 1968), pp. 73-74, 112. See also his
Paradoxes of Progress
(San Francisco: W.H. Freeman, 1978);

 

 

10. By and large, I am going to omit any discussion of Bateson's
biological writings and his revision of Darwinian evolution. Although
integrally related to his other work, limitations of space prevent
an exposition at this point. I am, also, primarily interested in the
ethical implications of that work, and this is presented in Chapter
8. Readers interested in filling this gap should consult
Mind and
Nature: A Necessary Unity
(New York: Dutton, 1979), and the essays in
Steps to an Ecology of Mind
titled "Minimal Requirements for a Theory
of Schizophrenia" and "The Role of Somatic Change in Evolution."

 

 

11. The following discussion is taken from Naven, 2d ed. (Stanford:
Stanford University Press, 1958), pp. 1-2, 29-30, 33, 3,5, 88, 92,
97-99, 106-34, 14141, 157-58, 175-79, 186-203, 215, 218-20, 257-79,
and the 1958 Epilogue. I have also used three articles from
Steps to an
Ecology of Mind
: "Experiments in Thinking about Observed Ethnological
Material," Morale and National Character," and "Bali: The Value System of
a Steady State." Bateson argues in
Mind and Nature
, pp. 192-95, that the
methodology of the Iatmul investigation is a paradigm for the resolution
of a very large number of problems in ethics, education, and evolution.

 

 

12. Bateson, however, had his differences with Ruth Benedict's approach,
as he notes on pages 191-92 of
Mind and Nature
. The discussion that
follows is concerned exclusively with ethos; I shall return to eidos in
the section on learning theory, below.

 

 

13. There is, however, kinship differentiation, and naven turns out to be
motivated by the attempt to reduce tensions (as personally experienced)
arising from these relationships, in addition to its importance in
resolving sexual tensions. For the most part, however, I shall not
be dealing with kinship motivation. Bateson's summary can be found in
Naven
, pp. 203-17.

 

 

14. For an overview of some of the anthropological discussion on this
topic, see Milton Singer, "A Survey of Culture and Personality," in Bert
Kaplan, ed.,
Studying Personality Cross-Culturally
(New York: Harper &
Row, 1961),pp. 9-90.

 

 

15. It is necessary to note that Bateson's early anthropological
work did contain two serious errors, both of which he later pointed
out. The first was what Alfred North Whitehead called the "fallacy of
misplaced concreteness" -- the making of abstractions into concrete
"things." Bateson was in fact aware of this when he wrote the Epilogue
to the first (1936) edition of
Naven
. He states there that despite the
way he tended to argue in the text, ethos is not an entity and cannot
be the cause of anything: no one has ever seen or tasted an ethos any
more than they have seen or tasted the First Law of Thermodynamics. The
concept is a description, a way of organizing data, a viewpoint taken
by the scientist or by the natives themselves.

 

 

Second, the notion that stability could be maintained by an "admixture"
of symmetrical and complementary schismogenesis was, he realized by 1958,
too rudimentary. It naively assumes the two variables can somehow cancel
each other out, but never develops a functional relationship between
them. Without such a relationship, there is no reason to expect that the
two processes will equilibrate; the explanation for stability is much too
fortuitous here. The real issue, Bateson saw later, was how (and whether)
increasing schismogenic tension served to trigger controlling factors, and
he came to reevaluate the theory in cybernetic terms with the concept of
"end-linkage." Cf. Chapter 8 of the present work and the 1958 Epilogue to
Naven
.

 

 

16. On Bali, see Gregory Bateson and Margaret Mead,
Balinese Character:
A Photographic Analysis
(New York: New York Academy of Sciences, 1942);
the essay on Bali mentioned in note 11; and "Style, Grace and Information
in Primitive Art," in
Steps to an Ecology of Mind
.

 

 

17. Herbert Marcuse,
One-Dimensional Man
(Boston: Beacon Press, 1964),
p. 17.

 

 

18. The discussion below is based on Jurgen Ruesch and Gregory Bateson,
Communication: The Social Matrix of Psychiatry
(New York: Norton,
1968; orig. publ. 1951), pp. 176, 212, 218, 242; and the following
articles from
Steps to an Ecology of Mind
: "Social Planning and
the Concept of Deutero-Learning"; "A Theory of Plan and Fantasy";
"Epidemiology of a Schizophrenia"; "Towards a Theory of Schizophrenia"
(written together with Don D. Jackson, Jay Haley and John H. Weakland);
"Minimal Requirements for a Theory of Schizophrenia"; "Double Bind,
1969"; and "The Logical Categories of Learning and Communication."

 

 

19. Bateson,
Steps to an Ecology of Mind
, p. 143 British edition;
p. 170 American edition.

 

 

20. There is such a thing as a so-called lucid dream, in which the dreamer
is aware that he or she is dreaming, but for the most part this phenomenon
is not a common occurrence.

 

 

21. Jay Haley, "Paradoxes in Play, Fantasy, and Psychotherapy,"
Psychiatric Research Reports
2 (1955), 52-58.

 

 

22. R. D. Laing,
The Divided Self
(Harmondsworth: Penguin Books, 1965;
first publ. 1959), pp. 29-30.

 

 

23. Quoted in Coleman,
Bateson and Chromosomes
, p. 273.

 

 

24. See Bateson's Introduction to Gregory Bateson, ed.,
Perceval's
Narrative: A Patient's Account of His Psychosis, 1830-1832
, by John
Perceval (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1961).

 

 

25. E. Z. Friedenberg,
R. D. Laing
(New York: Viking, 1974), p. 7.

 

 

26. My source for the following information is a talk given by Bateson
in London on 14 October 1975, and also pp. 121-23 of
Mind and Nature
.

 

 

27.
Steps to an Ecology of Mind
, p. 265 British edition, p. 295 American
edition. For a delightful Victorian story based on this theme, see Edwin
A. Abbott,
Flatland
, 6th ed. (New York: Dover, 1952).

 

 

28. R. D. Laing,
The Politics, of Experience
(New York: Ballantine Books,
1968), pp. 144-45.

 

 

29. "Officially" is a key word here, since it is through metacommunication
itself that we absorb the Cartesian world view. Cf. my discussion
in Chapter 5, that the Cartesian metaphysics contains participating
consciousness even while denying its existence.

 

 

 

CHAPTER 8. Tomorrow's Metaphysics (2)

 

 

1. Gregory Bateson,
Steps to an Ecology of Mind
(London: Paladin, 1973;
New York: Ballantine, 1972), p. 31 British edition, p. xxv American edition.

 

 

2. I am using "Mind" here roughly in the sense first employed in Chapter
5, that is, to denote the mental system that includes both the unconscious
and the mind (small m), or conscious awareness. The concept will be more
fully elaborated in the discussion below.

 

 

3. For an interesting comparison with the following, see Jurgen Ruesch
and Gregory Bateson,
Communication: The Social Matrix of Psychiatry
(New York: Norton, 1968; orig. publ. 1951), pp. 259-61.

 

 

4. On the following discussion, see "The Cybernetics of 'Self': A Theory
of Alcoholism," in
Steps to an Ecology of Mind
.

 

 

5. It is interestingto note here that one of the founders of AA was
influenced by the work of Carl Jung. See
Alcoholics Anonymous
, 3d ed.
(New York: Alcoholics Anonymous World Services, 1976), pp. 26-27.

 

 

6. The following section is based on Bateson's
Mind and Nature: A Necessary
Unity
(New York: Dutton, 1979), pp. 91.114, and
Steps to an Ecology of
Mind
, p. 458 British edition, p. 482 American edition.

 

 

7. The discussion of redundancy given below is based on
Steps to an
Ecology of Mind
, pp. 101-13 British edition, pp. 128-40 American edition.

 

 

8. Michael Polanyi,
Personal Knowledge
, corrected ed. (Chicago:
University of Chicago Press, 1962), p. 88.

 

 

I hope I am not belaboring a point here, but it may not be immediately
obvious that making everything redundant is equivalent to making
everything random. A useful analogy might be the signal-to-noise ratio
of a radio broadcast or TV screen: it must be a ratio if it is to exist
at all. If everything were a signal, there would be no more background;
so everything would be background (the TV screen would be black, for
example). If every soldier in the army were promoted to the rank of
general, there would be no more army. Total redundancy, in other words,
destroys differentiation. When everything is redundant there is no longer
a framework left to create redundancy. "If everybody is somebody," wrote
Gilbert and Sullivan in one of their operettas, "then nobody is anybody."

 

 

9. Gregory Bateson,
Naven
, 2d ed. (Stanford: Stanford University Press,
1958), p. 276.

 

 

10. Gregory Bateson and Margaret Mead;
Balinese Character:
A Photographic Analysis
(New York: New York Academy of Sciences,
1942). For representative kinesic studies, see R. L. Birdwhistell,
Introduction to Kinesics
(Louisville, Ky.: University of Louisville
Press, 1952), and A. E. Scheflen,
How Behavior Means
(Garden City,
N.Y.: Doubleday Anchor, 1974).

 

 

11. Anthony Wilden,
System and Structure
(London: Tavistock Publications,
1972), pp. 123, 194, and passim. On the discussion of analogue versus
digital knowledge given below see
Steps to an Ecology of Mind
,
pp. 109-12, 387-89, 408 British edition, and pp. 136-39, 411-14, 432-33
American edition.

 

 

12. Actually, I have some difficulties with Bateson's contention that
the essence of an unconscious message is that it is unconscious, or
that all analogue communication is an exercise in communication about
the unconscious mind. Dance can be about the relationship between space
and content, or lightness and gravity, for example. In the famous film