7
Tomorrows Metaphysics (1)
Let me state my belief that such matters as the bilateral symmetry
of an animal, the patterned arrangement of leaves in a plant, the
escalation of an armaments race, the processes of courtship, the
nature of play, the grammar of a sentence, the mystery of biological
evolution, and the contemporary crises in man's relation to his
environment, can only be understood in terms of such an ecology of
ideas as I propose.
-- Gregory Bateson, Introduction to
"Steps to an Ecology of Mind" (1972)
We have come a long way since our survey of seventeenth-century
science, and our analysis of the shift from feudalism to capitalism
which accompanied the emergence of the Cartesian paradigm as the
dominant world view of the West. I have argued that science became
the integrating mythology of industrial society, and that because of
the fundamental errors of that epistemology, the whole system is now
dysfunctional, a mere two centuries after its implementation. A view of
reality structured on what is only conscious and empirical, and excluding
the tacit knowing that any perception in fact depends upon, has brought
us to an impasse. I have suggested that the split between analysis and
affect which characterizes modern science cannot be extended any further
without the virtual end of the human race, and that our only hope is a
very different sort of integrating mythology.
At the end of Chapter 6, I made some suggestions as to how fact and value
might once again be united -- suggestions that could possibly become
part of a new epistemology, but which do not constitute a coherent system
in and of themselves. There are, however, a large number of disciplines
that claim to unite fact and value, and some of these, such as yoga, Zen,
the oriental martial arts, and various types of meditation, are rapidly
gaining popularity in the West. In addition, a number of well-articulated
philosophies, such as those of George Gurdjieff and Rudolf Steiner,
offer coherent, monistic ways of understanding the world. Why not adopt
one of these? Why not abandon Cartesianism and embrace an outlook that
is avowedly mystical and quasi-religious, that preserves the superior
monistic insight that Cartesianism lacks? Why not deliberately return
to alchemy, or animism, or number mysticism? If reality frightens you,
Max Weber once remarked, the religion of your fathers is always there
to welcome you back into its loving arms.
The problem with these mystical or occult philosophies is that they share
what Susanne Langer has cited as the key problem of all nondiscursive
thought systems: they wind up dispensing with thought altogether. To say
this is not, however, to deny their wisdom. Such philosophies contain
the nugget of participating consciousness and can make it real to any
serious devotee, and for that reason alone, practices such as Zen and
yoga are certainly worth doing. My point is that once the insight is
obtained, then what? These systems are, like dreams, a royal road to the
unconscious, and that is fine; but what of nature, and our relation to
it? What of society, and our relationship to each other? If our goal is
nothing more ambitious than calming our anxieties and turning off our
minds -- as is typically the case when an empire or major world view
collapses -- then we can simply turn philosophy into psychotherapy and
be done with all these discomforting complexities. Intellectually, this
approach is not very interesting, and psychologically, it strikes me
as being a colossal failure of nerve. In fact, it is but the flip side
of Cartesianism; whereas the latter ignores value, the former dispenses
with fact. It seems to me that we should be able to do better than merely
alternate between extremes.
In larger terms, the problem may be restated as follows. We stand at a
crossroads in the evolution of Western consciousness. One fork retains
all the assumptions of the Industrial Revolution and would lead us
to salvation through science and technology; in short, it holds that
the very paradigm that got us into trouble can somehow get us out. Its
proponents (and they generally include the modern socialist states) view
an expanding economy, increased urbanization, and cultural homogeneity
on a Western model as both good and inevitable. The other fork leads
to a future that is as yet somewhat obscure. Its advocates are an
amorphous mass of Luddites, ecologists, regional separatists, steady-state
economists, mystics, occultists, and pastoral romantics. Their goal is the
preservation (or resuscitation) of such things as the natural environment,
regional culture, archaic modes of thought, organic community structures,
and highly decentralized political autonomy. The first fork clearly
leads to a blind alley or Brave New World. The second, on the other hand,
often appears to be a naive attempt to turn around and go back whence we
came; to return to the safety of a feudal age now gone by. But a crucial
distinction must be introduced here: recapturing a reality is not the
same thing as returning to it. My discussion of alchemy attempted to
clarify how much we lost when that tradition was discarded. In Chapter
6, I sought to demonstrate that if one equated body knowledge with
unconscious knowledge, the Hermetic world view became physiological
rather than occult. But at no point did I suggest that we could solve
our dilemmas by attempting to return to the pre-modern world. Rather,
my point was that as long as we dream, and as long as we have bodies,
the insight into reality which the alchemists, Jung, and Reich obtained
will remain indispensable, and must in fact become a major part of our
view of reality. The same thing can be said for the attempt to live
in harmony with the environment, or to have a sense of intimacy and
community. Such things will always be the basic reality of a healthy
human life, and a world view that ignores them in the name of "progress"
is itself a precarious illusion. "All the errors and follies of magic,
religion, and mystical traditions," writes Philip Slater in "Earthwalk,"
"are outweighed by the one great wisdom they contain -- the awareness
of humanity's organic embeddedness in a complex and natural system."1
Recapturing this wisdom is not the same thing as abolishing modernity --
although it might help us to transcend it.
The real difficulty, of course, is discovering how to recapture this
wisdom in a mature form. The works of Jung and Reich are landmark attempts
to do this, but their approach tends to be anti-intellectual. A knowledge
of dreams and the body will inevitably be crucial components of the
new metaphysics, but I doubt that the work of Jung and Reich could ever
serve as its framework.
Indeed, I know only one attempt to reunite fact and value which I regard
as a possible framework for a new metaphysics, and that is the astonishing
synthesis provided by the cultural anthropologist Gregory Bateson. As far
as I can tell, his work represents the only fully articulated holistic
science available today; one that is both scientific
and
based on
unconscious knowing. Bateson's work is also much broader than that of
Jung or Reich, in that it places a strong emphasis on the social and
natural environment, in addition to the unconscious mind. It situates
us
in
the world, whereas Jungian or Reichian self-realization often
becomes an attempt to avoid it.
Bateson is not yet widely known, but I suspect that future historians
may come to regard him as the most seminal thinker of the twentieth
century. The "Batesonian synthesis" -- what might be termed the
"cybernetic/biological metaphor" -- is not Bateson's work alone; but the
synthesis of ideas is his, as is the extraction of the concept of Mind
from its traditionally religious context, and the demonstration that it is
an element inherent in the real world. With Bateson's work, Mind (which
also includes value) becomes a concrete reality and a working scientific
concept. The resulting merger of fact and value represents an enormous
challenge to the human spirit, not merely a calming of its fears.2
As we begin our discussion of Bateson, however, it may be useful to
provide a disclaimer at the outset. Modern science got into trouble by
claiming to be the one true description of reality. In this sense it had
much in common with its predecessor, the medieval Catholic world view,
and there is no point in deliberately repeating this error. I am not
suggesting, then, that Bateson s work is without limits or problems,
or that the crises of our age can be resolved simply by adopting it
uncritically and applying it to our dilemmas. Crises don't get resolved
that way in any event. What I do believe is that Bateson's work represents
the recovery of the alchemical world view in a credible, scientific form;
that it turns the conscious/unconscious dialectic into a creative method
for investigating reality; and that if the world view of a nondystopian
New Age is not derived directly from his work, it will inevitably contain
some of its most salient features.
Although the Batesonian synthesis bears remarkable similarities to Eastern
thought, and appears to be epistemologically disparate from all Western
scientific methodology save quantum mechanics and information theory, its
real inspiration was the work of Gregory's father, William Bateson, the
remarkable turn-of-the-century biologist who coined the term "genetics"
in 1906. A brief exposition of William Bateson's scientific career is
indispensable not merely to an understanding of the origins of Gregory
Bateson's thought, but also to a thorough grasp of its content.3
William Bateson lived in the heyday of British scientific materialism.
The great physicist James Clerk Maxwell (1831-79) had published his final
statement on reality, "Matter and Motion," towards the end of his life,
and Thomas Henry Huxley had spent much of his career popularizing that
way of thinking in his ideological "campaign" for physical science and
the Darwinian theory of natural selection. Bateson, who had received his
own training under the famous anti-Darwinian thinker Samuel Butler, was,
despite his scientific sophistication, part of an older nonprofessional
scientific tradition, that of the "gentleman amateur," a social type
closely associated with the British aristocracy.4 Materialism,
utilitarianism, and expertise -- all these he saw as the shoddy
values of a bourgeois middle class. His own emphasis was on aesthetic
sensibility. He spoke of true education as "the awakening to ecstasy"
(an idea retained by Gregory in his own theory of learning), not the
dreary preparation for a mundane career. Scientific work reached its
highest point, he held, when it aspired to art. As an undergraduate at
Cambridge he defended the retention of classical Greek as a required
subject because it provided an "oasis of reverence" in the otherwise arid
mind of the typical science student, and in an 1891 flyer on the subject,
he wrote:
If there had been no poets there would have been no problems, for
surely the unlettered scientist of to-day would never have found
them.
To him it is easier to solve a difficulty than to feel it.
[Italics mine]
Creating a science out of the "feel" of things proved an accomplishment
that eluded William Bateson. His own career embodied the agonizing split
between science and art, the healing of which became the central project
of Gregory Bateson's life. He was convinced from the start that emotion,
like reason, had precise algorithms, and one of Gregory's favorite quotes
was taken from Descartes' arch-rival, Blaise Pascal: "The heart has its
reasons
which the reason does not at all perceive."
William Bateson's attempt to create a science of form and pattern, and the
aesthetic and political attitudes that formed the basis of this attempt,
have been brilliantly analyzed by the historian of biology William
Coleman. Coleman shows how this attempt and these attitudes emerged
in the context of Bateson's opposition to the theory of chromosomes,
which had been developed by 1925. The theory held, and still holds,
that all hereditary phenomena can be traced to a material particle,
known as the gene, which is lodged in the chromosome. This atomistic,
Newtonian approach sees the gene as the one hereditary element that is
stable, persisting through all change. To Bateson such an approach started
at the wrong end of the problem. What persisted, as both Samuel Butler
and Bateson's next-door neighbor Alfred North Whitehead had told him,
was not matter but
form
; what Gregory would later term "Mind." He thus
undertook to uncover the pattern and process of evolution by an analysis
of heredity and variation, and to do this focused not on regularities,
but on deviations from the norm. "Treasure your exceptions," he once
remarked to a fledgling scientist; and the elucidation of "normal"
anatomy through the study of nature's anomalies became central to
his approach. One examined deviations, or morphological disruptions,
to find out how the organism in question adapted, how it managed
not
to go to pieces. (Years later, Gregory Bateson would arrive at his own
formulations of typical human interaction by studying alcoholics and
schizophrenics.) Thus, in his
Materials for the Study of Variation
(1894), a guidebook to animal teratology, Bateson stated that the goal
was to ascertain the laws governing form.5 The origin of variation,
he claimed, had to be sought in the living thing itself, not, as
Darwin had held, in the environment. Although he was not a Lamarckian,
William Bateson, like the early alchemical Newton, saw the principle of
transformation as an internal one. To locate the origin of variation in
the gene, however, and then to combine this with a theory of fortuitous
variation, was to make a late-Newtonian error: to hold that order could
somehow emerge from the random collisions of material particles. Newton's
later doctrine of change by way of the rearrangement of impenetrable
corpuscles was to Bateson an anathema, a nonexplanation.