that's
what that was all about." But the formal etiology of
creativity and
schizophrenia remains the same. The principle is synergistic, says
Bateson; "no amount of rigorous discourse of a given logical type can
"explain" phenomena of a higher type."27
A similar event occurs in the relationship between Zen master and student,
in which the master poses an impossible problem, a double bind known as a
"koan." Some of these are famous: "What is the sound of one hand clapping?,"
or "Show me your face before your parents conceived you." Bateson cites
the one in which the master holds a stick over the pupil and cries,
"If you say this stick is real, I'll hit you. If you say it isn't real,
I'll hit you. If you keep quiet, I'll hit you" -- a classic double
bind. What constitutes the creative exit here is the nature of the
metacommunication. The student can, for example, take the stick and
break it in two, and the master might accept this response if he sees
that the act reflects the student's own conceptual/emotive breakthrough.
In Learning III, the individual learns to change habits acquired in
Learning II, the schismogenic habits that double bind us all. He learns
that he is a creature who unconsciously achieves Learning II, or he
learns to limit or direct his Learning II. Learning III is learning
about
Learning II, about your own "character" and world view. It is
a freedom from the bondage of your own personality -- an "awakening to
ecstasy," as William Bateson once defined true education. This awakening
necessarily involves a redefinition of the self, which is the product
of one's previous deutero-learning. In fact, the self starts to take on
a certain irrelevance; in Bateson's words, it ceases to "function as
a nodal argument in the punctuation of experience." As we have seen,
the journey can be dangerous. The problem of the self is so difficult
that many psychotics will not use the first person singular in their
speech. For others more fortunate, Bateson claims, there is a merger of
personal identity with "all the processes of relationship in some vast
ecology or aesthetics. . . ." Or as Laing put it in one of his most
beautiful passages,
True sanity entails in one way or another the dissolution of the
normal ego, that false self competently adjusted to our alienated
social really; the emergence of the "inner" archetypal mediators
of divine power, and through the death a rebirth, and the eventual
reestablishment of a new kind of ego-functioning, the ego now being
the servant of the divine, no longer its betrayer.28
It is here that we arrive at a crucial point, one that Laing has made
over and over again in his work. The type of reasoning involved in
schizophrenia is the same as that at work in art, poetry, humor, and
even religious inspiration. The main difference is that the latter
forms of trans-contextuality are more or less freely chosen, whereas
the schizophrenic is caught up in a system not of his own making. But in
formal terms, at least, schizophrenia represents a more highly developed
form of consciousness than the varieties of Learning II which most of
us have been taught. Yet what is the nature of this Learning II, at
least on the official level? By and large, it is a charade. The modern
reality-system requires allegiance to a logic that in actual practice
has to be violated all the time. Western society has deutero-learned
a Cartesian double-bind and called it "reality"; it was precisely
metacommunication (nuance, tacit knowing) that the Cartesian world view
officially managed to destroy.29 At the level of the dominant culture,
we are supposed to believe that scientific knowledge is the only knowledge
real or worth having; that analogue knowledge is nonexistent or inferior;
and that fact and value have nothing to do with one each other. None of
this is true, but we are all required to live by these rules, and for
the most part not to comment on them (except in books, I suppose). Yet
where does insanity lie, in such a situation? As we saw in our discussion
of Newton, we now live in a world turned upside down, a systemic double
bind that has resulted in a kind of collective madness. The only way out
of this double bind, it would seem, lies in rising to a new level of
holistic consciousness which will facilitate new and healthy modes of
behavior. Whereas a Cartesian analysis of modern knowledge and social
problems winds up, as Nietzsche said, biting its own tail, a holistic
analysis suggests that not all circles are vicious; and that there
might be ways of stepping out of the present one. Bateson offers us
a place to step, a non-Cartesian mode of
scientific
reasoning.
For in the course of elaborating the nature of our schismogenic tensions,
and the role of analogue knowledge in the transmission of information --
discussions that necessarily include a critique of Cartesian dualism --
he also developed a methodology that merges fact with value and erodes
the barrier between science and art. This methodology is holistic rather
than Cartesian, and as much intuitive as it is analytic. It is, to quote
Don Juan's admonition to Carlos Castaneda, "a path with a heart," and
yet without any corresponding loss of rational clarity.
I have presented this chapter as an intellectual odyssey, Gregory
Bateson's journey through a series of problems that are among the most
fascinating any scientist or thinker might consider. His studies do not
necessarily add up to a formal epistemology, but then the scientific
Revolution itself did not begin as a set of abstract principles,
but rather as a series of investigations of diverse problems --
falling bodies, planetary motion, light and color. Only much later
did these investigations reveal a common methodology; the
ideology
of mechanism was more the work of Voltaire and Laplace than of
Descartes and Galileo. Yet in Bateson's case, it may not be premature
to argue that the insights gleaned from studying latmul transvestism,
learning theory, metacommunication, and schizophrenia do ultimately
constitute an epistemological framework. Indeed, Bateson himself has
elaborated this epistemology in some of his writings on cybernetic
explanation. By its very nature, however, Bateson's epistemology resists
linear explication. It is really a stance toward life and knowledge,
a commitment rather than a formula. Like alchemy, his epistemology
constitutes a praxis. In approaching a problem, Bateson sought to immerse
himself in the world view being studied. His scientific sophistication
notwithstanding, Bateson instinctively knew that most knowledge was
analogue, that realities lay in wholes rather than parts, and that
immersion (
mimesis
) rather than analytical dissection was the beginning
of wisdom. To give a digital summary of his approach risks reifying
it, and thereby rendering it worthless or even dangerous. "Let loose
ends lead to their own ends," a friend of mine once wrote in one of her
poems; and perhaps it would be best not to tie them up here. Certainly,
no set of abstractions Bateson or I lay out in linear, discursive terms
can grasp the larger noncognitive reality of life. But we live in this
century, not the fourteenth or twenty-second, and for better or worse
we are saddled with verbal-rational knowledge as the primary mode of
exposition. It is with some ambivalence, then, that I turn to a linear
and analytical exposition of Batesonian epistemology.
8
Tomorrows Metaphysics (2)
Mere purposive rationality unaided by such phenomena as art, religion,
dream and the like, is necessarily pathogenic and destructive of life;
and . . . its virulence springs specifically from the circumstance
that life depends upon interlocking
circuits
of contingency,
while consciousness can see only such short arcs of such circuits
as human purpose may direct. . . .
That is the sort of world we live in -- a world of circuit structures
-- and love can survive only if wisdom (i.e., a sense of recognition
of the fact of circuitry) has an effective voice.
-- Gregory Bateson, "Style, Grace and
Information~ in Primitive Art" (1967)
A well-ordered humanism does not begin with itself, but puts things
back in their place. It puts the world before life, life before man,
and the respect of others before love of self. This is the lesson
that the people we call "savages" teach us: a lesson of modesty,
decency and discretion in the face of a world that preceded our
species and that will survive it.
--Claude Lévi-Strauss (1972 interview)
Batesonian epistemology is essentially an elaboration of an answer to a
single question: What is Mind? As Bateson tells us in his Introduction to
"Steps to an Ecology of Mind," Western science has attempted "to build
the bridge to the
wrong half
of the ancient dichotomy between form
and substance."1 Rather than explain mind (or Mind), Western science
explained it away. But it is unlikely that we could start with substance
(matter and motion) as the one explanatory principle, and deduce form,
or mind, from it. In Bateson's way of thinking, Mind is -- without being
a religious principle or entelechy -- every bit as real as matter.2
The reality of Mind in Bateson's world view gives his epistemology
certain characteristics that are formally identical to alchemy and
Aristotelianism. Fact and value are not split, nor are "inner" and "outer"
separate realities. Quality is the issue, not quantity, and most phenomena
are, at least in a special sense, alive. Yet there is one great difference
between Bateson's work and all of those traditional epistemologies that
are premised on the notion of a sacred unity: there is no "God" in his
system. There is no animism, no 'mana,' nothing of what we have called
"original participation," because Mind is regarded as being immanent
in the arrangement and behavior of phenomena, not inherent in matter
itself. Thus, although there
is
such a thing as participation -- we
are not separate from the things around us -- it does not exist in the
"primitive" or pre-modern sense.
Earlier in this work, we delineated the differences between
seventeenth-century science and its holistic predecessors. Before we
proceed to an analysis of Batesonian epistemology, it will be useful
to examine an outline of its differences from the Cartesian paradigm,
as shown in Chart 2.3
Chart 2. Comparison of Cartesian and Batesonian world views
World view of modern science World view of Batesonian holism
---------------------------- -------------------------------
No relationship between fact and value. Fact and value inseparable.
Nature is known from the Nature is revealed in our
outside, and phenomena are relations with it, and
examined in abstraction from phenomena can be known
their context (the experiment). only in context (participant
observation).
Goal is conscious, empirical Unconscious mind is primary;
control over nature. goal is wisdom, beauty, grace.
Descriptions are abstract, Descriptions are a mixture of
mathematical; only that which the abstract and the concrete;
can be measured is real. quality takes precedence over
quantity.
Mind is separate from body, Mind/body, subject/object, are
subject is separate from each two aspects of the same
object. process.
Linear time, infinite progress; Circuitry (single variables in the
we can in principle know all system cannot be maximized);
of reality. we cannot in principle know
more than a fraction of reality.
Logic is either/or; emotions are Logic is both/and (dialectical);
epiphenomenal. the heart has precise algorithms.
Atomism: Holism:
1. Only matter and motion 1. Process, form, relationship
are real. are primary.
2. The whole is nothing more 2. Wholes have properties
than the sum of its parts. that parts do not have.
3. Living systems are in 3. Living systems, or Minds,
principle reducible to are not reducible to their
inorganic matter; nature is components; nature is alive.
ultimately dead.
We have commented on some of the above differences in Chapters 5 and 7,
but most are not immediately obvious and will have to be spelled out
in the discussion that follows. For now, I wish to point out that the
differences involved are as profound as those that exist between science
and alchemy, Sancho Panza and Don Quixote, or conventional sanity and
Learning III. As Bateson himself once admitted, he had come a long way on
the road from dualism, yet still thought in terms of an independent "I"
and conceived of himself as a subject confronting objects. The statement
is hardly surprising, for Bateson, or any other thinker writing about
holism in the late twentieth century, remains a transitional figure. The
fact that he retained the thought processes of our world is what enabled
him to converse with us. But if Batesonian holism is indeed the mental
framework of an emerging civilization, that civilization, once mature,
will probably find our ways of thinking almost incomprehensible. It may
even build museums of the history of science, in which visitors will
have to turn their minds literally inside out in order to grasp what
Galileo and Newton were trying to say.