Gregory Bateson (1904–1980)

Mind and Nature is Bateson's last book, although two followed it posthumously, and in the colloquy with his daughter that closes Mind and Nature he discusses his ambition to write a volume called Where Angels Fear to Tread that would more directly treat concerns about consciousness, aesthetics, and the sacred. Mind and Nature is preliminary to that latter book (which became Angels Fear), laying out the epistemology and notions of organization and change that would underlie it.

This book show more treats the features that human thought (i.e. perception, ideation, logic, and explanation) has in common with biological change in individuals and populations (adaptation and evolution). Bateson characterizes these two fields (the "mind" and "nature" of the title) as the "Great Stochastic Processes." Beginning with an emphasis on "the pattern that connects," he introduces a kit of ideas with putatively universal application in what he calls -- taking a cue from Jung's usage in Septem Sermones ad Mortuos -- the Creatura. He uses contemporary biology for his understanding of nature, but he uses philosophical materials and cybernetic theories in preference to the products of academic psychology.

I found this book a fast read, but it is not for the intellectually lazy. Although there is a glossary of particular words Bateson felt his readers might find alien, his general lexicon pulls no punches. He makes great hay out of Russell's theory of logical types, metaphorically expanding its application to the whole panoply of hierarchical phenomena and systems. Most of the text is organized into long chapters containing sets of numbered theses, each treated in a few pages of discussion and example.

In some respects, the part of the book that most excited me on this re-read was the appendix "Time Is Out of Joint," a memorandum circulated to the University of California Regents (of whom Bateson was one). In less than seven pages, Bateson sums up his most important arguments from Mind and Nature and applies them to the difficulties of governing an educational institution. The result is startlingly similar in content, if not in form, to Aleister Crowley's early essay "Thien Tao: Or, the Synagogue of Satan." Bateson and Crowley alike try to communicate the need for human striving to comprehend complementary poles, in order to progress by dialectical transcendence. It is a matter of enantiodromia, rather than compromise: not to say, "Light -- Darkness -- I am the Reconciler between them" like the officers of a Golden Dawn Equinox ceremony, but rather to say, "I am Light, and I am Darkness, and I am that which is beyond them" like the Crowned and Conquering Child in the utmost aire of LIL. show less

I find it vexing as ever to attempt a summary of Batesonian thought, partly a reflection of how unorthodox Batesonian cybernetics is to that Cartesian outlook originally presented throughout my education, and partly from the conviction that all the myriad parts of Bateson's thought are equally relevant. Any attempted summary threatens to bulk so large as to suggest it would be easier to simply re-read Bateson.

Perhaps it suffices to emphasise two points. One is Bateson's use of metaphoric show more explanation, on the grounds the metaphor is the logic of biological life. While Western science predominates and is "pre-occupied with quantity, the artificiality of experiment, and the dualism of Descartes," [10] its logic proceeds mechanistically, linearly, empirically. The second point is that Bateson strives always to understand the living world as a "necessary unity" -- a world of mental process, in which he locates the sacred. Bateson leans upon Jung's conception of Creatura and Pleroma, not occurring rather encountered, and always in tandem. The distinction is hierarchic not substantive: Creatura is a level up from that of Pleroma, a higher logical type.

Creatura and Pleroma interface epistemologically, are not ontologically separate substances. Their boundary is best understood as a bridge across which information passes, our understanding of the world comprising both together. Seeing the world this way avoids the chief errors of Cartesian thought's insufficient holism: reducing the world to mechanical chains of causation (in which mind is alienated, consigned to an illusion); or, painting ourselves into corners from which we extract ourselves only through recourse to supernaturalism (explanations lying "outside the body" as miracle).

Building upon his unified outlook, Bateson in Angels Fear looks toward further explication of the natural world and life within it, and for a "syntax of consciousness" -- formal rules relating various disparate concepts falsely separated by our predominant dualism. An emphasis upon relations, as opposed to referents or "things", is the way forward. Structure is itself a means of communication, so structure is then an informational idea, and can be causal without having a separate "existence" as supernatural accounts would require. There is no ghost in the machine, rather a causal influence of structure inherent in the machine. "A model of the interaction between structure and process underlies much of the argument of this book, and it will be critical to understand the relationship between these notions and the problems of knowledge and description." [37]

Bateson helpfully points out the value of religion as opposed to science, without arguing any specific religion should replace Cartesian science. "Art, like religion, represents an area of experience that privileges Creatural ways of thinking" [198] in contrast to the Pleroma-limited approach of mechanistic science. "Certainly through human history, and perhaps necessarily into the future, religion has been the only kind of cognitive system that could provide a model for the integration and complexity of the natural world, because these are the characteristics that must persistently elude even the most meticulous efforts to [merely] describe." But again, the way forward includes both, never one over the other. "Apart from Creatura, nothing can be known; apart from Pleroma, there is nothing there to know." [200]

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I suggested in my 2011 review of Bateson's Mind and Nature that this later effort, Angels Fear is inspirational recapitulation. That gloss was from memory and after a recent re-reading I'd amend that to: it is indeed recapitulation but not only that. There is a good deal here that while not offering new arguments, at least considers old material from the stance of reassessment and implication rather than mere summary, shifting the discussion to those questions Bateson wanted to examine next. Just as importantly, fully grasping the arguments here relies on a level of familiarity with Batesonian thought unobtainable from this book alone. Yet despite these reservations, Angels Fear served me well as introduction to Batesonian cybernetics, and could do for others equally well.

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Originally begun by Gregory alone, but its completion interrupted by illness: Gregory requested the collaboration of anthropologist daughter Mary Catherine, originally as assistant, whose contributions evolved to that of co-author, eventually ushering the manuscript to completion after Gregory's death.

Includes a Glossary, with entries slightly edited in places from those taken from Mind and Nature; a consideration of sources with interesting commentary on unpublished manuscripts; and Index. show less

Maybe it's the things that I read, but I come across many passing references to Gregory Bateson's work. And much of that name-checking points to this book, a collection of essays developing Bateson's concepts and theory of the mind in context (... of other minds, things, places, tools, etc.). The essays are ordered chronologically, which allows readers to see the development and refinement of key ideas that comprise Bateson's developing theory of mind. Some of those keys ideas are logic as a show more framework for sense-making, Newtonian and communicative realms, context, deutero-learning (i.e., learning about learning), difference, differences that make a difference (i.e., ideas leading to change), facts, contexts, corrective systems, information and the tools we use to create information that generates difference. The mind in context, the ecology of the mind, is a cybernetic (i.e., self-corrective) system.

As a chronological collection of essays, readers will benefit from seeing ideas developing and becoming more refined and interconnected as Bateson works on them. He relies on a common set of analogies and allusions that also make frequent appearances (e.g., the blind man's cane, Kant's discussion of facts about chalk, animal communication) and become richer and more meaningful along the way. The section summaries are helpful, but readers will really be rewarded by the essays in the concluding section (written between 1965 and 1970) which show fully-fledged ideas in their clearest expression.

Overall this book is highly readable. And as one might expect from a polymath like Bateson, his treatment of some disciplinary subjects seems a little brief, but it never seems ill-informed, overly confident, or wildly speculative. He even admits his inexpert treatment of these subjects in one of the later essays in the book. Well worth the effort. show less

In previous readings of Bateson, not only Mind and Nature, I was left with an impression similar to that from primers on non-Euclidean geometries: fabulist structures from simple premises, but despite the simplicity, oddly difficult to hang onto just days or weeks after reading. As though I was so bounded, my thinking so determined by Euclidean shapes and logic, that I'd revert to them despite having been persuaded the non-Euclidean alternatives were at least equally valid, if not superior. show more An anecdote I've always recalled somewhere in my reading of Bateson is his claim that at some point, he no longer saw five fingers when looking at his own hand, but four spaces between digits. I wanted to evaluate that stance: is it better than the conventional view of five fingers? If so, how can I begin to see that way, perpetually, and not only while reading his book?

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I speculate that Mind and Nature is a good foundation for reading Bateson, and Angels Fear inspirational recapitulation. The remaining titles, I think, serve as deep explorations of details and evidence.

Outline of Batesonian cybernetics:

Evolution and Learning each fit a general pattern: Bateson identifies this pattern (or system) as Mind. In elaborating upon this insight, Bateson simultaneously explores the common-sense meaning of mind, expands its scope beyond that of human consciousness, and eliminates illusions / misconceptions / superstitions surrounding mind and matter.

Characteristics or criteria of mind:
- made of parts themselves not mental, mind is immanent in certain sorts of organisation of parts
- parts triggered by events in time; if differences in the external world are static, individual can trigger an event by moving relative to an object (bifocal vision)
- the event may provide no energy, but the respondent may utilise its own (collateral) energy, usually supplied by metabolism (Cybernetic causality as contrasted with Newtonian causality)
- then causes-and-effects form into circular (or more complex) chains
- all messages are coded
- logical typing governs the meaning of messages, and the control of a system possible thereby
- mind is a system of double-description adhering to the above criteria

Bateson provides considerable detail on the system of double-description for biological evolution: two stochastic systems (epigenesis and Darwinian selection), linked together in a recursive chain. The logical structure & limits which result are complex, but suggests a solution to many delusions and confusions through history (including the Chain of Being and Lamarckian inheritance). Bateson spends less time detailing the parallels for learning, I expect as an editorial decision for the book, and not for lack of evidence. He does cite relevant articles from his other books which seem to fill in some of these gaps.

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Re-reading Mind and Nature, I'm firmly convinced Bateson will be read 100 years from now as a seminal source of widely-accepted thinking on the ways social order links to ecology, to basic physical structure (biology, chemistry, physics), and to values. And yet, if that doesn't come to pass, if Batesonion cybernetics ends up a scientific dead-end, I suspect it'll prove to be no less an accomplishment: a scenario in which individual observations and postulates, each irrefutable or uncontroversial when taken alone, are put together coherently and yet ... “wrong”. I'm not sure which scenario I'd find more interesting.

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This reading completed June 2011, at least my second reading and perhaps even fourth. Mind and Nature retains its essential punch: I'm as astounded and excited as ever by the ideas and Bateson's illustrations of them.

Memorable ideas and illustrations from my readings of Bateson documented in Comments; expand as I re-read other Bateson works. show less