Ontology of complexity

A reading of Gregory Bateson

GIANFRANCO SAVINO
English translation copyright © 2014 Gianfranco Savino
All rights reserved. Originally published in USA asOntologia della
Complessità copyright © 2012 Gianfranco Savino
ISBN-13: 978-1490579894
to my wife you show me every day the complex beauty of simplicity

CONTENTS

1. Gregory Bateson between Epistemology and Ontology p. 1

2. Systemic Diseases of Contemporary Science p.12
2.1 Single Vision and Newton’s Sleep p.16
2.2 A Science Made of “Dormitive Principles” p.20
2.3 “The Syllogisms in Grass” and the Metaphor p.25 that We Are
3. Birth of an Epistemological Matrix p.34
3.1 Pleroma and Creatura p.36
3.2 Immanent Logical Types p.39
3.3 Idea, Information, Difference p.40
3.4 What is aMind? p.45
4. The Beautiful the Sacred, the Death. Towards a monistic p.50 solution of
Mind / Body Problem
4.1 The Holistic Properties of Mental Systems p.56
4.2 Epistemology of the Beautiful p.60
4.3 Epistemology of the Sacred p.65
4.4 The Boundaries of ‘Self’ p.70
5. Last Thoughts p.76

6. Appendix. Gregory Bateson’s Notion of the Sacred. p.79 Steps towards a

Postmodern Determination of the
Essence of Religion.
All Bibles or sacred codes have been the causes of the following Errors:

1. That Man has two real existing principles: Viz: a Body & a Soul.
2. That Energy, call’d Evil, is alone from the Body; & that Reason, call’d Good, is alone from the Soul.
3. That God will torment Man in Eternity for following his Energies.

But the following Contraries to these are True:

1. Man has not Body distinct from his Soul; for that call’d Body is a portion of Soul discern’d by the five
Senses, the chief inlets of Soul in this age.
2. Energy is the only life, and is from the Body; and Reason is the bound or outward circumference of
Energy.
3. Energy is Eternal Delight.

WILLIAM BLAKE, The Marriage of Heaven and Hell

1 GREGORY BATESON BETWEEN EPISTEMOLOGY

AND ONTOLOGY

In 1923, in a never read preface to a lecture course bearing the title

“Ontology: The Hermeneutics of Facticity”, Martin Heidegger pointed to
the task which, from the point of view of his experience of thought, was more
properly entrusted to the care of philosophical meditation, by the following
words:

"Asking questions. Questions are not flashes of genius, questions are not even
‘the problems’ today so regular which you fish in hearsay and find in the
readings and which are accompanied by a gesture of deepness. Questions
arise from confrontation with ‘things’. And things are only there
whereeyesare."

With this statement put almost at the onset of his speculative journey
Heidegger definitively repudiated the later insurgent attempts to present his
work as overly divorced from the real problem context of modern man, when
not simply ideological, and at the same time spelled out the need for a
general ontic curvature for every thought that aspired to be seriously and
radically hanging from a fundamental ontological question.

From the point of view of this statement, the man’s thinking was configured
essentially as an activity inextricably linked to the truth of his thrownness
(Geworfenheit) into the world, even as the eminent space of the revealing of
this thrownness as a historical thrownness. What else did the duty of the
“confrontation with the ‘things’ ” declare unless the bond of origin and
reference of the philosophical application with the reasons of its own time
and with the ontic issues which this time calls into question? In the specific
case of Heidegger’s experience the insertion of the fundamental ontological
question (Seinsfrage) in the most advanced consciousness of his own time
and in his knotty problem was realized in the identification of the ‘question
concerning technology’ as an intimation always and even more today put to
thinking of Being.

Referring to that experience of thought and to its initial quoted statement as to

the inspiring intention of the present work, we ask: what is today - in an era
that is only partially also Heidegger’s – the ‘thing’ by comparing with the
philosophical interrogation should arise?

Of course it is not a matter to give the reflection a “theme” or a “title” and

then hold it in terms of an easy and charming “relevance.” Instead, it is to
become aware of the fact that the authenticity of all our possible arrangement
to ask and to think currently resides in our ability to remain in the vicinity of
the event whose happening originally essentializes our time.

The event is the eradication of man from the earth by a technique which in its
disturbing and effective operating increases so rapidly its overwhelming
power to tend now to achieve a dimension of global domination and the
fulfillment of all its chances of provocation and machinations of the being.

Directed to this event - that “happens today and has been for three centuries
on the way ”1- attention and willing to investigate shared by all fields of
knowledge and common to all civilizations and cultural traditions have
arisen from time. The measure of this new attention is itself a sign of the
pressure that contemporary thought receives from its ‘thing’.

The historical phenomena in the background of which our practice with the
world takes character and visibility in all aspects and moments are, by nature
and size, that the thought is not allowed to reject or to neglect a payment.
Felix Guattari wrote that “the great crisis of the end of the millennium seems
to announce as the conjunction of all possible convulsions ”2and that “you
would not end to enumerate the fields drifting, or which evolve in a
catastrophic way (energy, employment , ecology, demography, international
relations ...)”3. We all adhere - in a more or less conscious way
– to this perception of reality. We seem to share the generalized anxiety of
those who are in the imminence of the deconstruction of all the axioms of
their personal functioning. This feeling echoes indeed at the center of our
lives as the fundamental emotional tonality of present age.
1 MARTIN HEIDEGGER,Nur noch ein Gott kann uns helfen(Der Spiegel,
May 31, 1976)

The historical evolution of our communities on a global scale (which like

any other evolutionary process - should always act in a delicate balance of
innovation and stability) hangs conspicuously on the side of the innovative
elements and accelerates so violently its bike to let us predict the rapid
achievement of a kind of vanishing point and the resulting final separation
from anchorage to any kind of tradition. That link of transmission and
essential derivation that has always linked the present to the past and has
allowed its intelligibility at the thought is progressively vanishing.

Our sense of belonging to the world is shaken to its roots, the humanity of
man is subjected to a deep process of obsolescence, and the conditions for
the survival of the biosphere itself is at risk of being compromised beyond
repair. Still, the thought still shows mainly to correspond only in terms of
increasing agitation and of a didactic unproductive anxiety, which does not
commit its most intimate resources, does not push it forward in understanding
but rather condemns it to confine itself among showy and superficial aspects
of the thing in question. We are unable to access that “initial appeal” that the
radical nature of the events taking place instead demands from meditation.

Above all, we find it hard to establish as a leader of the acquired reflection

the awareness that the transformations of our time cannot be grabbed and
correctly localized in the space of a merely accidental and historical
phenomenology. Namely, the awareness that those
2 FELIX GUATTARI,Soft Subversions(Semiotextet, 1996), chapter 19,Plan
for the planet
3 Ibidem

transformations require instead of being considered as in some way “fated”

outcomes of the epistemological premises of our civilization, and that
therefore these premises have to be taken as the true reference of
philosophical inquiry.

The contemporary knowledge must now become engaged in accounting two

needs:
1) the need to attack the ontic problems of its time by enlightening its
essential ontological source;
2) the need to clarify and thematize its own epistemological premises and
their intimate connection with the happening of the event that is currently the
focus of its attention.
There were few experiences of research indeed, to date, that have moved in
the direction of this commitment. Among them, we believe it is certainly one
of the most significant and full of legacies that, Gregory Bateson led
throughout his whole life.

The first difficulty that you are forced to deal with when you try to analyze
Gregory Bateson's work is linked to the virtual impossibility of framing such
work in the categories that are usually striven to define, classify and
recognize the products of culture. Gregory Bateson in fact expressed
contributions in various fields of contemporary science, revealing always a
presence of the first order in each of them, able to innovate in a radical way -
if not even to subvert - the conceptual paradigms of the disciplines with
whom he came in contact.

Biologist by training and “vocation”, he devoted himself for many years to

anthropology and, therefore, on the basis of the importance of the results from
his research in these fields, he was involved in the early development of
cybernetics. Then he transposed the ideas gathered during this experience
into psychiatry and animated, from the 50s, a true psychiatric movement - the
so-called “Palo Alto Group” - which is still one of the liveliest and most
important experiences of contemporary clinical practice. Having
subsequently radicalized his position as a challenge to the clinical
knowledge in general, then he devoted himself to a series of experimental
researches on animal communication and to the study of the processes of
evolution of cultures. In latest years, finally attempting a synthesis of the
ideas that he had acquired in his long life as a scientist, he contributed
significantly to the recent disciplines of ecology and epistemology,
especially pushing them towards a more effective understanding of the
systemic crisis that the our civilization is currently going through.

Yet, despite the diversity of his work, his is not the intellectual biography of
an eclectic. Instead, we can rightly argue that he remained throughout his life
tied to a single node of problems, of which only gradually he became aware
and that only in his late years he was able to explain clearly.

Reading his writings there is the certainty that it was following the trail of a
‘single unthought’ that he felt the need to deal with such a large number of
scientific investigations and stress, and that his discoveries, although
belonging to very distant and seemingly unrelated areas, are revealed - once
assumed the novelty of his point of view - as variants and local
manifestations of the same ‘ecosystem of ideas’.

The very structure of his speech, his own way of formulating the questions
and of integrating the ideas reflect, with rare and unmistakable elegance, that
sense of unity of the biosphere and of the knowledge that he always asserted
and towards which he moved his steps.

We can say with some confidence that, as an anthropologist, as a biologist, as

an epistemologist and as a psychiatrist Bateson had always faced the same
question: to understand the reality of the pragmatic structure of
communication, to grasp the formal necessary components of the
communicative events, of those events in which dynamics of interaction
between co-present entities take place, and - along with it - to lay the
foundations of a science that was able to discuss in strict terms the whole
series of issues related to those situations in which in some way
informational exchanges and formal structures play a crucial role.

Gregory Bateson always moved by the conviction that “such matters as the
bilateral symmetry of an animal, the patterned arrangement of the leaves in a
plant, the escalation of the armaments race, the processes of courtship, the
nature of play, the grammar of a sentence, the mystery of biological evolution
and the contemporary crisis in man's relationship to his environment ”4are
subjected to the same formal necessity and therefore precisely this kind of
necessity must become the specific object of a science, that is, a set of
organically assembled hypotheses and ideas.
4 GREGORY BATESON,Step to an ecology of mind,Introduction, (The
University

Of course, it must be said that the contribution of his work nor that of those
with him and after him tried to develop his insights was not enough for the
birth of such a science. But the fact is that - at least in the last one hundred
and fifty years - a long line of thinkers and theories has greatly contributed to
indicate a set of goal lines and reference points scattered here and there,
under which it would be already possible today to define a new scientific
territory.

In particular, Bateson believed that the findings of cybernetics and systems

theory and ideas raised in the mathematical theory of groups, Gestalt
psychology and ecology had already provided sufficient conceptual tools for
thinking - in a renewed form and closer to their complex nature the problems
of the interaction between ideas, communication, mental process,
organization, differentiation and structure. And that, on the basis of these
tools, it was already possible to build “a bridge between the facts of life and
behavior and what we know today of the nature of pattern and order ”5.

For this reason, in 1979, on the threshold of his last and most important
essay, he declared the explicit intention of asking questions about what kind
of necessity asserted the integration of the world and what kind of
epistemological errors could compromise it instead, by asking:
"What pattern connects the crab to the lobster and the orchid to the primrose
and all the four of them with me? And me to you? And all the six of us the
amoeba in one direction and to the back-ward schizophrenic in another? "6

Statements of this type are quite common in the writings of Bateson.

of Chicago Press, 2000), xxiii
5 GREGORY BATESON,Step to an ecology of mind, Introduction, xxxii

6 GREGORY BATESON, Mind and nature, Introduction, (New York: E.P.

Dutton, 1979),8

Their wisely disconcerting character has not to be interpreted like a trivial

rhetorical device; it must also be understood as the elegant instrument
through which he allows his readers to directly access the core of his whole
search path . The idea is that to escape from the impasse in which the
evolutionary internal motility of our civilization has put us, it is now
essential to reformulate the epistemological coordinates of our scientific
knowledge and set aside the quantitative and mechanistic vision of the world
that science has built on the basis of a passed physics and of a series of
cultural premises which have arisen and self-corroborated throughout the
course of the Modern Age. It is in fact due to this vision - along with the myth
of the substantial separation between mind and body and between man and
nature - that long chain of cultural errors and ethical values that today
threaten our very survival.

The work of Gregory Bateson has always been intended to shake in depth the
image that the knowledge of our age has built for itself. And even though the
awareness of its importance is still very recent thing, its intrinsic ‘Socratic’
quality, its uncommon problematic rigor and the unquestioned authority of the
author have already made it so that it configures in the contemporary debate
as a true place of political confrontation, as a thorny term of distinction
between environments and guidance of scientific research. Everything to the
point that we believe we can already easily foresee that the work of Bateson
become more and more the “stumbling block” of culture in the coming years.
It is necessary therefore to consider at this point: do such considerations and
evaluations make Gregory Bateson a problem for the properly
philosophicalthought of these years? Are we not dealing with an author who
though undoubtedly brilliant and out of the ordinary - moved in such a close
and traditionally ‘scientific’ area to be ultimately alien to the philosophy and
its issues?

The objection is not trivial, and - to the extent that it implicitly declares at the
same time a review of what is essentially ‘science’, a review of what is
essentially ‘philosophy’ and a review of what should be the relationship
which exists today between these two regions of human knowledge – it
deserves to be discussed and, in our view, contested.

It is quite clear that Bateson’s views about the need for a redefinition of the
epistemological foundations of science and the long argument he developed
in this sense would be enough already to count him - along with many other
scientists of equal value - at least in the ranks of the so-called ‘philosophers
of science’. But it is equally clear that, in the specific case of his work, such
labeling would not be nothing more than an attempt to neutralize its
subversive potential giving him a ‘role’ and a chance of pigeonholing in one
of several compartmentalized disciplines the academic contemporary
philosophy has been divided in just to protect its own survival.

Keep in mind that the singularity of Bateson's speech consists mainly in its
ability to weave together in a single movement a broad range of issues that
pertain to ethics as much as to epistemology, to logic as much as to politics,
and to deprive each of them of any belong and connotation, and to bring them
consistently and tenaciously to the single root of a deeper and more radical
question which involves the relationship that original and fundamental human
thought historically implemented with the essential necessities of the house
(οίκος) of man, his environment, his world.

This unique way of weaving and attacking the multi-dimensionality of the

problems at the thought of our time, places the works of Bateson beyond any
schematic definition. It is indeed a clear and inescapable challenge to the
consolidated metaphysical attitude of our culture that drives us to divide
knowledge into disciplines and increasingly parceled and non-
communicating backgrounds and to conceive science and philosophy (but
also art, religion and policy) as inviolably distinct traditions of human work,
or even opposed to each other.

Bateson is aware that the dualistic or pluralistic separations of culture reflect

a broader and more original dualistic attitude of our civilization, which
brings us to separate, in their essential consideration, mind from body,
pattern from matter and matter from time, and practice in the world in terms
of “God versus man, elite versus people, chosen race versus others, nation
versus nation, and man versus nature ”7. And because “it is doubtful whether
a species having bothan advanced technology andthis strange way of looking
at its world can endure ”8, he strongly emphasizes
7 GREGORY BATESON,Steps toward an ecology of mind, 337
8 Ibidem

the need to reassert the monistic nature of reality from the integration of those
margins that perniciously still stand out and away areas of production of
thought.

The whole work of Bateson can be interpreted as the experiment of this

integration. And it is primarily for this reason that we feel we can look to his
position as an eminently philosophical position, marked by a setting of an
ontological character, in the sense in which Martin Heidegger, the most
radical thinker of the twentieth century, has marked this term.

We have to clarify, however, that the ontology of Bateson is not a meditation

on the “sense of Being,” or in any way the explicit and conscious questioning
of the link that binds the problematicFrage nach dem Seinto theFrage nach
dem Technik, instead as it emerges and develops in the reflection of
Heidegger. It is hard to believe indeed - despite the extraordinary harmony of
certain themes and certain settings of their speeches - that the two thinkers
have had any attendance or knowledge of each other's research.
The ontology of Bateson has an entirely ontic matrix and continuously
measures its own truth in a confrontation with the objects of empirical
investigations that are its foundation.

Its character is rather that of a sort of ‘ecographic reconnaissance’ of reality,

i.e. a discourse that seeks to recognize and bring about the unity of the echoes
from various fields of modern science and to describe by their track the
image of that necessarypattern that connectsand supports, in their essential
depth, all things.

Bateson described in a poem the goal of his research as “the lonely Skeleton
of Truth ”9and the image of this skeleton he reconstructs in the course of his
work always appears - as indeed all true echographic image uncertain and
delicate, so as to require a continuous audit and update of the contours and
never to allow hard deductions or arrogant certainty.

The ontological dimension of Bateson's speech does not feed on the

recording or synthetic possibilities of language, but it builds slowly and with
hesitation around the axis of some leading assertions, which together are the
preliminary horizon and the landing point of his speculative way.
9 GREGORY BATESON, MARY CATHERINE BATESON, Angels Fear,
Introduction(Cresskill, Hampton Pr, 2005), 5

They can be traced largely to three, namely:

1) mind is in matter, that is, the world of ideas, organization, communication
and thought process is inherent in nature and is not separated from it in any
way;
2)sacred is in matter, that is, the experiences and knowledge related to
religions testify to the existence of immanent mental systems of vast
dimensions, of which our ‘ I ’ and our species are only subsystems;
3)time is in matter, that is, the world and every possible description of the
world always contain the time and necessarily cannot exist outside or
separately from it.
It is clear that statements of this kind go beyond the field of pure scientific
research as well as that of the so-called ‘philosophy of science’, moving
clearly in the direction of a strictly speaking ontological issue on always in
Heidegger’s words – “the question of Being” and its truth.
In this issue Bateson brings the contribution of a radical vision that combines
together the need for a rewrite of the conceptual paradigm of Western science
and the need for a critical consideration of the same metaphysical premises
of our tradition of thought, of which contemporary science and technique can
be regarded just as the most striking product.
Precisely because of the identification of this double level of criticism of the
underlying conceptual structures of our civilization, the thought of Bateson
appears as one of the most advanced points of that broad constellation of
experiences which over the last century has variously operated to determine
the possibility of a “new beginning” and a “countermovement” for the history
of ideas and Western societies.
To the extent that this thought experiment shows totally committed to
integration of new scientific knowledge with philosophy (via this two-way
movement: to give empirical research an ontological dimension and to give
the philosophical question an ontic dimension), it is intended to remain
essentially un-recognizable to both, until they will hire, the problem of a
critical revision of their own epistemological frameworks as one of their
most pressing issues.
Let us add that this unrecognizable nature is usually the most characteristic
sign of all those places of cultural history (and of natural history) where ‘the
new’ arise.
The purpose of the present research is that ‘new’ that has arisen in the work
of Gregory Bateson and the assessment of its implications on the questions of
our time, on our way to formulate and implement them in all their epochal
meaning.
Bateson was never meant to provide answers to these questions, as he was
aware of the necessarily perverse nature of each response. But we feel we
can say, however, that he has certainly provided reasonable evidence of the
possibility of looking at them in a totally different and innovative way. And
that - as he wrote shortly before his death - in this new look,

"But mysteries remain.

The world looks more elegant than it did ... " 10.
10GREGORY BATESON, A Sacred Unity(New York, Cornelia & Michael
Bessie Book 1991), 307
2 SYSTEMIC DISEASES OF CONTEMPORARY
SCIENCE

Gregory Bateson's epistemological proposal - by virtue of which he can be

counted among the most radical and fruitful thinkers of our time - is not
actually the result of an organic and purely speculative process. It is rather
the derivative product of a complex of critiques that, in the course and on the
basis of his own empirical research, he addressed the fundamental
connotations of contemporary scientific system.

It is good to point out and emphasize that the objections raised by Bateson to
scientific knowledge arise from the very core of the system against which
they are directed and that their position makes them automatically essential
and authoritative.

To Bateson the point is not indeed to challenge the scope of science as such,
nor to give substance to anti-scientific attitudes or suggestions. The point is
instead to engage with consistency and rigor all the necessary theoretical
implications inherent in the most recent discoveries and the most advanced
hypothesis of modern science, and to understand that the image that modern
science has built for itself over the past three centuries and the preliminary
assumptions still steering the progress openly conflict with the data of its
most recent acquisitions and have become outdated quickly in their presence.

That is, although most of the contemporary scientific disciplines has

produced - according to Bateson - discoveries and processing sufficient to
revolutionize the traditional approach of the issues that concern
communication processes and phenomena of self-organization of living
matter, the conceptual paradigm these disciplines are still using and - in a
broader sense - the metaphysical pattern of the systemic configuration of
science as such instead appear totally inadequate to recruit and develop the
meaning and scope of innovation which also has come to produce. All this
poses to the thought task of clarifying and deeply reviewing the assumptions
on which modern science rests and, more generally, the way we know and
conceive reality to which we belong. That is, a fundamental question of
epistemology is put to the thought.

The concept of epistemology suggested by Bateson does not actually

correspond to the one implied in the traditional use of the term. It combines
the current definition of epistemology as a branch of science the discipline
that studies how the particular organisms or aggregates of organisms
know, think and decide- with the definition of epistemology as a branch of
philosophy – the question that focuses on the necessary extent and other
essential characteristics of the processes of thought, knowledge and
decision.

In this combination, the term 'epistemology' is enriched with an

unprecedented density of meaning and is used to denote the set of all
necessary formal components (and of ideas through which we reflect these
components) of the process by which we know things in general, being
included in this pronoun ‘we’ even “the starfish and the redwood forest, the
segmenting egg and the Senate of the United States ”.11

It is quite clear that the central assumption of this definition is that our
knowing is in general only “a small part of a wider integrated knowing that
knits the entire biosphere ”12, namely, that its self-organizing mode and its
structural requirements reflect and reproduce in an essential way the broader
formal necessities of the immense biological communications network in
which it is included.

Bateson devoted great part of its effort of thought to trying to seek and to
clarify the structural correspondences that bind the human world of thinking,
knowing and communicating to the mental characteristics of the
11 GREGORY BATESON,Mind and Nature, 4
12 GREGORY BATESON,Mind and Nature, 88

great ecological systems, with the stated goal of rebuilding the fundamental
bridge between Nature and Culture that modern Western man seems to have
finally demolished. In his view, Nature and Culture do not designate two
separate and non-communicating regions of the world, but rather two great
systems of interrelationships involved in the same set of formal regularities
and structural constraints, ie in the sameepistemology.

In making this statement Bateson is aware of not being determining the

occurrence of a thought absolutely new and eccentric with respect to the
Western tradition, but rather to be recovering the fragments of an ancient and
consolidated wisdom, which in the West, more than elsewhere, has been
buried for centuries under the weight of the Personal God theology and of
Cartesian dualistic assumptions. The wisdom of the great theistic religions,
the tragic culture of classical Greece, Pythagoreanism, Platonism, mysticism
of the Gnostics and that of a poet like William Blake, the epistemology of
Kant and the theology of Teilhard de Chardin are to Bateson constant
partners in a dialogue through which he tries to reconstruct the trace of a
potentially different approach to the problem of the relationship between
Nature and Culture, and between Mind and Matter.

What emerges from this dialogue is the awareness of a necessary

correspondence between the nature of the ideas that are produced within the
human civilizations, and which inspire their self-organization, and the nature
of those most basic broad and deep ‘ideas’ that regulate and give substance
to the world of biological communication. It can rightly be argued that this
kind of awareness represents the true core of Bateson's speculative position,
since in fact his criticism of the system of science and epistemology of
Western culture is based on it.

What kind of necessity, according to Bateson, binds the epistemology of

human cultural systems to that of ecological systems and their natural history?
That is, in what sense do the ideas we have about the way in which we
produce and organize our own abstractions reflect the way in which nature
determines and organizes its own processes of communication in the great
phenomenon of life?

Not in the sense, of course, of a match that simply exists and cannot admit the
possibility of a crack, but in a way that Bateson callednormative13. As he
wrote,

“ The laws of the sequence of propositional steps in argument (or

injunctional steps in cooking and embryology) can be, and often are, broken,
and their breach is not followed by inflicted penalty or vengeance by man or
God. Nonetheless, the outcome of the sequence will depend upon the
sequence of steps, and if the sequence is in wrong order or some steps are
omitted, the outcome will be changed and may be disastrous."14

The possibility of error and of disease is implicit in all the phenomena that
have a systemic and complex nature, especially in those integrated networks
of elaborate and delicate processes we call ‘Culture’ and ‘Natural History.’

Yet, according to Bateson, the task of the culture - and in particular of the
scientific culture - is to correspond as much as possible, in its own
epistemological configuration, the essential features of its reference object. A
civilization, in fact, that produces an inadequate view of the nature of the
world to which it belongs and of its own evolutionary dynamics, must
inevitably come to be in a state of great discomfort and difficulty in managing
its relations with the world and understanding all the phenomena it is
involved in.

The roots of the ecological crisis that our civilization has determined, and of
all other problematic issues of its current historical phase, sink - in this way
- right in the misconception of the living and systemic nature of the world
with which we interact and the constraints and formal characteristics
required by our interaction.

Bateson believes that modern science - structured on data of an outdated

physics and on the theoretical assumptions of a unsustainable metaphysics -
is one of the central points of this misunderstanding.

There are in particular three epistemological errors that he finds in the

contemporary scientific system and to which he places the responsibility for
13 GREGORY BATESON,A Sacred Unity,215
14 G. BATESON, M. C. BATESON,Angels Fear, 159

its substantial obsolescence:

1) the bias that ‘quantity’ is generally more significant and influential
than ‘pattern’;
2) the inability to formulate clearly and rigorously the whole series of
concepts which are habitually used in scientific working (expecially within
those disciplines that study phenomena with distinct "mental"
characteristics ) and to make explicit the theoretical assumptions which
science indirectly refers;
3) the acquisition of abstract and lineal logic as a model of thought and
mental process in general.
From the analysis of these three errors Bateson does begin the
deconstruction of modern science metaphysics and of its role in the
systemic crisis of our civilization.

2.1 Single Vision and Newton's Sleep15

Of the three grounds that mainly undertake the Batesonian attempt of an

epistemological revision of science the one that concerns the conceptual
antagonism between the notion of "quantity" and the notion of "pattern" is
perhaps the one that can claim more credit in a significant part contemporary
scientific culture.

Although the idea of an ordered and measurable universe has its roots in the
most distant Platonic-Pythagorean tradition and has been found practically
the entire development of Western culture, it was only during the seventeenth
century that - in the wake of the astonishing success of the new experimental
Galilean physics and Newtonian celestial mechanics setting arose and
consolidated the notion that science should deal almost exclusively with
quantifiable data and calculations and with forecast.

Without delving into a complex effort of theoretical localization of essence

and metaphysical roots of modern science - effort which for obvious reasons
could never find here a space worthy enough - we can summarize and assume
some pieces of a consideration which now belongs to the critical instruments
of contemporary thought and that implicitly frames the reasoning of Bateson.
So we remind you that:
15In a letter of November 22nd1802 to Thomas Butts the great mystic and
poet William Blake lashed out at the mechanistic culture of his time by these
words: “May God us keep / From Single vision & Newton’s Sleep!”.
Bateson often quotes these verses at the very beginning of his essays.

- science exists and develops, starting from the modern age, in the essential
configuration of what Heidegger called as the “mathematical system of
reason”16;
-according to this configuration, the science establishes itself the “initial
foundation of what you may know, from and in prime propositions, which do
not themselves have a need for roots” and builds itself as the “unity of a
founded concatenation of propositions, propositions supported by the prime
propositions and adjusted on them”;
-the “dominance of the mathematics”, which connotes in a decisive manner
the essence of modern science, is the decision to reduce the knowability of
the beings to the calculation of their quantitative data and the evaluation of
their causative mechanical connections, iethose aspects that most effectively
become available to instances of operation and provocation typical of
“manipulative hands” of technology;
-the extraordinary correspondence of the initial decisions of modern science
with the demands of progress and with success of the technology determines
a new and surprising self-validating power of its essential conditions;
-in virtue of this self-validating power these prerequisites can - in a
remarkably short period of time when compared with the much slower and
more conservative time of European cultural history prior to the Renaissance
- to replace the older and more deeply rooted principles of biblical theology
in the metaphysical core of knowledge;
-prominent places of establishment of modern science as the “mathematical
system of reason” should be considered the experiences and metaphysical
positions of great thinkers of the seventeenth century as Newton, Galileo,
Bacon, and, more than any other, Descartes.
16See MARTIN HEIDEGGER, Schelling’s Treatise on the Essence of
Human Freedom(Ohio University Press, 1985)

In the context of a general as implicit assumption of this interpretation of the

mechanistic characteristics of modern scientific tradition, Bateson puts great
emphasis on the crucial role that the thought of Descartes had in the
construction of epistemology that underlies this tradition:

“[…] I find that there are two basic beliefs, intimately connected which are
both obsolete and dangerous, and which are shared by contemporary
supernaturalists and by prestigious and mechanistic scientists. The mass of
superstition now fashionable even among behavioural scientists and
physicists springs from a combination of these two fundamental and
erroneous beliefs. It is a strange fact that both of these beliefs are connected
to the same giant of philosophic thought, René Descartes. Both beliefs are
quite familiar.

The first is the idea that underlies the whole range of modern superstition,
namely that there are two distinct explanatory principles in our world,
“mind” and ”matter”. As such dichotomies invariably must, this famous
Cartesian dualism has spawned a whole host of other splits as monstrous as
itself: mind/body; intellect/affect; will/temptation; and so [[p_059]] on.

It was difficult in the seventeenth century to imagine any nonsupernatural

explanation of mental phenomena, and at that time it was already apparent
that the physical explanations of astronomy were going to be enormously
successful. It was therefore quite natural to fall back upon age-old
supernaturalism to get the problems of “mind” out of the way. This
accomplished, the scientists could proceed with their “objective” inquiries,
disregarding or denying the fact that the organs of sense, indeed our whole
range of approaches to study of “matter,” are very far from being
“objective”.

Descartes‘ other contribution also bears his name and is taught to every child
who enters a scientific lab or reads a scientific book. Of all ideas about how
to think like a scientist, the idea of using intersecting coordinates, the so-
called Cartesian coordinates, to represent two or more interacting variables
or represent the course of one variable over time, has been among the most
successful. The whole of analytic geometry sprang from this idea, and from
analytic geometry the calculus of infinitesimals and the emphasis upon
quantity in our scientific understanding..”17
17 G. BATESON, M.C. BATESON,Angels Fear, 58

From Bateson's point of view the dominance of theoretical notion of

‘quantity’ is only the most striking manifestation of a metaphysical (and
therefore epistemological) determination of modern science that leads our
vision of the world to differ from the essential nature of the world itself and,
for this reason, to generate serious distortions in the preliminary assumptions
under which we organize our practical relationship with the world.

“The belief that quantities can determine patterns is surprisingly pervasive

and influential. It is, of course, a basic premise in contemporary economics
and therefore one of the factors which determines international chaos as well
as ecological disaster on the home front. ”18

It is good to note that, at least on the side of these critical considerations,

Bateson is not a lone voice in the landscape of contemporary science. If, in
fact, it is true that since Galileo we have learned that the book of nature “is
written in the language of mathematics, and its characters are triangles,
circles, and other geometrical figures,” and if still less than a century ago a
physicist like Rutherford could say with contempt that “qualitative is nothing
more than badly made quantitative”, it is also true that the "spontaneous"
evolution of mathematics, physics and biology in particular, soon led many
scientists to notice that, as a matter of fact, in the world of our everyday
experience geometric shapes are rather an exception than a rule, and that very
unlikely you may interpret exclusively in terms of quantitative and computing
a natural reality where colours, forms, aesthetical organization and
informational exchange play such an important widespread and obvious role.

It must be said, therefore, that in the light of a now very large scientific
literature, which in recent decades has contributed critically to revise the
traditional approach of almost all the core issues of research (and which of
course we will not account here in detail19), the epistemological paradigm of
18 G. BATESON, M.C. BATESON,Angels Fear, 59
19It was mostly the problems posed by the geometric description of the
natural objects of irregular shape, the creation of models that can explain the
behavior of
modern science can no longer be regarded asa theorem, but necessarily asa
problem.

And perhaps it should be noted further that around today consciously

divergent and antagonistic visions of nature of knowledge and its systemic
foundations are increasingly confronting and clashing. It is up to Bateson, of
course, the merit of having contributed significantly to determine the
feasibility of this confrontation.

2.2 A science made of “dormitive principles”

Even the second line around which Bateson make his attempt to challenge the
epistemological status of contemporary science originates from the
comparison with the problems and the results arising from his experience as
a researcher. And even in this case observations initially linked to the
specific issue of the scientific work end up raising more radical issues that
concern the fundamental determination of our way of producing and
organizing knowledge, which is the fundamental determination of our primary
reference to the being.

In studies undertaken in the area of the behavioural sciences (anthropology,

psychiatry and ethology, in particular) Bateson soon realized that what more
than anything else was still keeping these disciplines to a

many messy and unpredictable dynamic systems and the understanding of

organizational characteristics and behaviour of living organisms and other
complex systems, to progressively highlight the inadequacy of the classical
quantitative and linear science. The reference is, therefore, to all those
theories that have favoured the recognition of the complex nature of these
problems, and among these, particularly to Mandelbrot’s fractal geometry,
Thom’s Catastrophe Theory, Prigogine’s study of dissipative structures, the
formalization of recursive properties of the systems developed by Maturana
and Varela, the hypothesis of Darwinian evolutionism revision developed by
Stephen J. Gould, Watzlawick’s pragmatic theory of communication, Haken’s
studies in synergetics and other theories of the same epistemological
relevance. Needless to reiterate that perhaps many of these theories have
influenced the work of Bateson and they were in turn influenced.

low level of scientific rigor and scarce epistemological coherence was the
inveterate habit to proceed in an almost exclusively inductive way and
multiply the explanatory hypotheses, without, however, achieving the
development of any core of ‘basic knowledge’.

In agile introductory pages of his first collection of essays, he exemplifies the

cognitive state of knowledge related to the behaviour in these words:

“Moliere, long ago, depicted an oral doctoral examination in which the

learned doctors ask the candidate to state the 'cause and reason' why opium
puts people to sleep. The candidate triumphantly answers in dog Latin:
‘Because there is in it a dormitive principle (virtus dormitiva)’.

Characteristically, the scientist confronts a complex interacting system in this

case, an interaction between man and opium. He observes a change in the
system - the man falls asleep. The scientist then explains the change by giving
a name to a fictitious ‘cause’, located in one or other component of the
interacting system. Either the opium contains a reified dormitive principle, or
the man contains a reified need for sleep, an adormitosis, which is
‘expressed’ in his response to opium.

And, characteristically, all such hypotheses are ‘dormitive’ in the sense that
they put to sleep the ‘critical faculty’ (another reified fictitious cause) within
the scientist himself. ”20
It is easy to see - according to Bateson - that the vast majority of the concepts
and assumptions which we habitually use in psychology, psychiatry,
sociology, anthropology and economics have come out of arguments very
similar to what pushes the character of Molière to postulate the existence of a
“dormitive principle.”

The incredible “mass of quasi-theoretical speculations” which is the corpus

of these disciplines and the hundreds of concepts (“ego”, “anxiety”,
“instinct”, “aims”, “mind”, “I”, “hereditary coordination”, “intelligence”,
“stupidity”, “maturity” and the like), which resulted from these speculations,
they represent a serious obstacle to any attempt to reset the problems related
to the reality of behaviour according to an epistemological model that takes
into account the true nature and complexity of this reality.

“For the sake of politeness, I call these ‘heuristic’ concepts; but, in truth,
most of them are so loosely derived and so mutually irrelevant that they mix
together to make a sort of conceptual fog which does much to delay the
progress of science.”21

The most serious aspect of this approach in certain sectors of the science is
that it also has a remarkable as insidious self-validation power. In fact,

“If we assert that opium contains a dormitive principle, we can then devote a
lifetime of research to studying the characteristics of this principle. Is it heat-
stable? In which fraction of a distillate is it located? What is its molecular
formula? And so on. Many of these questions will be answerable in the
laboratory and will lead on to derivative hypotheses no less ‘dormitive’ than
that from which we started.”22

Consider, for example, what happens whenever we bring up the concept of

“instinct.” Complex phenomena such as the intelligent behavior of a living
organism are explained in terms of a mechanical derivation from a supposed
causal reified principle. In this way, through a reductionist operation often
rougher than useful, you can avoid and exclude from the explanation
(preserving, ultimately, the scientific process itself from the danger of a deep
epistemological crisis) the analysis of the complex network of interactive
processes that is created between the structural data and the ability of
learning and informational exchanging of the living organism and those of its
environment.

It is an absolutely clear fact that the concept of “instinct” - like for example
that of “gravity” - operates simply as a principle of explanation, namely as “a
sort of conventional agreement between scientists to stop trying to explain
things at a certain point”23. But if on the one hand, Newton seems to have
been very aware at the time that he had invented and not discovered his law
of gravity, and he was therefore well aware of its exclusively fictitious
nature, on the other hand, the modern science of behavior still seem to stay
intended to invest time and energy in wasteful and unnecessary laboratory
research aimed to identify and isolate the objective correlative of the
instincts, that is, of certain reified abstractions arisen from the reductionist
anxiety of those sciences themselves.
21 GREGORY BATESON,Steps to an Ecology of Mind, Introduction, xxvi

Even more pernicious is perhaps the use to which the concept of "energy" is
submitted in this area of science. Of course, if the nebulous ideas that come
from many quarters about things like "inner energy" or "psychic energy" fail
to let our explanatory hypotheses on the phenomena of life and behavior
advance a single step, they certainly denounce an irresistible trend of science
in general to think thethingnessof things always and exclusively in terms
ofsubstance, and therefore to build its conceptual paradigms by modeling
them on that of classical physics.

Wittily Bateson remarks that,

“For at least 200 years, say from the time of Newton to the late nineteenth
century, the dominant preoccupation of science was with those chain of cause
and effect which could be referred to forces and impacts. The mathematics
available to Newton was preponderantly quantitative, and this fact,
combined with the central focus upon forces and impacts, led men to measure
with remarkable accuracy quantities of distance, time, matter and energy.
(...) The early pioneers of behavioral science not unnaturally began their
survey of behavior by desiring a similar rigorous base to guide their
speculations. Length and mass were concepts which they could hardly use in
describing behavior (whatever that might be), but energy seemed more handy.
It was tempting to relate ‘energy’ to already existing metaphors such as
‘strength’ of emotions or character or ‘vigor.’ Or to think of ‘energy’ as
somehow the opposite of ‘fatigue’ or ‘apathy.’ Metabolism obeys an energy
budget (within the strict meaning of ‘energy’), and energy expended in
behavior must surely be included in this budget; therefore it seemed sensible
to think of energy as a determinant of behavior.
23 GREGORY BATESON,Steps to an Ecology of Mind, 39

It would have been more fruitful to think of lackof energy as preventive of

behavior, since in the end a starving man will cease to behave. But even this
will not do: an amoeba, deprived of food, becomes for a time more active.
Its energy expenditure is an inverse function of energy input.

(...) If mass and length are inappropriate for the describing of behavior, then
energy is unlikely to be more appropriate. After all, energy is Mass x
Velocity2, and no behavioral scientist really insists that ‘psychic energy’ is of
these dimensions.”24

It is not improper to detect, on the sidelines of these observations, that

Kant25was perhaps the first philosopher to realize the metaphysical habit of
knowledge to deal with the explanatory principles as empirical objects and
to reify abstractions of thought, when he challenged the rational psychology
of his age on fallacy according to which the 'I think' function was reified
through the substantial reality of ‘soul’ and related to alleged scientific
speculations.

It is clear that even in the case of Bateson's reasoning the very question is not
so much a refutation of an epistemological error (here in a strict sense)
consolidated in the proceedings of certain disciplines, but rather the
identification of an additional constitutive element of that fundamental
metaphysical configuration which still exists within the system of
contemporary science. The impulse that these disciplines manifest to
consider thingness of things in rigid terms of the present and objectified
substance evidently has not foundation in any intrinsic need of performance
of the sciences as such (the same way the bias that pushes to remove
qualitative aspects and a-substantial phenomena from the explanation). It
reveals, if anything, instead essentially the appearance of thatinitial
decision- we would say in Heideggerian terms - which claimed scientific
thinking as a whole to constitute itself in the mode of this kind ofratio, or - in
terms
24 GREGORY BATESON,Steps to an Ecology of Mind, Introduction, xxix
25See IMMANUEL KANT,The Critique of Pure Reason, Book 2:
Trascendental Dialectic - Chapter 1: The Paralogisms of Pure Reason -
Section1: The Soul is Substance

closer to the language of Bateson - of that epistemologywhich preliminarily

and implicitly directs and organizes the practices or the content of our way of
knowing.

Right in reference to the possibility of interpreting the group of the criticisms

that it moves to scientific knowledge according to this perspective, Bateson's
thought shows the roots of a meditation which - as we try to clarify further -
should be considered eminently philosophical.

2.3 “The Syllogism in grass” and the metaphor that we are.

The need to confront the logic - as the intended form of Western rationality -
arises for Bateson away from problems related to the cybernetic theory of
circular retroactive causality based systems and those related to
schizophrenia and, more generally, to the complicated phenomena of
communication between men. Again, lacking a systematic and complete
discussion of the matter, it is rather the presence of a long series of
references and allusions scattered in the polemical works that allows us to
argue that the criticism of the logic as a model of scientific thought is one of
the most continuous and important leitmotif in Bateson's work.
It is necessary, before proceeding to present the arguments of this criticism,
echoing a famous Heideggerian text26, ask at the outset:: are the allegations
against the logic (in particular against the formalized deductive Aristotelian-
Scholastic logic) arguments in favor of the Alogical and Illogical, the claim
to reject the rigor of thought and access to some kind of suggestive
‘irrationalism?’ Must we agree with those who, intending to defend the
traditional epistemological positions of reductionism and mechanism, have
argued for years with Bateson, and with those who continued and developed
his ideas, linking them to the image of ‘gurus’ adept at producing unscientific
suggestions and fascinations but all in all unrelated to the rigor and validity
of the orthodox science?

Even without taking a position on the merits of the dispute, it is entitled to

highlight the fact that the issue plays certainly a central role in the more
general context of the epistemological problem raised by Bateson. And we
may also notice that a critical comparison with the logic, to the extent that it
is necessarily a comparison with the fundamental mode of organization and
self-determination of Western knowledge and thought, can never be solved,
or even just set, in the restricted scope of the specific scientific problem, that
is in the dimension of a purely technical question or a question concerning
science methodology.
26See MARTIN HEIDEGGER, Pathmarks, Letter on Humanism(Cambridge
University Press 1998)

Its own very nature makes the question about the logic - whenever and
wherever it arises - a question that moves in the direction of fundamental
ontological problems (and perhaps it is superfluous, at this point, to make
reference again to Heidegger as the other site of the twentieth century thought
in which the question of logic openly raises in intimate connection to the
most radical and decisive questions of fundamental ontology).

Bateson's first criticism of the logic arises close to the interpretation of the
circular causation systems.
It is known that the cybernetics as a science arose precisely from the
development of the concepts of positive and negative feedback, through
which it was possible to give a correct and not supernatural formal
description of all those complex systems in which the informational exchange
proceeds along circular paths. If you think that nature seems, in the light of
the most advanced discoveries and theories, practically be organized only in
systems that have characteristics of cybernetic circuits, you can perhaps
realize the importance of a correct interpretation of them for the advancement
of science.
A very simple example of a cybernetic circuit is given by the common device
of an internal combustion engine. Bateson writes:

“Imagine a machine in which we distinguish, say, four parts, which I have

loosely called ‘flywheel’, ‘governor’, ‘fuel’ and ‘cylinder’. In addition, the
machine is connected to the outside world in two ways, ‘energy input’ and
‘load’, which is to be imagined as variable and perhaps weighing upon the
flywheel. The machine is circular in the sense that flywheel drives governor
which alters fuel supply which feeds cylinder which, in turn, drives
flywheel. Because the system is circular, effects of events at any point in the
circuit can be carried all around to produce changes at that point of origin
”27.

In such a system the adjustment mechanism can either be arranged such that
the operation of the system grows exponentially until it reaches a certain
vanishing point and a component of the system necessarily breaks down, or it
can be made so as to react when growth reaches a certain critical threshold,
and return the parameters of operation within acceptable values, keeping the
system in a state of equilibrium. In the first case the informational exchange
between the components of the system gives rise to a “positive feedback
loop”, in the second case we speak of a “negative feedback”.

The hypothesis of Bateson (and of all scientists who gave birth to the
cybernetics movement in the late 40s) is that the basic scheme of that circuit
is common to all mental systems, that is to all those systems in which the
interaction between the parties takes place on the basis of an informational
exchange.
In particular, all the communication dynamics within the cultural systems,
(those which are covered by anthropology), all the self-regulation
mechanisms of environmental ecosystems, as well as the whole process of
evolution of living species can be properly described and understood only as
cybernetic systems.

This assumption – to which Bateson, however, devoted all his work as a

researcher and investigator - inevitably leads to a new determination of the
concept of ‘cause’ and that of ‘effect.’

If it is true that the complex natural systems always operate in such a way that
A produces B and B necessarily affect retroactively the new state of A, the
attribution of the definitions of cause and effect within the A-B system loses
its traditional meaning and its traditional rigidity. Only a lineal attitude, i.e. a
way of thinking that rejects the feedback hypothesis and the idea of
circularity, can generate - in front of the given apparently selfcorrecting
systems - the two fundamental errors ofmechanism(the position that the cause
determines always unidirectionally the effect) and ofteleologism (the
position for which the effect is instead to determine the occurrence of a cause
to it adequate).

“What is the case is that when causal systems become circular [...], a change
in any part of the circle can be regarded ascausefor change at later time in
any variable anywhere in the circle. It thus appears that a rise in the
temperature of the room can be regarded as the cause of the change in the
switch of the thermostat and, alternatively, that the action of the thermostat
can be regarded as controlling the temperature of the room ”28.

The history of modern evolutionism is to Bateson a typical example of how

these two perspective errors of traditional science can face each other for
generations without being able thereby to improve the level of knowledge
and the quality of interpretation.

Classical deductive logic comes into this discussion because it is actually the
true implicit model of all lineal positions of this kind, and it is therefore
absolutely a bad model of causality. In fact:
“When the sequences of cause and effect become circular (or more complex
than circular), then the description or mapping of those sequences onto
timeless logic becomes self-contradictory. Paradoxes are generated that pure
logic cannot tolerate ”29.

What is in particular the inadequacy of logic as a model of causality? The

answer, however simple, it seems astonishing:
“Theif...thenof causality containstime, but theif...thenof logic is timeless. It
follows that logic is an incomplete model of causality ”30.

It is worth venturing incidentally the hypothesis that this annotation on the

difference between causality and logical deduction contains the germ of a
possible new determination of the essence of time. It seems implicit here
28 GREGORY BATESON,Mind and Nature, 60
29 GREGORY BATESON,Mind and Nature, 58

the idea that time belongs much more than to the measure of human thought, to
the essence of the matter itself. Let us leave unspoken and intentionally not
thought this possible implication of the reflection of Bateson, and let us
reiterate the idea that this reflection betrays at every point a thickness and a
problematic philosophical fecundity much larger than it appears at a first
surface and apprehension.

The opposition to the logic however, finds its most fertile ground in another
side of Bateson's argument. It is a topic that recurs with some frequency in
the writings of the great English epistemologist, and that is well stated in a
clear and concise paragraph of the 2nd chapter of the posthumous
essayAngels Fear. Because, despite its agile and plan style, it contains a
number of allegations very complex and full of implications, it is necessary
to lend him great attention.

“[…] the ‘logic’ of metaphor is something very different from the logic of the
verities of Augustine and Pythagoras. Not, you understand, 'wrong' but totally
different. [It may be, however, that while particular metaphors are local,
theprocess of making metaphorhas some wider significance -- may indeed
be a basic characteristic of Creatura].

Let me point up the contrast between the truths of metaphor and the truths that
the mathematicians pursue by a rather violent and inappropriate trick. Let me
spell out metaphor into syllogistic form: Classical logic named several
varieties of syllogism, of which the best known is the ‘syllogism in Barbara’.
It goes like this:

Men die;
Socrates is a man; Socrates will die.

The basic structure of this little monster -- its skeleton -- is built upon
classification. The predicate ('will die') is attached to Socrates by identifying
him as a member of a class whose members share that predicate. The
syllogisms of metaphor are quite different, and go like this:

Grass dies;
Men die;
Men are grass. [In order to talk about this kind of syllogism and compare it to
the ‘syllogism in Barbara’, we can nickname it the ‘syllogism in grass’]. I
understand that teachers of classical logic strongly disapprove of this way of
arguing and call it 'affirming the consequent', and, of course, this pedantic
condemnation is justified if what they condemn is confusion between one
type of syllogism and the other. But to try to fight all syllogisms in grass
would be silly because these syllogisms are the very stuff of which natural
history is made. When we look for regularities in the biological world, we
meet them all the time.

Von Domarus long ago pointed out that schizophrenics commonly talk and act
in terms of syllogisms in grass and I think he, too, disapproved of this way of
organizing knowledge and life. If I remember rightly, he does not notice that
poetry, art, dream, humor, and religion share with schizophrenia a preference
for syllogisms in grass.

But whether you approve or disapprove of poetry, dream, and psychosis, the
generalization remains that biological data make sense – are connected
together -- by syllogisms in grass. The whole of animal behavior, the whole
of repetitive anatomy, and the whole of biological evolution – each of these
vast realms is within itself linked together by syllogisms in grass, whether
the logicians like it or not.

It's really very simple – in order to make syllogisms in Barbara, you must
haveidentified classes,so that subjects and predicates can be differentiated.
But, apart from language, there are no named classes and no subjectpredicate
relations. Therefore, syllogisms in grass must be the dominant mode of
communicating interconnection of ideas in all preverbal realms.

I think the first person who actually saw this clearly was Goethe, who noted
that if you examine a cabbage and an oak tree, two rather different sorts of
organisms but still both flowering plants, you would find that the way to talk
about how they are put together is different from the way most people
naturally talk. You see, we talk as if the Creatura were really Pleromatic: we
talk about ‘things,’ notably leaves or stems, and we try to determine what is
what. Now Goethe discovered that a ‘leaf’ is defined as that which grows on
a stem and has a bud in its angle; what then comes out of that angle (out of
that bud) is again a stem. The correct units of description are not leaf and
stem but the relations between them.

These correspondences allow you to look at another flowering plant -- a

potato, for instance -- and recognize that the part that you eat in fact
corresponds to a stem.

In the same way, most of us were taught in school that a noun is the name of a
person, place, or thing, but what we should have been taught is that a noun
can stand in various kinds of relationship to other parts of the sentence, so
that the whole of grammar could be defined as relationship and not in terms
of things.

This naming activity, which probably other organisms don't indulge in, is in
fact a sort of Pleromatizing of the living world. And observe that
grammatical relationships are of the preverbal kind. ‘The ship struck a reef’
and ‘I spanked my daughter’ are tied together by grammatical analogy ”31.
Let us try to highlight and summarize the ideas that are more or less
implicitly assumed in this reasoning:
1) classical logic, namely that peculiar system of formalization of human
thought patterns based on deductive inferences, it is proposed - and is
traditionally welcomed - as a model of communication processes;
2) in particular, in the formulation of classical logic, propositions and
deductive links between propositions are based entirely on the ability to
analyzethe sentences, i.e. to distinguish clearly within them asubjectto a
predicate, assigning the terms to strictly defined classes;
3) if logical thinking is essentially organized on the possibilities of a
language that distinguishes originally a subject from a predicate, then the
metaphor is what most radically opposed to it, since it is precisely the
process that originally just ignores the possibility of that distinction;
4) it is quite clear that the logical thinking finds its possibility only under
specific conditions of human language, and that in all pre-verbal areas (but
also in very broad areas of human communication) the information has not
previously assigned to logical classes and through this assignment then
recognized and accepted, but it rather follows transmission rules which are
formally identical to those of the metaphor;
5) deductive logic, as a model of thinking (i.e. as a model of the transmission
and organization of ideas) is utterly inadequate to reflect the processes that
normally occur in the world of living organisms and mental systems.
Communication between mammals, the coding of genetic information, but
also the organization of behavioral relations among men and a huge range of
other natural phenomena presuppose communicative processes that have a
consistent internal structural very similar to what we call metaphor, and do
not show, however, no trait in common with the patterns of inference of
abstract logic.
To the extent that the natural history of human thinking (which is widely made
of curious processes such as humor, puns, associations of ideas, insights,
mysticism, schizophrenia and poetic creation) reflects the fundamental modes
of the phenomena of the living world (all of which are governed on
communicative rules that do not recognize the existence of the subject, but
only deal with the identification of predicates, ie the basic information that
you give in the form of differences), the assumption the abstract logic as a
model of thought itself seems almost comparable to a kind of evolutionary
error.
What are the implications of such a reflection on the more general
epistemological problem raised by Bateson in respect of contemporary
science?
The problem, remember, is ultimately escape from the dead end (crisis in
relations between men, the crisis of the man/environment relationship) in
which our civilization is hunted because of a fundamentally incorrect
interpretation of the nature of the world of which it is itself a part. Western
science, as has been said, is the eminent place of self-constituting and
selfvalidating of this interpretation.
If the objections raised about the conceptual dominance of the quantity on the
pattern, about the disproportionate tendency to proliferate inductive
hypotheses without testing and reviewing some of the epistemological
premises of such a procedure, and about the metaphysical assumptions of
dual nature wherever directing scientific research, already pose problems
which cannot be resolved in the context of science itself, the terms of
comparison with the unsustainability of logic seem to hint at something even
more fundamental.
What is captured here is in fact the link between the attitude of Western
rationality to think the being of Beings always and only in the way of present
and objectified substance (and therefore its intrinsic difficulty to relate
properly to a world that shows instead to be organized entirely on
differences and relationships, that is absolutely non-substantive and
nonobjectified events) and the original arrangement of language, within
which this rationality is actually to unfold.
The language (not as this or that specific language, but as the intended form
of at least every Western language) is what prepares for the thought the
possibility of thinking of reality as if it were made up of subjects which bring
upon themselves, act, interpret or undergo predicates and accidents of
various kinds.
The belonging of thought to the language looks absolutely more intimate and
original than any other possible determination of it.
The Western ratio is the inescapable destiny of the language of subjectivity.
Only where the language waiver of its nature, dissolves its internal structure
and frees itself within the ancient possibilities of metaphor (that is to say, in
particular, within poetry, art and religion) the thought is allowed a different
and alternative way to happen.
From these observations Bateson outlines and delivery, in response to the
epistemological crisis of our civilization, the skeleton of a real project for
thought.
Science will have to rewrite its own language and its own premises
experiencing a new integration with those other areas of our tradition which
have preserved over time the ability of a different reference to the being of
things, especially with art and religion.
This new integration is the task that awaits the next generation of scientists
and thinkers.
There is still a problem, however, for Bateson as for all of us: to understand
in what way we can properly and efficiently devote to it.
31 GREGORY BATESON, M.C. BATESON,Angels Fear, 26-27

3 BIRTH OF AN EPISTEMOLOGICAL MATRIX

One of the most unique characters of Gregory Bateson's epistemological

thesis lies in their ability to present itself in the guise of ‘stories,’ that is,
arguments that essentially ignore the static finality of definitions and escape
the lure of the firm statements, preserving and showing instead frankly all the
signs of its diachronic development, its temporal nature. Much of agility and
elegance that characterize all the writings of Bateson is linked to this way of
turning every idea and every theory - even those of which the author seems to
be absolutely convinced always in the form of a problem and never an
assertion that rigid. Assumptions are never separated from a clear and aware
assessment of their own limitations; observations are always strictly
contextualized in the data of subjective experience that produced them;
theories never claim to have a reliable and stable form, as if they had never
undergone changes over time, but instead they often go along with an open
discussion and criticism of their own ‘evolutionary history,’ uncertainties,
hazards, setbacks and ‘inexplicable beliefs’ that have directed their
development.

These connotations mean that the epistemology of Bateson can rightly be

considered as a whole as one big controversy addressed to that knowledge
that establish itself in total unawareness or dishonest concealment of its
implicit assumptions and inherent temporal limitations.

And, if this is true, then it is also true that this epistemology cannot be taken
into consideration as a theory among others, but rather deserves to be taken -
in a more original and more profound sense - as apossibilityfor the thought
and knowledge, a clear example of how you can actually proceed along a
path of questioning and integrate gracefully the fact that this questioning with
the explicit consciousness of the reasons of its own internal evolutionary
motility.

To respond adequately to this possibility, any exegetical attempt should also

try to unfold in a diachronic perspective of time and to avoid the inevitable
temptation to ‘photograph’ (that is to stiffen in a motionless and ultimate
image) what instead shows to be perfectly set in the dimension of its own
mobility, partiality and impermanence.

That would be necessary – for a theoretically profitable work - that comment

and interpretation were able to reproduce to some extent the same trend and
the same constitution for ‘stories’ of the ideas to which they are directed.

However, since the expectations of this research are very modest and
limited, we choose to discuss the conceptual elements of Bateson's
epistemology by isolating them from their real discursive context and
registering the form in which they present themselves in the most mature
moment of the speculative path of the author. At the same time, we admittedly
assume all the inevitable dose of arbitrariness and inadequacy inherent in
this way of proceeding.

We have already highlighted the fact that Bateson's epistemological proposal

has been built, in the course of a long history of scientific research, as an
integrated network of ideas, concepts, definitions and methodological
principles, which only slowly and with difficulty have come to fit connected
in the plot of a larger and recognizable unitary meaning. It was also said that
the level of interdependence between these elements is such as to suggest the
use of the term ‘ecosystem’ to designate the complex.
In this ‘ecosystem’ of thoughts some ideas serve as general coordinates of the
whole matrix, and the frequency with which Bateson uses them to account for
any other theory or idea automatically puts them on a level of singular clarity.

None of these conceptual tools are properly invented by Bateson. They are
all derived from other cultural sources, in truth also different among them,
but in his speech they acquire a significance and a new and interesting
dynamic at all.

Finally, let us say at the outset that it is primarily in these ‘places’ of

Bateson's epistemology that one can see the traces of that fundamental
ontological position which we have repeatedly mentioned so far, and which
remains the true leading object of the present exploration.

3.1 Pleroma and Creatura.

The distinction between ‘Plèroma’ and ‘Creatura’ dates back, in its first
known version, to Valentinus, a mystical thinker of Christian Gnosticism who
lived in the second half of the 2nd century AD. It was then taken up and re-
actualized by Carl Gustav Jung in one of his recent and less famous writings,
entitledSeptem Sermones to Mortuos.

Bateson believes that this distinction can be a valuable starting point for an
epistemology that wants to break free from misunderstandings of materialism
and supernaturalism and put in an explicit alternative to the Cartesian
Matter/Spirit dualism.

Pleroma and Creatura do not coincide with the two traditionally opposing
classes of inanimate things and living things. More generally, these terms and
their antinomy do not designate any of the regions in which it is possible to
divide the whole of beings in virtue of any ‘substantial’ or ‘essential’
prerogative.

Pleroma and Creature are rather the names of two initial modes of
occurrence and conceptual description of the factual reality, two large
categorical chances of phenomenal happening, ie, the names of two ‘worlds’.
The difference between these ‘worlds’ is the presence or absence in them of
what Bateson called “mental process.” In particular, the ‘world’ of inanimate
things, considered as accessible to the descriptive possibilities of chemistry
and physics, to the extent that it is devoid of those informational exchanges
and of that sensitivity to difference that distinguishes the phenomena of life
and mental organization, is the ‘world’ of the Pleroma. Everywhere,
however, the events are mutually governed and determined by difference,
distinction and information, and reveal a complex organization such as to be
essentially irreducible to the plane of physical-chemical linear causal
explanation, there exists the <world> of the Creatura. Bateson writes:

“The world of nonliving matter, the Pleroma, which is described by the laws
of physics and chemistry, itself contains no description. A stone does not
respond to information and does not use injunctions or information or trial
and error in its internal organization. To respond in a behavioural sense, the
stone would have to use energy contained within itself, as organisms do. It
would cease to be a stone. The stone is affected by forces and impacts, but
not by differences.

I can describe the stone, but it can describe nothing. I can use the stone as a
signal – perhaps as a landmark. But itisnot the landmark. I can give the stone
a name; I can distinguish it from other stones. But it is not its name, and it
cannot distinguish. It uses and contains no information. ―Itǁis not even anit,
except insofar as I distinguish it from the remainder of inanimate matter.
What happens to the stone and what it does when nobody is around is not part
of the process of any living thing. For that it must somehow make and
receivenews.

You must understand that while Pleroma is without thought or information, it

still contains – is the matrix of – many other sorts of regularities. Inertia,
cause and effect, connection and disconnection, and so on, these regularities
are (for lack of a better word)immanentin Pleroma. Although they can be
translated (again for lack of a better word) into the language of Creatura
(where alone language can exist), the material world still remains
inaccessible, the Kantian Ding an sichwhich you cannot get close to. We can
speculate – and we have speculated very carefully and very creatively about
it – but in the end, at the last analysis, everything we say about Pleroma is a
matter of speculation, and such mystics as William Blake, for example,
frankly deny its existence ”32.

It is important to notice that the distinction between Creatura and Pleroma

does not in any way call into question the substantiality of the beings, but
relates to the organizational principles intrinsic to the phenomena and open,
therefore, a different and traditionally forgotten direction to thought in the
consideration of the real.

“ Although there is an apparent dualism in this dichotomy, between Creatura

and Pleroma, it is important to be clear that these two are not in any way
separate or separable, except as levels of description. On the one hand, all of
Creatura exists within and through Pleroma; the use of the termCreatura
affirms the presence of certain organizational and communicational
characteristics which are themselves not material. On the other hand,
knowledge of Pleroma exists only in Creatura. We can meet the two only in
combination, never separately. The laws of physics and chemistry are by no
means irrelevant to the Creature – they continue to apply – but they are not
sufficient for explanation. Thus, Creatura and Pleroma are not, like Descartes
'mind' and 'matter', separate substances, for mental processes require
arrangements of matter in which to occur, areas where Pleroma is
characterized by organization which permits it to be affected by information
as well as by physical events ”33.

The Pleroma and Creatura duality is definitely one of the most significant
segments of the epistemological matrix described by Bateson's thinking. But
it is also one of the places where most evidently the ontological dimension of
this thought is to constitute.

It is completely peaceful, in fact, that the radicalism with which Bateson

opposes the criteria (descriptive/organizational) on which the Pleroma and
Creature antinomy rests to the substantialist determinations that describe the
more usual antagonistic pairs Spirit/Matter and Mind/Body, in itself marks a
conscious exit of his meditation from the horizon of the PlatonicChristian-
Cartesian metaphysics of subjectivity that is pervading the entire tradition of
Western knowledge and thought. As we later will show, it is in fact through
reconstructions of certain ‘abandoned spaces’ of this same tradition, that
Bateson produced the experiment of a fundamentally different ontological
position and of a practice of thinking that, in its injunctive connotations, is
undoubtedly subversive and divergent with respect to what, in the course of
many centuries, has originally let our civilization access the thought and the
world.

3.2 Immanent Logical Types.

The second "intellectual tool" that Bateson buys from Western philosophy
and adapts to the needs of its proposal is the so-called logical ‘type theory’.

This theory was formulated by Bertrand Russell at the beginning of the

century in order to overcome a contradiction that he had discovered in the
logical system of foundation of mathematics developed by Gottlob Frege.

At some point in his treatise Frege asserted that a class could be a member of
another class or of itself, causing by this assertion a number of serious
contradictions that threatened to undermine the entire deductive system.
Russell clarified the misunderstanding which Frege had incurred and
demonstrated the inconsistency of that statement through the elaboration of
the concept of logical ‘type’.

The confusion made by Frege was similar to that present in this inference:

The sky is blue;

Blue is a color;
So the sky is a color.

It consisted in operating a predicative act between logically noncontiguous

elements.
Russell understood that between the logical plane of the ‘individuals’ and
that of ‘predicates of individuals’, between the latter and that of ‘predicates
of predicates of individuals’ and so on, there is an unbridgeable distance of a
‘jump’ between logical hierarchical and non-communicating levels, and that,
assigned to each of these levels a ‘type’ (0, 1, 2, 3, ...) the only lawful
propositions are exclusively those ones in which the subject is of the type n
and the logical predicate is of the type n+1. Therefore, the inference
presented as an example is incorrect because it lays down a predicative
relation between “heaven” and “colour” although these terms are in the
speech of non-contiguous logical types, and, likewise, Frege's assertion is
incorrect because no class can contain itself as a member (ie, something that
is of its same logical type) but a class can belong only to a hierarchically
superior set as a ‘class of classes’.
Similarly to what has been done about the concepts of the Pleroma and
Creature, Bateson reveals even for this theory a possibility to use an
intellectual fecundity far superior to those conferred by its inventor himself.
In particular, he realizes that the hierarchical structure of logical types is
immanent to a huge number of physical and mental phenomena and it is the
rule that is at the source of many of the cases of ‘mistake’ and ‘disorder’ that
can occur in the complex world of the Creature.
Bateson realizes, for example, that the relation between the name and the
designated thing (and therefore between the plane of reality and the plane of
description) is to be interpreted as a difference between logical types, having
in fact the name (and, more generally, the act of the description) a
hierarchically higher level than that of the thing and therefore irreducibly
distinct and distant from it. Similarly, he discovers that the map has a higher
type logical than that of the territory; that acceleration is a physical quantity
whose type logical is higher than speed, and that (always keeping to the his
most frequent examples) the word “tumbleweed” has the same logical type of
“bush” or “tree”, since it does not indicate a species or a genus of plants but
a particular set of plants whose members have their own unique way to grow
and propagate.
Bateson also shows, in the course of detailed scientific analysis, that the
complex mechanisms of genetic coding and the processes of learning are
structured on strict rules of logic type theory and that, in general, these rules
are a key piece of the network of “necessary truths” which forms the
ontological boundary (or “pattern that connects”) of reality as such.
Correspondingly, they are therefore also accepted in the epistemological
matrix Bateson means to build to determine the possibility of a description
(which we have defined elsewhere ‘echographic’) of this reality.

3.3 Idea, information, difference.

It is significant that the text under which Bateson was brought to the attention
of a wide audience and not just specialists, namely the collection of essays
entitledSteps Towards an Ecology of Mind, starts by explaining a few things
about the innovative use of the word ‘idea’ that the author proposes in these
essays and that he actually takes up in the course of his entire intellectual
work.

The notion of ‘idea’ has a very central location in the epistemological matrix
I am trying to describe and is the main gateway to the ontological nature of
the problem from which this matrix springs and to which it corresponds.
Bateson writes:

“The essays, spread over thirty-five years, combine to propose a new way of
thinking about ideas and about those aggregates of ideas which I call ‘minds’.
This way of thinking I call the ‘ecology of mind’, or the ecology of ideas. It
is a science which does not yet exist as an organized body of theory or
knowledge.

But the definition of an ‘idea’ which the essays combine to pro-pose is much
wider and more formal than is conventional. The es-says must speak for
themselves, but here at the beginning 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 relationship to him
environment, can only be understood in terms of such an ecology of ideas as I
propose.

The questions which the book raises are ecological: How do ideas interact?
Is there some sort of natural selection which determines the survival of some
ideas and the extinction or death of others? What sort of economics limits the
multiplicity of ideas in a given region of mind? What are the necessary
conditions for stability (or survival) of such a system or subsystem? ”34

All scientific and not scientific issues raised by Bateson are constantly
presented in the form of questions relating to ‘ecological’ connections and
relationships between types of ideas or systems of ideas. Also notable is the
fact that this way of expressing the description / understanding of reality has
led Bateson to question, in his last and unfinished intellectual fatigue, about
the very essence of what is produced in the determination and recognition of
an ‘idea’, and - moving from this query - to deal with those questions and that
knowledge that traditionally science rejects as foreign to itself and the
religion instead preserves as its most intimate resource. In Angels Fearin
fact, he explicitly declares:
34 GREGORY BATESON,Steps to an Ecology of Mind,Introduction,xxiii

“Even though we can discuss the ideas which we ‘have’ and what we
perceive through our senses, and so on, the enveloping question, the question
of the nature of the envelope in which all that ‘experience’ is contained, is a
very different and much more profound question, which approaches matters
that are part of religion.

I come with two sorts of questions posed by these stories: What is the nature
of the continuum or matrix of which or in which “ideas” are made? And what
sorts of ideas create distraction or confusion in the operation of that matrix
so that creativity is destroyed?”35

Bateson is aware that the vastness of his formal definition of ‘idea’ recalls
very closely the fundamental ontological position of the Platonism and, in a
lighter brilliant note posted in theIntroductionof the essay onMind and
Nature, explicitly evokes this illustrious precedent to clarify his personal use
of this concept:

“ Plato's most famous discovery concerned the ‘reality’ of ideas. We

commonly think that a dinner plate is ‘real’ but that its circularity is ‘only an
idea.’ But Plato noted. first, that the plate is not truly circular and, second,
that the world can be perceived to contain a very large number of objects
which simulate, approximate, or strive after ‘circularity.’ He therefore
asserted that ‘circularity’ is ideal (the adjective derived from idea) and that
such i deal components of the universe are the real explanatory basis for its
forms and structure. For him, as for William Blake and many others, that
‘Corporeal Universe’ which our newspapers consider ‘real’ was some sort
of spin-off from the truly real, namely the forms and ideas. In the beginning
was the idea.”36
35 GREGORY BATESON, M.C. BATESON,Angels Fear,70
36 GREGORY BATESON,Mind and Nature,4

The notion of ‘idea’ has a clear heuristic connotation in Bateson's speech,

being ultimately a conceptual tool almost intuitively learned that
preliminarily introduces to the tonal horizon of investigation. But it has also
and above all a clear ontological dimension to the extent that it is endeavored
to designate in general all those abstractions that operate immanently in
reality constituting its own essential structure or primary foundation.

‘Idea’ is defined elsewhere by Bateson as “a complex aggregate of

information,” an ‘information’ being “any difference that makes a difference
”37. According to this definition it is clear that the ‘idea’ - as a not material
structure which operates in the necessary self-constitution of matter and in its
processes of description – belongs to the ontological plane of ‘difference’.

Thinking reality as an integrated unity held in its integration and need by

‘ideas’ ultimately means to be disposed to think the essence of the beings in
terms of differing of a difference.

Inquiring about the nature of the difference, in a fast but extraordinarily dense
paragraph, Bateson observes:

“[...] difference is dimensionless because it tends to be a ratio between two

similars of some kind; and ratios between similars have no dimensions
because the dimensional aspect ‘cancels out.’ The difference between these
things is still the difference between these things after I mail this thing to
Alaska or to any other place. We deal with something that is not localized
and that is, in a certain sense, not physical. On the other hand, it can trigger a
sense organ.
What you do as a perceiver, always, is to compare. If you do not have an
external event to trigger you, you make an event by a scanning process so that
the yellow of the paper against the brown of the table can be perceived by
micronystagmus. The difference becomes an event in time. ”38

At the end of the same essay, Bateson then clarifies the epistemological
37 GREGORY BATESON, M.C. BATESON,Angels Fear, Glossary,209

implications of this recognition:

“[...] although the realm of ideas, information, mind - call it what you will is
immanent in, and inseparable from, the realm of physical appearences, it
must be approached with its own special preconceptions and premises. The
physical analogies will not do, and the analogies of method taken from the
hard sciences will not do.

The new science will form around profoundly nonphysical ideas: the nature
of the relation between name and that which is named, the nature of recursive
systems, and the nature of difference. ”39

On the basis of a juxtaposition of those collected quotations, we are now

able to reconstruct a considerable chunk of that ontological position which is
being built between the lines of Bateson's reflection and which I assumed to
be the prime reference of this work.

Reiterating to be aware of making a markedly ‘plastic’ but - as I believe I

have shown - in any event unfounded and arbitrary exegesis let us summary
the steps taken by Bateson in the direction of such an ontology:

1) reality is an integrated unity of phenomena and processes whose

integration is based on a matrix of abstractions or ideas in itself necessary
and immanent;

2) the task of science and thought is to recognize this matrix and take it on the
foundation of its epistemological self-determination;
3) ideas, around which structure the reality of real, are complex aggregates
of differences, that is absolutely not physical, not localizable, dimensionless
entities, whose last and essential nature is that ofevents located in time;
4) the knowledge of modern science – guiding in its basic guidelines our
relationship with the world – firm in a substantialistic consideration of
beings, has become inadequate to resolve the critical inconsistencies in
which it also has precipitated this relationship;
5) an epistemologically well renewed science and able to fit the reality to
with reference to which it is made, must abandon its traditional implicit
metaphysical position and start from a question that asks about the nature of
the difference, which is about the Being of beings conceived as a eventuality.
Although lacking in Bateson a complete discursive organization of this
ontological issue and perhaps even missing a clear philosophical awareness
of it; although this way to highlight the speculatively most fruitful legacy of
his reflection is equivalent to rush there instead where even “angels fear to
tread” and, therefore, all things considered, to betray the complex delicacy
and uncertainty of Bateson's thinking, I am nevertheless persuaded that this
thought practices to the bottom the injunction to a non-traditional way of
experiencing the sense of being and the nature of things, and that only by
agreeing to such an ontological initial tone it is possible to capitalize on his
legacy.

3.4 What is amind

All the conceptual tools by which Bateson defines the framework of its
epistemological matrix come together into the formalization of the notion of
‘mind’. The distinction between Pleroma and Creatura, the theory of logical
types, the concepts of ‘idea’ and ‘difference’ - developed independently in
other parts of his scientific work and meditation - are the indispensable
presupposition of the theory of mental systems which Bateson reached in the
last years of his life and that, in hindsight, remains its most important
contribution to contemporary science. The formal definition of ‘mind’
proposed in the last essay that he was able to publish in life is the instrument
through which all the problems of its investigation are reset and, above all,
the conceptual horizon within which, for our author, the research their
possible solutions must be moved. In particular, the questions about the
nature of aesthetic experience and its relevance in the processes of
communication and interaction, the question about the nature of the 'sacred'
and knowledge held by religion and the meaning of the idea of ‘self’ and
‘consciousness’ - evidently questions on horseback between knowing and
thinking, between science and philosophy - are captured and addressed by
Bateson in reference to its rigorous and innovative formal rewriting of the
concept of ‘mind’. And this is enough to convince us of the central role that it
plays in the epistemological problem that we are trying to rebuild and in its
possible ontological implications.

Bateson's thesis is that a ‘mind’ is a system that meets a precise list of

descriptive criteria and that only within minds it is possible to find those
complex phenomena we call thought, evolution, ecology, life, learning.
These criteria are discussed in detail inMind and Nature(1979), where,
however, they are presented together with a remarkable artwork. Therefore, I
just summarize them assuming as undisputed the reflection from which they
spring and focusing our attention instead on their necessary scientific and
philosophical implications. This is the way Bateson enunciates the criteria40:

1. A mind is an aggregate of interacting parts or components.

2. The interaction between parts of mind is triggered by differenceand
difference is nonsubstantial a phenomenon not located in space or time,
difference is related to negentropy and entropy rather than to energy.
3. Mental process requires collateral energy.
4. Mental process requires circular (or more complex) chains of
determinations.
5. In mental process, the effects of difference are to be regarded as
transforms (ie, coded versions) of events which preceded them.The rules of
this transformation must be comparatively stable (ie, more stable than the
content), but are themselves subject to transformation.
6. The description and classification of these processes of transformation
disclose a hierarchy of logical types immanent in the phenomena.
It seems clear that, according to such a determination, the concept of ‘mind’
is stripped of all its traditional connotations and becomes the denotative
element of a series of very heterogeneous entities, even if all united by the
fact of possessing a high degree of complexity and autonomy, and manifesting
processes similar to thought and evolution. Animals and people definitely
fall under this definition, and indeed more generally, it covers all living
organisms. But certain parts of organisms characterized by a certain
autonomous functioning and self-regulation, such as single cells or organs,
may be considered ‘minds’, in the sense of the definition proposed by
Bateson. But the most significant consequence of this definition is that in
order to recognize the presence of a mental system

“ there is no requirement of a clear boundary, like a surrounding envelope of

skin or membrane, and you can recognize that this definition includes only
some of the characteristics of what we call ‘life.’ As a result, it applies to a
much wider range of those complex phenomena called “systems”, including
systems consisting of multiple organisms or systems in which some of the
parts are living and some are not, or even to systems in which there are no
living parts. What is described here is a something that can receive
information and can, through the self-regulation or self-correction made
possible by circular trains of causation, maintain the truth of certain
propositions about itself. The two provide the rudiments of identity – unlike
the stone, the mind we are describing is an ‘it’. There is, however, no reason
to assume that it will be either conscious or capable of self-replication, like
some of the minds we count among our friends and relatives. A given mind is
likely to be a component or subsystem in some larger and more complex
mind, as an individual cell may be a component in an organism, or a person
may be a component in a community. The world of mental process opens into
a self-organizing world of Chinese boxes in which information generates
further information.”41.
40 GREGORY BATESON,Mind and Nature,92

The idea of ‘mind’ has such a wide connotation (but at the same time such a
rigorous one) that it includes local and planetary ecosystems and certain
particular human systems in which the exchange of information and internal
interaction reach sufficient levels of complexity and show to behave as
autonomous entities in some extent self-correcting and evolving, such as
‘cultures’, ‘communities’ or ‘family groups’.

Remarkable is the fact that instead computers do structurallynot meet all the
criteria set out to recognize the mental process and that therefore they cannot
be considered ‘minds’ in any way. Bateson writes:

“We use to argue about whether a computer can think. The answer is, ‘No’.
What thinks is a total circuit, including perhaps a computer, a man, and an
environment. Similarly, we may ask whether a brain can think, and again the
answer will be, ‘No’. What thinks is a brain inside a man who is part of a
system which includes an environment ”42.
41 GREGORY BATESON, M.C. BATESON,Angels Fear,19

We understand, without great difficulty, that the idea of the mental process
proposed here fits in many of the discussions in which contemporary science
is involved, revolutionizing their same basic approach and giving them an
absolutely new and rare conceptual and methodological clearness.

Of particular interest are the implications regarding the consideration of

concepts such as ‘I’, ‘self’ and ‘subject’, which receive, on the basis of that
analysis of the characteristics of mental systems, a complete renovation and a
revision of its epistemological and philosophical meaning. In fact

“if mind is a system of pathways along which transforms of difference can be

transmitted, mind obviously does not stop with the skin. It is also all the
pathways outside the skin relevant to the phenomenon that you want to
account for ”43.

And also:

“To draw a boundary line between a part which does most of the
computation for a larger system and the larger system of which it is a part is
to create a mythological component, commonly called a ‘self’. In my
epistemology, the concept of self, along with all arbitrary boundaries which
delimit systems or parts of systems, is to be regarded as a trait of the local
culture – not indeed to be disregarded, since such little epistemological
monsters are always liable to become foci of pathology. The arbitrary
boundaries which were useful in the process of analyzing the data become all
too easily battlefronts, across which we try to kill an enemy or exploit an
environment ”44.

Bateson appears to be quite convinced that the concepts of ‘I’ and ‘identity’,
especially when they are interpreted in a strong way - as traditionally
happens in Western scientific philosophical and religious culture - are the
expression of a metaphysical position concealing the recognition of systemic
connections subsisting in the whole of beings, pushing to suppress the
perception of being partakers of processes and needs greater than our small
individual subjectivity and leading to ethical attitudes marked by hubris and
violence.
43 GREGORY BATESON,A Sacred Unity,165

Without anticipating the issues that will be the last part of this work, let us
point out that the notion of ‘mind’ not only represents the central block of the
whole matrix epistemological profiled by Bateson but it establishes itself as
the most significant point of intersection of the scientific matter with more
philosophical and ontological issues. ‘Mind’ is in fact the most complex and
important one of those necessary pattern of reality identified by Bateson's
epistemological discourse, as well as the means by which this discourse is
ready to deal explicitly with the task of a ‘break’ with the fundamental
philosophical dualist and substantialist position of Western thought and
knowledge and with the metaphysics that underlies them, pointing to a
possible monistic solution of the question at the basis of all human
civilization: the mind / body problem.

Bateson is aware that, only on the basis of the response which is prepared to
this initial question, the man interprets and builds its relationship with the
world, its historical identity, the nature of everything he is to be and do. This
answer, which automatically determines the center and the pattern of every
possible human epistemology, has for Bateson a meaning similar to that
which in (not so distant) Heidegger's meditation has the initial reference to
the Sense of Being. I take this analogy, of course, just to clarify the
speculativeextentof the problem.
Around the mind / body problem reflection about the implicit patterns of
thought and knowledge, reflection on the patterns of the actual and necessary
ethics and ecology are to defile and get confused. Bateson himself moreover
- legitimizing considerably the present reading of his work openly declares
that if “for all human purposes with what can be known, there can be no clear
line between epistemology and ontology ”45.
45 GREGORY BATESON, M.C. BATESON,Angels Fear,19

4 THE BEAUTIFUL, THE SACRED, THE DEATH.

TOWARDS A MONISTIC SOLUTION OF MIND / BODY
PROBLEM.

Bateson often defined his research as the relentless attempt to clarify the
nature of the Riddle of the Sphinx and the deadlines by which it is generally
possible to answer it. The Riddle of the Sphinx is the question that puts man
moving towards the understanding of his own humanity, and therefore, in this
sense, the metaphysical center around which every civilization historically
implements its self-understanding, makes up and perceives the image of its
own place in the world and assesses the nature and extent of its own
contradictions. That is why Bateson thought of primary importance that our
answer to the Riddle of the Sphinx was “in accordance with the current
functioning of living systems” and that contemporary science undertook to
devote all its resources to build and defend the reasons for this agreement
and this fragile as necessary consistency.

The Riddle of the Sphinx is the place where every culture faces and solves -
or sometimes leaves unspoken and hidden - the problem of fundamental
epistemology (in the meaning this word is characterized by Bateson), and so
it is easily recognizable as the implicit content of all those forms of
knowledge that play a somehow foundational role in human civilization, such
as religion or art. But, more specifically, what is the question which it is
placed and is likely to grow in importance as radical for the purpose of
considering that mankind in general has of itself and of its relations with
what we call “the world” ? The question is, according to Bateson, - as has
already been partially anticipated at the end of the previous chapter - that of
the relationship existing between ‘mind’ and ‘body’.

The problem of the mind/body relationship is the necessarily preliminary

stress which, according to Bateson, each activity carried out from inquiring
of science refers to. At the same time, it is also the only authentic interface
that connects knowledge arising in the body of the more and more distinct
and not communicating traditions of human work. In fact, the set of ideas that,
in the fields of science, art, religion or politics, are to play a role somewhat
analogous to that an epistemological framework always finds its first roots
and its ultimate reference in this problem. To the extent that these ideas, on
the one hand, are necessarily influenced in their appearance and in their
structure from the initial understanding of the mind / body relationship and,
on the other hand, contribute indirectly and constantly to redefine the meaning
and consideration of this relationship, they inevitably interact validating each
other or each other giving rise to more or less significant and disturbing
contradictions.

Conversely to what happens in the epistemological constitution of human

cultural systems, even in the system of ideas woven from Gregory Bateson,
the problem of the mind / body relationship has the character of a hub and a
unifying axis between the various regions that comprise his interest as a
scientist and thinker. We can indeed say that, precisely because of the fact
that every question raised by Bateson in the various fields in which his
research ranged (from anthropology to psychiatry, from epistemology to
ontology) was always a question having in mind that one and the same
question, his thinking ultimately realized his original aspiration to build itself
as a local subsystem of the larger system of ideas that binds the human
culture and the biosphere itself, of which it was able to reproduce the
internal consistency, epistemological constraints and necessary features, as
well as the unmistakable grace.

It is good to clarify that the problem of the mind / body relationship, as it is

conceived by Bateson, does not coincide with the problem of the relationship
between our mind and our body. This specific theme is accepted in
reflection only as it exemplifies the sense of a problem that is instead thought
of in terms much broader and more inclusive.

The question asking about the mind / body relationship is actually a question
that asks about the connections that bind the abstract ideational and
organizational components of reality to its material substrate. Only as such it
is a question that brings together the foundation of any possible investigation
directed to any of the aspects of the being and has the dignity of the initial
query and foundational knowledge. Of whatever nature the relationship of
knowledge that binds man to his environment, it can never avoid to face the
need to provide an explanation to some extent understandable of the way in
which concrete elements and tangible things in the world that is around us
interact with abstractions, and of how forms and ideas come to determine the
behavior of matter. For this reason, the effort to make the ‘mental’ with
‘corporeal’ coexist in understanding is the problematic basis on which every
tradition of knowledge and the epistemological self-building of every
civilization rest on.

In an attempt to demonstrate the importance that this kind of question has

historically played in the determination of the fundamental characteristics of
cultures, Bateson compares the contents and structure of creation myths of
ancient religions, highlighting the fact that - despite the interpretations within
which they were subsequently imprisoned - their most authentic content is in
close relation with the initial problem of the mind / body relationship and
that religion is, in general, a form of knowledge developed almost for the
purpose of protecting and preserving the answer with respect to this problem
peoples have historically developed. This comparison is significant in the
context of a discussion that tries to explain how at the origin of the systemic
crisis of our civilization there is a concern relating to this question, that there
is an explosion of a conflict between the epistemological assumptions on
which traditionally it our vision of the world was ruled and the structural
needs of the biological nature of it. The discussion also indicates to
contemporary science the task of finding a solution to this conflict as its most
urgent and important task.

Bateson writes:
“Consider, for example, the central origin myth of Judaeo-Christian peoples.
What are the fundamental philosophic and scientific problems with which
this myth is concerned?

In the beginning God created the heaven and the earth. And the earth was
without form, and void; and darkness was upon the face of the deep. And the
Spirit of God moved upon the face of the waters.

And God said, Let there be light: and there was light. And God saw the light,
that it was good: and God divided the light from the darkness. And God
called the light Day, and the darkness he called Night. And the evening and
the morning were the first day.

And God said, Let there be a firmament in the midst of the waters, and let it
divide the waters from the waters. And God made the firmament, and divided
the waters which were under the firmament from the waters which were
above the firmament: and it was so. And God called the firmament Heaven.
And the evening and the morning were the second day.

And God said, Let the waters under the heaven be gathered together unto one
place, and let the dry land appear: and it was so. And God called the dry
land Earth; and the gathering together of the waters called he Seas: and God
saw that it was good.

Authorized version

Out of these first ten verses of thunderous prose, we can draw some of the
premises or fundamentals of ancient Chaldean thought and it is strange,
almost eerie, to note how many of the fundamentals and problems of modern
science are foreshadowed in the ancient document. (1) The problem of the
origin and nature of matter is summarily dismissed. (2) The passage deals at
length with the problem of the origin of order. (3) A separation is thus
generated between the two sorts of problem. It is possible that this separation
of problems was an error, but—error or not—the separation is maintained in
the fundamentals of modern science. The conservative laws for matter and
energy are still separate from the laws of order, negative entropy, and
information.
(4) Order is seen as a matter of sorting and dividing. But the essential notion
in all sorting is that some difference shall cause some other difference at a
later time. If we are sorting black balls from white balls, or large balls from
small balls, a difference among the balls is to be followed by a difference in
their location—balls of one class to one sack and balls of another class to
another. For such an operation, we need something like a sieve, a threshold,
or, par excellence, a sense organ. It is understandable, therefore, that a
perceiving Entity should have been invoked to perform this function of
creating an otherwise improbable order.
(5) Closely linked with the sorting and dividing is the mystery of
classification, to be followed later by the extraordinary human achievement
of naming.

It is not at all clear that the various components of this myth are all products
of inductive reasoning from experience. And the mat-ter becomes still more
puzzling when this origin myth is compared with others which embody
different fundamental premises.

Among the Iatmul of New Guinea, the central origin myth, like the Genesis
story, deals with the question of how dry land was separated from water.
They say that in the beginning the crocodile Kavwokmali paddled with his
front legs and with his hind legs; and his paddling kept the mud suspended in
the water. The great culture hero, Kevembuangga, came with his spear and
killed Kavwokmali. After that the mud settled and dry land was formed.
Kevembuangga then stamped with his foot on the dry land, i.e., he proudly
demonstrated ‘that it was good.’

Here there is a stronger case for deriving the myth from experience combined
with inductive reasoning. After all, mud does re-main in suspension if
randomly stirred and does settle when the stir-ring ceases. Moreover, the
Iatmul people live in the vast swamps of the Sepik River valley where the
separation of land from water is imperfect. It is understandable that they
might be interested in the differentiation of land from water.

In any case, the Iatmul have arrived at a theory of order which is almost a
precise converse of that of the book of Genesis. In Iatmul thought, sorting
will occur if randomization is prevented. In Genesis, an agent is invoked to
do the sorting and dividing.

But both cultures alike assume a fundamental division between the problems
of material creation and the problems of order and differentiation.”46

Of the many and extraordinary ideas and suggestions that it would be

possible to draw from this beautiful page of anthropology (which for
understandable reasons it was necessary to quote in full), we limit ourselves
here to discuss those most relevant to our reasoning.

It is useful to insist - also on the basis of reported speech - that the problem
of the mind/body relationship is never reduced by Bateson to the theme of the
relationship between the human body and his mind, so that the intellectual
thickness of his meditation stands out and away from the work of many of his
followers or the content of certain debates that currently hold court at some
pseudo-scientific environments.

The mind/body question is the issue that involves the essential relationship
that must exist between the formal (or abstract) components and the material
components of reality as such. In this sense it is a purely ontological issue
attacked by Bateson at the crossing point between his experiences of
empirical scientific research and his path of epistemological reflection.
Anyway, it is the connotation itself of the concept of “mind” made by Bateson
to strictly impose this approach to the problem.

The mind / body relationship, so considered, is the authentic content of the

basic knowledge that is expressed in science, as well as in religion and in
other dominant regions of the human culture. With it the tradition of many
civilizations on the planet has paid a dualistic interpretation essentially
based on the recognition of a dissociation between two dimensional planes
of the being and, at the same time, on the unaware misunderstanding of the
complex nexus of integration that exists between them as well. This kind of
interpretation is at the origin of epistemological confusion and systemic
crisis that our society is going through: to correct its character in a markedly
monistic way must be the task of the thought and knowledge of our age.
Which way, according to Bateson, can you access this new integrated rather
than dualistic interpretation of the relationship and interaction between the
‘mental’ and the ‘corporeal’? In part this question has already been
answered. The previously considered formal redefinition of the concept of
‘mind’, in fact, plays a role in this regard as an absolutely essential
conceptual tool. Only through a different - more abstract and more rigorous –
assumption of the category of ‘mental system’, and then through an innovative
assessment of the ‘holistic’ properties of these systems, Bateson believes that
we can tackle the task of an epistemologically correct apprehension of those
events and phenomena in which the complex interpenetration of material
needs and immanent abstractions becomes primarily evident.
46 GREGORY BATESON,Steps to an Ecology of Mind, Introduction, xxx

Therefore let us reconstruct the main steps taken by Bateson toward a

monistic solution of the mind / body problem by examining just the way he
sets the analysis of three of these particular categories of phenomena: the
aesthetic experience; the experience of the sacred; the manifestation and
dissolution of individual consciousness.

4.1 The holistic properties of mental systems.

Before passing on to the way in which Bateson rereads in the prospect of a

new monistic epistemology, the themes of the beauty, the sacred and the
consciousness, it is necessary to clarify the terms under which he strictly
defines and uses the concept of ‘holism’, in order to clear up some
misunderstandings of our discussion in which some contemporary literature
could make us incur. Bateson himself was very aware of the fact that the
category of ‘holistic properties’ was in need of a precise conceptual
connotation that evades the mystification of “the preacher, the hypnotist,
therapist and missionary”47. As he wrote in the last years of his life:
47It is worth quoting in full a poem published inAngels Fear, 5, which makes
clear the way Bateson sees its cultural legacy and the dangers to which it is
necessarily exposed. Title of poem isThe manuscript: “So there it is in
words / Precise / And if you read between the lines / You will find nothing
there / For that is the discipline I ask / Not more, not less / Not the world as
it is / Nor ought to be - / Only the precision / The skeleton of truth / I do not
dabble in emotion / Hint at implications / Evoke the ghosts of old forgotten
creeds / All that is for the preacher / The hypnotist, therapist and missionary
/ They will come after me / And use the little that I said / To bait more traps /
For those

“ ‘Holistic’ is a popular word today, occurring most often in phrases like

‘holistic medicine,’ referring to a multitude of views and practices, ranging
from homeopathy to acupuncture, from hypnosis to psychedelics, from the
laying of hands to the cultivation of the alpha rhythms, from Hinduism to Zen,
from the bedside manner to the ultimate depersonalization of diagnosis by
astrological typing. And so on.

Men have hoped for holistic solutions for a long time. The word itself goes
back to Smuts in the 1920s and is defined in the OSD as ‘the tendency in
nature to produce wholes from the ordered grouping of units’. The systematic
thinking that makes it possible to give precise, formal, and nonsupernatural
meaning to the word goes back to the nineteenth century. It is there we find
the early contributors to this thinking about wholes and to the formal relations
between information and organization, including Claude Bernard (the ‘milieu
interieur’), Clerk Maxwell (his ‘demon’ and his analysis of the steam engine
with a governor, 1870), Russel Wallace (natural selection, 1858), and a man
of special interest to doctors – the 'Old Doctor' Dr Andrew Still. Old Still
was the founder of osteopathic medicine. In the late nineteenth century, he got
the idea that the pathologies of the body could be due to disruption of what
we today call communication – that the inner physiological organization of
the body could be a matter of message transport and that the spinal cord was
the principal clearinghouse through which all messages had to pass. He
argued that by manipulation of the spine it should be possible to cure all
pathologies. He went a little crazy, I think, as men do who have ideas a
hundred years too soon. He came to believe that his ideas would cover not
only the may defects whose focus indeed is related to the spine, its postures
and its messages, but also that similar theories could be applied to bacterial
invasions and so on. This got him into trouble, but still and all, he was an
earlyholistin precisely the sense in which I want to use the word.
”48
who cannot bear / The lonely / Skeleton / of Truth”.
48 GREGORY BATESON, M.C. BATESON,Angels Fear,179

This passage contains some very important assertions to understand

Bateson's use of the concept of ‘holism’ and its implications in contemporary
scientific debate.

As it is written in the Glossary published as an appendix to almost all his

works and collections of writings, ‘holism’ is defined as “the tendency in
nature to produce from the ordered grouping of parts complex wholes with
properties that are not present in or predictable from the separate parts”, and
its adjective ‘holistic’ refers to “modes of acting and observing that are
attentive to holistic properties.” Defined in this way it becomes the key
concept to be able to interpret, without recourse to supernatural explanations
or crude reductionist positions, all those phenomena that show a complex
integration of matter and abstract components.

If you accept the idea that a system - as such - always has properties greater
than the sum of the properties of its parts, then there is no need to resort to
mechanistic and spiritualist extremism to set a comprehension of such events
as the functions of a living cell, the intelligent behavior of an organism or the
aesthetic attitude of men, because all these realities appear as epiphenomenal
properties of particularly complex mental systems.

Bateson writes:

“I want to suggest that the word 'holistic' has taken on an almost new and
much more precise meaning since World War II, and that this new and
precise meaning gives hope of a deep revision of occidental culture. It is
becoming clear that the mysterious phenomena we associate with ―mindǁ
have to do with certain characteristics of systems that have only rather lately
come within the purview of science. These include:
- The characteristics of circular and self-corrective systems,
- The combination of such systems with information processing,
- The ability of living things to store energy (I use the word in its ordinary
physical sense – ergs, foot-pounds, calories, etc), so that a change in some
sense organ (the receipt of news of a difference) may trigger the release of
stored energy.

There are a few other points that go to make up the new ways of thinking
about purpose, adaptation, pathology, and, in brief, life, and these are being
explored in the fields of cybernetics, information theory, systems theory, and
so on. But here I want to call attention to a condition of our time – that as the
conventional ways of thinking about mind and life collapse, new ways of
thinking about these matters are becoming available
– not only to ivory-tower philosophers but also to practitioners and to the
‘man in the street.’ Historically, the new developments, which became
conspicuous in Word War II and the period following, have almost totally
altered everything that we say and think about mental process and about the
body-mind as a total, living, self-correcting, and self-destroying entity.
Cybernetics in its widest sense is, so far as I know, the only serious
beginning of thinking about wholes in any formal way.

If we approach the phenomena of mind with these new tools, then genetics
and the whole determination of shape and growth – that which determines the
symmetry of your face, with an eye on each side of a nose
– all of that which is steered by message material from DNA – can be
recognized as a part of the mental organization of the body. A part of the
holism. If, the, we pose the double question,‘What is a man that he may
recognize disease or disruption or ugliness?’and ‘What is disease or
disruption or ugliness that a man may know it?’the new ways of thinking
provide a bridging answer, in the assertion that a self-recursive
communication system may be aware of disruption of its own function. It may
have pain and many other types of awarenesses. It may also be aware or
harmony in its own function and that awareness may become the basis for
awe and an awareness of beauty in the larger and more inclusive system.”49

Here we find already the core argument of the discussions that will be
developed later.
It is very important to note, finally, that the question concerning the notion of
‘holism’ is posed by Bateson in explicit connections with the theory of
mental systems, and thus with the problem of the mind/body relationship of
and the epistemological crisis of our civilization. The fundamental belief that
moves Bateson is that

“It should now be possible to find a more stable theoretical stance. We need
such a stance to limit the excesses both of the materialists and these who flirt
with the supernatural. And further, we need a revised philosophy and
epistemology to reduce the intolerance that divides the two camps. ‘A plague
on both your houses!’Mercutio exclaims as he dies.
49 GREGORY BATESON, M.C. BATESON,Angels Fear,180-181

And I assert that we know enough today to expect that this improved stance
will be unitary, and that the conceptual separation between ‘mind’ and
‘matter’ will be seen to be a by-product of – a spin-off from –an insufficient
holism. When we focus too narrowly upon the parts, we fail to see the
necessary characteristics of the whole, and are then tempted to ascribe the
phenomena which result from wholeness to some supernatural entity.”50

On the basis of this rigorous intellectual tool Bateson developed his original
interpretation of the issues relating to beauty, the sacred and the nature of
individual ego.

4.2 Epistemology of the beautiful.

The research Bateson carried out around the problem of the nature of
aesthetic experience - as well as those he carried out about the meaning of
the sacred and of religious knowledge, and the limitations of the concept of
‘consciousness’ - actually offer insights so wide as to be legitimately objects
of specific meditations and essays. The way I deal with here, however, is
consciously approximate and synthetic. Recall, in fact, that the purpose of
this work is not to provide an exhaustive exposition of Bateson's point of
view on each of the many issues with which he came in contact, but it is,
much more modestly, to suggest the possibility to see through the cracks of
his complicated intellectual legacy the features of a ‘different thinking,’ an
ontological position that is essentially innovative relating to prevailing
Western metaphysical tradition.

The consideration of the problems related to the aesthetic experience is not

developed by Bateson in a unified and organic way. Rather, it is left to a
series of assertions and observations we find in all his production, according
to the tested method of “keeping a little bit of everything everywhere,”
without ever worrying about running out or leading to systematic fulfillment
of any of the themes that he held under his reflection.

The first thing you are required to think about the problem of aesthetics is the
already discussed distinction between Pleroma and Creatura. The phenomena
of artistic creation, production and recognition of the beauty in fact represent
an area of experience that undoubtedly privileges Creatural ways of thinking.
A work of art is, by Bateson, the outcome of mental process just like “the
conch or the crab or the human body.”

“The thought that enters into its creation generally involves multiple cycles of
self-correction, repeated testing and listening, correcting and editing.
Sometimes we may see the results of calibration in the swift curve drawn by
the practiced hand of the Zen master, as sure as the hawk stooping to its prey
after eons of evolution. [...] Every work of art depends on a complexity of
internal relations and can be seen as another in that family of examples that
can be looked at to understand 'the pattern which connects' and the nature of
Creatura.”51

The beauty of an artwork, just like the beauty of living organisms, is such
because it can be seen as an epiphenomenal sign of a complex mental system
which works (iethinks) in an integrated, circular, self-correcting way and
which is able to tirelessly restore the conditions of its internal balance. Such
a system - a system that is able to create art or to express beauty - always
gives rise, according to Bateson, to stochastic processes, namely processes
that are the outcome of the combined action of deterministic and epigenetic
components with random components.
Insofar Creatural realities are all characterized by such holistic properties, it
is clear that the aesthetic attitude is no longer something that only covers the
narrow experience of man, but it is rather a sphere of phenomena that puts
human experience in close relationship of affinity and correspondence with
what happens in the whole world of the biological and mental process. In
this sense, the epistemology that supports the understanding of aesthetic
reality is necessarily a monistic epistemology in a double meaning: because
through the assumption of the ideas of ‘self-correcting system’ and ‘mental
process’ it unifies in its explanatory model material factors and abstract
factors; and because it may be seen as a possible starting point to overcome
the traditional view of the specificity of the human condition as separate and
opposed to the rest of nature and to affirm the essential epistemological and
ontological unity of the living world.

Aesthetics is one of the fundamental modes of internal organization of the

organisms of Creatura and at the same time, it is their mutual relation. For
this reason the knowledge that develops around it (the knowledge
accumulated by those who create art, the knowledge in general responsible
for the recognition of the beauty and the same knowledge that comes from the
reflection that takes place around this kind of problems) undergoes the
conditioning of all those epistemological patterns that filter and establish our
relationship with reality and, in equal measure, contributes to validate or
modify its essential aspects. Knowledge that deals with aesthetic problems
cannot therefore be separated from knowledge that deals with the behavior,
because it is intimately linked to the processes by which we build the image
of ourselves and of our place in the world.

“ It may be, however, that the dichotomy between moral and aesthetic is a by-
product of the premise of mind/body division or of the similar division
between consciousness and the remainder of mind. Certainly occidental
people expect to be more aware of and more articulate about moral
judgments than about aesthetic. We say,‘de gustibus non est disputandum'as
though the aesthetic were no suitable subjects for doubt or scientific analysis.
And yet we agree that some people, more skilled in this matters than others,
are able to contrive objects or sounds which those others can agree are
beautiful.
We know little of what makes some teachers, some political leaders, some
gardeners, some psychotherapists, some animal trainers, and some aquarium
keepers great. We say vaguely that these skills depend uponart rather than
science. Perhaps there is a scientific truth behind this metaphor.

We know virtually nothing about the processes whereby a baseball pitcher

computes his action or whereby a cat estimates her jump to catch a mouse.
But it is certain that these computations arenotdone the way an engineer
would do them: the cat and the pitcher do not use the differential calculus.”52

The real core of aesthetic experience is for Bateson the ability for a mental
organism of a certain complexity torecognizethe characteristics of its own
deeper systemic organization in othermental systems. On this basis, the
aesthetic expertise is basically the skill to use ideas derived from perceiving
your own internal organizational model as the "central metaphor" in
reference to which you build your relationship with the world.

“ If it be true that certain people are specially gifted in the art of acting upon
complex systems with homeostatic or ecological characteristics, and that
these people do not operate by spelling out the interaction of all relevant
variables, then these people must use some inner ecology of ideas as an
analogic model. (By ‘ideas’ I mean thoughts, premises, affects, perceptions
of self, etc.)

But if this skill is, in some sense, really an ‘art’, then it is possible that the
inner ‘ecology of ideas’ is a close synonym of what might also be called
aesthetic sensibility.”53

Of course, as the aesthetic skills has an intimate connection to the problem of

recognizing systemic integration, its proper exerting can become one of the
avenues for reasserting, at the epistemological bottom of our civilization, the
awareness of the monistic nature of the world we belong to and a no more
confrontational and antagonistic vision of our
52 GREGORY BATESON,A Sacred Unity, 255
53 GREGORY BATESON,A Sacred Unity, 256
relationship with the being.

The meditation on the aesthetics set by Bateson thus becomes a tool used to
explicitly raise the issue of our initial and foundational reference to the
essence of beings and to the ethosthat necessarily arises from this reference.
Gracefully writes our author:

“ [...] I shall argue that the very nature and purpose of art and poetry is to
exemplify the creativity of mind and that this is the appropriate fundamental
theorem for a science of aesthetics. In creativity, mind is brought together,
and this integration is a close synonym of ‘beauty’. Wordsworth mocks that,
to ‘Peter Bell’,

A primrose by a river’s brim A yellow primrose was to him, And it was

nothing more.

To the poet, the primrose can be something more. I suggest that this something
more is, in fact, a more self-reflexive recognition. The primrose resembles a
poem and both poem and primrose resemble the poet. He learns about
himself as a creator when he looks at the primrose. His pride is enhanced to
see himself as a contributor to the vast processes which the primrose
exemplifies.

And his humility is exercised and made valid by recognizing himself as a tiny
product of those processes. Even within his own living, his conscious self is
little more than a middleman, a publisher and retailer of the poems.

[...] the creative filter between us and the world, is always and inevitably
there. This it is to be both creature and creator. This the poet knows much
better than the biologist.”54
54GREGORY BATESON,A Sacred Unity, 263-264
4.3 Epistemology of the sacred.

If the epistemology of aesthetic facts seems to be closely connected with the

idea that certain mental systems are able to perceive and recognize their own
internal systemic organization, the epistemology of those experiences that
arise in the context of singular things we call ‘the sacred’ revolves around
the idea instead of the special type of relationship that, in general,
necessarily constrainthe parttothe whole.

Since the reflections on the nature and significance of the sacred are perhaps
the most problematic and difficult to manage heritage of Bateson’s, and
because he himself seems to consider these observations particularly
relevant, especially in last writings, it is necessary to address the issue by
adopting the same measures of methodological caution taken by our author.

Bateson was perfectly aware that this is the only territory “where even the
angels fear to tread”, and that there is no way to approach it with the
vehemence or anxiety typical of those who want summarily resolve in a few
rigidly defined concepts the thickness of the problematic issue, perhaps to
draw from such a solution tools and techniques to manipulative acting. He
knows also that the role historically played by religion in our civilization
(largely associated with the experiences of intolerance, obscurantism and
violence) and the language by which we are traditionally used to deal with
these questions inevitably are likely to affect the very meaning of reflections
he developed and to seal off access to the chance of thinking about the sacred
and religion in radically renewed terms.

Any statement made in this area of things is always and only a problem. Any
issue you are able to reach through thinking about this kind of assertions is
always necessarily partial and provisional. This is the kind of discipline to
which the reasoning of Bateson (and in general of every great thinker)
constantly invites us.

Proceeding, however, in a consciously reductive way (and therefore to some

extent necessarily in a risky and inadequate way), let us now summarize the
main observations that Bateson inferred from the interpretation of certain
places (of literature, wisdom and experience) traditionally associated with
religion and the sacred. According to Bateson:
1. the experience of the sacred is generally linked to the recognition sudden
and not searched – of thebiological natureof the world to which we belong;

2. it is in some way connected with the idea that it is necessary not to

communicatesomething in certain circumstances;
3. the sacred has always an integraldimension and its most striking feature is
the ease with which this dimension may be disturbed or compromised;
4. the idea of the sacred is radically and fundamentally opposed to the idea
of ‘conscious purpose;’
5. knowledge of religions preserves the awareness of the constraints and
necessary epistemological rules on which rests the functioning of the great
environmental ecosystems and those complex interaction systems that are
human communities;
6. knowledge of religions reflect in its intimate constitution the
characteristics of the sacred, in particular its dependence on the need not to
communicate some informations to avoid compromising the integrity of the
whole;
7. the way of conceiving the ideas of ‘god’, the ‘sacrament’ and the nature of
religious experience strongly influences the way we relate the reality as a
whole;
8. the theology of the ‘personal god’, with its idea of a creator separated
from his creation and a purposeful order immanent in the world is the
implicit model of each dualistic position as well as the metaphysical root of
each provocative and manipulative attitude to the Being. All these
observations are not taken simply as the outcome of an acute anthropological
intuition and left to the status of more or less empirical thoughts, but are
instead made the subject of an attempt to a formal and rigorous explanation
carried out through the use of the conceptual tools of cybernetics and systems
theory.
Thus, for example, the bond between the sacred and the need not to
communicate is read in relation to the problem of how the information
propagates within complex systems. The debate is Bateson:

“What is it that men and women hold sacred? Are there perhaps processes in
the working of all living systems such that, if news or information of these
processes reaches other parts of the system, the working together of the
whole will be paralyzed or disrupted? ”55

And elsewhere:

“If we think of information as traveling in a network of trains of cause and

effect, does it then become possible for us to describe in some formal way
how any given message is located in the network and thence to identify which
(even ‘true’) messages should not - for the sake of the whole system
- be located where? ”56

The interpretation of this aspect of the experience of the sacred in relation to

issues that affect the circuital organization of mental systems would pave the
way for asking in another passage, the question whether it is necessary to add
to the criteria already identified to describe the formal structure of ‘mind’ an
additional criterion: the need that in mental process the information should be
distributed unevenly among the interacting parts. The remarkable thing about
this part of Bateson’s argument is that, through explanatory models derived
from cybernetics, he determines the opportunity to discuss in a non-allusive
or suggestive way, but rigorously and formally issues that relate to the nature
of not-knowing and secrecy , that is, of what in religion is generally called
and known as the ‘mystery’.

This type of investigative procedure is adopted for each of the issues

Bateson raises about the sacred and religion. Placed in a position of
equidistance between the lineal unilateral and therefore unsustainable
opinions of spiritualism (which makes a rational and not-imaginative
discussion and understanding of the reality of the sacred virtually
impossible) and materialism (which solves the complex and problematic
phenomena linked to religious experience essentially by denying them in their
consistency and their actual meaning), Bateson’s analysis has the merit of
addressing traditionally far from science issues by employing the very tools
of advanced and rigorous science, even if renewed in its epistemological
basis. It states tersely amonisticviewpoint, which is able to correspond the
complexity of the real by matching in the explanation mechanical needs and
formal principles of organization, and by refusing any dualistic separation
between material and immaterial.
55 GREGORY BATESON,Angels fear, 81

But the very core of Bateson’s theoretical reflection about the nature of the
sacred lies within the idea that when a ‘mental body’ makes a religious
experience what happens to him is actually to discover that his individuality
is not in any way separate from the world around, and to recognize that he is
only a part of a system with mental characteristics far more vast and complex
and to change, for this recognition, the perception of its own identity and its
place.

“What has been said so far can be read as argument or evidence for the
reality of very large mental systems, systems of ecological size and larger,
within which the mentality of the single human being is a subsystem. These
large mental systems are characterized by, among other things, constraints on
the transmission of information between their parts. Indeed, we can argue
from the circumstance that some information should not reach some locations
in large, organized systems to assert the real nature of these systems – to
assert the existence of that whole whose integrity would be threatened by
inappropriate communication. By the word ‘real’ in this context, I mean
simply that it isnecessary for explanationto think in terms of organizations of
this size, attributing to these systems the characteristics of mental process (as
defined by the criteria listed in chapter 2). But it is one thing to claim that
this is necessary and not surprising and quite another to go on to say,
however vaguely, what sort of mind such a vast organization might be. What
characteristics would such minds expectably show? Are they, perhaps, the
sort of thing that men have called gods? The great theistic religions of the
world have ascribed many sorts of mentality to the highest gods, but almost
invariably their characteristics have been derived from human models. Gods
have been variously imagined as loving, vengeful, capricious, long-suffering,
patient, impatient, cunning, incorruptible, bribable, childish, elderly,
masculine, feminine, sexy, sexless, and so on. What mental characteristics
are to be expected in any large mental system or mind, the basic premises of
whose character shall coincide with what we claim to know of cybernetics
and systems theory? Starting from these premises, we surely cannot arrive at
a lineal, billiard-ball materialism. But what sort of religion we shall develop
is not clear. Will the vast organized system have free will? Is the
―Godǁcapable of humor? Deceit? Error? Mental pathology? Can such a God
perceive beauty? Or ugliness? What events or circumstances can impinge
upon this God‘s sense organs ? Are there indeed organs of sense in such a
system? And limitations of threshold? And attention? Is such a God capable
of failure? Frustration? And, finally, consciousness? The great historical
religions of the world have either answered such questions without pausing
to note that these are questions that permit more than one answer, or they
have obscured the matter under a mass of dogma and devotion. To ask such
questions may indeed disturb faith, so that the questions themselves might
seem to define a region where angels would appropriately fear to tread. ”57

Without dwelling on all the possible implications of Bateson’s reasoning and

on all its internal development, let us stress the fact that redefining the very
concepts of ‘god’ and ‘the sacred’ apart from the traditional Creator-creature
dialectic and anchoring them to the issue of recognition fabric regularity and
structural constraints on which rests the proper functioning of immanent
mental systems of ecological dimensions and of the relationship between the
‘whole system’ to the various 'local systems', it means the possibility of
preparing a radical innovation of the epistemological basis deep in our way
of thinking and putting us in touch with the world.

The challenge Bateson intends to launch is to recognize among the most

advanced scientific discoveries of our time, a number of fundamental
principles kept in some of the epistemological components of traditional
religions and make them the basis for a rapprochement between these two
regions of knowledge, for the purpose of establishing a new integrated and
monistic vision of reality and knowledge. Mainly because of this intent,
therefore, the reflection on the sacred is one of the most significant
theoretical places where evidently the decisive change of reference to the
ontological dimension of reality - which entire Bateson's thinking seems
geared toward – prepares to arise.

4.4 The boundaries of ‘Self’.

The third problematic junction around which the possibility of a monistic
approach of the mind/body relationship outlines is the nature and meaning of
what we mean by the notion of ‘Self’ or ‘individual consciousness’. Also in
this case the amplitude of the themes that Bateson raised in reference to this
problem is such that our discourse necessarily must be turned into a concise
summary. It is, again, to retrace the central places of Bateson's thinking in
order to show its relevance to the more general question of the ontological
dimension of this thought.

The arguments around the aesthetic experience and the experience of the
sacred have shown that from the point of view of a strictly monistic
epistemology it is possible to developed an explanation of phenomena in
which the mixture of material and immaterial reaches extraordinary levels of
complexity by interpreting them as epiphenomenal properties of systems that
possess 'mental' organizational and procedural characteristics. The basic
hypothesis is that such a system may include within its spontaneous abilities
the skill to recognize the pattern of its own internal organization in other
systems in some way similar to it, and to recognize itself as a part (or a
subsystem ) of a system with similar characteristics but of enormously larger
dimensions.

In the same terms arises, according to Bateson, the problem of

‘consciousness’. It is quite reasonable (and explainable by the conceptual
tools of cybernetics and systems theory) that a mental system, which has
achieved a remarkable degree of organizational complexity, can manifest
among its properties even something like a self-conscious feeling or that
intricate web of ideas and perceptions which we call ‘Self’.

Bateson knows that such an interpretation of the reality of those phenomena

that refer to a ‘conscience’ first forces to revise our most traditional and
deep-rooted ideas about the boundaries and limitations of the individual
mind system.

“The basic rule of systems theory is that, if you want to understand some
phenomenon or appearance, you must consider that phenomenon within the
context of allcompletedcircuits which are relevant to it. The emphasis is on
the concept of the completed communicational circuit and implicit in the
theory is the expectation that all units containing completed circuits will
show mental characteristics. The mind, in other words, is immanent in the
circuitry. We are accustomed to thinking of the mind as somehow contained
within the skin of an organism, but the circuitry isnotcontained within the
skin.

Consider the case of a man felling a tree with an ax. Each stroke of the ax
must be corrected for the state of the cut face of the tree after each chip flies.
In other words, the system which shows mental characteristics is the whole
circuit from the tree to the man’s sense organs, through his brain to his
muscles and the ax, and back to the tree. This is not the unit which
psychologists are accustomed to considering but it is the unit which systems
theory will force them to consider.

Very little thought will show that this change in relevance from thinking of
man versus tree to thinking of man as part of a circuit that includes the tree
will change our ideas of the nature of the self, the nature of power,
responsibility, and so on.

It might even lead the human race to a sort of wisdom that would preclude the
wanton destruction of our biological environment and preclude some of the
very peculiar attitudes we exhibit toward patients, foreigners, minorities, our
spouses, and our children - and even each other.”58

If consciousness is an epiphenomenal property of mental individual systems,

and if the boundaries of this system do not coincide with those that we are
used to assign, ie do not coincide with either the brain or the body of the
individual, nor are able to be in any case rigidly fixed, then something
fundamental in the way we perceive ourselves and practice the world is
shaken and questioned: the dualism between ‘subject’ and ‘object’ which,
even in its strictest interpretation, has been assumed throughout the Modern
Age as one of the pillars of the epistemology of our civilization. Again,
Bateson’s meditation shows to be aimed at those fundamental metaphysical
positions which unconsciously lead our thinking in his reference to Being of
beings, and to language, as the place of its actual constitution and self-
validation.

“[...] the whole of language, as we are accustomed to using it, assumes that
you can talk about ‘this’, and the uses of ‘this’, and the single purposes, and
given the effect of ‘this’, and so forth and so forth. And right center of saying
things of that kind is our use of the first person pronoun, ‘I’. [...] When you
use the word ‘I’, what really do you mean in terms of a language which
would be acceptable, not so much to Buddhism, but just to ordinary natural
science? What is this entity, ‘I’, ‘you’, ‘me’? Well, we mean one end of an
interaction, yes? One end of a lot of interactions. ‘I’, at the moment, ‘am’. If
you make a diagram of the room, I’m that which you can’t see inside of, and
this differentiates me. In a sense, my existence is demonstrated by my
opacity.

If you could see what is happening in all my nerve fibers and all my inputs
and all my outputs, then it wouldn’t be very sensible to draw a line around
me and say he is limited there. There is a mass of pathways for messages and
information to travel on in this room. [...] They go through the skin. The skin
is a pickup affair. It’s not the blind man’s stick. It’s the end of the blind man’s
stick, not the stick. The stick is the pathway it goes along. Where does the
blind man begin? Can we cut him off halfway up the stick? But you are
cutting the line of communication when you cut there. The rule for any sort of
systems theory is to draw around the lines of communication, as far as you
can. Of course, there aren’t any isolated systems, really.

So that we arrive, as we push this at a world which is very unlike the world
represented by ordinary language [...] ”59

From all that we have quoted it is clear that Bateson’s reflection about the
nature of consciousness and the notion of 'self' can be interpreted as an
argument against substantialist positions of science and, more generally,
against the metaphysics of subjectity from which it seems to arise “the
pathology of wrong thinking in which we all live”60. So, in this sense,
especially along with the arguments set out about the sacred and aesthetics, it
is one of the main places where the work of Bateson takes on an ontological
connotation.

But, as we have previously argued, it also plays the role of an interface,

thanks to which the epistemological and ontological problems are placed in
close contact with the ethical one. It is common ground that a different
assumption of the meaning and reality of consciousness necessarily implies a
profound change in our view of life and death.

Not account for all the many observations made by Bateson in this sense, we
simply express the two main ideas on which he built his thinking in this area.

The first idea is that consciousness is by its very nature to produce and feed
those purposive / appetitive attitudes which in general involve at each
epistemologically dualistic position and are the implicit model of the
technique, in its draft manipulation of the beings. Bateson writes:

“ [...] conscious-purpose very rapidly becomes destructive. ‘Purpose’ is a

very dangerous concept. Consciousness, I don’t know. [...] The trouble with
consciousness is that in the nature of the case it focuses in. There is
something that they call the ‘screen of consciousness’, and this to me is
almost a mechanical analogy. We receive the products of our mental
activities, the images, but the creation of those images is beyond us. It is an
extraordinary and miraculous process. It is a beautiful process. But what in
the end I am conscious of is a subtraction from the totality and the totality
cannot be reported to consciousness. The more you have to report to
consciousness the more machinery it requires to operate the whole thing, and
soon the head gets bigger than the body and then the head has the problem of
reporting on itself and it has to get bigger than herself. Consciousness is
always going to be selective. When you get the other two, the sacred and the
aesthetic, which are very closely related, you are partly standing off to see a
whole. Consciousness is tending to focus in, whereas notions like the sacred
and the beautiful always tend to be always looking for the larger, the whole.
That is why I distrust consciousness as a prime guide. ”61
The second idea concerns the way a renewed consideration of consciousness
can change our relationship with death. Constantly in the course of his work,
Bateson has shown to be absolutely convinced that the problem of death
plays an essential significance in the epistemological construction of all
civilizations and in the fundamental perception that every man experiences of
himself, of his own existence and his relationship with the world. Long pages
of his last essays are devoted to the way his personal experience as a
terminal cancer patient has contributed to a restructuring of deep levels of his
own personal epistemology (an experience in some ways similar to what the
Buddhists callenlightenmentorawakening) and has allowed him access to a
not more and not only traditionally intellectual understanding of problems
that occupied him throughout his life as a scientist and thinker.

If what we call ‘self’ is a manifestation of a mental system whose processes

and reality are not rigidly circumscribed, if the distinction between ‘subject’
and ‘object’ loses its traditional character and gets rid of the dualistic
separation between mind and matter, if a new monistic epistemology allows
us to affirm the absolute immanence of mind to matter, and therefore the
absolute belonging of man’s consciousness to his body, then the idea of death
is emancipated from the old myths and beliefs and the very existence leaves
behind every heartache, every neurotic attachment to things, all forms of
epistemological panic.

As Bateson wrote elegantly, as if to seal his intellectual journey:

“ And last, there is death. It is understandable that, in a civilization which

separates mind from body, we should either try to forget death or to make
mythologies about the survival of transcendent mind. But if mind is immanent
not only in those pathways of information which are located inside the body
but also in external pathways, then death takes on a different aspect. The
individual nexus of pathways which I call ‘me’ is no longer so precious
because that nexus is only part of a larger mind.

The ideas which seemed to be me can also become immanent in you. May
they survive - if true. ”62
62GREGORY BATESON,A Sacred Unity,Introductionby Rodney
Ronaldson, xix.

5 FINAL THOUGHTS

Throughout the course of the twentieth century Western philosophy has been
discovered engaged in a confrontation, in many ways unprecedented, with
itself, with the reasons of its own movement and its very survival. The
outcome of this comparison seems to be still uncertain and in no way
predictable. The perception that in the history of our century something
absolutely decisive has been consumed, accompanied, however, all major
meditative experiences of this time. And - thus showing that, to some extent,
the lessons of Nietzsche and Heidegger were metabolized by our culture - the
idea that the internal motility of Western tradition of thought has exhausted, or
deployed, or led to its own extreme evolutionary possibilities and that it is
somehow necessary to seek an injunction and a new form to thought, may
well be regarded as the most authentic inspiration of philosophy in recent
decades.

Warning intimately to still be in the middle of the ford, and, echoing a

Heidegger’s famous adage, warning that a transition of this magnitude could
commit a whole ages of our history, we experience the occupation of
philosophy, ie the commitment of those who feel compelled to take on their
own era in thought, without being able to rely on the tools and usual places of
such employment and, at the same time, without even being able to predict
new words that it will be confidential.

In times of crisis and navigation without landing, who can determine in

advance where and how will arise the possibility of the new and the initial?
Heidegger himself argued (much more in the last years of his life) that the
boost to the production of such a possibility would come from fields and
forms at all far from those of philosophy, and that, indeed, cybernetics would
soon be replaced metaphysics in its traditional role of the founding
knowledge.63
In the background of this consideration of cultural issues of our civilization,
the intellectual legacy of Gregory Bateson acquires a decidedly and from
every point of view not secondary importance.

As it is now clear, the experience of Bateson cannot be considered a

philosophical product, neither can it be framed with easiness in any of the
categories which we usually use to define the areas of culture. It is rather the
very explicit attempt to give rise to a knowledge that is such without further
specification, to cross the fields of science, meditation, art, and religion
taking away from them all what is useful to the experiment of their
courageous and radical integration.

What is the result of this experiment? The extent to which is the experiment
successful? What legacy does it leave over us?
Bateson himself showed to be very polished in this regard, interpreting his
work as a reasonable testimony in support of the feasibility of a different,
fruitful and not yet beaten, pathway for thought and Western science, but
certainly not as the definitive end of such a road. That’s why, ultimately, his
way to ask the questions and to build connections and joints between
apparently very distant questions remains a lesson entrusted to science as
well as religion, philosophy and politics, at a time when these traditions are
shocked in their own epistemological foundation and experience an
unprecedented need for hearkens to one another and to reshuffle the
paradigmatic elements of their identity.
The reflections developed around the pathologies of contemporary science,
the reactivation of certain abandoned or left out spaces of our intellectual
heritage, the definition of a new concept of epistemology and new
epistemological questions and issues, the monistic setting of the mind / body
problem are not separate pieces of an eclectic research, but tightly
interrelated explorations, among which, with delicate clarity, emerges the
appearance of a thought that thinks in a very non-traditional reference to
Being of beings and its meaning.
In Bateson’s production the essential communality of ontology, epistemology,
aesthetics and ethics shows itself so perfectly obvious, and the ontological
dimension of meditation penetrates the plane of its ontic event and it is from
this, in turn, focused and determined, without this in any way disturbing the
elegance and the tenor of his stature.
The impulse to sprout the seeds that writing and example of Gregory Bateson
have left us has already given many successful results. Since the years when
he was still alive, his radical point of view had led some intellectuals to
make it a real term of distinction, recognition and aggregation inside the
rooms professionally engaged in scientific research or cultural debate. There
are even movements of opinion which refer explicitly to his thought (or some
interpretation of it) and who engage actively in its disclosure.
Not for us to determine the value and merit of such initiatives. But we can
sustain with good reason that, in any case, the attempt to lock the subversive
quality of Bateson’s work in some form of organized and completed system
of ideas and theories will always be the best way to cheat and remove the
original fertility of this work.
Perhaps it would be more correct to leave innovation brought forward by
Gregory Bateson the meaning that it is always to be associated with any
major change that is to occur in the history of thought, viz. a necessary
possibility “that shakes silently and without consequences all the real and all
of reality”64.
63 See MARTIN HEIDEGGER,Nur noch ein Gott kann uns helfen(Der
Spiegel May 13th, 1976)
64 MARTIN HEIDEGGER,Die Erinnerung in die

Metaphysik,Nietzschevol.2

APPENDIX
GREGORY BATESON’S NOTION OF THE SACRED.

STEPS TOWARDS A POSTMODERN DETERMINATION OF THE

ESSENCE OF RELIGION
*Reprinted fromAtti dell’Accademia di Scienze Morali e Politiche, vol. CXI, Napoli 2000.

It may be that in the history of the concept of ‘sacred’ has occurred, with the
break-in scene of the proposals put forward by Gregory Bateson, what is
usually defined as an ‘event’. It is right to be always wary with such
assessments, in view of a philosophical research interpreted primarily as a
requirement of rigor; but if the transformations of a civilization are eminently
the transformations of its essential places (and apprehensiondetermination of
the ‘sacred’ is certainly one of these places) and if our civilization has
reason to feel itself as basically in the center of a radical transformation, then
it is perhaps appropriate to consider that the ‘sacred’ in this era is subjected
to deep stresses and its possible transmutations have been to some extent
anticipated and recognized (and thus therefore put on the way) in the abstract
and powerfully ineffective world of ideas. Now, if this is true, things
supported by Bateson in the course of a lifetime devoted to the study of the
relations between ‘mental’ and ‘corporeal’ cannot fail to be considered as
decisively operating in the sense of that anticipation and recognition.

Why then are we so late to recognize the meditative work of Bateson as

central in a debate about the essence of the ‘sacred’ that really wants to be
current, viz., that really wants to be in actual relation to the needs of this
season of the world? Is there something essential - that concerns the very
nature of thinking of Bateson - which prevents the full assumption of
thenovumso obviously produced by his legacy?

Already twenty years have passed since the death of Bateson and the
publication (just shortly front) of his most important essay, Mind and
Nature(1979), and one is not still aware of the reasons why he remains in the
context of contemporary knowledge still largely misunderstood. The critical
literature which occurred in the meantime around his work has drifted mostly
between some moralistic ecologist positions and some naive attempts to
promote, through it, the revenge of irrationalism and mysticism on the arid
rationality of contemporary technology and science, all in perfect fulfillment
of a warning prophecy bequeathed by Bateson himself to those that were to
follow:

“So there it is in words / Precise / And if you read between the lines / You
will find nothing there / For that is the discipline I ask / Not more, not less /
Not the world as it is / Nor ought to be - / Only the precision / The skeleton
of truth / I do not dabble in emotion / Hint at implications / Evoke the ghosts
of old forgotten creeds / All that is for the preacher / The hypnotist, therapist
and missionary / They will come after me / And use the little that I said / To
bait more traps / For those who cannot bear / The lonely / Skeleton / of
Truth”65

The preachers, the hypnotists, therapists and missionaries in truth flock to the
places of an increasingly widespread Batesonian exegesis. But next to them
is no less dense the swarm of professional detractors, the officiants of the
intellectual establishment who condemn Bateson for his irreconcilable
differences, for his talent to express himself with the words of the 'sacred'
even in contexts where it is assumed , the ‘sacred’ should be approached
only in strict form (viz., in the rigidform) of an object to speculative and
scientific investigation. These two variants of deception and
misunderstanding are precisely united by the lack of discipline, the inability
to precision, the inability to remain in the dutiful hesitation of the ‘new’
without rushing with crude violence in the territory of the implications,
definitions and peremptory solutions expressed in terms of the already-
known, as well as a sensational negligence for the fact that, ultimately, it is
the inadequacy of these terms that Bateson’s reflection wants to show.
65 G. BATESON, M.C BATESON,Angels Fear, 5

The Batesonian text requires, however, as the only form of rigor, the
availability to abandon all that is already settled in the plant of our
fundamental epistemology (that is, in the system of premises determining our
own reference to the being of the world). And all the more so in places
where the word of central inspiration is the ‘'sacred, viz. a word of
ambiguity and critical misunderstanding par excellence, a word weighed
down by centuries of obscurantism and division as well as by a tremendous
potential for ideological manipulation. Subtracted from the tradition of
Western metaphysics to the possibility of formal thought and to the
knowledge of the sciences, the ‘sacred’ remains unspeakable (for those who
aspire to say on the basis of aninitialrigor) within this tradition itself, and
that - more than anything else - means that the text-machine brought into the
world by Bateson is unable to work there where the tradition continues to
tyrannically perpetrate itself, well beyond the completion (by Nietzsche and
Heidegger definitively announced) of its own evolutionary possibilities.
The philosopher cannot but be embarrassed in front of the text of Bateson, to
the extent that he is a philosopher just on the basis of an inherited and
indestructible desire to retain and defend the safety of the concept from
sliding, on the basis of the anxious possibility of its own construction and,
therefore, ultimately, the certainty of himself, of his own epistemological
identity. For him, that text is inevitably full of stumbling, that is, in the
original sense of the word, it is ascandal.

The scientist is no less in a crisis in front of the text of Bateson. He

recognizes in it the nakedness of the process that is the basis of his own
doing as a scientist, but right because of this unveiling he considers it
intolerable, an unbearable infringement of his own status. Since he still thinks
of himself as a builder of knowing and on this apperception he implants his
own role-power, he cannot accept the unveiling of the building process, its
revelation as artifice, convention, attempt, and especially as a place of a
crisis which is not today concealable. He warns in this operation a
fundamental threat to his own personal functioning and, therefore, he reacts
almost always in defense of the inviolability of it.

In the face of philosophy and science, Bateson’s adventure (meaning with the
word ‘adventure’ to designate a totality prior to the separation of the man
from his work) is exactly something unrecognizable, a place originally
stranger to both, to the extent that they still metaphysically choose to succumb
to the needs of their traditional systems.

Indeed, the scientific investigation takes on by Bateson always an “illegal”

ontological curvature, which leads him to approach problems which are -
under the statute assigned to science by the Modern Age metaphysics –
extraneous to science itself. At the same time, philosophical questions are
deformed by him through an ontic aggravation leading to languages and
informative tools, which are not traditionally frequented, if not neglected at
all, by philosophy. Through this movement which constrains them to
biunivocal correspondence, philosophy and science are subtracted from
Bateson to themselves (well beyond what has ever happened in any so-called
philosophy of science), making them as well - in the body of his thought
experiment - unrecognizable. The text therefore becomes the space in which
actually arises the experiment of the recovery of the initial and lost
integration between knowledge and thinking, and it is, in particular, as an
area of this original unity - prior, as a possibility, to the occurrence of any
metaphysics - that the work of Bateson in his destiny is conditioned by the
stretch of its unrecognizability. It is, by necessity, a beginning, the tracing of
the boundary of a still almost completely unknown region, whose exploration
firmly calls the forces which live as their fundamental situation the fact of
completion/exhaustion of all resources of the Western tradition movement,
and rejects all those who decline the experience of this fact. And of this
opening essence the discourse on the ‘sacred’, more than any other, bears the
entire burden.

Even acknowledging that, with respect to the determination of the concept of

‘sacred’ which occurred in the course of anthropological debate of the last
one hundred and fifty years, Bateson does not seem to make any relevant
changes but seems indeed to take such a determination as a matter of starting,
you cannot ignore the fact that the interpretation of this term in reference to a
set of problems not previously been placed in relation to it is an interesting
intellectual operation.

Bateson was trained as an anthropologist, but it is not from the point of view
of a traditional anthropological research that he leads his investigation of the
‘sacred’. That is, there is not in his work any purely descriptive and
cataloging study of positive or institutionalized category of the ‘sacred’, nor
a search of the motivations that have historically resulted in the variety of
human cultures the same formation of the spheres of social objects and events
that anthropology generally leads to the ‘sacred’. His research has never
been circumscribed by sociological or historiographical criteria and has
never had the purpose to reconstruct from an evolutionary viewpoint the
genesis of the forms of the religious perhaps by starting from the
identification of a temporally and historically most basic species. The
materials of the typical anthropological investigation - places, people, times,
acts, behaviors, reports and testimonies literary or artistic - are taken on by
Bateson with a freedom which, under the guise of the disorder and the
absence of method, however, reveals the determination of an absolutely
accurate intention, and are made the subject of comparisons and
interpolations that very little recall any other similar work.

Bateson's recognition of the problem of the ‘sacred’ lacks theoretical

elements that might let us relate it to a whole wide range of issues, and even
modes of expression (social function of rituals and religious institutions;
existential meaning and social-historical implementation of transcendence;
relationship between religion and ideology; meaning of the religious dynamic
in the constitution of power relations; sacred / violence relationship, etc ...),
which are very typical of the more usual philosophical and anthropological
reflection. These issues simply do not appear in the Batesonian text, except
in the form of short and quite peripheral references to the fundamental
direction of the speech, which goes in another direction.

The intention of Bateson is precise: to abstract abductively from the data of

the religious phenomenon confirmations of some fundamental theses drawn
about the nature of the systemic and biological world in which we are
immersed, and to support, through them, the need to a new monistic
epistemology that unifies in the coherence of a single system of ideas and
elementary abstractions the ‘mental’ and the ‘corporeal’ and, with them, all
those areas of reality traditionally kept separate and opposing by the
essentially dualistic ontology underlying knowledge of Modern Age. Under
the exclusive focus of this plan arises the discourse on the ‘sacred’, made
mostly of a series of texts and fragmentary reflections scattered throughout
the body of his work and of a single final unfinished attempt to summarize the
basic lines of meditation: the volume Angels Fear (1987), completed and
published by his daughter Mary Catherine and an admirable example of
writing intended and built as an experiment of ecological interaction.

In which role and to what extent, however, does the legacy of the previous
anthropological reflection comes to this discourse?
First, the method through which Bateson interprets and refers to the material
chosen for its reflection reveals an unmistakable functionalist imprint. Tied
to the lesson of Malinowski and Radcliffe-Brown - his masters in
anthropology in the years of the first experiences of researcher and strongly
marked by the reflection of Durkheim, Bateson in his work presupposes the
interpretation of the term ‘sacred’ as a category-possibility by which men in
general think and live the reality, and only in a partial and derivative way, as
an objectification of the historical configuration of human cultures. What is
therefore essentially investigated is the role this category-possibility plays in
the functioning and dis-functioning of systems of relations in which human
presence is involved. Durkheim's statement that

“the division of the world into two domains, one including all that is sacred,
and the other including all that is profane, is the distinctive character of
religious thought ”66

thus plays as an important premise in Bateson’s work, anyway interpreted in

the sense 1) of an unbridgeable ontological distinction between sacred
experiences and profane experiences and 2) a determination of the ‘sacred’
and the ‘profane’ not as domains of historical and social objectification
genetically (ie in a temporally ultimate way) determined, but as spaces of the
happening, genealogically open for the functioning of every event of human
existence.
66EMILE DURKHEIM,Les formes elementaires de la vie religieuse, Paris
1912

Thus, differences with more traditional settings do not exist at the level of
method, but rather at the level of the basic questioning reference. As written
by Mary Catherine Bateson

“Gregory's answer to the question ‘why religion?’ is, like Durkheim’s, a

functional one, but it is one that treats religion as addressing unavoidable
epistemological problems: the limitations on knowledge, the unavoidable
gaps in every description, the paradoxes produced by recursiveness. ”67

One typical feature of Bateson’s procedure is the ability to make explicit and
subject of an aware theming the epistemological premises themselves
assumed by the research. If, in fact, already inNaven(1936) he reflected the
need to problematize the concepts of ‘function’ and ‘structure’ and their
complex relationship, thus outlining the lintels of an analysis method for the
most part - and for explicit recognition - due to the example of A. R.
Radcliffe-Brown, in the course of subsequent investigations on the ‘sacred’
this ability to meta-problematization reaches extreme levels of refinement, up
to turn into an authentic and unmistakable characteristic of Bateson's writing
style: his ability to speak and to reveal, while speaking, the process of
thinking which is taking place behind that speaking itself. The awareness of
the importance of working in scientific discovery with the culturally
privileged intention to make the practice of discovery itself the main subject
of reflection is, therefore, very likely, to Bateson the greatest legacy of his
initial training as an anthropologist, but it's pretty no doubt that this attitude
has acquired over time a highly autonomous dimension, after all, irreducible
to examples from the prior intellectual debate.

Any reflection belonging to the so-called Irrationalism appears then basically

unrelated to the theme of the ‘sacred’, as well as developed by Bateson; they
are necessarily excluded from the interest (and also absent in the text as mere
polemical references) as bearers of a point of view that very badly goes
along with by the need (for Bateson absolutely central) to rejoin the ‘sacred’
to the matter, to affirm the possibility of a new integration between the
knowledge of religion and science, and to divest the approach to the
religious of its traditional moral teachings.
67 G. BATESON , M.C. BATESON,Angels Fear, 200

The only data that can let us read Bateson's analysis of the ‘sacred’ in
continuity with the research of the twentieth century anthropology is,
therefore, the taking over of the definition of the sacred as sacred-power, as
the dimension of the unpredictable superpower, of what in essence eludes the
capacity of man for knowledge and control.

In fact, if all of the most well-established interpretations of the

terminological-ideological groups which write in the history of the cultures
the ideogram of the sacred (the group generally referred as
‘classic’:sanctussacer, qadōš, αγιος-αγνος, heilig-holy, and the group
known as ‘primitive’:mana, taboo, manitu, Orenda, etc...) converge to
include in its conceptual roots the warning of the power of that which is
beyond human control (the power of natural event unknown in its reason, the
power of the disruption of the normal functioning of ecological systems, the
power of the entity - god, priest, magic item, sacrificial beast, etc ... - that
could intervene in this disruption and bring it back to ‘normal’ condition, and
so on), even in observations conducted by Bateson plays an absolutely
central role the binding scope of what we call the ‘sacred’ with the
unleashing of sequences of events ontologically impossible to forecast and
control of human knowledge. I will return later to this aspect of the question,
but let us say with reasonable certainty that this character of the religious
element is also taken by Bateson in a rather unproblematic way, just like an
element of established contemporary anthropology, and therefore, to some
extent, as a premise of the speech itself.

A fundamental and irreducible difference of the reflections of Bateson from

more classical interpretation of the same documentary material is marked,
however, once again, by the functionalization of such material in a discourse
that has as its main purpose to put in the connection the ‘sacred’ and religion
to epistemological issues. It is worth quoting in this regard an example of
typical Bateson’s way to proceed. In this agile page of anthropological
hermeneutics he gleans arguments in support of his consideration of the
essential contents of knowledge of religions through an interpretation, at least
unusual, of a famous passage inGenesisof the Bible. Bateson writes:

“Consider, for example, the central origin myth of Judaeo-Christian peoples.

What are the fundamental philosophic and scientific problems with which
this myth is concerned?

In the beginning God created the heaven and the earth. And the earth was
without form, and void; and darkness was upon the face of the deep. And the
Spirit of God moved upon the face of the waters.

And God said, Let there be light: and there was light. And God saw the light,
that it was good: and God divided the light from the darkness. And God
called the light Day, and the darkness he called Night. And the evening and
the morning were the first day.
And God said, Let there be a firmament in the midst of the waters, and let it
divide the waters from the waters. And God made the firmament, and divided
the waters which were under the firmament from the waters which were
above the firmament: and it was so. And God called the firmament Heaven.
And the evening and the morning were the second day.

And God said, Let the waters under the heaven be gathered together unto one
place, and let the dry land appear: and it was so. And God called the dry
land Earth; and the gathering together of the waters called he Seas: and God
saw that it was good.

Authorized version

Out of these first ten verses of thunderous prose, we can draw some of the
premises or fundamentals of ancient Chaldean thought and it is strange,
almost eerie, to note how many of the fundamentals and problems of modern
science are foreshadowed in the ancient document. (1) The problem of the
origin and nature of matter is summarily dismissed. (2) The passage deals at
length with the problem of the origin of order. (3) A separation is thus
generated between the two sorts of problem. It is possible that this separation
of problems was an error, but—error or not—the separation is maintained in
the fundamentals of modern science. The conservative laws for matter and
energy are still separate from the laws of order, negative entropy, and
information.
(4) Order is seen as a matter of sorting and dividing. But the essential notion
in all sorting is that some difference shall cause some other difference at a
later time. If we are sorting black balls from white balls, or large balls from
small balls, a difference among the balls is to be followed by a difference in
their location—balls of one class to one sack and balls of another class to
another. For such an operation, we need something like a sieve, a threshold,
or, par excellence, a sense organ. It is understandable, therefore, that a
perceiving Entity should have been invoked to perform this function of
creating an otherwise improbable order.

(5) Closely linked with the sorting and dividing is the mystery of
classification, to be followed later by the extraordinary human achievement
of naming”68.

This text clearly reveals the uniqueness of a survey method which gives up
with any idea of scientific rigor as an instance of completeness, and which
knowingly abandons all traditional hermeneutic attitude to free the
possibilities of thought towards new directions. Traditionally unrelated
regions of subjects and questions are combined and placed in relation, and
through their difference the unseen is allowed to appear. This way to practice
thinking – to which Bateson often referred by the term ‘abduction’ - is
exactly what prevents the reduction of his research to the language and
content of traditional anthropology.

As a matter of fact, the discourse on the ‘sacred’ is located for Bateson at the
crossroads of a number of knowledge (anthropology, psychiatry, logic,
ecology, systems theory, epistemology), and escapes substantially to the
single possibilities of understanding offered by each of them, requiring
unequivocally the need for a new integrated thinking that knows how to
approach the reality of the real and its inseparable unity. The atomising of
knowledge wrought by its metaphysical configuration appears to be
unsustainable when you face a level of experience and a phenomenon in
which unity and integration of all play an absolutely crucial role. For this
reason, the discourse on the ‘sacred’ unveils and undermines the virtuality
and the inadequacy of the variousλογοςin which the Modern Age has
shattered the knowledge and proposes itself as an experiment in their
reintegration into a unity that is not antique, not arbitrarily pre-modern, but
necessarily original, historically placed already beyond the closing of the
Modern Age, and so, in the first and non-trivial sense,post-modern.
68 GREGORY BATESON,Steps to an Ecology of Mind, Introduction, xxx

Thus, despite the obvious presence of traces of the especially

anthropological debate, which has arisen around the question of the ‘sacred’
over the last century and more, the text of Bateson is essentially
eccentricwith respect to the contents and language of this debate and
irreducible, in its fundamental determination, to the metaphysical
presuppositions of modern science.
What makes - you have to wonder - such eccentricity possible in the building
and functioning of this text?
Of course, you do not have to provide a merely philological answer, but
rather to take note of something which is, however, very obvious even to an
only superficial survey of Bateson’s works. The figure is that Bateson does
not take on as privileged references of dialogue and discussion the authors of
the mainstream tradition of Western science and thought, but rather the places
where this tradition comes clearly in crisis and shows its bias. It is clear that
when referring to the expression ‘tradition of Western metaphysics’, you do
not refer to the indistinct whole of all that has been written and thought in the
West, but rather to a certain line of cultural products that share the fact that
they can all be traced back the determination of a single fundamental
ontological position, which acts in them in the function of a center. Assuming
- with Heidegger - the identification of this ontological position in the so-
called ‘metaphysics of subjectness’, ie ontological attitude to consider Being
itself as substance, as a subject of predicates, present and stable in its
persisting identity, you can interpret the historical movement of our
modernity at least as an affirmation-deployment of this metaphysics, and you
have a theoretical object that allows you to recognize those places (authors,
productions of thought and knowledge) which conflict with the needs of the
its deployment and subtract at its center, ie which are, compared to
it,eccentric. Bateson shows to attend with great ease and with a declared
unique interest these places - which are nothing but, ultimately, the
testimonies of positions alien to the groove of Aristotelian-Christian-
Cartesian dualist ontology - and founds on their support the possibility of
giving birth to an interpretation of the ‘sacred’ which is already in itself a
spill by movement (accomplished, exhausted, short-circuited, prisoner of a
dangerous dead end) of Westernonto-theo-logy.
It is therefore the mysticism of poet William Blake and that of the Gnostic
tradition filtered through the mediation of Jung to become, along with the
meditation of Kant (eminent place of the unveiling of the metaphysical
configuration of the Westernepisteme), the definition points of perspective
through which Bateson reads the issue of the ‘sacred’. And next to them a no
less decisive role is played, in this perspective construction, by all the issues
raised by cybernetics, systems theory, nonlinear dynamical systems and
ecology (real frontier areas of western science), in which the results of
scientific inquiry itself cannot be received and understood in their innovative
capacity without rewriting the fundamental epistemological paradigm within
which science, as a whole, still defines itself.
This is, then, the functional mechanism that makes the Batesonian text
extraneous, in its underlying reason, to all the traditional philosophical or
anthropological literature on the ‘sacred’: a decisive attendance of the
marginal and neglected currents of Western thought and most advanced of
scientific speculation, and their abductively free and creative integration.
This is the theoretical tool that allows him to discuss in innovative means the
essence of religion and the phenomenology of the ‘sacred’ and to put this
discussion in a brand new (and utterly full of implications) connection to
purely epistemological inevitable questions.

What does it mean, however, that religion and the sacred exist as a reality in
some way involved in the problems of epistemology?
It is important to clarify at this point of the survey, that the concept of
epistemology developed and used by Bateson does not coincide exactly with
the traditional one, and that this divergence plays an extremely relevant role
in the context of the reflection on the sacred. In his seminal essayMind and
Nature(1979) he expresses this difference and on it rests, therefore, the
entire ability to understand the meaning of theses proposed later. Combining
the current definition of epistemology as a branch of science the discipline
that studies how the particular organisms or aggregates of organisms
know, think and decide- with the definition of epistemology as a branch of
philosophy –the question that focuses on the necessary limits and other
essential characteristics of the processes of learning, thinking and
decision- Bateson comes to assign a wider meaning to the term and use it to
denotethe set of all necessary formal components (and also of ideas
through which we reflect these components ) required by the process
through which we know things in general, being included in this pronoun
‘we’ even “the starfish and the redwood forest, the segmenting egg and the
Senate of the United States”69and, in general, any other entity (singular or
complex) that give rise to processes of mental type. And, as Bateson himself
writes, thinking aloud about the process of thinking that is the basis of the
thesis of his essay,
“And in the anythingwhich these creatures variously know, I included ‘how
to grow into five-way symmetry’, ‘how to survive a forest fire’, ‘how to
grow and still stay the same shape’, ‘how to learn’, ‘how to write a
constitution’, ‘how to invent and drive a car’, ‘how to count to seven’, and so
on. Marvelous creatures with almost miraculous knowledge and skills.

Above all, I included ‘how to evolve’, because it seemed to me that both

evolution and learning must fit the same formal regularities or socalled laws.
I was, you see, starting to use the ideas [...] to reflect, not upon our own
knowing, but upon that wider knowing which is the glue holding together the
starfishes and sea anemones and the redwood forests and human
committees”.70

The concept of epistemology formulated by Bateson finds its reason in the

central thesis that all biological systems (organisms or aggregates of
organisms or parts of organisms or sets of organisms and non-organic
entities) are the protagonists, as such, of a series of processes generically
classified as ‘mental’. These processes have the characteristic to be bound
by a common set of formal requirements (structural conditions or elementary
truths). The universality of these abstractions, which hold in their
ontological necessity all the ‘mental’ processes, founds the intimate
communality and unity of these processes and their systemic substrates, and
therefore, ultimately, it founds the unity and coherence of the real.
Epistemologyis, by Bateson, properly the name of this set of abstractions
69 GREGORY BATESON,Mind and Nature, 4
70 Ibid.

and, at the same time (and for the fundamental reason that human knowledge
itself is a process subject to the same conditions of epistemology which is
object of its own interest and speculation ), of the knowledge that focuses on
them and their essential and binding character.

Epistemology is therefore the knowledge that knows the conditions of itself

as a knowledge and of every other possible knowledge. Thus, it knows the
conditions for existence and proper functioning of biological and mental
systems and operates immanently in each of these systems as the fundamental
data of their own organization. Epistemology is the “pattern which connects”
(a topical phrase of Bateson’s) all things in their very setting-up, it is the
event (absolutely nonsubstantial and unobjectivable, as such) of subsisting in
the totality of Being of a necessary fabric of powerful elementary
abstractions, which constitute the necessity, consistency and elegance of the
very nature of the world. Getting closer to the nodes of biological world
epistemology means, therefore, getting closer to the necessity, and that is the
‘sacred’, which is - according to Bateson and on the basis of an acquired
outcome of modern anthropology
- the word designating in all human cultures the inviolable sphere of ideas
and things required for the proper functioning of the world. The ‘sacred’ and
the necessity are to Bateson the terms of a relation of identity, as necessity is
the center of the recognizing experienced by all the mystics and the object of
the warding witnessed by all sacred texts and practices of all religions, and
at the same time, is the term of reference and selfdefinition (τελος) of the
scientific demand itself, and so the only possible place of a new integration
between religion and science.

It is no coincidence, in fact, that the reinterpretation of all the categories

related to the phenomenology of the ‘sacred’ is carried out by Bateson
through the mediation of a theoretical object rigorously formulated, ie, via
the formal definition of concept of ‘mind’. According to this definition
(which, mind you, most of the essay onMind and Nature (1979) is devoted to
and which is the inescapable premise toAngels Fear (1989), the essay on the
epistemology of the ‘sacred’), a ‘mind’ is an aggregate of interacting parts
and components that meet certain specific functional conditions: 1) the
interaction between parts of the system called a ‘mind’ is triggered by
difference, which is an event in itself absolutely nonsubstantial and not
located in space or time, and 2) difference and its coded versions
(transforms) give rise to chains of circular or more complex chains of
determinations, ruled by positive or negative feedbacks and powered by
collateral energy, ie energy which is external to the mental process itself, and
3) the description and classification of these processes of transformations
implicit in mental process disclose a hierarchy of logical types immanent in
the phenomena.71

The concept of ‘mind’ that is emerging in this definition, built entirely by

notions derived from systems theory and cybernetics, is of central importance
in the whole reflection of Bateson, because it enables him to set up the
problem of the ‘sacred’ ( but, more generally, all matters pertaining to the
phenomenology of the biological world) in an epistemologically non-
dualistic perspective, not irrational yet, at the same time, freed from the
anxieties of mechanism. Recognizing, in fact, the mind as a feature of the
self-organization of matter itself and evaluating all the processes related to it
as epiphenomenal properties of systems that meet certain precise formal
conditions is equivalent to laying the foundation for the assertion of absolute
immanence of ‘mind’ within the ‘body’ and their fundamental ontological
homogeneity. Only in this way it is possible, for Bateson, to give an
acceptable interpretation of the phenomena of life and communication and
escape from the impasse in which knowledge has been driven by the
dialectical opposition of the two epistemological positions that have marked
the development of modernity and which belong - albeit in a mirror – to the
same metaphysical outlook and, therefore, the same distortion: materialism of
mechanistic science and supernaturalism of the followers of the irrational.
Bateson writes:

“These two species of superstitions, these rival epistemologies, the

supernatural and the mechanical, feed each other. […]

It should be possible to find a more stable theoretical stance. We need such a

stance to limit the excesses both of the materialists and of those who flirt
with the supernatural. And further, we need a revised philosophy or
epistemology to reduce the intolerance that divides the two camps. […]

And I assert that we know enough today to expect that this improved stance
will be unitary, and that the conceptual separation between ‘mind’ and
‘matter’ will be seen to be a by-product of – a spin-off from an insufficient
holism. When we focus too narrowly upon the parts, we fail to see the
necessary characteristics of the whole, and are then tempted to ascribe the
phenomena which result from wholeness to some supernatural entity”72.
71 GREGORY BATESON,Mind and Nature, 92

‘Holism’ is the “tendency in nature to produce from the ordered grouping of

parts complex wholes with properties that are not present in or predictable
from the separate parts”73, and the concept of ‘mind’ proposed by Bateson is
precisely a holistic perspective on the problem of the ‘sacred’ and the
relationship between material and immaterial. Shape, difference,
information, relation exist within the matter as the data of its immanent
organization, yet they are not material, have no substance, ie they are - from
the point of view of fundamental ontology of Western metaphysics non-
entities, as they can be understood only in the mode of events. In their
interactions, however, there is the ‘mind’. The cause-effect relationships that
govern the phenomenality of these data are neverlineal74, but they always
have a circular (ie retroactive) or more complex character, which makes
them difficult, if not entirely inaccessible to the understanding of a scientific
knowledge that still think - on the basis of the metaphysics of subjectity and
ground recognized and deconstructed by Heidegger - the causality as a
mechanical determination. However, there is a wide constellation of
experiences and processing arisen from the same and most advanced
contemporary scientific research, which has already provided, according to
Bateson, sufficient tools to produce a holistic interpretation, that is,
ontologically monistic, of the link between ‘mind’
72 GREGORY BATESON,Angels Fear, 51-52
73 GREGORY BATESON,Angels Fear,Glossary, 208

74Ibid. “ ‘Lineal’ describes a relation among a series of causes or arguments

such that the sequence does not come back to the starting point”.

and ‘body’ . But the full recognition of the implications of this research and
the resulting upheaval of epistemology of Western knowledge remain,
however, still unrecognized tasks.
The criticism of mechanism and taking the idea of ‘mind’ into the group of
explanatory principles of science are not Bateson’s innovations but belong to
a well-established scientific literature that has its strongholds within quantum
physics, cybernetics, systems theory as well in linguistics, logic, and in that
broad area of investigation that goes by the name of cognitive science. It is
also true that precisely in the context of cognitive science, the concept of
‘mind’ has found its first rigorous formulations and has been used in an
epistemological controversy as opposed to what Fodor called the “Common-
Sense Materialism”75. But the specificity of Batesonian use of this concept
lies in its total lack of objective and preliminarily and exclusively
determined referents, that is, in its entirely insubstantial character, which
makes it therefore particularly appropriate, from a purely theoretical point of
view, to encourage the affirmation of an ontological position consciously
subversive of the Western metaphysical tradition. Although cognitive
science, indeed, moves from recognizing the conceptual shortcomings of
materialism and its claim to reasonably explain the phenomena of life and
communication using only the presence of entities with spatial extent and
physical activity (and thus excluding differences, information, relations and
all other notions of mental type), it almost always ends up reducing the
problem of mind and matter relationship to the more narrow issue of the
functionality of intelligent human behavior, and anchoring the idea of ‘mind’
to the physical substrate of the brain, falling in a position which still
underlies in its essence to the metaphysical necessity to define reality as
present objectivity and which does not escape, therefore, a fundamentally
reductionist epistemology. The most interesting and innovative characteristic
of Bateson’s definition of ‘mind’ lies, however, in the fact that, according to
it, to recognize the presence of a mental system

“there is no requirement of a clear boundary, like a surrounding envelope of

skin or membrane, and you can recognize that this definition includes only
some of the characteristics of what we call ‘life’. As a result, it applies to a
much wider range of those complex phenomena called ‘systems’, including
systems consisting of multiple organisms or systems in which some of the
parts are living and some are not, or even to systems in which there are no
living parts. What is described here is something that can receive information
and can, through the self-regulation or self-correction made possible by
circular trains of causation, maintain the truth of certain propositions about
itself. These two provide the rudiments of identity [...] There is, however, no
reason to assume that it will be either conscious or capable of self-
replication, like some of the minds we count among our friends and relatives.
A given mind is likely to be a component or subsystem in some larger and
more complex mind, as an individual cell may be a component in an
organism, or a person may be a component in a community ”76.
75 JERRY FODOR,The language of thought, New York 1975

Mainly on the basis of its formal wideness Bateson's idea of ‘mind’ plays an
essential role in the considerations on the ‘sacred’. If this notion were not, in
fact, sufficiently flexible to make possible a cybernetic analysis of ecological
systems or human life complex relations (family, culture or community), the
holistic interpretation of the phenomenology of ‘sacred’ advanced by
Bateson simply would not be possible.

Not surprisingly, on the basis of the considerations up to this point, Bateson

clarifies the meaning of his reflections made in the first part of Angels
Fear(1987) around the possibility of a cybernetic reading of the concepts of
‘faith’, ‘mystery’, ‘sacrament’, ‘sacrilege’ and all other most topic
conceptual places of the phenomenology of the ‘sacred’, by stating:

“What has been said so far can be read as argument or evidence for the
reality of very large mental systems, systems of ecological size and larger,
within which the mentality of the single human being is a subsystem. These
large mental systems are characterized by, among other things, constraints on
the transmission of information between their parts. Indeed, we can argue
from the circumstance that some information should not reach some locations
in large, organized systems to assert the real nature of these systems - to
assert the existence of that whole whose integrity would be threatened by
inappropriate communication. By the word ‘real’ in this context, I mean
simply that it isnecessary for explanationto think in terms of organizations of
this size, attributing to these systems, the characteristics of mental process
[...].
But it is one thing to claim that this is necessary and not surprising and quite
another to go on to say, however vaguely, what sort of mind such a vast
organization might be. What characteristics would such minds expectably
show? Are they, perhaps, the sorts of thing that men have called gods? ”77

The relationship between the survey of the ‘sacred’ and the concept of
‘mind’ is clarified here in its true meaning, suggesting theoretical
implications perhaps not yet sufficiently meditate. Let's try to summarize in a
schematic way the main ideas advanced in this passage:

1) it is not the assumption of the existence of mental systems described by the

criteria of Mind and Nature(1979) to urge a re-reading of the phenomena of
the ‘sacred’ from the point of view of cybernetics, but it is rather the
possibility to read those phenomena in this way to push the affirmation of the
reality of mental systems;

2) affirming that these mental systems immanent in phenomenality of nature

arerealdoes not mean, in any event, supporting their objective (ie substantial)
existence, it simply means that the notion of ‘mind’ is needed to arrive at a
plausible description of the factuality of certain phenomena, and that this
epistemological necessityis the only form of reality that the thought can
never grant to “patterns that connect” and, ultimately, to the real itself;

3) in order to affirm the reality (in the sense of present objectivity here) of a
mental system we should define the exact boundaries of the system itself,
which, by reason of the essential and insurmountable unity of the world of
mental process, is not possible in any case. Mental systems (including
ecosystems) are never circumscribable as separated from each other, do not
have linearly traceable contours and, therefore, exist only in the way of
powerful immanent abstractions, which are recognizable in their operations
only through a conventional and arbitrary delimitation of their outlines, that
is, of their identity;

4) once you have defined the extent and existence of these systems, you can
give a functional cybernetic description that allows you to interpret with
rigor and consistency the full range of events that are usually traced back to
the realm of the ‘sacred’;

5) religions have traditionally acknowledged the factof the systemic and

mental organization of the world, have produced a descriptive knowledge of
this fact and have, in general, appointed its actuality by employing the word
‘god’.

What do you think, then, according to Bateson, initially behind the word
‘god’? You think the necessity (ie the immanence) of a plot of elementary and
necessary truths which rule the functioning of our biological world and
establish its systemic organization. You think that, in terms of Western
metaphysics, is traditionally called the ‘ground’ of beings.

This thesis - reaffirmed and clarified, though never in such an explicitly

ontological way, through the entire discourse developed around the ‘sacred’
- is remarkably consonant with the interpretation of the same problem
provided by Martin Heidegger, surely another of most eccentric and
subversive of the Western metaphysical tradition movement meditative
experiences. It is no documented neither appears in any way likely a mutual
attendance of the two authors, but as it has already been noticed78, the points
of contact between their speculative positions are varied. It is worthwhile,
therefore, to give a short fragment of the reflection that Heidegger expressed
around the question of the essence of the concept of ‘god’, particularly in
order to let Bateson come out from a certain isolation and to show that the
possibility of another interpretation of the sense of religion and of the
‘sacred’ already exists as an operating eventuality in the philosophical
culture of our time. In 1936, helping to lay the foundations for a new
integration of knowledge, Heidegger writes:
78 See in particularEUGENIO MAZZARELLA,Un’appendice ontica: ecologia cibernetica e
circolo linguistico. Bateson e Heidegger. LaFroemmigkeit come compito ineludibile del pensiero,
Appendix to ID.,Tecnica e metafisica. Saggio su Heidegger, Naples 1981.

“Every philosophy is theology in the original and essential sense that the
conceptual understanding (λογος) of entities as a whole raises the question of
the ground of Being, and this ground is calledθεος, god. [...] But you should
not assess the theology found in philosophy on the basis of any dogmatic and
ecclesiastical theology, that is you have not to believe, in particular, that
philosophical theology is simply the rational and ‘Enlightenment’ form of an
ecclesial theology [...]. Rather the opposite is true, namely, that Christian
theology is the Christianization of an extrachristian theology, and that only for
this reason the Christian theology could again be secularized. [...] Theo-logy
means here, once again, to raise the question of the beings as a whole. This
question of the beings as a whole - the theological question - cannot be taken
without the question of the Being as such, the essence of Being in general.
This is the question of ον η ον, the question of' ‘ontology’.

The philosophical question is always and in itself twofold, onto-logic and

theo-logic, in the broadest sense. The philosophy is onto-theo-logy. The more
originally it meets this duality, the more authentically it is philosophy. [...]

We shall employ these ancient determinations because they are still the ones
that indicate in the best way the most original problem area of philosophy
and that always maintain this tradition ”79.

And later, pondering the essence of the concept of ‘pantheism’:

“In his formal meaning, pantheism means: ̟αν - θεος, ‘All-God’, each being
is in relationship with God; each being is related to the ground of the Being.
This ground is the One,εν, it is, as a ground, all (̟αν) the rest that is in it, in
the ground. [...] This be-and-stay-inherent in God is called ‘immanence’. All
knowledge relating to the entities as a whole must somehow think the whole
as one with its ground, and as a result, every system implies in some way
such immanence ”80.
79MARTIN HEIDEGGER,Schelling’s Treatise on the Essence of Human
Freedom, Ohio University Press 1985

While in the obvious difference of modes of expression and the underlying

problems, Bateson’s meditation and Heidegger’s meditation converge on the
need to put of the concept of ‘god’ in relation to the idea of the ‘necessity’
(ontological and epistemological) which founds in its essence the
deployment-operation of the beings as a whole. And this ‘ecological’ taking
of the notion of ‘god’ - common, therefore, for both interpretations - allows
Bateson, in particular, to seek in the religious literature of various human
cultures traces of the acknowledgement of the ‘sacred’ as acknowledgement
of systemic necessity and, thereby, to keep in contact with the traditional
anthropological determination of the ‘sacred’ as ‘sacred-power’, as the
scope of the unfolding of sequences of events related to extremely broad and
essentially inaccessible to the forecast and human control systemic contexts.

In the sense of this research, for example, we can read those pages of Angels
Fear(1987) in which Bateson ponders the meaning of the concept ofanankein
the Greek tragic literature (identified as the only authentic place of
recognition of the ‘sacred’ in classical Greek culture ) and compares that
with the Hindu concept ofkarma, and with the notion of ngglambibelonging
to Iatmul populations of New Guinea, or those pages in which he discusses
the dualorganization of all the great religious systems, considering it as a
metaphor (ie a trans-lation of the same essential structure) of the necessary
duality of every ‘mind’ as such. This kind of analysis is exactly what enables
Bateson to say that

“It is time to reverse the trend which since Copernicus has been in the
direction of debunking mythology, to begin to pick up the many
epistemological components of religion that have been brushed aside. In
doing so, we may come upon important notions partly displaced by trash
(particularly the kind of trash produced by religious people pretending to
scientific authority, which is not their business) or partly lost by the failure to
understand what religion was about, that has characterized most of the
scientific debunking. [...]

Religion does not consist in recognizing little bits of miracles ( miracula,

‘little marvels’), such as every religious leader tries to avoid providing but
which his followers will always insist upon, but vast aggregates of
organization having immanent mental characteristics. I suggest that the
Greeks were close to religion in concepts such asananke,nemesisandhubris,
and diverged from religion when their oracles claimed supernatural
authority, or when their mythologists embroidered the tales of the various
gods in the pantheon ”81.

And to further clarify the meaning and intent of his investigation of the
concept of ‘god’, Bateson makes a unique proposal, with an the effective and
obvious ironictalent (ie revealing failings necessarily implied in any
authentic saying):

“I am trying to investigate the communicational regularities in the biosphere,

assuming that in doing so, I shall also be investigating interwoven
regularities in a system so pervasive and so determinant that we may even
apply the word ‘god’ to it. The regularities we discover including
regularities and necessities of communication and logic - form a unity in
which we make our home. They might be seen as the peculiarities of the god
whom we might call Eco.

There is a parable which says that when the ecological god looks down and
sees the human species sinning against its ecology - by greed or by taking
shortcuts or taking steps in the wrong order - he sighs and involuntarily sends
the pollution and the radioactive fallout. It is of no avail to tell him that the
offense was only a small one, that you are sorry and that you will not do it
again. It is no use to make sacrifices or offer bribes. The ecological God is
incorruptible and therefore is not mocked”82.
81 GREGORY BATESON,Angels Fear, 142

The ‘god’ Bateson is looking for is the ‘god’ of ecological necessity,

recognized and unrecognized many times and in many forms in the history of
religious knowledge, but ever operating in the biological functioning of the
world, as a fabric of insurmountable epistemological constraints. The
epistemology of each mental system is part of this a-substantial and immanent
‘god’ (ie far from being apersonwho can become the object of worship and
theological speculation). The necessity which establishes things as always
inviolably distinct from the ideas representing them, from their perception
and description, the necessity which establishes the ontological gap between
“the map and the territory”, the necessity expressed in the self-evidence of
logical tautologies and the necessity holding the evolution of living matter
are just some versions or fragments of the ‘god’ which is immanent in this
world. This ‘god’ - which is nothing but theeventof its own immanence - has
been for a long time kept but also hidden by traditional religions and their
tendency to hopelessly become a mystified and institutional version of the
original experience of the ‘sacred’. But it is also the end of a recognition
process that contemporary science is being urged to make by the data of its
own most recent acquisitions. In the concept of such a god is, therefore, to
define the territory - whose exploration Bateson always considered as his
prior intention - where knowledge of science, myth and art meet the
possibility of their initial integration.

The notion of ‘god’ defined by Bateson with reference to cybernetic

properties of mental systems immanent in the nature of the world acts as a
center, in the context of the whole discourse raised around the meaning of the
‘sacred’. All other inquiries and statements flow from the premise of this
notion or refer to it or are instrumental to its possibility. Looking to the idea
of the epistemological nature of the ‘sacred’, Bateson therefore develops his
investigation of the meaning of the categories of religion, and in particular
the meaning of ‘faith’.

If the purpose is to build and defend a monistic view of reality, it is clear that
the nature of that event we call ‘faith’ cannot be located on the premise of the
realityof the object towards which the act of ‘faith’ is addressed. Indeed, the
problem of the existence or non-existence of the external referent of ‘faith’
(ie a person ‘god’ or any other substantial entity) is negligible, and the
mental functioning of the process ‘faith’ should be clarified, for Bateson,
only in the context of itself and in connection with the most basic problems of
epistemology. Epistemology is, as has been said, the whole of the conditions
of possibility (ie constraints) within which a ‘mind’ implements that process
we call ‘knowledge’. The first one
- in an ontological sense - of these constraints is to Bateson the gap which
separates the world of things - considered according to Kant as things-
inthemselves - and the world of ideas, or abstractions (differences and
transforms of differences), which knowledge and therefore the life of every
mental system is made of. This necessary unbridgeable hiatus is a problem
that recurs at every level of epistemology of any mental system and often
gives rise to confusion and serious errors. In relation to it the event-process
called ‘faith’ finds its own meaning and function.

What Bateson asserts in this regard appears remarkably in tune with the core
of Kant's insights about the organization of that function of the human mind
which he called ‘intellect’, and seems to be nothing but the clarification and
deployment of this critical passage of theKritik der reinen Vernunftin which
Kant notes that

“it must still remain a scandal to philosophy and to the general human reason
to be obliged to assume,as an article of mere belief, the existence of things
external to ourselves (from which, yet, we derive the whole material of
cognition for the internal sense), and not to be able to oppose a satisfactory
proof to anyone who may call it in question ”83.

Bateson writes:
83IMMANUEL KANT, The Critique of Pure Reason, Preface to Second
Edition 1787, Pennsylvania State University Ed., 23

“[...] the jump is always there. If I look through my corporeal eyes and see an
image of the rising sun, the propositions ‘I look’ and ‘I see’ have a sort of
validity different from that of any conclusion about the world outside my
skin. ‘I see a sun rising’ is a proposition that indeed, as Descartes insists,
cannot be doubted, but extrapolation from this to the outside world –‘There
is a sun’- is always unsure and must be supported by faith. Another problem
is that all such images are retrospective. The assertion of the image qua
description of the external world, is always in a past tense. Our senses can
only tell us at best whatwasso a moment ago. We do in fact read the causal
sequence backwards. But this fundamentally unreliable information is
delivered to perceiving self in the most convincing and indubitable form as
animage. It is this faith - a faith in our mental process that must always be
defended!”84
The mental process, therefore, has among its epistemological constraints, the
need to bridge the gap between the thingness of things, and the ideality of
ideas, of which only it is composed, through an act of ‘faith’. This original
and irreplaceable ‘faith’ is a precondition of the process of ‘mind’, and
therefore of life. It must be preserved and protected, because its disturbance
or even a revelation to the conscience of its very nature could cripple
seriously the functionality of the ‘mind’. Bateson, moreover, dedicates - as it
is known - a large part of his research as a scientist to lay the foundation for
an interpretation of schizophrenia as a disease of the ‘faith’ of the perceiving
self towards its own perceptions and its representative possibilities, and to
highlight the large structural similarities between the mental process of the
schizophrenic and that of the mystic. In the context of this reading of the
functional significance of the ‘faith’, religion becomes necessarily that
knowledge which the mental system of human culture entrusts the task of
preserving the awareness of the fundamental epistemological importance of
‘faith’ and educating its discipline.

Bateson puts it this way in the world the opportunity to give a completely
initial sense to intimacy of the act of ‘faith’, revealing the unique nature and
the only mode of subsistence that the real may exist to us as mental entities.

“If we had continual awareness of our image-making processes, our images

would cease to be credible. It is indeed a merciful dispensation that we
know not the processes of our own creativity - which sometimes are the
processes of self-deceit.

To be unconscious of these processes is the first line of our defense against

loss of faith. A little faith in perception is vitally necessary, and by packing
our data into the form of images, we convince ourselves of the validity of our
belief.Seeing is believing. But faith is in believing that seeing is believing.
As Blake said of the ‘corporeal’, which we believe we know, ‘It is in
Fallacy, and its Existence an Imposture’ ”85.

In a similar way to what is done around the concept of ‘faith’, Bateson then
proposes an interpretation of all the other main sites of the phenomenology of
the ‘sacred’, always moving from a functionalist consideration of the
epistemological necessity of mental systems.

The mental systems that he examines are varied. They are compared from the
point of view of their structural connotations to highlight the set of formal
patterns that unites them. Developing, for example, a survey of the major
myths of some human cultures and combining the results with the analysis of
some mechanisms of the biological world, Bateson wonders if there is a
meaningful identity between the fact that “the body that is adjusting itself to
the stresses and vicissitudes of experience shall not communicate with the
DNA, the carrier of genetic instructions for the next generation”86, the fact
that “it is apparently necessary that we have no knowledge of the processes
by which in our perception images are formed”87 and the fact that relevant
pieces of religious literature from
85 GREGORY BATESON,Angels Fear, 96
86 GREGORY BATESON,Angels Fear, 88

87 Ibid.

around the world “share the notion of not communicatingsomething under

some circumstances”88. If the circuitry of genetics, those of the relationship
between the outside world and perceiving self and those of cultural systems
all have characteristics that fit to the formal definition of ‘mind’, we should
wonder, on the basis of these observations, whether the essential need to the
proper functioning of the ‘minds’, in general, that certain messages, certain
information (also true) are not located in certain positions of the circuit is
just another piece of that epistemological necessity that is mentioned behind
the word ‘sacred’. And we should wonder, according to Bateson, whether
just this kind of constraints are from the perspective of a systemic and
ecological evaluation of religious knowledge - the essence of those issues
typically associated with ‘sacred’, that is ‘secrecy’ and ‘mystery’. The
discussion that he leads in this regard is highly articulated and rich of
examples. It comes to the determination that, in general, “secrecy can be used
as a markerto tell us that we are approaching holy ground”89and that some
form of non-communication is to such an extent necessary and desirable for
the smooth operation of the mental process that it would already be possible
to start writing a different and more coherent apprehension of the concept of
‘sacred’ only on its basis.

Of course this precise connection between the ‘sacred’ and

noncommunication, ‘mystery’ and the need not to say, echoes the long
tradition of mystical knowledge produced by all civilizations, but also, for
example, the last famous statements of the attempt to recon thought (mental
process) and its nature (epistemological organization) built by Ludwig
Wittgenstein in hisTractatus Logico-philosophicus.

The need not to say, in order to preserve the integrity of the ‘sacred’, ie the
proper functioning of mental processuality (whose most evident sign is,
according to Bateson, the condition men call the ‘grace’) - which is also, as
Wittgenstein states, the need tosacrifice what has been said to access the
space instead of what can never be said - operates in the same Batesonian
text as a fundamental norm. And this is the reason why that text never claims
the unrealistic completeness of a theoretical system made of peremptory
assertions. Even where the holistic interpretation of the phenomenology of
the ‘sacred’ seems to exhaust convincingly the organic totality of the theme
that it examines, Bateson never shows to be selfsatisfied: the circle is never
closed, and through a difficult balance of revelations and suggestions, the text
on the ‘sacred’ reveals an unusual ability to copy empathically the nature of
its own object and gets characterized by the unequivocal sign of elegance and
‘grace’.
88 GREGORY BATESON,Angels Fear, 79

As has been sharply written, Bateson is “the man of science who got to the
very limits of language” and made himself a living metaphor of the same
argument that he tried to recognize and define by his own research. This
integral dimension of communication is perhaps the very core of his taking of
the essence of the ‘sacred’.

“Integrative dimension of experience” is the phrase by which Bateson

defines the ‘sacred’ as the way reality exists, that is a mode of perceiving
and building the reality. ‘Sacredness’ is an event and, according to its
determination, basically it is that event which reveals the systemic nature of
the whole in which we are immersed and lets us perceive that the process
through which we are in relationship with reality (the very fact of our every
perception, therefore) is part of a larger mental process, that is the facticity
of our world as a biological world. In the ‘sacred’ experience reaches its
own boundaries and senses itself as such, ie includes in its epistemological
construction even the awareness of the constraints inherent in such a
construction. Sacred experience is therefore integrative experience, that is
impossible to every representation duality and, therefore, ontologically
impossible to say. This necessary ineffability is, as has been said, what the
mystics (and great artists and great poets) have always been trying to show,
striving to accomplish a task that cannot in any case be acquitted, but which
sometimes - as Bateson remarked - they do “very prettily”90.

Integrity is the condition of the ‘sacred’ in the sense that it is the core of its
essence and of its meaning, but also in the sense that it is what the ‘sacred’
behaviors strive to protect and what ethical behavior of man – his righteous
living within the measure of earth - is focused on. As opposed to that
dimension there is, for Bateson, the dimension ofconscious-purpose, that is
the typically human capacity to act in order to preliminarily defined
purposes. This capacity presupposes a required splitting of the experience in
a series of dualistic pairs (subject-object, I-World, purpose-mean, useful-
useless, etc. ...) that prevent the perception of the unity of the whole and lead
to behaviors almost always disturbing the proper functioning of the
biological world. Appetitive attitudes are therefore what is most radically
opposed to entirely aesthetic quality (ie free from any conscious purpose) of
the ‘sacred’ and knowledge that knows it. These attitudes extend, however,
more and more their relevance in determining our relationship with the
world, and the spaces within which we are allowed to recognize the ‘sacred’
unity of the real contract at an alarming rate, to the point that as Bateson
notes, “we are even becoming incapable of committing sacrilege”91.
90 GREGORY BATESON,Steps to an Ecology of Mind, 138
It is then to bring to life - through the most advanced tools of contemporary
scientific knowledge - the sense of an ancient word, ‘sacer’, which has never
stopped meaning the basic necessity of our biological nature, although it has
been seriously forgotten by centuries of a rigidly dualistic metaphysical
tradition (scientific, religious, political), which pushed the situation of
Western humanity in the dead end of an unprecedented ecological crisis (in
the formally broadest sense of the term).

‘Sacer’ is - since the beginning of linguistic and ideological history of the

word – ‘that which cannot be touched’, and perhaps Bateson's interpretation
of the ‘sacred’ is nothing more than an attempt to revive the original meaning
of this definition from the fate of concealment and mystification. ‘Sacred’ is,
in fact, in Bateson’s use of the term, ‘that which cannot be touched’ first in
the purely descriptive sense of the assertion. As already shown, in fact,
‘sacred’ is the limit of the experience, what cannot be achieved by the
possibility of reason and conscious representation; ‘sacred’ is the need not to
situate certain information in certain points of the mental circuit and therefore
‘sacred’ is the inability to reach certain segments and certain levels of
knowledge and communication. ‘Sacred’ are, finally, those dimensions of the
systemic organization of natural events that are beyond human contact, that is,
the ability of man to forecast, control and manipulate.

But ‘sacred’ is ‘that which cannot be touched’ even in the normative sense of
the statement, as it is true that ‘sacred’ is the need to preserve certain
constraints and certain properties of the mental process from the knowledge
(and thus, ultimately, from the possibility of their appetitive and purposive
acquisition) and not to intervene, in particular, in the functioning of mental
systems of ecological size.

Recovering the initial knowledge guarded in the experience of what men call
the ‘sacred’, the text of Bateson then testifies the existence of a reasonable
opportunity to escape from the plant of the Western metaphysical tradition,
through a critical and aware attendance of the most advanced production of
this tradition itself. It opens the perspective of a research that could lead to a
monistic conception of the meaning of religion, that is, towards
analiveunderstanding of the intimate unity of all the reality, the absolute
communality of mind and body and full immanence of the ‘sacred’ and the
‘divinity’ in the matter. This perspective already exists in the marginal and
forgotten saying of mystics and great poets, but its affirmation requires the
definitive overcoming of the fundamental ontological position of
metaphysics, which led us to consider the being of all beings (and therefore
also the being of ‘god’) as present substance, and prevents us from thinking
about the pattern that connects all things, that is the very fact of their
connection, as an event, a nonentity, what isotherthan the substance and the
present.

“Consciousness is tending to focus in, whereas notions like the sacred and
the beautiful tend to be always looking for the larger, the whole. That is why
I distrust consciousness as a prime guide. [...] I think the sacramental is being
damaged all the time. The damage is the taking apart. The sacredness is the
coming together. The sacred is the hook up, the total hook up and not the
product of the split. [...] It is always surprising when you want to do a little
meditating to discover the difference between thinking of the things and
thinking of the relationship between the things. This has to do with the sacred
very much ”92.

Overcoming Western metaphysics means finding in the evolutionary history

of our own knowledge (and in non-Western knowledge) the reasons for
declaring the unsustainability of each ontological and epistemological
dualism and to return the meaning of the experiences which point out our
participation in the organic nature of the world to its original determination.
The dualism exists initially as a possibility always open to the wandering of
thought, but it also exists as a privileged form of an era of our civilization,
that age we call ‘modern’. In fact belongs to this age the claim of the absolute
substantial separation between mind and body, between what is material -
objectively present in space and in time and what is, in this sense, not
material. Also belongs to this age the whole series of antinomian oppositions
that arise from this first pair by analogy and govern, on the ontic plane, our
reference to entities: good vs evil, man vs nature, subject vs object, purpose
vs mean, believer vs infidel, elected races vs other races, etc... This array of
logical and ideological divisions cannot but have an essential relationship
with the first and most rooted dualistic assumption: the one that at the
beginning of European history gives birth to the idea of ‘god’ as a person
(substance), a creator infinitely distant and opposed by essence (that is, in its
fundamental predicates) to his creature. If the thought that thinks ‘god’ thinks
the ground of beings and therefore performs an absolutely primary
ontological function, then it is clear that the initial Christian consideration of
‘divinity’ and the nature of the world has the meaning of a model and an
implicit legitimation for each later dualist pair. It triumphs, therefore, in the
age of modern and, to the extent that Western modernity tends to become the
ontic configuration of the whole planet, it is bound to find success in the
ongoing transformation of all the civilizations of the globe. The issue is that,
as Bateson tirelessly points out, the assumption of a metaphysical dualism,
the idea of a personal god, the religion springing from this idea and the
ecological crisis in which we stand, are fundamentally the same. And it is not
lawful for thought, to believe that the ontic difficulties humanity is now
forced to deal with can be understood apart from a critical consideration of
their ontological (epistemological) premises.
92 GREGORY BATESON,A Sacred Unity, 299-302-303

Overcoming metaphysics means, therefore, on the basis of Bateson’s

meditation, coming out of the modern age and its initially Christian character,
that is, going all the way through it as a destiny in the space of its productions
of thought and knowledge and laying from the platform of these productions
themselves a bridge to an age of thought (and therefore of human history), we
still know nothing about, except the fact - simple but indispensable - that its
character, in the first and authentic sense, will bepost-modern. There are
perhaps reasons enough to consider the research of Bateson as an important
first segment of this bridge, but you cannot be assured that this segment will
be followed necessarily by others or that the outcome of such a transition
will resemble the vision outlined by Bateson. But it's worth recognizing with
sincerity that, observed from space of this vision, the problems certainly
remain, nevertheless “the world looks more elegant than it did ...”93.
93
GREGORY BATESON,A Sacred Unity, 307
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Gianfranco Savino was born in 1974 and is a philosopher and a poet with a
non-academic career. As a philosopher he has authored many articles, given
courses at the university and lectured at Jean Monnet International Summer
Seminars. His interests range from Philosophy of Science to the Theory of
Politics. He publishedNell’assenza di nomi (In the absence of names), an
anthology of essays on Heidegger related topics.

You can find out more about Gianfranco Savino on his website
http://gianfrancosavino.wix.com/ .
He lives in Naples, Italy and likes it a lot. Email him at:
gianfranco_savino@fastwebnet.it , he will be pleased.