The Reenchantment of the World

by Morris Berman

  7 Tomorrows Metaphysics (1)

  Let me state my belief that such matters as the bilateral symmetry of an animal, the patterned arrangement of leaves in a plant, the escalation of an armaments race, the processes of courtship, the nature of play, the grammar of a sentence, the mystery of biological evolution, and the contemporary crises in man's relation to his environment, can only be understood in terms of such an ecology of ideas as I propose. -- Gregory Bateson, Introduction to "Steps to an Ecology of Mind" (1972)

  We have come a long way since our survey of seventeenth-century science, and our analysis of the shift from feudalism to capitalism which accompanied the emergence of the Cartesian paradigm as the dominant world view of the West. I have argued that science became the integrating mythology of industrial society, and that because of the fundamental errors of that epistemology, the whole system is now dysfunctional, a mere two centuries after its implementation. A view of reality structured on what is only conscious and empirical, and excluding the tacit knowing that any perception in fact depends upon, has brought us to an impasse. I have suggested that the split between analysis and affect which characterizes modern science cannot be extended any further without the virtual end of the human race, and that our only hope is a very different sort of integrating mythology.

  At the end of Chapter 6, I made some suggestions as to how fact and value might once again be united -- suggestions that could possibly become part of a new epistemology, but which do not constitute a coherent system in and of themselves. There are, however, a large number of disciplines that claim to unite fact and value, and some of these, such as yoga, Zen, the oriental martial arts, and various types of meditation, are rapidly gaining popularity in the West. In addition, a number of well-articulated philosophies, such as those of George Gurdjieff and Rudolf Steiner, offer coherent, monistic ways of understanding the world. Why not adopt one of these? Why not abandon Cartesianism and embrace an outlook that is avowedly mystical and quasi-religious, that preserves the superior monistic insight that Cartesianism lacks? Why not deliberately return to alchemy, or animism, or number mysticism? If reality frightens you, Max Weber once remarked, the religion of your fathers is always there to welcome you back into its loving arms.

  The problem with these mystical or occult philosophies is that they share what Susanne Langer has cited as the key problem of all nondiscursive thought systems: they wind up dispensing with thought altogether. To say this is not, however, to deny their wisdom. Such philosophies contain the nugget of participating consciousness and can make it real to any serious devotee, and for that reason alone, practices such as Zen and yoga are certainly worth doing. My point is that once the insight is obtained, then what? These systems are, like dreams, a royal road to the unconscious, and that is fine; but what of nature, and our relation to it? What of society, and our relationship to each other? If our goal is nothing more ambitious than calming our anxieties and turning off our minds -- as is typically the case when an empire or major world view collapses -- then we can simply turn philosophy into psychotherapy and be done with all these discomforting complexities. Intellectually, this approach is not very interesting, and psychologically, it strikes me as being a colossal failure of nerve. In fact, it is but the flip side of Cartesianism; whereas the latter ignores value, the former dispenses with fact. It seems to me that we should be able to do better than merely alternate between extremes.

  In larger terms, the problem may be restated as follows. We stand at a crossroads in the evolution of Western consciousness. One fork retains all the assumptions of the Industrial Revolution and would lead us to salvation through science and technology; in short, it holds that the very paradigm that got us into trouble can somehow get us out. Its proponents (and they generally include the modern socialist states) view an expanding economy, increased urbanization, and cultural homogeneity on a Western model as both good and inevitable. The other fork leads to a future that is as yet somewhat obscure. Its advocates are an amorphous mass of Luddites, ecologists, regional separatists, steady-state economists, mystics, occultists, and pastoral romantics. Their goal is the preservation (or resuscitation) of such things as the natural environment, regional culture, archaic modes of thought, organic community structures, and highly decentralized political autonomy. The first fork clearly leads to a blind alley or Brave New World. The second, on the other hand, often appears to be a naive attempt to turn around and go back whence we came; to return to the safety of a feudal age now gone by. But a crucial distinction must be introduced here: recapturing a reality is not the same thing as returning to it. My discussion of alchemy attempted to clarify how much we lost when that tradition was discarded. In Chapter 6, I sought to demonstrate that if one equated body knowledge with unconscious knowledge, the Hermetic world view became physiological rather than occult. But at no point did I suggest that we could solve our dilemmas by attempting to return to the pre-modern world. Rather, my point was that as long as we dream, and as long as we have bodies, the insight into reality which the alchemists, Jung, and Reich obtained will remain indispensable, and must in fact become a major part of our view of reality. The same thing can be said for the attempt to live in harmony with the environment, or to have a sense of intimacy and community. Such things will always be the basic reality of a healthy human life, and a world view that ignores them in the name of "progress" is itself a precarious illusion. "All the errors and follies of magic, religion, and mystical traditions," writes Philip Slater in "Earthwalk," "are outweighed by the one great wisdom they contain -- the awareness of humanity's organic embeddedness in a complex and natural system."1 Recapturing this wisdom is not the same thing as abolishing modernity -- although it might help us to transcend it.

  The real difficulty, of course, is discovering how to recapture this wisdom in a mature form. The works of Jung and Reich are landmark attempts to do this, but their approach tends to be anti-intellectual. A knowledge of dreams and the body will inevitably be crucial components of the new metaphysics, but I doubt that the work of Jung and Reich could ever serve as its framework.

  Indeed, I know only one attempt to reunite fact and value which I regard as a possible framework for a new metaphysics, and that is the astonishing synthesis provided by the cultural anthropologist Gregory Bateson. As far as I can tell, his work represents the only fully articulated holistic science available today; one that is both scientific and based on unconscious knowing. Bateson's work is also much broader than that of Jung or Reich, in that it places a strong emphasis on the social and natural environment, in addition to the unconscious mind. It situates us in the world, whereas Jungian or Reichian self-realization often becomes an attempt to avoid it.

  Bateson is not yet widely known, but I suspect that future historians may come to regard him as the most seminal thinker of the twentieth century. The "Batesonian synthesis" -- what might be termed the "cybernetic/biological metaphor" -- is not Bateson's work alone; but the synthesis of ideas is his, as is the extraction of the concept of Mind from its traditionally religious context, and the demonstration that it is an element inherent in the real world. With Bateson's work, Mind (which also includes value) becomes a concrete reality and a working scientific concept. The resulting merger of fact and value represents an enormous challenge to the human spirit, not merely a calming of its fears.2

  As we begin our discussion of Bateson, however, it may be useful to provide a disclaimer at the outset. Modern science got into trouble by claiming to be the one true description of reality. In this sense it had much in common with its predecessor, the medieval Catholic world view, and there is no point in deliberately repeating this error. I am not suggesting, then, that Bateson s work is without limits or problems, or that the crises of our age can be resolved simply by adopting it uncritically and applying it to our dilemmas. Crises don't get resolved that way in any event. What I do believe is that Bateson's work represents the recovery of the alchemical world view in a credible, scientific form; tha
t it turns the conscious/unconscious dialectic into a creative method for investigating reality; and that if the world view of a nondystopian New Age is not derived directly from his work, it will inevitably contain some of its most salient features.

  Although the Batesonian synthesis bears remarkable similarities to Eastern thought, and appears to be epistemologically disparate from all Western scientific methodology save quantum mechanics and information theory, its real inspiration was the work of Gregory's father, William Bateson, the remarkable turn-of-the-century biologist who coined the term "genetics" in 1906. A brief exposition of William Bateson's scientific career is indispensable not merely to an understanding of the origins of Gregory Bateson's thought, but also to a thorough grasp of its content.3

  William Bateson lived in the heyday of British scientific materialism. The great physicist James Clerk Maxwell (1831-79) had published his final statement on reality, "Matter and Motion," towards the end of his life, and Thomas Henry Huxley had spent much of his career popularizing that way of thinking in his ideological "campaign" for physical science and the Darwinian theory of natural selection. Bateson, who had received his own training under the famous anti-Darwinian thinker Samuel Butler, was, despite his scientific sophistication, part of an older nonprofessional scientific tradition, that of the "gentleman amateur," a social type closely associated with the British aristocracy.4 Materialism, utilitarianism, and expertise -- all these he saw as the shoddy values of a bourgeois middle class. His own emphasis was on aesthetic sensibility. He spoke of true education as "the awakening to ecstasy" (an idea retained by Gregory in his own theory of learning), not the dreary preparation for a mundane career. Scientific work reached its highest point, he held, when it aspired to art. As an undergraduate at Cambridge he defended the retention of classical Greek as a required subject because it provided an "oasis of reverence" in the otherwise arid mind of the typical science student, and in an 1891 flyer on the subject, he wrote:

  If there had been no poets there would have been no problems, for surely the unlettered scientist of to-day would never have found them. To him it is easier to solve a difficulty than to feel it.

  [Italics mine]

  Creating a science out of the "feel" of things proved an accomplishment that eluded William Bateson. His own career embodied the agonizing split between science and art, the healing of which became the central project of Gregory Bateson's life. He was convinced from the start that emotion, like reason, had precise algorithms, and one of Gregory's favorite quotes was taken from Descartes' arch-rival, Blaise Pascal: "The heart has its reasons which the reason does not at all perceive."

  William Bateson's attempt to create a science of form and pattern, and the aesthetic and political attitudes that formed the basis of this attempt, have been brilliantly analyzed by the historian of biology William Coleman. Coleman shows how this attempt and these attitudes emerged in the context of Bateson's opposition to the theory of chromosomes, which had been developed by 1925. The theory held, and still holds, that all hereditary phenomena can be traced to a material particle, known as the gene, which is lodged in the chromosome. This atomistic, Newtonian approach sees the gene as the one hereditary element that is stable, persisting through all change. To Bateson such an approach started at the wrong end of the problem. What persisted, as both Samuel Butler and Bateson's next-door neighbor Alfred North Whitehead had told him, was not matter but form; what Gregory would later term "Mind." He thus undertook to uncover the pattern and process of evolution by an analysis of heredity and variation, and to do this focused not on regularities, but on deviations from the norm. "Treasure your exceptions," he once remarked to a fledgling scientist; and the elucidation of "normal" anatomy through the study of nature's anomalies became central to his approach. One examined deviations, or morphological disruptions, to find out how the organism in question adapted, how it managed not to go to pieces. (Years later, Gregory Bateson would arrive at his own formulations of typical human interaction by studying alcoholics and schizophrenics.) Thus, in his Materials for the Study of Variation (1894), a guidebook to animal teratology, Bateson stated that the goal was to ascertain the laws governing form.5 The origin of variation, he claimed, had to be sought in the living thing itself, not, as Darwin had held, in the environment. Although he was not a Lamarckian, William Bateson, like the early alchemical Newton, saw the principle of transformation as an internal one. To locate the origin of variation in the gene, however, and then to combine this with a theory of fortuitous variation, was to make a late-Newtonian error: to hold that order could somehow emerge from the random collisions of material particles. Newton's later doctrine of change by way of the rearrangement of impenetrable corpuscles was to Bateson an anathema, a nonexplanation.

  For Bateson, then, it was not the gene, but the pattern or form of an organism which was the crucial element in heredity; and if so, then symmetry must be the key to the lock. The basic facts of his study came from examining segmentation, such as that which occurs in the earthworm. Biologists call this phenomenon "meristic differentiation," the repetition of parts along the axis of an animal. This axial symmetry can be distinguished from the type of radial symmetry displayed by starfish or jellyfish. Both types of symmetry show the continuity of cell generations and behavior we call "hereditary." But whereas the segments of the radially symmetric animals are usually all alike, transversely segmented creatures are capable of a dynamic asymmetry between successive segments -- "metamerism." In other words, anomalies of merism are the result of a disruption of normal functioning, and this leads to variation; but this process is itself normal. Nonrepetitive segmentation, such as occurs in the development of the lobsters claw, falls into this category. For William Bateson the study of metamerism opened the door to a concrete demonstration of the primacy of form over matter, and enabled a systemic understanding of heredity and variation. As such, his work constituted a first step in developing an alternative to chromosome theory. He eventually came to argue that what was transmitted in heredity was not an objective substance, but the power or faculty of being able to reproduce a substance: tendency, disposition, was what was passed on.6

  Bateson, however, did take one idea from Victorian physics, which was having its own struggles trying to reconcile matter and force. A number of physicists, including Maxwell, had suggested that for heuristic purposes only, the atom be viewed not as a Newtonian billiard ball, but as a smoke ring, or a vortex. The advantages were obvious. The so-called vortex atom made possible an explanation of the universe which was not completely deterministic. The image embodied the unification of matter and force, as Sir Joseph Larmor, its leading exponent, once declared, and it enabled one to talk of force and change without relying totally on Newtonian rearrangement. Like a smoke ring, the vortex atom was seen as being able to twist and divide, producing new loops; and although Bateson did not discuss the vortex atom explicitly, he emphasized spontaneous division as the key characteristic of living matter. His own notion of living matter, derived partly from ideas already current in Cambridge zoological circles, held that an organism was a "vortex of life." In 1907 he wrote that animals and plants were not simply matter, but systems through which matter was passing. Consciousness apart, said William Bateson, any entity that, like a smoke ring, could spontaneously divide had to be regarded as a living entity. There is no vitalism in his work, no assumption of "God" or an 'élan vital.' But his is a type of explanation which has little in common with traditional physics, and in fact much more in common with alchemy. In both -- as in what would later become information theory -- nature is first and foremost "a perpetual circulatory worker."7