Clearly, continues Bateson, the result could have been avoided if the young man had been able to confront his mother with the fact that she became uncomfortable when he expressed affection for her. But years of intense dependency and training, going back to a time when he was a helpless infant, had set up a pattern that made this option impossible. Over the years he had learned, says Bateson, that "if I am to keep my tie to mother, I must not show her that I love her, but if I do not show her that I love her, then I will lose her." We see in this example a confusion of logical types. The child had learned that if he were to maintain his relationship with his mother,
he must not discriminate accurately between orders of message. . . . As a result [he] must systematically distort his perception of metacommunicative signals. . . . He must deceive himself about his own internal state in order to support mother in her deception.
There is, then, no such thing as a schizophrenic person. There is only a schizophrenic system. The mother in such a system is in the position of controlling the child's definitions of its own messages, and (deutero-) teaches it a reality based on false discrimination of those messages. She also forbids the child to use the metacommunicative level, which is that level ordinarily used to correct our perception of messages, and without which such normal relationships become impossible. Yet modern psychiatry puts the child in the lockup, and lets the mother run free. A strong father might be able to intervene on the child's behalf early on, and in an extended family even an uncle or grandparent might save the situation. But madness has increased proportionally with the rise of the nuclear family, and it is typically the case in schizophrenogenic families that if the father (or the mother, if it is the man who is doing the double binding) were to step in to support the child, he would have to recognize the real nature of his own marriage -- a recognition that would undo it. Schizophrenia is not a "disease but a systemic network, a wonderland in which Alice is not free to tell the queen she is more than a little bit looney.
How does one escape from the double bind, then? On the individual level, at least, Bateson notes that the exit door is frequently creativity. In a later (1969) reflection on the double bind, and in his elaboration of "Learning III" in an article on "The Logical Categories of Learning and Communication" (1971), Bateson realized that schizophrenia was itself part of a larger system that he called the "trans-contextual syndrome." Jokes, which often involve the scrambling of the literal and the metaphorical, are a good example or this syndrome. They depend on a sudden condensation of logical types, a violation of the Russell-Whitehead theory ("A beggar told me he hadn't had a bite in three days, so I bit him"). There is, in fact, a double bind present in the etiology of a whole range of behavior -- schizophrenia, humor, art, and poetry, for example -- but the theory of the double bind does not formally distinguish between these activities or states of mind. There is no way to say whether a particular family will produce a clown or a schizophrenic, for example. Those whose life is enriched by trans-contextual gifts, says Bateson, or impoverished by them, have this in common: things are never just what they are. There is often, or even always, a "double take" involved, a symbolic level that distinguishes the Don Quixote from the Sancho Panza. Thus while the patient in the hospital canteen thinks, "What can I do for you?" might be a sexual invitation, the comedian constructs a short story or TV situation comedy based on the very same confusion. >>c.f., Koestler, "bisociation"
According to Bateson, the double bind is rooted in the theory of deutero-learning; trans-contextuality is a deutero-learned "trait." In work he did on mammalian communication in the 1960s, Bateson discovered that one could double bind a porpoise until schizophrenic symptoms were induced.26 For example, first teach the animal a series of tricks (flips somersaults, etc.) and deutero-teach the context -- instrumental reward -- by tossing it a fish every time it performs a trick. Then raise the ante: reward comes after three tricks are executed. Finally raise the ante to a level that assaults the entire Learning II pattern: reward the porpoise only after it invents a completely new trick. The creature goes through its entire repertoire, either one trick at a time or in sets of threes, and gets no fish. It keeps doing it, getting angrier, more vehement. Finally, it begins to go crazy, exhibit signs of extreme frustration or pain. What happened next in this particular experiment was completely unexpected: the porpoise's mind jumped to a higher logical type. It somehow realized that the new rule was, "Forget what you learned in Learning II; there is nothing sacred about it." The animal not only invented a new trick (for which it was immediately rewarded); it proceeded to perform four absolutely new capers that had never before been observed in this particular species of animal. The porpoise had become trans-contextual. it had broken through the double bind to what Bateson calls "Learning III." In Learning III, we literally rise to a new level of existence, and then look down and recall, perhaps fondly, our past consciousness, fraught with what we thought was wresolvabie contradiction. "Oh yes," we may say; "that's what that was all about." But the formal etiology of creativity and schizophrenia remains the same. The principle is synergistic, says Bateson; "no amount of rigorous discourse of a given logical type can "explain" phenomena of a higher type."27
A similar event occurs in the relationship between Zen master and student, in which the master poses an impossible problem, a double bind known as a "koan." Some of these are famous: "What is the sound of one hand clapping?," or "Show me your face before your parents conceived you." Bateson cites the one in which the master holds a stick over the pupil and cries, "If you say this stick is real, I'll hit you. If you say it isn't real, I'll hit you. If you keep quiet, I'll hit you" -- a classic double bind. What constitutes the creative exit here is the nature of the metacommunication. The student can, for example, take the stick and break it in two, and the master might accept this response if he sees that the act reflects the student's own conceptual/emotive breakthrough.
In Learning III, the individual learns to change habits acquired in Learning II, the schismogenic habits that double bind us all. He learns that he is a creature who unconsciously achieves Learning II, or he learns to limit or direct his Learning II. Learning III is learning about Learning II, about your own "character" and world view. It is a freedom from the bondage of your own personality -- an "awakening to ecstasy," as William Bateson once defined true education. This awakening necessarily involves a redefinition of the self, which is the product of one's previous deutero-learning. In fact, the self starts to take on a certain irrelevance; in Bateson's words, it ceases to "function as a nodal argument in the punctuation of experience." As we have seen, the journey can be dangerous. The problem of the self is so difficult that many psychotics will not use the first person singular in their speech. For others more fortunate, Bateson claims, there is a merger of personal identity with "all the processes of relationship in some vast ecology or aesthetics. . . ." Or as Laing put it in one of his most beautiful passages,
True sanity entails in one way or another the dissolution of the normal ego, that false self competently adjusted to our alienated social really; the emergence of the "inner" archetypal mediators of divine power, and through the death a rebirth, and the eventual reestablishment of a new kind of ego-functioning, the ego now being the servant of the divine, no longer its betrayer.28
It is here that we arrive at a crucial point, one that Laing has made over and over again in his work. The type of reasoning involved in schizophrenia is the same as that at work in art, poetry, humor, and even religious inspiration. The main difference is that the latter forms of trans-contextuality are more or less freely chosen, whereas the schizophrenic is caught up in a system not of his own making. But in formal terms, at least, schizophrenia represents a more highly developed form of consciousness than the varieties of Learning II which most of us have been taught. Yet what is the nature of this Learning II, at least on the official level? By and large, it is a charade. The modern reality-system requires allegiance to a logic that in actual practice h
as to be violated all the time. Western society has deutero-learned a Cartesian double-bind and called it "reality"; it was precisely metacommunication (nuance, tacit knowing) that the Cartesian world view officially managed to destroy.29 At the level of the dominant culture, we are supposed to believe that scientific knowledge is the only knowledge real or worth having; that analogue knowledge is nonexistent or inferior; and that fact and value have nothing to do with one each other. None of this is true, but we are all required to live by these rules, and for the most part not to comment on them (except in books, I suppose). Yet where does insanity lie, in such a situation? As we saw in our discussion of Newton, we now live in a world turned upside down, a systemic double bind that has resulted in a kind of collective madness. The only way out of this double bind, it would seem, lies in rising to a new level of holistic consciousness which will facilitate new and healthy modes of behavior. Whereas a Cartesian analysis of modern knowledge and social problems winds up, as Nietzsche said, biting its own tail, a holistic analysis suggests that not all circles are vicious; and that there might be ways of stepping out of the present one. Bateson offers us a place to step, a non-Cartesian mode of scientific reasoning. For in the course of elaborating the nature of our schismogenic tensions, and the role of analogue knowledge in the transmission of information -- discussions that necessarily include a critique of Cartesian dualism -- he also developed a methodology that merges fact with value and erodes the barrier between science and art. This methodology is holistic rather than Cartesian, and as much intuitive as it is analytic. It is, to quote Don Juan's admonition to Carlos Castaneda, "a path with a heart," and yet without any corresponding loss of rational clarity.
I have presented this chapter as an intellectual odyssey, Gregory Bateson's journey through a series of problems that are among the most fascinating any scientist or thinker might consider. His studies do not necessarily add up to a formal epistemology, but then the scientific Revolution itself did not begin as a set of abstract principles, but rather as a series of investigations of diverse problems -- falling bodies, planetary motion, light and color. Only much later did these investigations reveal a common methodology; the ideology of mechanism was more the work of Voltaire and Laplace than of Descartes and Galileo. Yet in Bateson's case, it may not be premature to argue that the insights gleaned from studying latmul transvestism, learning theory, metacommunication, and schizophrenia do ultimately constitute an epistemological framework. Indeed, Bateson himself has elaborated this epistemology in some of his writings on cybernetic explanation. By its very nature, however, Bateson's epistemology resists linear explication. It is really a stance toward life and knowledge, a commitment rather than a formula. Like alchemy, his epistemology constitutes a praxis. In approaching a problem, Bateson sought to immerse himself in the world view being studied. His scientific sophistication notwithstanding, Bateson instinctively knew that most knowledge was analogue, that realities lay in wholes rather than parts, and that immersion (mimesis) rather than analytical dissection was the beginning of wisdom. To give a digital summary of his approach risks reifying it, and thereby rendering it worthless or even dangerous. "Let loose ends lead to their own ends," a friend of mine once wrote in one of her poems; and perhaps it would be best not to tie them up here. Certainly, no set of abstractions Bateson or I lay out in linear, discursive terms can grasp the larger noncognitive reality of life. But we live in this century, not the fourteenth or twenty-second, and for better or worse we are saddled with verbal-rational knowledge as the primary mode of exposition. It is with some ambivalence, then, that I turn to a linear and analytical exposition of Batesonian epistemology.
8 Tomorrows Metaphysics (2)
Mere purposive rationality unaided by such phenomena as art, religion, dream and the like, is necessarily pathogenic and destructive of life; and . . . its virulence springs specifically from the circumstance that life depends upon interlocking circuits of contingency, while consciousness can see only such short arcs of such circuits as human purpose may direct. . . .
That is the sort of world we live in -- a world of circuit structures -- and love can survive only if wisdom (i.e., a sense of recognition of the fact of circuitry) has an effective voice. -- Gregory Bateson, "Style, Grace and Information~ in Primitive Art" (1967)
A well-ordered humanism does not begin with itself, but puts things back in their place. It puts the world before life, life before man, and the respect of others before love of self. This is the lesson that the people we call "savages" teach us: a lesson of modesty, decency and discretion in the face of a world that preceded our species and that will survive it. --Claude Lévi-Strauss (1972 interview)
Batesonian epistemology is essentially an elaboration of an answer to a single question: What is Mind? As Bateson tells us in his Introduction to "Steps to an Ecology of Mind," Western science has attempted "to build the bridge to the wrong half of the ancient dichotomy between form and substance."1 Rather than explain mind (or Mind), Western science explained it away. But it is unlikely that we could start with substance (matter and motion) as the one explanatory principle, and deduce form, or mind, from it. In Bateson's way of thinking, Mind is -- without being a religious principle or entelechy -- every bit as real as matter.2
The reality of Mind in Bateson's world view gives his epistemology certain characteristics that are formally identical to alchemy and Aristotelianism. Fact and value are not split, nor are "inner" and "outer" separate realities. Quality is the issue, not quantity, and most phenomena are, at least in a special sense, alive. Yet there is one great difference between Bateson's work and all of those traditional epistemologies that are premised on the notion of a sacred unity: there is no "God" in his system. There is no animism, no 'mana,' nothing of what we have called "original participation," because Mind is regarded as being immanent in the arrangement and behavior of phenomena, not inherent in matter itself. Thus, although there is such a thing as participation -- we are not separate from the things around us -- it does not exist in the "primitive" or pre-modern sense.
Earlier in this work, we delineated the differences between seventeenth-century science and its holistic predecessors. Before we proceed to an analysis of Batesonian epistemology, it will be useful to examine an outline of its differences from the Cartesian paradigm, as shown in Chart 2.3
Chart 2. Comparison of Cartesian and Batesonian world views
World view of modern science World view of Batesonian holism ---------------------------- -------------------------------
No relationship between fact and value. Fact and value inseparable.
Nature is known from the Nature is revealed in our outside, and phenomena are relations with it, and examined in abstraction from phenomena can be known their context (the experiment). only in context (participant observation).
Goal is conscious, empirical Unconscious mind is primary; control over nature. goal is wisdom, beauty, grace.
Descriptions are abstract, Descriptions are a mixture of mathematical; only that which the abstract and the concrete; can be measured is real. quality takes precedence over quantity.
Mind is separate from body, Mind/body, subject/object, are subject is separate from each two aspects of the same object. process.
Linear time, infinite progress; Circuitry (single variables in the we can in principle know all system cannot be maximized); of reality. we cannot in principle know more than a fraction of reality.
Logic is either/or; emotions are Logic is both/and (dialectical); epiphenomenal. the heart has precise algorithms.
Atomism: Holism: 1. Only matter and motion 1. Process, form, relationship are real. are primary. 2. The whole is nothing more 2. Wholes have properties than the sum of its parts. that parts do not have. 3. Living systems are in 3. Living systems, or Minds, principle reducible to are not reducible to their inorganic matter; nature is components; nature is alive. ultimately dead.
We have commented on some of the above differences in Chapters 5 and
7, but most are not immediately obvious and will have to be spelled out in the discussion that follows. For now, I wish to point out that the differences involved are as profound as those that exist between science and alchemy, Sancho Panza and Don Quixote, or conventional sanity and Learning III. As Bateson himself once admitted, he had come a long way on the road from dualism, yet still thought in terms of an independent "I" and conceived of himself as a subject confronting objects. The statement is hardly surprising, for Bateson, or any other thinker writing about holism in the late twentieth century, remains a transitional figure. The fact that he retained the thought processes of our world is what enabled him to converse with us. But if Batesonian holism is indeed the mental framework of an emerging civilization, that civilization, once mature, will probably find our ways of thinking almost incomprehensible. It may even build museums of the history of science, in which visitors will have to turn their minds literally inside out in order to grasp what Galileo and Newton were trying to say.
The Reenchantment of the World Page 26