The Reenchantment of the World

by Morris Berman

  36. Aptly termed "split-brain follies" by Theodore Roszak. See Unfinished Animal (New York: Harper & Row, 1975), pp: 52-57. The various experiments that have been performed with the "two brains" might conceivably be seen as constituting a refutation of my argument about the body and unconscious knowledge. After all, these experiments do reveal the right hemisphere as being (in right-handed people) the locus of nonverbal functions. However, my argument does not deny that the brain stores images or organizes them. The "two brain" experiments tell us nothing about where the knowledge originates from. Thus I believe it can be maintained that intelligence is in the body, and data processing in the brain. Nor is this to deny that the brain can be a very sensual thing, amplifying and processing fantasy, dreams, artistic imagery, and so on.

  37. Peter Marris, Loss and Change (Garden City, N.Y.: Doubleday Anchor, 1975).

  38. There are limits to this argument, of course, but it is nevertheless likely that beyond the common substrate of primary process, Galileo's body was different from that of Thomas Aquinas, and that both of them were significantly different from the body of Homer. The human body has changed over the centuries in a number of important ways: in height, shape, ability to perceive colors, and especially in physiognomy. Psychoanalyst Stanley Keleman has developed this theme in some detail, and has argued that the body of the future will be a further radical departure from that of the present.

  39. It should be clear that I have not left Descartes behind, largely because it is presently impossible to think discursively in purely nonscientific categories, although I have struggled to do so (cf. notes 35 and 36 to this chapter). The discussion in the text continues the mind/body dichotomy, locating the ego in the head and the unconscious in the body. It also uses the term "unconscious" in two senses, as participation, and as knowledge in the body which we somehow cannot get at. Can such an approach be justified?

  I would answer by saying that this chapter has an inevitable tension built into it. I am trying to provide a verbal analysis of nonverbal experience, and there are obvious limits to what can be communicated in this way. As don Juan noted, the "tonal," by definition, cannot possibly explicate the "nagual." Thus the two senses of the unconscious which I make use of are only dual to scientific reasoning. To holistic reasoning, mimesis is "the knowledge present in the body, and is hardly inaccessible." In other words, the "nagual" is not unknown. It is only unknown to the ego. The ontological being, the whole person, does know it, but there is no way of presenting this knowledge to the reader in book form short of having the text printed on fur or switching to verse. I could, of course, have invented a new holistic terminology, complete with words such as "mindbody" and "selfother," but I do not think a scientific Finnegans Wake would be helpful at this point. I suggest, then, that the present chapter and its Cartesian vocabulary be viewed as a prop helping us to advance to the point where we shall no longer think in dualistic terms. We are still stuck in dualism, yet can recognize an approaching change.

  40. E. A. Burtt, The Metaphysical Foundations of Modern Science, 2d ed. (Garden City, N.Y.: Doubleday, 1932), p. 17; Langer, Philosophy in a New Key, pp. xiii, 3, 12-13.

  41. The following discussion is adapted from my essay, "The Ambiguity of Color," published in 1978 by the Exploratorium in San Francisco; use of this material by permission of the Director. See also Mike and Nancy Samuels, Seeing with the Mind's Eye (New York: Random House, 1975), p. 93, Land's article, "Experiments in Color Vision," may be found in the May 1959 issue of Scientific American, and the quote from Lao-tzu appears in Alan Watts, The Way of Zen (New York: Vintage Books, 1957), p. 27, Whorf's classic work is Language, Thought, and Reality, ed. John B. Carroll (Cambridge: The MIT Press, 1956). There is a large literature on the human aura; the interested reader might start with Nicholas M. Regush, Exploring the Human Aura (Englewood Cliffs, N.J.: Prentice-Hall, 1975).

  42. Exposure beyond fifteen minutes starts to push the inmate toward a breakdown. See "No new tortures needed," Montreal Gazette, 17 October 1980, and "Pink power calls raging inmates," Montreal Gazette, 5 January 1981.

  43. This statement may be a bit misleading; I do not mean to suggest that anthropocentrism is the answer to our epistemological dilemmas. It is worth asking, for example, what the cetacean or arachnid experience of light and color is, and Judith and Herbert Kohl explore this approach in their interesting book The View from the Oak (San Francisco: Sierra Club Books, 1977). Even in these cases, however, the human factor intrudes; what one is really studying is the human experience of the cetacean (or arachnid) experience of light and color. But recognizing the existence of this factor and incorporating it into our sciences does not necessarily result in anthropocentrism. Donald Griffin discusses the notion of participant observation in biological research in The Question of Animal Awareness (New York: The Rockefeller University Press, 1976).

  44. Robert Bly, Sleepers Joining Hands (New York: Harper & Row, 1973), pp. 48-49.

  45. Brown, Life Against Death, p. 236.

  CHAPTER 7. Tomorrow's Metaphysics (1)

  1. Philip Slater, Earthwalk (New York: Bantam Books, 1975), p. 233.

  2. Gregory Bateson died in San Francisco in July 1980. He was working on a successor to Mind and Nature, which may have explored the aesthetic dimension that I discuss briefly in Chapter 9; but as it stands now, the discussion of his work in Chapters 7 and 8 below turns out, very unexpectedly, to be "complete."

  A biography of Bateson appeared too late for me to read it for this work: David Lipset, Gregory Bateson: The Legacy of a Scientist (Englewood Cliffs, N.J.: Prentice-Hall, 1980).

  3. The discussion of William Bateson's life given below is based on the following sources: William Coleman, "Bateson and Chromosomes: Conservative Thought in Science," Centaurus 15 (1970), 228-314; Beatrice Bateson's memoir of her husband, William Bateson, F.R.S., Naturalist (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1928), pp. 1-160; and Gregory Bateson, Steps to an Ecology of Mind (London: Paladin, 1973; New York: Ballantine, 1972), pp. 47-52 British edition, 73-78 American edition.

  4. Morris Berman, "'Hegemony' and the Amateur Tradition in British science," Journal of Social History 8 (Winter, 1975), 30-50. All British science, however, was colored by this tradition down to the late nineteenth century.

  5. The full title is Materials for the Study of Variation treated with especial Regard to Discontinuity in the Origin of Species.

  6. What was lost to science when chromosome theory triumphed we can only guess. Bateson's idea of the transmission of tendency has been revived in the work of Gregory Bateson, C. H. Waddington, and a few other biologists who have been able to argue successfully for the existence of Lamarckian mimicry -- something that simulates the inheritance of acquired characteristics. But by and large, the world of materialistic, orthodox biology is leading, ineluctably, to the potential horrors of gene manipulation and recombinant DNA -- horrors that might have been avoided had Bateson's views prevailed in the 1920s. Cf. Barry Commoner, "Failure of the Watson-Crick Theory as a Chemical Explanation of Inheritance," Nature 226 (1968), 334.

  7. Victorian model-building, including the vortex atom, has been the subject of a large literature, including a very critical overview by the French historian Pierre Duhem in chapter 4 of his Aim and Structure of Physical Theory, trans. Philip P. Wiener (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1954; orig. French edition 1914). Further material can be obtained in works by and about William Thomson (Lord Kelvin), P. G. Tait, James Clerk Maxwell, Oliver Lodge, Joseph Larmor et al. Cf. Robert Silliman, "William Thomson: Smoke Rings and Nineteenth-Century Atomism," Isis 54 (1963), 461-74.

  8. W. and G. Bateson, "On certain aberrations of the red-legged partridges 'Alectoris rufa' and 'saxatilis,'" Journal of Genetics 16 (1926), 101-23.

  9. Cf. Gunther S. Stent, The Coming of the Golden Age (Garden City, N.Y.: The Natural History Press, 1968), pp. 73-74, 112. See also his Paradoxes of Progress (San Francisco: W.H. Freeman, 1978);

  10. By and large, I am going to omi
t any discussion of Bateson's biological writings and his revision of Darwinian evolution. Although integrally related to his other work, limitations of space prevent an exposition at this point. I am, also, primarily interested in the ethical implications of that work, and this is presented in Chapter 8. Readers interested in filling this gap should consult Mind and Nature: A Necessary Unity (New York: Dutton, 1979), and the essays in Steps to an Ecology of Mind titled "Minimal Requirements for a Theory of Schizophrenia" and "The Role of Somatic Change in Evolution."

  11. The following discussion is taken from Naven, 2d ed. (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1958), pp. 1-2, 29-30, 33, 3,5, 88, 92, 97-99, 106-34, 14141, 157-58, 175-79, 186-203, 215, 218-20, 257-79, and the 1958 Epilogue. I have also used three articles from Steps to an Ecology of Mind: "Experiments in Thinking about Observed Ethnological Material," Morale and National Character," and "Bali: The Value System of a Steady State." Bateson argues in Mind and Nature, pp. 192-95, that the methodology of the Iatmul investigation is a paradigm for the resolution of a very large number of problems in ethics, education, and evolution.

  12. Bateson, however, had his differences with Ruth Benedict's approach, as he notes on pages 191-92 of Mind and Nature. The discussion that follows is concerned exclusively with ethos; I shall return to eidos in the section on learning theory, below.

  13. There is, however, kinship differentiation, and naven turns out to be motivated by the attempt to reduce tensions (as personally experienced) arising from these relationships, in addition to its importance in resolving sexual tensions. For the most part, however, I shall not be dealing with kinship motivation. Bateson's summary can be found in Naven, pp. 203-17.

  14. For an overview of some of the anthropological discussion on this topic, see Milton Singer, "A Survey of Culture and Personality," in Bert Kaplan, ed., Studying Personality Cross-Culturally (New York: Harper & Row, 1961),pp. 9-90.

  15. It is necessary to note that Bateson's early anthropological work did contain two serious errors, both of which he later pointed out. The first was what Alfred North Whitehead called the "fallacy of misplaced concreteness" -- the making of abstractions into concrete "things." Bateson was in fact aware of this when he wrote the Epilogue to the first (1936) edition of Naven. He states there that despite the way he tended to argue in the text, ethos is not an entity and cannot be the cause of anything: no one has ever seen or tasted an ethos any more than they have seen or tasted the First Law of Thermodynamics. The concept is a description, a way of organizing data, a viewpoint taken by the scientist or by the natives themselves.

  Second, the notion that stability could be maintained by an "admixture" of symmetrical and complementary schismogenesis was, he realized by 1958, too rudimentary. It naively assumes the two variables can somehow cancel each other out, but never develops a functional relationship between them. Without such a relationship, there is no reason to expect that the two processes will equilibrate; the explanation for stability is much too fortuitous here. The real issue, Bateson saw later, was how (and whether) increasing schismogenic tension served to trigger controlling factors, and he came to reevaluate the theory in cybernetic terms with the concept of "end-linkage." Cf. Chapter 8 of the present work and the 1958 Epilogue to Naven.

  16. On Bali, see Gregory Bateson and Margaret Mead, Balinese Character: A Photographic Analysis (New York: New York Academy of Sciences, 1942); the essay on Bali mentioned in note 11; and "Style, Grace and Information in Primitive Art," in Steps to an Ecology of Mind.

  17. Herbert Marcuse, One-Dimensional Man (Boston: Beacon Press, 1964), p. 17.

  18. The discussion below is based on Jurgen Ruesch and Gregory Bateson, Communication: The Social Matrix of Psychiatry (New York: Norton, 1968; orig. publ. 1951), pp. 176, 212, 218, 242; and the following articles from Steps to an Ecology of Mind: "Social Planning and the Concept of Deutero-Learning"; "A Theory of Plan and Fantasy"; "Epidemiology of a Schizophrenia"; "Towards a Theory of Schizophrenia" (written together with Don D. Jackson, Jay Haley and John H. Weakland); "Minimal Requirements for a Theory of Schizophrenia"; "Double Bind, 1969"; and "The Logical Categories of Learning and Communication."

  19. Bateson, Steps to an Ecology of Mind, p. 143 British edition; p. 170 American edition.

  20. There is such a thing as a so-called lucid dream, in which the dreamer is aware that he or she is dreaming, but for the most part this phenomenon is not a common occurrence.

  21. Jay Haley, "Paradoxes in Play, Fantasy, and Psychotherapy," Psychiatric Research Reports 2 (1955), 52-58.

  22. R. D. Laing, The Divided Self (Harmondsworth: Penguin Books, 1965; first publ. 1959), pp. 29-30.

  23. Quoted in Coleman, Bateson and Chromosomes, p. 273.

  24. See Bateson's Introduction to Gregory Bateson, ed., Perceval's Narrative: A Patient's Account of His Psychosis, 1830-1832, by John Perceval (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1961).

  25. E. Z. Friedenberg, R. D. Laing (New York: Viking, 1974), p. 7.

  26. My source for the following information is a talk given by Bateson in London on 14 October 1975, and also pp. 121-23 of Mind and Nature.

  27. Steps to an Ecology of Mind, p. 265 British edition, p. 295 American edition. For a delightful Victorian story based on this theme, see Edwin A. Abbott, Flatland, 6th ed. (New York: Dover, 1952).

  28. R. D. Laing, The Politics, of Experience (New York: Ballantine Books, 1968), pp. 144-45.

  29. "Officially" is a key word here, since it is through metacommunication itself that we absorb the Cartesian world view. Cf. my discussion in Chapter 5, that the Cartesian metaphysics contains participating consciousness even while denying its existence.

  CHAPTER 8. Tomorrow's Metaphysics (2)

  1. Gregory Bateson, Steps to an Ecology of Mind (London: Paladin, 1973; New York: Ballantine, 1972), p. 31 British edition, p. xxv American edition.

  2. I am using "Mind" here roughly in the sense first employed in Chapter 5, that is, to denote the mental system that includes both the unconscious and the mind (small m), or conscious awareness. The concept will be more fully elaborated in the discussion below.

  3. For an interesting comparison with the following, see Jurgen Ruesch and Gregory Bateson, Communication: The Social Matrix of Psychiatry (New York: Norton, 1968; orig. publ. 1951), pp. 259-61.

  4. On the following discussion, see "The Cybernetics of 'Self': A Theory of Alcoholism," in Steps to an Ecology of Mind.

  5. It is interestingto note here that one of the founders of AA was influenced by the work of Carl Jung. See Alcoholics Anonymous, 3d ed. (New York: Alcoholics Anonymous World Services, 1976), pp. 26-27.

  6. The following section is based on Bateson's Mind and Nature: A Necessary Unity (New York: Dutton, 1979), pp. 91.114, and Steps to an Ecology of Mind, p. 458 British edition, p. 482 American edition.

  7. The discussion of redundancy given below is based on Steps to an Ecology of Mind, pp. 101-13 British edition, pp. 128-40 American edition.

  8. Michael Polanyi, Personal Knowledge, corrected ed. (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1962), p. 88.

  I hope I am not belaboring a point here, but it may not be immediately obvious that making everything redundant is equivalent to making everything random. A useful analogy might be the signal-to-noise ratio of a radio broadcast or TV screen: it must be a ratio if it is to exist at all. If everything were a signal, there would be no more background; so everything would be background (the TV screen would be black, for example). If every soldier in the army were promoted to the rank of general, there would be no more army. Total redundancy, in other words, destroys differentiation. When everything is redundant there is no longer a framework left to create redundancy. "If everybody is somebody," wrote Gilbert and Sullivan in one of their operettas, "then nobody is anybody."