Form,
Substance and Difference
by Gregory Bateson
Let me say that it is an extraordinary honor to
be here tonight, and a pleasure. I am a little frightened of you all, because I
am sure there are people here who know every field of knowledge that I have
touched much better than I know it. It is true that I have touched a number of
fields, and I probably can face any one of you and say I have touched a field
that you have not touched. But I am sure that for every field I have touched,
there are people here who are much more expert than I. I am not a well-read
philosopher, and philosophy is not my business. I am not a very well-read
anthropologist and anthropology is not exactly my business.
But I have tried to do something which Korzybski
was very much concerned with doing, and with which the whole semantic movement
has been concerned, namely, I have studied the area of impact between very
abstract and formal philosophic thought on the one hand and the natural history
of man and other creatures on the other. This overlap between formal premises
and actual behavior is, I assert, of quite dreadful importance today. We face a
world which is threatened not only with disorganization of many kinds, but also
with the destruction of its environment, and we, today, are still unable to
think clearly about the relations between an organism and its environment. What
sort of thing is this, which we call "organism plus environment"?
Let us go back to the original statement for
which Korzybski is most famous—the statement that the map is not the
territory. This statement came out of a very wide range of philosophic
thinking, going back to Greece, and wriggling through the history of European
thought over the last 2000 years. In this history, there has been a sort of
rough dichotomy and often deep controversy. There has been violent enmity and
bloodshed. It all starts, I suppose, with the Pythagoreans versus their
predecessors, and the argument took the shape of "Do you ask what it's
made of—earth, fire, water, etc.?" Or do you ask, "What is its pattern?"
Pythagoras stood for inquiry into pattern rather than inquiry into substance.1 That controversy
has gone through the ages, and the Pythagorean half of it has, until recently,
been on the whole the submerged half. The Gnostics follow the Pythagoreans, and
the alchemists follow the Gnostics, and so on. The argument reached a sort of
climax at the end of the eighteenth century when a Pythagorean evolutionary
theory was built and the discarded—a theory which involved Mind.
The evolutionary theory of the late eighteenth
century, the Lamarckian theory, which was the first organized transformist theory
of evolution, was built out of a curious historical background which has been
described by Lovejoy in The Great Chain of Being. Before Lamarck, the
organic world, the living world, was believed to be hierarchic in structure,
with Mind at the top. The chain, or ladder, went down through the angles,
through men, through the apes, down to the infusoria or protozoa, and below
that to the plants and stones.
What Lamarck did was to turn that chain upside
down. He observed that animals changed under environmental pressure. He was
incorrect, of course, in believing that those changes were inherited, but in
any case, these changes were for him the evidence of evolution. When he turned
the ladder upside down, what had been the explanation, namely, the Mind at the
top, now became that which had to be explained. His problem was to explain
Mind. He was convinced about evolution, and there his interest in it stopped.
So that if you read the Philosophie Zoologique (1809), you will find
that the first third of it is devoted to solving the problem of evolution and
the turning upside down of the taxonomy, and the rest of the book is really
devoted to comparative psychology, a science which he founded. Mind was
what he was really interested in. He had used habit as one of the axiomatic
phenomena in his theory of evolution, and this of course also took him into the
problem of comparative psychology.
Now mind and pattern as the explanatory
principles which, above all, required investigation were pushed out of
biological thinking the later evolutionary theories which were developed in the
mid-nineteenth century by Darwin, Huxley, etc. There were still some naughty
boys, like Samuel Butler, who said that mind could not be ignored in this
way—but they were weak voices, and incidentally, they never looked at
organisms. I don't think Butler ever looked at anything except his own cat, but
he still knew more about evolution than some of the more conventional thinkers.
Now, at last, with the discovery of cybernetics,
systems theory, information theory, and so on, we begin to have a formal base
enabling us to think about mind and enabling us to think about all these
problems in a way which was totally heterodox from about 1850 through to World
War II. What I have to talk about is how the great dichotomy of epistemology
has shifted under the impact of cybernetics and information theory.
We can now say—or at any rate, can begin to
say—what we think a mind is. In the next twenty years there will be other ways
of saying it and, because the discoveries are new, I can only give you my
personal version. The old versions are surely wrong, but which of the revised
pictures will survive, we do not know.
Let
us start from the evolutionary side. It is now empirically clear that Darwinian
evolutionary theory contained a very great error in its identification of the
unit of survival under natural selection. The unit which was believed to be
crucial and around which the theory was set up was either the breeding
individual or the family line or the subspecies or some similar homogeneous set
of conspecifics. Now I suggest that the last hundred years have demonstrated
empirically that if an organism or aggregate of organisms sets to work with a
focus on its own survival and thinks that is the way to select its adaptive
moves, its "progress" ends up with a destroyed environment. If the
organism ends up destroying its environment, it has in fact destroyed itself.
And we may very easily see this process carried to its ultimate reductio ad
absurdum in the next twenty years. The unit of survival is not the breeding
organism, or the family line, or the society.
The old unit has already been partly corrected
by the population geneticists. They have insisted that the evolutionary unit
is, in fact, not homogeneous. A wild population of any species consists always
of individuals whose genetic constitution varies widely. In other words,
potentiality and readiness for change is already built into the survival unit.
The heterogeneity of the wild population is already one-half of that
trial-and-error system which is necessary for dealing with environment.
The artificially homogenized populations of
man's domestic animals and plants are scarcely fit for survival.
And today a further correction of the unit is
necessary. The flexible environment must also be included along with the
flexible organism because, as I have already said, the organism which destroys
its environment destroys itself. The unit of survival is a flexible
organism-in-its-environment.
Now, let me leave evolution for a moment to
consider what is the unit of mind. Let us go back to the map and the territory
and ask: "What is it in the territory that gets onto the map?" We
know the territory does not get onto the map. That is the central point about
which we here are all agreed. Now, if the territory were uniform, nothing would
get onto the map except its boundaries, which are the points at which it ceases
to be uniform against some large matrix. What gets onto the map, in fact, is difference,
be it a difference in altitude, a difference in vegetation, a difference in
population structure, difference in surface, or whatever. Differences are the
things that get onto a map.
B
ut
what is a difference? A difference is a very peculiar and obscure concept. It
is certainly not a thing or an event. This piece of paper is different from the
wood of this lectern. There are many differences between them—of color,
texture, shape, etc. But if we start to ask about the localization of those
differences, we get into trouble. Obviously the difference between the paper
and the wood is not in the paper; it is obviously not in the wood; it is
obviously not in the space between them, and it is obviously not in the time
between them. (Difference which occurs across time is what we call
"change.")
ut
what is a difference? A difference is a very peculiar and obscure concept. It
is certainly not a thing or an event. This piece of paper is different from the
wood of this lectern. There are many differences between them—of color,
texture, shape, etc. But if we start to ask about the localization of those
differences, we get into trouble. Obviously the difference between the paper
and the wood is not in the paper; it is obviously not in the wood; it is
obviously not in the space between them, and it is obviously not in the time
between them. (Difference which occurs across time is what we call
"change.")
A difference, then, is an abstract matter.
In the hard sciences, effects are, in general,
caused by rather concrete conditions or events—impacts, forces, and so forth.
But when you enter the world of communication, organization, etc., you leave
behind that whole world in which effects are brought about by forces and
impacts and energy exchange. You enter a world in which "effects"—and
I am not sure one should still use the same word—are brought about by differences.
That is, they are brought about by the sort of "thing" that gets onto
the map from the territory. This is difference.
Difference travels from the wood and paper into
my retina. It then gets picked up and worked on by this fancy piece of
computing machinery in my head.
The whole energy relation is different. In the
world of mind, nothing—that which is not—can be a cause. In the hard
sciences, we ask for causes and we expect them to exist and be
"real." But remember that zero is different from one, and because
zero is different from one, zero can be a cause in the psychological world, the
world of communication. The letter which you do not write can get an angry
reply; and the income tax form which you do not fill in can trigger the
Internal Revenue boys into energetic action, because they, too, have their
breakfast, lunch, tea, and dinner and can react with energy which they derive
from their metabolism. The letter which never existed is no source of energy.
It follows, of course, that we must change our
whole way of thinking about mental and communicational processes. The ordinary
analogies of energy theory which people borrow from the hard sciences to
provide a conceptual frame upon which they try to build theories about
psychology and behavior—that entire Procrustean structure—is non-sense. It is
in error.
I suggest to you, now, that the word
"idea," in its most elementary sense, is synonymous with
"difference." Kant, in the Critique of Judgment—if I
understand him correctly—asserts that the most elementary aesthetic act is the
selection of a fact. He argues that in a piece of chalk there are an infinite
number of potential facts. The Ding an sich, the piece of chalk, can
never enter into communication or mental process because of this infinitude.
The sensory receptors cannot accept it; they filter it out. What they do is to
select certain facts out of the piece of chalk, which then become, in
modern terminology, information.
I suggest that Kant's statement can be modified
to say that there is an infinite number of differences around and within
the piece of chalk. There are differences between the chalk and the rest of the
universe, between the chalk and the sun or the moon. And within the piece of
chalk, there is for every molecule an infinite number of differences between
its location and the locations in which it might have been. Of this
infinitude, we select a very limited number, which become information. In fact,
what we mean by information—the elementary unit of information—is a difference
which makes a difference, and it is able to make a difference because the
neural pathways along which it travels and is continually transformed are
themselves provided with energy. The pathways are ready to be triggered. We may
even say that the question is already implicit in them.
T
here
is, however, an important contrast between most of the pathways of information
inside the body and most of the pathways outside it. The differences between
the paper and the wood are first transformed into differences in the
propagation of light or sound, and travel in this form to my sensory end
organs. The first part of their journey is energized in the ordinary
hard-science way, from "behind." But when the difference enter my
body by triggering an end organ, this type of travel is replaced by travel
which is energized at every step by the metabolic energy latent in protoplasm
which receives the difference, recreates or transforms it, and passes it
on.
here
is, however, an important contrast between most of the pathways of information
inside the body and most of the pathways outside it. The differences between
the paper and the wood are first transformed into differences in the
propagation of light or sound, and travel in this form to my sensory end
organs. The first part of their journey is energized in the ordinary
hard-science way, from "behind." But when the difference enter my
body by triggering an end organ, this type of travel is replaced by travel
which is energized at every step by the metabolic energy latent in protoplasm
which receives the difference, recreates or transforms it, and passes it
on.
When I strike the head of a nail with a hammer,
an impulse is transmitted to its point. But it is a semantic error, a
misleading metaphor, to say that what travels in an axion is an
"impulse>" It could correctly be called "news of a
difference."
Be that as it may this contrast between internal
and external pathways is not absolute. Exceptions occur on both sides of the
line. Some external chains of events are energized by relays, and some chains
of events internal to the body are energized from "behind." Notably,
the mechanical interaction of muscles can be used as a computational model.2
In spite of these exceptions, it is still
broadly true that the coding and transmission of differences outside the body
is very different from the coding and transmission inside, and this difference
must be mentioned because it can lead us into error. We commonly think of the
external "physical world" as somehow separate from an internal
"mental world." I believe that this division is based on the contrast
in coding and transmission inside and outside the body.
The mental world—the mind—the world of
information processing—is not limited by the skin.
Let us now go back to the notion that the
transform of a difference traveling in a circuit is an elementary idea. If this
be correct, let us ask what a mind is. We say the map is different from the
territory. But what is the territory? Operationally, somebody went out with a
retina or a measuring stick and made representations which we then put upon
paper. What is on the paper map is a representation of what was in the retinal
representation of the man who made the map/ and as you push the question back,
what you find is an infinite regress, an infinite series of maps. The territory
never gets in at all. The territory is Ding an sich and you can't do
anything with it. Always the process of representation will filter it out so
that the mental world is only maps of maps of maps, ad infinitum.3 All
"phenomena" are literally "appearances."
Or we can follow the chain forward. I receive
various sorts of mappings which I call data or information. Upon receipt of
these I act. But my actions, my muscular contractions, are transforms of
differences in the input material. And I receive again data which are transforms
of my actions. We get thus a picture of the mental world which has somehow
jumped loose from our conventional picture of the physical world.
This i
s
not new, and for historic background we go again to the alchemists and
Gnostics. Carl Jung once wrote a very curious little book, which I recommend to
all of you. It is called Septem Sermones ad Mortuos, Seven Sermons to
the Dead.4
In his Memoirs, Dreams and Reflections, Jung tells us that his house was
full of ghosts, and they were noisy. They bothered him, they bothered his wife,
and they bothered the children. In the vulgar jargon of psychiatry, we might
say that everybody in the house was as psychotic as hooty owls, and for quite
good reason. If you get your epistemology confused, you go psychotic, and Jung
was going through an epistemological crisis. So he sat down at his desk and
picked up a pen and started to write. When he started to write the ghosts all
disappeared, and he wrote this little book. From this he dates all his later
insight. He signed it "Baslides," who was a famous Gnostic in
Alexandria in the second century.
s
not new, and for historic background we go again to the alchemists and
Gnostics. Carl Jung once wrote a very curious little book, which I recommend to
all of you. It is called Septem Sermones ad Mortuos, Seven Sermons to
the Dead.4
In his Memoirs, Dreams and Reflections, Jung tells us that his house was
full of ghosts, and they were noisy. They bothered him, they bothered his wife,
and they bothered the children. In the vulgar jargon of psychiatry, we might
say that everybody in the house was as psychotic as hooty owls, and for quite
good reason. If you get your epistemology confused, you go psychotic, and Jung
was going through an epistemological crisis. So he sat down at his desk and
picked up a pen and started to write. When he started to write the ghosts all
disappeared, and he wrote this little book. From this he dates all his later
insight. He signed it "Baslides," who was a famous Gnostic in
Alexandria in the second century.
He points out that there are two worlds. We
might call them two worlds of explanation. He names them pleroma and the
creatura, these being Gnostic terms. The pleroma is the world in which
events are caused by forces and impacts and in which there are no
"distinctions." Or, as I would say, no "differences." In
the creatura, effects are brought about precisely by difference. In fact, this
is the same old dichotomy between mind and substance.
We can study and describe the pleroma, but
always the distinctions which we draw are attributed by us to the
pleroma. The pleroma knows nothing of differences and distinction; it contains
no "ideas" in the sense in which I am using the word. When we study
and describe the creatura, we must correctly identify those differences which
are effective within it.
I suggest that "pleroma" and
"creatura" are words which we could usefully adopt, and it is
therefore worthwhile to look at the bridges which exist between these two
"worlds." It is an oversimplification to say that the "hard
sciences" deal only with the pleroma and that the sciences of the mind
deal only with the creatura. There is more to it than that.
First, consider the relation between energy and
negative entropy. The classical Carnot heat engine consists of a cylinder of
gas with a piston. This cylinder is alternately placed in contact with a
container of hot gas and with a container of cold gas. The gas in the cylinder
alternately expands and contracts as it is heated or cooled by the hot and cold
sources. The piston is thus driven up and down.
But with each cycle of the engine, the difference
between the temperature of the hot source and that of the cold source is
reduced. When this difference becomes zero, the engine will stop.
The physicist, describing the pleroma, will
write equations to translate the temperature difference into "available
energy," which he will call "negative entropy," and will go on
from there.
The analyst of the creatura will note that the
whole system is a sense organ which is triggered by temperature difference. He
will call this difference which makes a difference "information" or
"negative entropy." For him, this is only a special case in which the
effective difference happens to be a mater of energetics. He is equally
interested in all differences which can activate some sense organ. For him, any
such difference is "negative entropy."
O
r
consider the phenomenon which the neurophysiolgists call "synaptic
summation." What is observed is that in certain cases, when two neurons, A
and B, have synaptic connection to a third neuron, C, the firing of neither
neuron by itself is sufficient to fire C; but that when both A and B fire
simultaneously (or nearly so), the combined "impulses" will cause C
to fire.
r
consider the phenomenon which the neurophysiolgists call "synaptic
summation." What is observed is that in certain cases, when two neurons, A
and B, have synaptic connection to a third neuron, C, the firing of neither
neuron by itself is sufficient to fire C; but that when both A and B fire
simultaneously (or nearly so), the combined "impulses" will cause C
to fire.
In pleromatic language, this combining of events
to surmount a threshold is called "summation."
But from the point of view of the student of
creatura (and the neruophysioligist must surely have one foot in the pleroma
and the other in creatura), this is not summation at all. What happens is that
the system operates to create differences. There are two differentiated classes
of firings by A: those firings which are accompanied by B and those which are
unaccompanied. Similarly there are two classes of firings by B. The so called
"summation" when both fire, is not an additive process from this
point of view. It is the formation of a logical product—a process of
fractionation rather than summation.
The creatura is thus the world seen as mind,
whenever such a view is appropriate. And whenever this view is appropriate,
there arises a species of complexity which is absent from pleromatic
description: creatural description is always hierarchic.
I have said that what gets from territory to map
is transforms of difference and that these (somehow selected) differences are
elementary ideas.
But there are differences between differences.
Every effective difference denotes a demarcation, a line of classification, and
all classification is hierarchic. In other words differences are themselves to
be differentiated and classified. In this context I will only touch lightly on
the matter of classes of difference, because to carry the matter further would
land us in problems of Principia Mathematica.
Let me invite you to a psychological experience,
if only to demonstrate the frailty of the human computer. First note that
differences in texture are different (a) from differences in color. Now
note that differences in size are different (b) from differences in
shape. Similarly rations are different (c) from subtractive differences.
Now let me invite you, as disciples of
Korzybski, to define the differences between "different (a),"
"different (b)," and "different (c)" in the
above paragraph. The computer in the human head boggles at the task. But not
all classes of difference are as awkward to handle
One such class you are all familiar with.
Namely, the class of differences which are created by the process of
transformation whereby the differences immanent in the territory become
differences immanent in the map. In the corner of every serious map you will
find these rules of transformation spelled out—usually in words. Within the
human mind, it is absolutely essential to recognize the differences of this
class, and, indeed, it is these that form the central subject matter of
"Science and Sanity."
An hallucination or a dream image is surely a
transformation of something. But of what? And by what rules of transformation?
Lastly there is that hierarchy of differences
which biologists call "levels." I mean such differences as that
between a cell and a tissue, between tissue and organ, organ and organism, and
organism and society.
Th
ese
are the hierarchies of units or Gestalten, in which each sub unit is a
part of the unit of next larger scope. And, always in biology, this difference
or relationship which I call "parT of" is such that certain
differences in the part have informational effect upon the larger unit, and
vice versa.
ese
are the hierarchies of units or Gestalten, in which each sub unit is a
part of the unit of next larger scope. And, always in biology, this difference
or relationship which I call "parT of" is such that certain
differences in the part have informational effect upon the larger unit, and
vice versa.
Having sated this relationship between
biological part and whole, I can now go on from the notion of creatura as mind
in general to the question of what Is a mind.
What do I mean by "my" mind?
I suggest that the delimitation of an individual
mind must always depend upon what phenomena we wish to understand or explain.
Obviously there are lots of message pathways outside the skin, and these and
the messages which they carry must be included as part of the mental system
whenever they are relevant.
Consider a tree and a man and an ax. We observe
that the ax flies through the air and makes certain sorts of gashes in a
pre-existing cut in the side of the tree. If now we want to explain this set of
phenomena, we shall be concerned with differences in the cut face of the tree,
differences in the retina of the man, differences in this central nervous
system, differences in his efferent neural messages, differences in the
behavior of his muscles, differences in how the ax flies, to the differences
which the ax then makes on the face of the tree. Our explanation (for certain
purposes) will go round and round that circuit. In principle, if you want to
explain or understand anything in human behavior, you are always dealing with
total circuits, completed circuits. This is the elementary cybernetic thought.
The elementary cybernetic system with its
messages in circuit is, in fact, the simplest unit of mind; and the transform
of a difference traveling in a circuit is the elementary idea. More complicated
systems are perhaps more worthy to be called mental systems but essentially
this is what we are talking about. The unit which shows the characteristic of
trial and error will be legitimately called a mental system
But what about "me"? Suppose I am a
blind man, and I use a stick. I go tap, tap, tap. Where do I start? Is
my mental system bounded at the handle of the stick? Is it bounded by my skin?
Does it start halfway up the stick? Does it start at the tip of the stick? But
these are nonsense questions. The stick is a pathway along which transforms of
difference are being transmitted. The way to delineate the system is to draw
the limiting line in such a way that you do not cut any of these pathways in
ways which leave things inexplicable. If what you are trying to explain is a
given piece of behavior, such as the locomotion of the blind man, then, for
this purpose, you will need the street, the stick, the man; the street, the
stick, and so on, round and round.
But when the blind man sits down to eat his
lunch, his stick and its messages will no longer be relevant—if it is his
eating that you want to understand
And in addition to what I have said to define
the individual mind, I think it necessary to include the relevant parts of
memory and data "banks." After all, the simplest cybernetic circuit
can be said to have memory of a dynamic kind—not based upon static storage but
upon the travel of information around the circuit. The behavior of the governor
of a steam engine at Time 2 is partly determined by what it did at Time 1—where
the interval between Time 1 and Time 2 is that time necessary for the
information to complete the circuit.
We get a picture, then, of mind as synonymous
with cybernetic system—the relevant total information-processing,
trial-and-error completing unit. And we know that within Mind in the widest
sense there will be a hierarchy of subsystems, any one of which we can call an
individual mind.
But this picture is precisely the same as the
picture which I arrived at in discussing the unit of evolution. I
believe that this identity is the most important generalization which I have to
offer you tonight.
In considering units of evolution, I argued that
you have at each step to include the completed pathways outside the
protoplasmic aggregate, be it DNA-in-the-cell, or cell-in-the-body, or
body-in-the-environment. The hierarchic structure is not new. Formerly we
talked about the breeding individual or the family line or the taxon, and so
on. Now each step of the hierarchy is to be thought of as a system,
instead of a chunk cut off and visualized as against the surrounding
matrix.
This identity between the unit of mind and the
unit of evolutionary survival is of very great importance, not only theoretical,
but also ethical.
It means, you see, that I now localize something
which I am calling "Mind" immanent in the large biological system—the
ecosystem. Or, if I draw the system boundaries at a different level, then mind
is immanent in the total evolutionary structure. If this identity between
mental and evolutionary units is broadly right, then we face a number of shifts
in our thinking.
First,
let us consider ecology. Ecology as currently two faces to it: the face which
is called bioenergetics—the economics of energy and materials within a coral
reef, a redwood forest, or a city—and, second, an economics of information, of
entropy, negentropy, etc. These two do not fit together very well precisely
because the units are differently bounded in the two sorts of ecology. In
bioenergetics it is natural and appropriate to think of units bounded at the
cell membrane, or at the skin; or of units composed of sets of tiers at which
measurements can be made to determine the additive-subtractive budget of energy
for the given unit. In contrast, informational or entropic ecology deals with
the budgeting of pathways and of probability. The resulting budgets are
fractionating (not subtractive). The boundaries must enclose, not cut, the
relevant pathways.
Moreover, the very meaning of
"survival" becomes different when we stop talking about the survival
of something bounded by the skin and start to think of the survival of the
system of ideas in a circuit. The contents of the skin are randomized at death
and the pathways within the skin are randomized. But the ideas, under further
transformation, may go on out in the world in books or works of art. Socrates
as a bioenergetic individual is dead. But much of him still lives in the
contemporary ecology of ideas.5
It is also clear that theology becomes changed
and perhaps renewed. The Mediterranean religions of 5000 years have swung to
and fro between immanence and transcendence. In Babylon the gods were transcendent
on the tops of hills; in Egypt, there was god immanent in Pharaoh; and
Christianity is a complex combination of these two beliefs.
The cybernetic epistemology which I have offered
you would suggest a new approach. The individual mind is immanent but not only
in the body. It is immanent also in pathways and messages outside the body; and
there is a larger Mind of which the individual mind is only a subsystem. This
larger Mind is comparable to God and is perhaps what some people mean by
"God," but it is still immanent in the total interconnected social
system and planetary ecology.
Freudian psychology expanded the concept of mind
inwards to include the whole communication system within the body—the
automatic, the habitual, and the vast range of unconscious process. What I am
saying expands mind outwards. And both of these changes reduce the scope of the
conscious self. A certain humility becomes appropriate, tempered by the dignity
or joy of being part of something much bigger. A part—if you will—of God.
If you put God outside and set him vis-a-vis his
creation and if you have the idea that you are created in his image, you will
logically and naturally see yourself as outside and against the things around
you. And as you arrogate all mind to yourself, you will see the world around
you as mindless and therefore not entitled to moral or ethical consideration.
The environment will seem to be yours to exploit. Your survival unit will be
you and your folks or conspecifics against the environment of other social
units, other races and the brutes and vegetables.
If this is your estimate of your relation to
nature and you have an advanced technology, your likelihood of survival
will be that of a snowball in hell. You will die either of the toxic
by-products of your own hate, or, simply, of over-population and overgrazing.
The raw materials of the world are finite.
If I am right, the whole of our thinking about
what we are and what other people are has got to be restructured. This is not
funny, and I do not know how long we have to do it in. If we continue to
operate on the premises that were fashionable in the prescybernetic era, and
which were especially underlined and strengthened during the Industrial
Revolution, which seemed to validate the Darwinian unit of survival, we may
have twenty or thirty years before the logical reductio ad absurdum of
our old positions destroy us. Nobody knows how long we have, under the present
system, before some disaster strikes us, more serious than the destruction of
any group of nations. The most important task today is, perhaps, to learn to
think in the new way. Let me say that I don't know how to think that
way. Intellectually, I can stand here and I can give you a reasoned exposition
of this matter; but if I am cutting down a tree, I still think "Gregory
Bateson" is cutting down the tree. I am cutting down the tree.
"Myself" is to me still an excessively concrete object, different
from the rest of what I have been calling "mind."
The step to realizing—to making habitual—the
other way of thinking so that one naturally thinks that way when one reaches
out for a glass of water or cuts down a tree—that step is not an easy one.
And, quite seriously, I suggest to you that we
should trust no policy decisions which emanate from persons who do not yet have
that habit.
There are experiences and disciplines which may
help me to imagine what it would be like to have this habit of correct thought.
Under LSD, I have experienced, as have many others, the disappearance of the
division between self and the music to which I was listening. The perceiver and
the thing perceived become strangely united into a single entity. This state is
surely more correct than the state in which it seems that "I hear the
music." The sound, after all is Ding an sich, but my perception of
it is a part of mind.
It
is told of Johnann Sebastian Bach that when somebody asked him how he played so
divinely, he answered, "I play the notes, in order, as they are written.
It is God who makes the music." But not many of us can claim Bach's
correctness of epistemology—or that of William Blake, who know that the Poetic
Imagination was the only reality. The poets have known these things all through
the ages, but the rest of us have gone astray into all sorts of false reifications
of the "self" and separations between the "self" and
"experience."
For me another —clueanother moment when the
nature of mind was for a moment clear—was provided by the famous experiments of
Adelbert Ames, JR. These are optical illusions in depth perception. As Ames'
guinea pig, you discover that those mental processes by which you create the
world in three-dimensional perspective are within your mind but totally
unconscious and utterly beyond voluntary control. Of course, we all know that
this is so—that mind creates the images which "we" then see. But
still it is a profound epistemological shock t have direct experience of this
which we always knew.
Please do not misunderstand me. When I say that
the poets have always known these things or that most of mental process is
unconscious, I am not advocating a greater use of emotion or a lesser use of
intellect. Of course, if what I am saying tonight is approximately true, then
our ideas about the relation between thought and emotion need to be revised. If
the boundaries of the "ego" are wrongly drawn or even totally
fictitious, then it may be nonsense to regard emotions or dreams or our
unconscious computations of perspective as "ego-alien."
We live in a strange epoch when many
psychologists try to "humanize" their science by preaching an
anti-intellectual gospel. They might, as sensibly, try to physicalize physics
by discarding the tools of mathematics.
It is the attempt to separate intellect
from emotion that is monstrous, and I suggest that it is equally monstrous—and
dangerous—to attempt to separate the external mind from the internal. Or to
separate mind from body.
Blake noted that "A tear is an intellectual
thing," and Pascal asserted that "The heart has its reasons of
which the reason knows nothing." We need not be put off by the fact that
the reasonings of the heart (or of the hypothalamus) are accompanied by
sensations of joy or grief. These computations are concerned with matters which
are vital to mammals, namely, matters of relationship, by which I mean
love, hate, respect, dependency, spectatorship, performance, dominance, and so
on. These are central to the life of any mammal and I see no objection to
calling these computations "thought," though certainly the units of
relational computation are different from the units which we use to compute
about isolable things.
But there are bridges between the one sort of
thought and the other, and it seems to me that the artist and poets are
specifically concerned with these bridges. It is not that art is the expression
of the unconscious, but rather that it is concerned with the relation between
the levels of mental process. From a work of art it may be possible to analyze
out some unconscious thoughts of the artist, but I believe that, for example,
Freud's analysis of Leonardo's Virgin on the Knees of St. Anne precisely
misses the point of the whole exercise. Artistic skill is the combining of many
levels of mind—unconscious, conscious, and external—to make a statement of
their combination. It is not a matter of expressing a single level.
Similarly, Isadora Duncan, when she said,
"If I could say it, I would not have to dance it," was talking
nonsense, because her dance was about combinations of saying and moving.
Indeed, if what I have been saying is at all
correct, the whole base of aesthetics will need to be re-examined. It seems
that we link feelings not only to the computations of the heart but also to
computations in the external pathways of the mind. It is when we recognize the
operations of creatura in the external world that we are aware of
"beauty" or "ugliness." The "primrose by the river's
brim" is beautiful because we are aware that the combination of
differences which constitutes its appearance could only be achieved by
information processing, i.e., by thought. We recognize another
mind within our own external mind.
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.
From Steps to an Ecology of Mind,
1972, Chandler Publishing Co.; Balantine Books, a division of Random House, New
York. This was the Nineteenth Annual Korzybski Memorial Lecture, delivered
January 9, 1970, under the auspices of the Institute of General Semantics. It
is here reprinted from the General Semantics Bulletin, No. 37, 1970, by
permission of the Institute of General Semantics.
1.
R. G. Collingwood has given a clear account of
the Pythagorean position in The Idea of Nature, Oxford, 1945.
2.
It is interesting to note that digital computers
depend upon transmission of energy "from behind" to send "news"
along wire from one relay to the next. But each relay has its own energy
source. Analogic computers, e.g., tide mechanics and the like, are
commonly entirely driven by energy "from behind." Either type of
energization can be used for computational purposes.
3.
Or we may spell the matter out and say that at
every step, as a difference is transformed and propagated along its pathways,
the embodiment of the difference before the step is a "territory" of
which the embodiment after the step is a "map." The map-territory
relation obtains at every step.
4.
Written in 1916, translated by H. G. Baynes and
privately circulated in 1925. Republished by Stuart and Watkins, London, and by
Random House, 1961. In later work, Jung seems to have lost the clarity of the Seven
Sermons. In his "Answer to Job," the archetypes are said to be
"pleromatic." It is surely true, however, that constellations of
ideas may seem subjectively to resemble "forces" when their
ideational character is unrecognized.
5.
For the phrase "ecology of ideas," I
am indebted to Sir Geoffrey Vickers<'> essay "The Ecology of
Ideas" in Value Systems and Social Process, Basic Books, 1968. For
a more formal discussion of the survival of ideas see Gordon Pasks' remarks in
Wenner Gren Conference on "Effects of Conscious Purpose on Human
Adaptation," 1968.
Orig. source (10/01)
http://www.rawpaint.com/library/bateson/formsubstancedifference.html
http://www.rawpaint.com/library/bateson/formsubstancedifference.html
