Abstract
This article argues that two important thinkers of the 20th century, Gregory Bateson (1904–80) and Eric Voegelin (1901–85), developed a set of ideas that are of importance to the history of the human sciences. The article also argues that their ideas are, in essential ways, comparable and display similarities that have not yet been discussed within the larger history of the human sciences. The aim of the article is to show how the diagnostic terms provided by Bateson and Voegelin complement each other toward an understanding of underlying tensions and social pathologies of contemporary civilization.
In this article I argue that two important thinkers of the 20th century, Gregory Bateson (1904–80) and Eric Voegelin (1901–85), each in his way provided some crucial elements for us to pose foundational and interrelated questions about order and disorder, balance and unbalance, health and pathology. I also argue that, underneath their evident differences in focus and style, their thoughts and ideas display important similarities. These similarities have so far not been discussed within the larger history of the human sciences.
A juxtaposition of Gregory Bateson and Eric Voegelin is perhaps not the most evident of exercises, and for 5 main reasons. First, the two thinkers researched vastly different fields, with no overlapping contact at the empirical level: Bateson studied communication patterns among animals and humans; Voegelin studied the history of political ideas. Second, although they both were Europeans who ended up in America, they shared almost nothing in terms of background experiences or formative learning. Bateson was the son of a famous geneticist and went on to study biology and anthropology in Britain. Voegelin grew up in an Austrian academic environment, and studied law and Staatslehre before he came to identify as a political theorist. Third, while Voegelin was oriented towards an analysis of political thought in its historical context, Bateson’s direct interests belonged to the present. Fourth, in terms of reception, Bateson eventually became quite popular among alternative movements and a central figure in ecological thinking, and mostly with reference to the political left. Voegelin tried everything he could to stay aloft from political ideologies, but his approach was widely perceived as conservative, and has most often been appropriated by thinkers of the political right. Fifth, the two thinkers did not know each other and never engaged in any shared debate.
A preliminary qualification of the argument is therefore necessary. What is argued here does not build on any actual correspondence between the two thinkers, and the links I argue to exist between their ideas are not direct. I bring the two men together not in order to impose uniformity on their thought, but in order to present two converging attempts to diagnose what they came to perceive as the pathological nature of modernity. What exactly they meant by ‘pathology’ will become clearer throughout the argument. Suffice for now to say that both thinkers tried to identify something that had gone wrong in our very relation to the world, a ‘fallacy’ or a ‘derailment’ that manifested itself in both science and politics. They both sought to offer an alternative, via a genuine ‘philosophy of consciousness’ (for Voegelin) or via the articulation of a more healthy ‘epistemology’ (for Bateson). Although Voegelin and Bateson developed their thought within vastly different academic environments, underneath their differences they shared a background in crucial reading experiences of the classical traditions, including Plato’s philosophy. This of course was a very direct influence for Voegelin that he elaborated in great detail in his mature work, within the series Order and History, whereas with Bateson this influence was less explicitly articulated, even as it became more and more transparent towards the end of his life.
Stated more positively, juxtaposing the ideas of these two very diverse thinkers forces us to question conventional knowledge boundaries in the humanities, and helps to elucidate some deeper currents in the history of the human sciences and social thought of the 20th century. Bringing together these two thinkers therefore also has to do with a larger attempt, most explicitly developed by Arpad Szakolczai, to provide the study of modernity with external reference points in either history or anthropology. As has been argued by Szakolczai (2000), the particularities and underlying assumptions and worldviews that came to underpin the modern episteme can profitably be approached in comparative contrast to pre-modern or extra-modern contexts. This involves a twofold engagement that brings social theory into intimate contact with anthropology and historical sociology, opening up the study of the modern world in time and space (Thomassen, 2010). From the perspective of this theoretical horizon, Bateson and Voegelin belong to a group of thinkers who contributed to such an analysis. In this vein I aim to show that the diagnostic terms provided by Bateson and Voegelin complement each other toward an understanding of underlying tensions of contemporary civilization. I start by presenting the work of Bateson, followed by a discussion of Voegelin, before a more direct comparison between their main ideas is presented in 5 steps. I conclude by stressing the aesthetic dimension that for both thinkers came to ground their holistic vision of participatory experience.
Gregory Bateson: ‘Errors’ and pathologies in social evolution and epistemology
But when you separate mind from the structure in which it is immanent…the human society, or the ecosystem, you thereby embark…on fundamental error. I believe that this massive aggregation of threats to man and his ecological systems arises out of errors in our habits of thought at deep and partly unconscious levels. As therapists we clearly have a duty. First, to achieve clarity in ourselves; and then to look for every sign of clarity in others and to implement them and reinforce them in whatever is sane in them. (Bateson, ‘Pathologies of Epistemology’, 2000[1972]: 495)
Bateson had been trained as an anthropologist within the then dominant functional paradigms and neo-Marxist stresses on social conflict. His ethnographic encounter with the Iatmul forced him to reconsider everything he had learned. Bateson saw how contradictions could in fact be part of communication systems. In formal functionalist logic, from Kant to Russell, categories are neat and clearly delimited. However, ‘double binds’, as Bateson would call them later, are based on paradox – and double binds are real. Our mental and social life simply cannot be comprehended with formal logic. Even self-destructive systems have their own logic and ‘rationality’. This is the frightening thing about mental illnesses and pathologies: they do make sense. A schismogenetic system ‘functions’. Yet from a larger perspective it is out of balance, and it inevitably provokes a gradual loss of value and beauty (the aesthetic dimension was always much stressed by Bateson). Such systems, however, for Bateson were real enough – and he wanted to understand them in order to overcome them.
Bateson frequently used the word ‘pathological’. For Bateson, epistemologies could be wrong, based on error. Bateson never adopted a Durkhemian view of pathology as deviance from a social norm; rather, the social norm itself could be that pathology (Thomassen, 2013a). Bateson often said that ‘things can get into a muddle’, that certain communication processes can ‘go wrong’, that ‘fallacy’ and ‘error’ can establish and reproduce themselves within relationships of communication, between humans, and between humans and our environment. What did he mean by such terms? In some contexts, Bateson referred to errors in logical typing, or a misrecognition of the framing of a message (like the waitress asking the customer: ‘What would you like?’, and the schizophrenic customer not being able to decode the framing that delimits the question to the choice of food). However, Bateson very fundamentally linked the notion of ‘error’ to larger evolutionary and societal processes, and to epistemology itself.
Each error, said Bateson, carries within it a pathology. Therefore, when Bateson used the words ‘fallacy’ or ‘error’, he meant in a very direct way that these are pathologies. Epistemologies can be wrong and therefore false. So how can they exist? Well, Bateson had in a certain way always studied such errors. He found them among the Iatmul in his early fieldwork, but also in the worldviews that developed among alcoholics and schizophrenics. A pathology is an epistemology based on errors or on the false. Bateson rejected the predictable criticism that one can designate things as pathological only from one’s own standards, culture-specific and historically based as such standards must remain. No, said Bateson, pathologies are not pathologies because they contrast with his view of the world; they are pathologies because they contrast with the world as it is. In the ‘Afterword’ Bateson wrote to the biographical work About Bateson, edited by John Brockman (1977), Bateson first reiterated that for him epistemology was a part of natural history, but further claimed that the study of epistemology was necessarily a normative branch of natural history. One had not expected that natural history could be normative, but indeed, the epistemology which I am building for you is normative in two almost synonymous ways. It can be wrong, or I can be wrong about it. And either of those two sorts of error becomes itself part of any epistemology in which it occurs. Any error will propose pathology. (But I am the epistemology.)
1
Pathologies of epistemology: ‘Crisis in the Ecology of Mind’
Another entry into Bateson’s understanding of ecological pathologies is found in the chapter where he invoked the term in the title. Bateson published the short chapter ‘Pathologies of Epistemology’ in Steps to an Ecology of Mind (2000) where it was inserted in the final part VI of the book, ‘Crisis in the Ecology of Mind’. The book is a compilation of Bateson’s most important essays written over 30 years. The diagnosis of the pathological state of contemporary civilization was central to the entire undertaking. Introducing this final part VI of the book, Bateson again mentions the ‘confusions and contradictions’ that form part of our larger ‘mind’. Bateson says that it is well within our powers, with our technology, to ‘create insanity in the larger system of which we are parts’ (ibid.: 473); the final section is therefore dedicated to the study of the ‘mentally pathogenic processes’ by which we continue to create our insanity.
‘Pathologies of Epistemology’ is based on a paper Bateson delivered in Hawaii in 1969 at a conference on mental health. The paper starts out by Bateson provoking the audience with the question ‘Can you see me?’ Bateson then moves on to the question of ‘epistemological error’. After some general considerations on the concept of ‘mind’ (which he approaches as a larger system of communication that operates with and upon differences) he tries to pin down the ‘epistemological fallacies of Occidental civilization’ (Bateson, 2000: 491). Referring to biology (and to Darwin) Bateson says that one main cause of the pathology is to select the wrong ‘unit of analysis’ (my term). Darwin’s theory of natural selection, says Bateson, singles out the family line or the subspecies as the unit of survival, whereas the real unit of survival is organism plus environment. Bateson adds that ‘we are learning by bitter experience that the organism which destroys its environment destroys itself’ (ibid.). When the wrong unit is chosen, one ends up with one species against other species, or against the environment, or ‘man’ against nature. ‘There is an ecology of bad ideas, just as there is an ecology of weeds, and it is characteristic of the system that the error perpetuates itself. It branches out like a rooted parasite through the tissues of life, and everything gets into a rather peculiar mess’ (ibid.: 492).
The same kind of error leads to pathological theories of power and theories of control; in particular, theories of ‘unilateral power’ – a notion which makes no sense in Bateson’s relational epistemology. Bateson talks about this as a ‘myth of power’ (1999: 494); it is a self-validating myth since everyone believes in it, but it is still epistemological lunacy, and it inevitably leads to disaster (ibid.: 495). The myth of power becomes manifest within several realms, but all the various ‘errors’ belong to the same pathological epistemology: a belief in objectivity, undertaking actions while ignoring the interdependence of the larger system of relations, attempting to control one part of the system to which we belong by detaching this part from the larger pattern that connects. Bateson exposed this human abuse of power – the belief that we can achieve total control of the world – as an ‘epistemological folly’. He ends his paper by invoking the urgency of the matter, facing the dangers produced by the epistemological pathologies of the West, ranging from world famine, to insecticides to pollution, to atomic fallout, to the possibility of melting the Antarctic ice cap.
In his later works, Mind and Nature (2002[1979]) and Angels Fear (2005), Bateson would further elaborate on these views. One general fallacy he observed was that of seeking to control an interactive system through quantitative measurement. An example of these types of error is found in the characterization of ecosystems at a single level of analysis, as composed of discrete entities that respond mechanically to inputs and outputs of energy. According to Bateson, reliance on this type of quantitative analysis would only increase the likelihood of runaway ecological degradation, because the false sense of an ability to predict and control the factors of interest would only make a pathological system more efficiently pathological. Any idea of ‘total planning’ (whether in education, in genetics or in the social sphere) would lead only to more rapid self-destruction, since such an idea cannot address the very premises upon which the model is based. Bateson indicated that the same kind of fallacy operated both within science and politics. Organizing society and technology around this false sense of control would also reduce flexibility and thus the capacity to respond to ecological degradation. Bateson’s mature view became more and more linked to ecological theory (Bateson, 1991), but kept insisting that our ecological crisis is rooted in pathologies of epistemology.
Bateson and schismogenesis
Yet another entry into Bateson’s understanding of pathologies brings us back again to Bateson’s earliest work, where he introduced the concept of schismogenesis. 2 Schismogenesis is also what Bateson would call a ‘mental operation’, but it manifests itself in very concrete social processes. Bateson was here inspired by developments in American inter-war anthropology which tried to tie ‘culture’ to ‘personality’, as in Ruth Benedict’s Patterns of Culture (which Margaret Mead brought to Bateson during his fieldwork). Bateson had introduced the concept of schismogenesis in a 1935 article in Man, ‘Culture Contact and Schismogenesis’ (the essay appears in Bateson 2000 [1972]). The fuller discussion was developed in Naven, where he identified schismogenesis as a crucial dynamic in Iatmul culture. Bateson developed his ideas on schismogenesis during the unfolding drama of the inter-war period, the escalation toward the Second World War, the arms race, the rise of dictators and the general threat of violence and destruction lurking everywhere. As Bateson set out to do his fieldwork far away from these pathologies, he quite likely had not expected that on a small scale the Iatmul repeated many of the very same processes taking place within Europe.
In terms of definitions, Bateson (1958[1936]: 175) said that schismogenesis is a process of differentiation in the norms of individual behavior resulting from cumulative interaction between individuals. Bateson usefully distinguished between complementary and symmetrical schismogenesis. In the former, two ‘opposite’ types of behaviour reinforce each other in contrary directions: assertive versus submissive behaviour between two persons or two groups is the oft-quoted example. In the latter, the ‘same’ behaviour will lead to more of the ‘same’ by the other individual or group: boasting leading to more boasting is the example invoked by Bateson himself (ibid.: 177). Symmetrical relationships are those in which the two parties are equals; their competing, as in sports or wars, if not somehow blocked, turns into a repetitive system of escalating competition. Complementary relationships feature an unequal balance, such as dominance–submission (parent–child), or exhibitionism–spectatorship (performer–audience).
According to Bateson, schismogenesis could become part of any communication system or ‘communication relationship’ where individuals or groups interact. And we interact all the time! The behaviour of person X affects person Y, and the reaction of person Y to person X’s behaviour will then affect person X’s behaviour, which in turn will affect person Y, and so on. Bateson’s theory is indeed about such circles, vicious or virtuous. Bateson identified 4 main areas where schismogenetic processes could lead to pathology: in intimate relations between pairs of individuals (as in a marriage). in the progressive maladjustment of neurotic and pre-psychotic individuals: Bateson had no experience in psychiatry, but he was clearly very interested in it from an early age. He suggested that the schismogenetic process can unfold within a personality; e.g. that the single person is itself some kind of ‘communication system’ which can lose its balance. The ‘schizoid’ loses the capability to adjust himself or herself to reality. This therefore also involves the communication between the self and the external world. in culture contact: this was the field to which Bateson applied the term in his 1935 article; in fact, Bateson’s 1935 article was sparked by a ‘memorandum on the study of acculturation’ by Redfield, Linton and Herskovits (1936; acculturation was a key concept at that time in American anthropology). Here the danger of schismogenesis related to the real possibility that cultural groups would eventually seek to annihilate each other. in politics: international rivalries can be considered forms of symmetric schismogenesis. Bateson would restate that view in the context of the cold war oppositional logic that unfolded after 1945. Bateson also mentioned ‘class wars’ as types of complementary schismogenesis. Bateson indicated that political communication, even in democratic societies, could easily become a schismogenetic system where ‘reactions that provoke reactions provoke reactions’, leading opponents in a debate away from the ‘real problems’. It would be worthwhile, said Bateson, ‘to observe to what extent in their policies politicians are reacting to the reactions of their opponents, and to what extent they are paying attention to the conditions which they are supposedly trying to adjust’ (Bateson, 1958[1936]: 186–7).
How to control schismogenesis? Searching for balance
On the one hand, it is clear that schismogenesis is a generic part of human life: oppositional and symmetrical relations are not something to be avoided. On the other hand, they must somehow be contained or kept under control, for clearly the effects of schismogenesis can be disastrous. Bateson therefore suggested that researchers look into methods that one or both parties may employ to stop a schismogenetic process before it reaches its destructive stage. In the chapter (XIII) of Naven where Bateson introduced the concept of schismogenesis, he also sought to identify how schismogenesis could be controlled at the micro and macro levels. The control of schismogenesis will never be easy, as the ‘balance’ in any communication system (marriages or superpower politics) can easily be lost. The problem is furthermore that schismogenetic features can be stamped onto a whole culture and its values. Types of behaviour or words that are meant to modify intolerable behaviour instead stimulate this behaviour, leading to escalation. Bateson later developed this idea in his analysis of mental disorders. In International Relations the paradox is best exemplified via the security dilemma: in order to protect oneself, a state builds up its military defence, which provokes other states to do the same, which again increases the risk of aggression, etc.
So how does one get out of such a ‘vicious’ cycle then? Bateson indicated several factors (8), and it is beyond the limits of this article to discuss them all. Bateson said that certain concrete ritual behaviours either inhibited or stimulated a schismogenic relationship in its various forms. Bateson also said that an admixture of complementary and symmetrical forms could stabilize a relation, lessening the extremes of schismogenic intensity. ‘National character’ could rely on a manipulation of the codes of complementary and symmetrical tension, with stability being achieved by negative feedback factors within the behavioural systems. In short, there were several ways in which an exponential curve of hostilities could be flattened out.
The real answer to the question, however, resides in Bateson’s relational epistemology, in Bateson’s articulation of what one may term a ‘healthy’ system in positive terms. Instead of seeing a tree as composed of a trunk, branches and leaves, Bateson urged us to see a tree as made up of relations, a pattern that connects as a set of relationships that ties the leaf to the branch – a deep ecology communication that turns the leaf green, yellow and red, and lets it fall when it is ready, connecting it to the ground, the wind and the entropy turning the leaf into mould into which another plant will be born as part of a larger communication system which involves other trees, the climate, the biosphere – a communication system we are all part of and which makes life both possible and meaningful. This may sound terribly idealistic if not romantic to many ears. For Bateson such a relational view was the only one a true scientist could or should ever take seriously.
This focus on connections and the patterns that connect was certainly what made Bateson realize his strong affinities with Plato and the classical tradition. Bateson’s central interest was never restricted to the mere fact of interconnectedness and systematicity, but was rather focused on the quality of such overall connections. He was driven by a recognition that this ‘larger whole is primarily beautiful’. Bateson explicitly endorsed an Augustinian epistemology of the sacred, leading him to ‘an affirmation of beauty’ (Bateson, 2002[1979]: 16). To Bateson something had been lost that needed to be recovered: ‘We have lost the core of Christianity…We have lost Abraxas, the terrible and beautiful god of both day and night in Gnosticism’ (ibid.)
In a fully Platonic manner, Bateson argued that science should not merely be concerned with quantification and formal rigour, but rather with the ‘ultimate unifying beauty’ (ibid.: 17); or, in the words of Plotinus, the most important figure of neo-Platonic philosophy whom Bateson loved to quote, science must remain grounded in the ‘invisible and unchanging beauty which pervades all things’ (ibid.: 13). This is where Bateson’s search for a relational epistemology can be complemented with the more historically oriented work of Eric Voegelin.
Eric Voegelin: Pneumapathological consciousness or modernity as spiritual disorder
It would not be surprising if sooner or later psychologists and social scientists were to find out about the classic analysis of noetic existence as the proper theoretical basis for the psychopathology of the ‘age’. (Voegelin, 1990b: 278–279)
Voegelin just barely escaped the Nazis after the Anschluss of Austria in 1938. He eventually settled in America, where he would live most of the rest of his life (apart from 1958 to 1969 when he was professor at the University of Munich, filling the chair in political science that had remained vacant since Max Weber’s death). Some of Voegelin’s early writings were about the roots of Nazism. However, for Voegelin the problem turned out to be much broader. He identified a ‘gnostic tendency’ in modern political movements, but under the term gnosticism he very provocatively put other -isms that together define the modern episteme such as scientism, Marxism and positivism. For Voegelin it was somehow the very modern worldview and its search for ‘inner-worldly fulfilment’ that was problematic and indeed very pathological.
But what exactly was ‘pathology’ for Voegelin? The exercise is made difficult by the enormity of Voegelin’s work. Whereas Bateson published only a handful of books, Voegelin’s work runs to 39 volumes, and the term pathology is used throughout his authorship: in his early work on Nazism, in his work on political religions and ‘modernity without restraint’ (Voegelin, 2000a), and in his early statements about the gnostic nature of science and politics (2004). The exercise is also complicated by the decisive shifts that took place in Voegelin’s theoretical orientation, up until the writing of the last volumes of Order and History – shifts that cannot be discussed here. I will therefore indicate how Voegelin came to see pathologies, mostly with reference to his mature work – e.g. to what he wrote as he embarked on the series Order and History from the mid-1950s (see also Thomassen, 2013b, on which this section draws). It goes without saying that, given the space limits, and given the centrality of the term for Voegelin, no exhaustive analysis can be offered.
Voegelin’s work was concentrated on identifying the underlying pathologies of contemporary civilization. Whereas Bateson used the term as connected to ‘error’ and ‘fallacy’, inspired by the scientific language of cybernetics, Voegelin used ‘pathology’ interchangeably with another series of terms which are possibly even more charged: ‘spiritual disorder’, ‘disease’, ‘derailment’, ‘disorientation’, ‘closed’ or ‘pneumapathological’ consciousness. In his essay on ‘Reason: The Classic Experience’ he talks outright about the ‘psychopathology’ that dominates the entire modern worldview (1990b: 273 ff.). A longer list of Voegelian pathology-related terms would include ‘egophanic revolt’, ‘metastatic faith’, ‘demonic mendacity’, ‘Prometheanism’, ‘social Satanism’ and many others (see the excellent discussion by Franz, 1999). Perhaps the term that covers Voegelin’s view best is that of ‘spiritual disorder’, as it contrasts to his view of ‘order’ – an order that is a prerequisite for leading a meaningful life. Voegelin would also contrast ‘imbalanced’ to ‘balanced consciousness’ (Hughes, 1999: 163 ff.). Voegelin’s vocabulary, like his theoretical view, often derived from his reliance on the classical tradition. Voegelin’s ‘New Science of Politics’ (2000a) was in fact not new at all: it was a search within the classical traditions that he wanted to restore in the context of the present disorder.
‘Second reality’ and the loss of the truth quest
I have…used the expression truth of existence. We can now define it as the awareness of the fundamental structure of existence together with the willingness to accept it as the condicio humana. Correspondingly we shall define untruth of existence as a revolt against the condicio humana and the attempt to overlay its reality by the construction of a Second Reality…(Voegelin, 1990a: 49)
Voegelin followed Musil’s ideas concerning ‘stupidity’ (1999: see especially 55 ff., 98 ff.). Writing from Vienna in the late 1930s, Musil distinguished between different forms of stupidity, and was most interested in what he called ‘higher’ or ‘intelligent’ stupidity. This kind of stupidity is driven by hubris, when the human being tries to achieve something to which it has no right. Writes Voegelin: Higher, or intelligent, stupidity is a disturbance in the equilibrium of the spirit. The spirit now becomes the adversary, not the mind. It is not a defect of the mind as with simple people, but a defect of the spirit, a revolt against the spirit, which gives rise to saying or doing things against the spirit. Therefore this condition of higher stupidity is not a spiritual sickness in the sense of psychopathology, but something quite different. We need here an expression not used by Musil but available in German analyses of the matter since Schelling. Schelling already used the expression ‘pneumopathology’ for spiritual disturbances of this kind. (Voegelin, 1999: 101)
This sickness involves a loss of reality, which starts from a general process of de-humanization. Here, however, Voegelin goes further, still following Musil. The pneumopathological consciousness revolts against reality by creating a ‘second reality’, a ‘pseudo-order’. Living in such a ‘second reality’ is indeed a pathology of deformed consciousness. The second reality can never abolish the first reality: the first reality is the ‘ground’, the place from where man unfolds his existence, the place where ‘normally ordered man lives’ (1999: 108). However, the second reality will come to stand in conflict with the first reality. This conflict can be ‘solved’ in two main forms: in ‘contemplation’ or in ‘practice’. Voegelin here draws on his earlier analysis of Marxism or positivism as such a form of contemplation, where entire thought systems are constructed against an ordered reality. He again employs here the extremely charged language of ‘intellectual swindle’ that underpins any construction of a system: ‘Since reality has not the character of a system, a system is always false; and if it claims to portray reality, it can only be maintained with the trickery of an intellectual swindle.’ The practice-oriented solution of the conflict between the two forms of reality is not a swindle, but rather takes the form of a lie. ‘The lie becomes the indispensable method because the second reality claims to be true, and since it constantly comes into conflict with the first reality, it is necessary to lie constantly’ (ibid.: 109).
Voegelin’s recovery of reason
As can be sensed, part of the pathological character of modernity had to do for Voegelin with ideology. Voegelin locates, conventionally, ideologies as formal systems of thought within modern times. Ideologies as thought systems were products of the 19th century. At the same time, one of Voegelin’s main points was always to show that the character and origins of modern ideologies can be traced back in time, back at least to antiquity. Voegelin also argued that the ancients had indeed developed a diagnostic vocabulary to address exactly such pathologies. Therefore, while ideologies as ‘closed systems’ are pathologies of the modern – revolts against existence – the human tendencies that can drive toward such pathological patterns go back in time and arguably pertain to the human psyche. The diagnosis of such pathologies lay at the heart of axial and post-axial thought: In fact, the Greek thinkers diagnosed it [the pathological consciousness] as a disease of the psyche from the time they had occasion to observe it in the embattled polis. Heraclitus and Aeschylus, and above all Plato, speak of the nosos or nosema of the psyche; and Thucydides speaks of the expansion of the disease into the disorders of the Peloponnesian War as a kinesis, a feverish movement of society…The Stoics, especially Chrysippus, were intrigued by the phenomenon, and Cicero, summarizing the findings of the preceding centuries, deals with the disease at length…He calls it the morbus animi, the disease of the mind, and characterizes its nature as an aspernatio rationis, as a rejection of reason. (Voegelin from The Ecumenic Age, as quoted in Franz, 1999: 141) Heraclitus had distinguished between the men who live in the one and common world (koinos kosmos) of the logos which is the common bond of humanity (homologia) and the men who live in the several private worlds (idios kosmos) of their passion and imagination, between the men who lead a waking life and the sleepwalkers who take their dreams for reality (B 89); and Aeschylus had diagnosed the Promethean revolt against the divine ground as a disease or madness (nosos, nosema). In the Republic then, Plato used both the Heraclitian and Aeschylean symbols to characterize the states of attunement and closure to the ground as states of existential order and disorder. Still, it took the shattering experiences of ecumenic imperialism and, in its wake, existential disorientation as a mass phenomenon, to let the bond between reason and existential order arrive at conceptual fixation. Only the Stoics created the terms oikeiosis and allotriosis, translated by the Latins as conciliation and alienation, to distinguish between the two states of existence which respectively make the life of reason possible or condition disorders of the psyche. (1990b: 274)
This relates to another point stressed by Voegelin: the diagnosis of pathological states, of ‘imbalanced consciousness’, cannot be made without accounts of a well-ordered state or ‘balanced consciousness’. It is never just enough to establish what is wrong. We need a language of health as well. It is not possible here to fully engage Voegelin’s larger attempt to formulate a theory of consciousness. Suffice to say that here again Voegelin did not create such ideals or values ex novo but found them articulated in historical individuals, such as Plato or Saint Augustine, and their contemplative attitude and openness toward the divine ground – their seeking of attunement to the ordered world.
In search of order
Voegelin was not interested in antiquity for the sake of philology: he saw the parallels to the contemporary situation, and from here he engaged in an attempt at restoration, a ‘search for order’ (1987). Philosophy (and political science) was to Voegelin not about creating a system in the world: our role is rather to interpret experiences of transcendence as such ‘differentiating experiences’ become symbolized in thought. As Voegelin had said in the ‘New Science of Politics’, …since the maximum of differentiation was achieved through Greek philosophy and Christianity, this means specifically that theory is bound to move within the historical horizon of classic and Christian experiences. To recede from the maximum of differentiation is a theoretical retrogression; it will result in various types of derailment which Plato has characterized as doxa. (Voegelin, 2000a: 152)
This also helps to indicate what Voegelin meant by a ‘balanced consciousness’. Voegelin’s understanding must be placed in his analysis of the dangers accompanying the discovery of divine transcendence, itself a crucial aspect of the axial age revolutions. The human search for meaning now became placed in what Voegelin calls a tension between the finite world and transcendent reality. Human consciousness very fundamentally has to do with how we orient ourselves toward the transcendent. The fallacy for Voegelin is to misidentify one of the poles in this tension as reality and declaring irrelevant or untrue the other pole of the tension. Consciousness becomes unbalanced when either immanence or transcendence is ignored or rejected. The balanced consciousness recognizes the tension of existence as a condition which sets the limits for human thought and action. The pathology involved in various types of modern worldviews or philosophies (see Hughes, 1989 for more detail) has to do with what Voegelin called the temptation to ‘hypostasize’ the transcendent, turning that into an ‘it’ or a thing. Voegelin saw the human being as framed by a series of tensions between the finite and the infinite, time and eternity, the human and the divine, which is why existence in metaxy became so central to his thinking. Voegelin interpreted the metaxy as Plato’s symbol for the in-between plane of human existence, the place of our participation in reality. To try to move outside the metaxy, attracted by the divine pole, or negating its existence altogether, equalled for Voegelin a loss of balance, a human hubris (duly signalled in Greek mythology), a ‘deformation’ of both thought and consciousness.
For Voegelin the disorder of the day could be contrasted only by types of symbolic representation of the world that preserved a vision of the world as ordered and meaningful. Grounding his idea of political communities in representations of transcendental experiences, Voegelin insisted that truth cannot be directly represented: this must happen in myth and symbols. The question of a political theorist, for Voegelin, concerns the modes of symbolization. Voegelin’s call for a restoration of political science was likewise a recovery of classical philosophy. Voegelin sided with Plato: there must be a connection between order in the soul, order in the city and order in the cosmos. Yet this ‘order’ is not man-made, but something we as humans should recognize and tune in to. For Voegelin this was possible only via participation in what he called ‘the divine ground’. The notion of participation would take centre stage in Voegelin’s mature thought, and is arguably the central theme in his series on Order and History. In the opening line of the Introduction to volume 1 of Order and History, Voegelin states that God and man, world and society, ‘form a primordial community of being’ (2001: 50). Human beings participate in the world as a part of that larger being. Man is not a self-created autonomous being. We do not carry the origin and meaning of our existence within ourselves.
Bateson and Voegelin: Convergences of thought
There seems to be something like a Gresham’s law of cultural evolution according to which the oversimplified ideas will always displace the sophisticated and the vulgar and hateful will always displace the beautiful. And yet the beautiful persists. (Bateson, 2002[1979]: 5)
First, where Bateson talked about ‘errors’ and ‘pathologies of epistemology’, Voegelin talked about ‘derailment’, ‘deformation’, ‘loss of balance’ and ‘pneumopathologies’. In both cases, the very charged wording used was invoked to diagnose not only specific situations or historical periods, but the modern worldview as such. This also induced them toward not just the study of single aspects of the world, empirically definable and delimited, but also toward our underlying view and experience of the world. Bateson attempted to establish the principles of an alternative, relational epistemology, while Voegelin attempted a theory of balanced consciousness, tied to a philosophy of history (see Webb, 1981). It was clear to both that to confront the pathological character of the modern, they had to reach deep down to the level of foundations. Their ‘research areas’ were not just political thought, mass ideologies, dolphins or alcoholics: their research area was how we think. It was at this level that the underlying pathologies of contemporary civilization lay buried; it was here that the beginning of an answer could emerge. Both thinkers tried to understand man’s experience of reality in its wholeness.
Second, while these projects were evidently ambitious and even grandiose, what characterized both thinkers was a clear recognition that their searching was not simply theirs. They remained acutely aware of the highly problematic tendency to ‘construct’ theories of the world, from where that world as defined and categorized becomes controllable. Such was not their project. Rather, one element of their work was exactly to denude this myth of power as hubristic, epistemologically meaningless and derailed. It was not so much power as the myth of power that corrupts, said Bateson (2002: 209). Both thinkers treated terms like ‘power’ or ‘energy’ as quasi-physical metaphors of modern social science to be distrusted, reified abstractions upon which madmen could erect their edifice and seek control of the world. ‘He who covets a mythical abstraction must be insatiable!’ (ibid.). Their own worldview, their own ‘theory’, rested in the world itself, was part and parcel of the world. What characterized their projects was therefore also a deep-bound humbleness. As Bateson said: ‘I surrender to the belief that my knowing is a small part of a wider integrated knowing that knits the entire biosphere or creation’ (ibid.: 82). Voegelin (2001: 41) would talk in similar terms as he introduced his Order and History series: ‘Whatever man may be, he knows himself a part of being. The great stream of being, in which he flows while it flows through him, is the same stream to which belongs everything else that drifts into his perspective.’ Their thinking was therefore experiential exactly to the extent that it was participatory.
Third, the view that Bateson and Voegelin developed was in both cases therefore tied to a recognition of limits, and to a recognition of the boundaries within which the search for truth could or should take place. Voegelin expressed this view of limits via Plato’s notion of the metaxy. ‘Reason’, in the classic experience, was tied to a recognition of groundedness and to a relational view of man in the world; the pathological nature of modernity was to be found in the violation of the metaxy, a departure from the in-betweenness of meaningful existence and thought. Bateson used different terms here, but his mature position would resemble Voegelin’s very closely. He was perhaps most explicit on this point in a memorandum he wrote to the regents of the University of California in 1978 (inserted as an appendix to Mind and Nature [2002(1979)]), significantly entitled ‘Time is Out of Joint’. Here Bateson launched a fierce attack against the entire academic system: what we teach young people today, he said, is meaningless and positively dangerous. The premises upon which our teaching is based are obsolete: Cartesian dualism; the strange physicalism of the metaphors we use to describe mental processes (‘power’, ‘tension’, ‘energy’, ‘social forces’); our anti-aesthetic assumption (borrowed from Bacon, Locke and Newton) that all phenomena can be studied and evaluated in quantitative terms. Every aspect of our civilization, wrote Bateson, ‘is split wide open’ (ibid.: 204), bifurcated into meaningless extremes, including of course the overall struggle between two equally monstrous ideologies, capitalism and communism. The universities are not representing any counterweight to this madness; instead ‘we try to run a university and to maintain standards of “excellence” in the face of growing distrust, vulgarity, insanity, exploitation of resources, victimization of persons, and quick commercialism. The screaming voices of greed, frustration, fear and hate’ (ibid.). 3
The idea that power simply be given to the students (as demanded by the student movements at that time) was no answer: faculty, administration and regents are obsolete, but so are the students, Bateson said. What can we do then, in the midst of all this obsoleteness? We can analyse it, said Bateson, and we can realize that it forms part of a ‘one-sided progress’ (2002[1979]: 205). Between conservatism and radical change, one must find a balance, and such a balance of conservation and adaptation was to Bateson present within biological systems, in the world: it was we who had moved away from it. Evolution as well as mental process is part of a greater process of change that develops within a series of ‘dualisms’: pattern/quantity, form/function, letter/spirit, rigour/imagination, homology/analogy, calibration/feedback, and so on (ibid.: 208). Bateson continues: Individual persons may favour one or the other component of this dualism and we will call them ‘conservatives’, ‘radicals’, ‘liberals’ and so on. But behind these epithets lies epistemological truth which will insist that the poles of contrast dividing the persons are indeed dialectical necessities of the living world. You cannot have ‘day’ without ‘night’. (2002[1979]: 2008)
Fourth, and in continuation, both thinkers denounced the pathological nature of ‘objectivism’, ‘positivism’ and ‘materialism’, but were equally critical of ‘supernaturalism’. In fact, Bateson would indicate that these erroneous epistemologies are themselves the results of a schismatic development in the West in which everything branches into subjectivism or objectivism, mind or matter, faith or facts – and these views, even if ‘opposite’, feed each other (see in particular Bateson’s discussion, 2002[1979]: 50–64). I state this with some emphasis, since one of the charges against both thinkers has often been that they were ‘mystics’, and that the science they were proposing was nothing but a religion, followed by secluded groups of believers. Bateson would be ridiculed by biologists for arguing that nature had a ‘mind’ and mainstream political and social scientists have little time for a thinker like Voegelin who based his political science on the notion of a ‘divine ground’. However, for Voegelin this divine ground is something very real (the unreal is to deny it), although here we have to be extremely careful concerning ‘reality’. Reality is tied to experience; the ‘poles’ that identify the tension of the metaxy indicate a kind of structural boundary to lived experience. ‘But if the poles of tension are hypostatized as independent entities – if the partners to the encounter are torn asunder and converted into subjects and objects of experience that exist apart from the experiential relation – then the true understanding of reality is lost and the vision of our humanity deformed’ (Morrisey, 1999: 24). In other words, ‘reality’ is itself an existential tension, and is therefore not directly accessible and cannot (must not!) be objectified. ‘Unreality’ is the human error to detach the poles of the tension from the experience of participation in reality, resulting, unavoidably, in spiritual disorder. Bateson liked to use a simple metaphor to emphasize the same point: when we say that the table is ‘hard’, we are in fact not saying anything about the table, nor are we simply expressing a subjectivist sensation flowing from a sense organ: all we can really say is something about the relation between a sense organ and a material object. Bateson’s science was not about immaterial ‘religion’: it was about relations, patterns of relations, and patterns of patterns, patterns that connect. Beautifully.
Fifth, and still in continuation, this further indicates how adverse both thinkers were to ideologies, seeing them as inherently unbalanced, schismatic or one-sided representations of the world. Only in a deeply pathological society where humans have been cut off from their experiential relation to the world can people so easily succumb to the lure of ideologies. Only in a spiritually weakened situation can people so easily be lifted away from the ground by positivistic utopias or ‘second order realities’, as Voegelin would call them – or fooled by these fantasies of ‘misplaced concreteness’ or ‘epistemological errors’, as Bateson would say. Their work diagnosed these pathologies of the mind that by their own magic turn the unreal into the real and in so doing eclipse reality. Both thinkers were adamant that this mental operation would be followed by real-world destruction; in fact, both were adamant that we are nearing the end of this destruction.
A recovery of science: In praise of sacred beauty
The image that piles up in front of us starts to look rather bleak: the world has become deeply pathological and the universities are but deepening the problem as we are caught up in the same disease of the mind. But that would not be a fair way to end the argument. It is certainly true that both thinkers were keenly aware of the historical moment and the immensity of the pathology. Voegelin saw strong parallels between the axial age and the disorder and confusion that characterized the present. The parallels were many, from the spread of sophistry to ecumenic expansion, but included at the heart a serious loss of meaning and a loss of an adequate language to speak about the world. Bateson called the moment of his writing for a ‘historical juncture’ a decisive one. In one place he even used a language very similar to Voegelin’s: We are in extraordinary confusion at this very moment. Our beliefs are undergoing rapid change at a pace comparable to the rate at which things were changing in Classical Greece, say between 600 and 500 B.C., or again in the beginning of the Christian Era. Ours is a strange and exciting world, in which the very premises of language are in question. (2002[1979]: 178)
Granted this state of affairs, one part of their task was to diagnose the pathology; as Bateson said in one of his very last writings: ‘The negative purpose of this book is to brush away some of the more ludicrous and dangerous epistemological fallacies fashionable in our civilization today’ (2005: 63). The role of therapists, however, does not stop here. Something must be proposed, an alternative must be indicated. Rather than ‘inventing a new language’ or proposing finished models, both thinkers would come to perceive their task as one of recovery of a meaning that had gone missing. Such a recovery, or such a search for ‘spiritual rest’, however, was not entirely outside reach. After all, ‘there are patches of sanity still surviving in the world’, as Bateson said in ‘Pathologies of Epistemology’ (2000[1972]: 495). Pathological states are real enough: they can be readily reproduced and come to dominate entire epochs. Yet, this ‘deformation’ or ‘derailment’, Voegelin would agree, is not an inborn state, nor is it, like a virus, an externally generated process that befalls a passive ‘victim’: the pathology is generated in the process of thinking and living in single individuals.
Herein lies a hope, if not a promise. Voegelin started from the premise that human thought springs from an experiential encounter with a ‘beyond’. It springs from the recognition that Man is not a self-created, autonomous being carrying the origin and meaning of his existence within himself…From this experience of his life in precarious existence within the limits of birth and death there rather arises the wondering question about the ultimate ground, the aitia or prote arche, of all reality and specifically his own. (1990b: 268)
The prote arche in Bateson’s view was mind itself, whereas Voegelin insisted on the primacy of the soul – but both would refer back to the Greek nous. Bateson’s ‘mind’ must of course be understood within his Platonic vision of epistemology as ‘an indivisible, integrated metascience whose subject matter is the world of evolution, thought, adaptation, embryology, and genetics – the science of mind in the widest sense of the word’ (2002[1979]: 82). Voegelin would have added ‘consciousness’ to the list – and then agreed.
In fact, the convergence of their views becomes understandable and meaningful when considering the importance that classical traditions played for both (see in particular Voegelin, 2000b). In the case of Bateson, these influences often remained latent and never became an object of explicit analysis. Yet, in his later works he kept making reference to Plato and also to Saint Augustine, and to the Bible too (in which Bateson was certainly not a ‘believer’ in any direct sense). Bateson prefaced his mature work, Mind and Nature, with the famous quote from Saint Augustine’s The City of God which speaks about the ‘Supreme God, whose beauty is invisible and ineffable’ and ends with the ‘Divinity which endlessly pervades with its invisible and unchanging beauty all things’. As we saw, this Augustinian view of the world was one both thinkers came to identify very strongly with.
Both thinkers realized that the recognition of something so clearly pathological about the world in which we live carries within itself a danger which, if unrecognized or not treated, easily becomes tied to a reproduction of the pathological. It is fair to say that Eric Voegelin and Gregory Bateson both recognized these dangers, without falling into the various traps of escapism, cynicism or utopianism, and without falling prey to that self-flagellating attitude towards the ‘world’ and everything created within it which represents nothing but the opposite extreme of positivism and blind belief in progress. In fact, Voegelin to a large extent analysed exactly these ‘traps’, via the human temptation to world rejection in moments of transition where the taken-for-granted worldviews of people were no longer representing adequate frameworks of interpretation.
Both thinkers insisted on the affirmation of the beautiful orderliness of the world, in which our own existence and evolution as a species could be understood and made meaningful. Both thinkers tried to approach what an ordered worldview might look like in contrast to a disordered view. They studied very different phenomena, but they both ended on a recognition of the world as a meaningfully ordered cosmos. They both argued that the role of the human being in such a cosmos is not to enforce the logic of our rational minds on an allegedly chaotic world, but humbly to recognize the beauty and intrinsic order of the world as it has been given to us. From here, reason and science become possible. Outside it, pathologies emerge.
Footnotes
Funding
The author received no financial support for the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article.