Abstract
Gregory Bateson developed his transdisciplinary thinking in the shadow of sociology, but his ideas are not generally viewed as part of the field of classical sociology. This article will explain this exclusion by arguing that Bateson’s way of theorising – while attempting to make progress in the understanding of reality – returns to ideas that were already rejected within the field in which he first worked. Furthermore, as a reading of Bateson through the lens of Durkheim will show, Bateson’s theories fail to provide a better understanding of social reality than those of his predecessors. This type of critical analysis demonstrates the weakness of some of Bateson’s central claims and contributes to a more in-depth understanding and reassessment of his ideas from a sociological perspective. Pointing out that Bateson’s critique of the modern worldview is based on a pre-critical and pre-modern philosophy of wholeness is not to invalidate Bateson’s foundational intuition that our current mode of thinking challenges our chances of surviving as a species. However, in order to make a theoretically convincing argument concerning how our thinking challenges our survival, a more critical understanding of the relation between mind and society than the one Bateson offers is required.
Gregory Bateson was an anthropologist by training, influenced by Alfred Radcliffe-Brown and Ruth Benedict, who were inspired in turn by classical sociologists such as Emile Durkheim. Bateson’s early ideas concerning the morphology of social relations developed as he studied Iatmul culture were, in the words of Charles Nuckolls (1995), ‘anticipated by Durkheim’ (p. 383). Gregory Bateson thus developed his transdisciplinary approach to social reality in the shadow of sociology: He was inspired by but critical of the sociological ideas, which dominated the anthropological field.
Bateson, thus, grew increasingly critical of a sociological approach. The most important step towards his ‘ecology of mind’ was a step out of the shadow of sociology and into the cybernetic movement. Bateson not only believed that cybernetics represented a superior way to understand reality, but he saw it as a way to heal a flawed epistemology, which he believed permeated Western self-understanding and was leading humankind towards an ecological crisis.
This critique of modern society has never had the same central position within debates on theoretical sociology that it has had within various applied fields. Bateson did inspire eminent sociologists such as Erving Goffman (1953, 1974) and Niklas Luhmann (Guy, 2018; Mathur, 2008), but in general, his ideas are not well-known in social science, a fact lamented by Guddemi, who takes the observation a step further: Not only is Bateson not well-known in sociology but only a ‘few people are using Bateson in the field of sociocybernetics, the application of cybernetic ideas to the study of social life’. This situation, Guddemi (2007) adds, is ‘ironic because the study of human social life was Bateson’s forte’ (p. 905).
This article will try to explain this irony, while contributing to the study of Bateson’s ideas from within the field of theoretical sociology.
The reason I see this as an important enterprise is that Bateson represents an early and extraordinarily rich instance of a trend (Maturana and Varela, 1979 [1972]; Ruesch and Bateson, 1951; von Bertalanffy, 1956; von Foerster et al., 1953; Wiener, 1950), which has become central to contemporary social science, namely, the interdisciplinary effort to grasp social reality by bringing processes and patterns from other fields of knowledge into contact with sociological ideas (Blancke and Denis, 2018; Castellani and Hafferty, 2009; Luhmann, 1992; Machalek and Martin, 2004; Mesoudi et al., 2006; Novikov, 2016).
Like other research in the field of cybernetics and social evolution, Bateson’s work represents the belief that since social reality has emerged from other levels of organisation, it must – in substance or in form – be part of a general process which unfolds from particles and atoms to planets and galaxies, and all realities – life, mind and society – thus inherit the same features since that is what makes their emergence possible. Since Bateson developed his ideas in a social scientific context, while most other of the cybernetic pioneers came from the natural sciences, Bateson’s ideas are of particular interest to the field of theoretical sociology.
I am well aware that to Bateson scholars, the very idea of attempting to study Bateson’s contribution within a single field overlooks the transdisciplinary nature of his work and is therefore a reduction of Bateson’s ideas. However, my argument will be that Bateson’s attempt to escape the shadow of sociology by debating social reality from a transdisciplinary perspective makes the results of his intellectual attempts central to the field of theoretical sociology.
Internal critique as method
By internal critique, we normally refer to a debate of a work based on its own standards. Since, I study the progress in Bateson’s thought by comparing the insight of the sociological ideas, which Bateson left, with the systems theories, which he later developed, I view this approach as form of an internal critique. By examining Bateson’s later work through the lens of Durkheim, I challenge the idea implicit in Bateson’s attempted progress, that he could improve the understanding of social reality by turning to systems theory.
What is innovation within a social scientific field?
A critical reading of Bateson may contribute to several agendas. First, it may contribute to the study of the relationship between classical sociology and systems theory. Second, it may contribute to the understanding of, what constitutes innovation within social theory. Nobody would challenge the fact that Bateson is creative, in the sense that he moved through different fields, like biology, psychiatry and anthropology using the insight of the one to challenge the orthodoxy within the other. However, what I am suggesting is that this mode of innovation is different from one that Dénes Némedi (1990) calls ‘real innovation’, which as he puts it ‘presupposes the exact knowledge of the gulf which separates the innovator from his [or her] predecessors . . .’ (p. 241). As the study of Bateson through the lens of Durkheim will demonstrate, Bateson operated without much interest in that gulf, and his theories were not innovative, when it comes to a theoretical understanding of social reality. In order to innovate, Bateson returned to ideas which were already rejected, and discovered already well-established fields.
Thus, while Bateson never simply recycled a given orthodoxy within one field, he had no problem with recycling older foundations, such as those of Platonism, Lamarckism or Spencerism, without confronting previous challenges to these ideas. Within the debates on progress in the social sciences (Cole, 1994; Rule, 1994, 1997), the study of Bateson’s attempted progress contributes to the larger agenda concerning whether systems theory is the right tool for understanding social reality. A full answer to the question however requires a broader and more detailed examination of systems theory than the current article can attempt.
The article is structured as an analysis of how Bateson’s systems theory appears through the lens of Durkheim. (1) It opens with a short presentation of the way Bateson took from his early ideas to his later efforts to create an ecology of mind. (2) Then five problems in Bateson’s theories are pointed out, before finally (3) comparing how Bateson and Durkheim understand social phenomena.
Systems theory: A way out of the shadow of sociology
In his early work as an anthropologist, Bateson was clearly operating in the shadow of sociology since he attempted a structural understanding of how culture causes whole groups of individuals ‘to think and feel alike’ (Bateson, 1936: 113). This ambition was based on the assumption that mental and emotional reality is a collective reality. In a central paragraph in his anthropological work, Naven, Bateson (1936) argues that behaviour is formed by thought and value, concepts that he distances from the meanings ascribed to them in individual psychology. Rather, Bateson believes that ‘culture in some way affects the psychology of the individuals’ (p. 113). However, Bateson avoids concepts such as ‘the social behaviour of individuals’, which he thought could be mistaken for referring to ‘Group Mind’ and ‘Collective Unconscious’ (p. 176).
Instead, inspired by Ruth Benedict’s (1989 [1934]) book Patterns of culture, Bateson (1936) uses the concept of ‘configuration’ or ‘pattern’ to designate the dynamics by which culture standardises the psychology of the individuals (p. 33). Following Benedict, Bateson subdivides configuration into ethos, which refers to the emotional emphases of culture, and eidos, which refers to ‘the standardised cognitive aspects of the individuals’ (p. 33).
Here as well as elsewhere, Bateson’s anthropology came close to the sociology of Durkheim, as argued by Charles W. Nuckolls (1995): ‘Durkheim most clearly anticipated Bateson in his discussion of category structure, a structure based on . . . the morphology of social relations’ (p. 383).
However, Bateson’s scepticism towards this type of sociological explanations grew, and in the afterword to Naven, he offers a critique of his own work and of the sociological ideas on which it was founded (Bateson, 1958: 297). With reference to Whitehead, he sees sociology as a case of the ‘fallacy of misplaced concreteness’ (262–63), which is the fallacy of viewing abstract conceptual constructs as if they were concrete things.
Bateson tended more and more towards a ‘scepticism of most of the explanatory methods of the social sciences’ (Guddemi, 2007: 911). In a lecture of 1940, Bateson explains how he became sceptical of the assumption that the objects of sociology could be dealt with ‘as though they were concrete entities’ (Bateson, 2000 [1972]: 83). He more generally viewed sociology as a way of reifying the social world by lifting it out of its environment, the natural world. This is the context for Bateson’s (1958) turn to cybernetics, which he saw as ‘an almost total change’ in the field of epistemology (p. 280).
Moving beyond sociology
Bateson’s ideas develop from his early anthropological work via his conversion to cybernetics, culminating in classical collection of papers he called Steps to an Ecology of Mind, which spans a period of more than 35 years, from 1935 to 1971.
In the introduction to Steps, Bateson claims that it was as he prepared the Korzybski Memorial Lecture in 1969 that he realised what he had been aiming for all his career (Bateson, 2000 [1972]: xxiv; cf. Engel, 2016), namely, an understanding, which constituted ‘a bridge between the facts of life and behavior and what we know today of the nature of pattern and order’ (p. xxxii).
The social sciences had, according to Bateson (2000 [1972]), reduced themselves to the massive production of data combined with heuristic concepts (p. xxvii). By turning to cybernetics, Bateson believed he could now begin to view mental, social, biological and technological reality as different levels of homeostasis within the same system, which he called mind. Steps and other books he worked on in the 1970s, such as Mind and Nature (Bateson, 2002 [1979]) and the posthumously published Sacred Unity: Further Steps to an Ecology of Mind (Bateson and Donaldson, 1991), contain the results of Bateson’s work. The focus in the following analysis will be the two works published by Bateson himself, Steps and Mind and Nature.
Five problems in Bateson’s ecology of mind
After having now briefly sketched the trajectory on which Bateson’s thoughts developed, I will now go directly to the analysis of what I see as the central problems in Bateson’s way of thinking:
Foundational looping
Mistaking a red sea for a blue ocean
Breaking the rules without deliberation
Creating a matrix of incompatible ideas
Establishing a continuity of explaining with mystical ideas Ad. 1: Foundational looping refers to the critique of contemporary ideas by returning to earlier foundations, without taking the arguments against these into account. Thus, as we shall see, Bateson returns to Spencer’s analogical approach to social reality without addressing the critique of Spencer’s method. Ad. 2: Mistaking a red sea for a blue ocean refers to the claim of having found a ‘new’ field or object, while disregarding the fact that the field or object has already been widely studied. Thus, as we shall see, Bateson’s ecology of mind approximates to Durkheim’s approach to sociology. Ad. 3: Breaking the rules without deliberation refers to an approach, which do not acknowledge the rules, which it brakes, and therefore do not reflect on the implied problems. Ad. 4: Creating a matrix of incompatible ideas refers to Bateson’s perhaps most central mode of innovation, namely, the combination of ideas taken from very different contexts – such as the theory of evolution, behaviourism and Platonism – and synthesising them into his own cybernetic framework. Ad. 5: Creating a continuity of explaining with mystical ideas refers to the development of one’s thoughts on the basis of the explanations given by non-scientific philosophers and mystics.
In the following, I will outline how these five problems weaken Bateson’s attempted progress, before explaining their consequence for the understanding of social phenomena.
Foundational looping: Returning to the Spencerian analogy
In the following, I will demonstrate how Bateson returns to Spencer’s analogical approach to social reality, without addressing the critique of Spencer’s method.
In his 1940 speech, Bateson recalls how he always had believed in ‘the Spencerian analogy between Organism and Society’ (Bateson, 2000 [1972]: 75), but was forced to give it up as he was trained as an anthropologist, a fact that can be related to Durkheim’s ‘stranglehold in British anthropology’ (Harries-Jones, 2016: 67). In opposition to this intellectual climate, Bateson turned to Spencer’s analogy, arguing that he was guided by a ‘vague mystical feeling that we must look for the same sort of processes in all fields of natural phenomena’ (Bateson, 2000 [1972]: 74).
Even if it may be argued that Herbert Spencer does not feature prominently in the writings of Bateson and that his later views are more nuanced in their view of social reality, Bateson argues that throughout his early anthropological career, he remains faithful to the Spencerian belief in ‘the pervading unity of the phenomena of the world’ (p. 75). This belief is central to his idea of an ecology of mind, as it is outlined in Steps, as well as the idea of ‘a sacred unity of the biosphere’ described in Mind and Nature (Bateson, 1979: 18).
Bateson’s return to Spencerism through the lens of Durkheim
Durkheim (1982 [1895]) had already taken up and criticised Spencer’s use of analogy, arguing that Spencer’s work hardly has ‘any other purpose than to show how the law of universal evolution is applied to societies’ (p. 48).
According to Durkheim, the problem with approaches like that of Spencer is methodological: Instead of trying to control their study of society by their knowledge of biology, [the biological sociologists] tried to infer the laws of the first from the laws of the second.
Without confronting this problem, Bateson follows directly up on Spencer’s analogy, as he argues that we must look for the same processes in all fields of natural phenomena, and thus that ‘If you want to understand mental process’, Bateson (2002 [1979]) argues in Mind and Nature, you must ‘Look at biological evolution and conversely if you want to understand biological evolution, go look at mental process’ (p. 221).
This demonstrates, how Bateson, as he follows the Spencerian intuition, makes a loop back to an older foundation without confronting the problem which this foundation has been shown to have.
Mistaking a red sea for a blue ocean
Given the central role of Durkheim in Bateson’s formative years, it is rather surprising that he is able to overlook the similarity between his own ambition with his ecology of mind and Durkheim’s ambition with sociology.
Bateson (2000 [1972]) claimed to have found a ‘new way of thinking about ideas and about those aggregates of ideas which I call “minds”’ (p. xxiii). Placing this ‘discovery’ alongside Sigmund Freud’s contribution, he writes that while Freudian psychology ‘expanded the concept of mind inwards to include the whole communication system within the body’, his own theory had expanded the ‘mind outwards’. It thus contributed to reducing ‘the scope of the conscious self’, which began with Freud (p. 467).
This description overlooks that most early sociology had the very same ambition. Durkheim (1953 [1898]) – a contemporary of Freud – based his ideas on the observation that much of our thought and behaviour operate without being ‘known by our conscious selves’ (p. 23). Durkheim believed that we needed the science of sociology because he – like Bateson more than half a century later – believed that the study of mental reality should be expanded from internal to external reality. Durkheim’s main concepts, such as ‘collective consciousness’ and ‘collective representations’, were designed to account for this reality, which was the product of ‘an immense corporation that extends not only through space but through time’ (Durkheim, 1995 [1912]: 15), making a psychology of ‘collective ideas and actions’ (Durkheim, 1981 [1900]: 1061) necessary.
Thus, Bateson’s central notion of the ecology of mind refers to the same ontological domain (read sea) as not only Durkheim, but also many others: By ecology of mind, Bateson (2000 [1972]) refers to the fact humans are ‘bound within a net of epistemological and ontological premises which – regardless of ultimate truth or falsity – become partially self-validating’ (p. 314). This net of epistemological and ontological premises parallels ‘the ideology of an age’, which Mannheim (2015 [1929]) calls ‘the total structure of the mind of this epoch’ (pp. 49–50) and the world of common sense, analysed by Alfred Schütz (1967 [1932]) and Berger and Luckmann (1966).
Bateson’s concept of an ecology of mind thus refers to the same social ontology, as existing theories, but he fails to consider the consequence of this as he outlines his own ambition. He thus mistakes a red sea for a blue ocean.
Breaking the rules without deliberation
Like Bateson later, Durkheim had already recognised that the science he took part in founding, sociology, was part of the very same reality which it aimed to explain. This fact, however, took him in the opposite direction from that which Bateson later took. Given the fact that scientific epistemology is part of social ontology more broadly, he reasoned, it must systematically attempt to constitute itself as a separate realm by operating via different methods, types of understanding and validity claims than those structuring the understandings of everyday life. This is the argument for Durkheim’s first and most basic rule of sociology: To consider social facts as things.
Nonetheless, when confronted with the premise that the conditions of knowledge are social, Bateson (2000 [1972]) concludes that ‘ontology and epistemology cannot be separated’ (p. 314) and consequently that the distinction should be dropped.
The second rule Durkheim formulates is that the conventional character of a practice or an institution should never be assumed in advance. This rule parallels the later anthropological distinction between emic and etic accounts (Jahoda, 1977): Emic refers to the meaning constructed by the actor observed, whereas by etic accounts, we refer to accounts based on scientific, analytical language.
Bateson never felt comfortable with the distinction between emic and etic accounts, but tended towards emic accounts, as is clear when reading his reflections on the issue in Naven. Here, Bateson recognises the difference between the demands of ‘the sociological view’ and what Bateson confusingly calls the ‘structural point of view’: ‘I myself tend, at least in conscious levels of my mind, to think most readily in structural terms’ (Bateson, 1958: 251); that is, to adopt a perspective where we, as researchers, ‘put ourselves in the place of a hypothetical intellect inside the culture’ (p. 86).
Sociology, Bateson recognised, demands ‘an entirely different point of view’, namely, that of ‘an observer outside the culture’ (p. 86), trained in ‘a certain effort of mental acrobatics’, which is required ‘to shift the mind from thinking in terms of one point of view to thinking in terms of another’ (p. 251). Bateson, however, never explains why his mode of reflection from the inside is superior, and why all the problems identified with going native, does not apply to him.
Creating a matrix of incompatible ideas
The most central and creative strategy for innovation which Bateson uses is a type of eclecticism, which may be called the creation of a matrix of incompatible ideas, which is the combination of ideas taken from very different contexts, based on very different assumptions, and combining them into his own understanding. Bateson’s theory of learning can be read as the most direct attempt to bridge ‘adaptation in the biological sense of the term’ with the world of ‘cultural habits or customary behaviour’ (Harries-Jones, 1995: 111) and to integrate these ideas into a platonic conception of the forms of reality. Bateson, as we shall see, refers to cybernetics as a matrix, or meta-science, as he uses it to integrate the evolutionary theories of Lamarck and Darwin with behaviourism on one hand and Neo-Platonism on the other. The theoretical foundation for creating the logic of the matrix, however, is taken from Russell’s theory of logical forms; I will therefore make a short introduction to his theory here and then go on to see how it is used as a matrix.
Russell’s theory of logical form as a matrix
The problem Russell is trying to solve with his theory of logical forms is that predicates cannot be used on themselves: Predicates like ‘red’ and ‘nice’ are not meaningfully described as red or nice themselves. In the theory of logical forms, Russell thus distinguishes between orders of objects and predicates: A zero-order, consisting of individual objects, and a first-order, which consists of predicates, by which the objects can be typed. ‘Red’ and ‘white’ are colours and ‘nice’ and ‘agreeable’ traits – colours and traits are thus predicates of predicates, that is predicates of a higher type. Bateson uses Russell’s levels of logical orders as a model for creating his own orders of modes of adaptations, which he calls learning.
Bateson distinguishes between what he calls zero learning, and Learnings I, II, III and IV. As we shall see now, Bateson creates a taxonomy of theories based on their adequacy in relation to describing the different levels of learning, which he identifies.
Zero learning: The evolutionary processes
Bateson (2000 [1972]) describes zero learning as a process, where information is received ‘from an external event, in such a way that a similar event at a later (and appropriate) time will convey the same information’ (p. 284).
The situation where an organism is unable to internally represent events in the environment corresponds to the blind stochastic processes, described by the Darwinian theory of evolution. At this level of adaptation, the organism lacks any realisation of reality, and the organism is therefore not yet subject to correction by trial and error (p. 287).
Learnings I and II: The use of behaviouristic research
As he moves to Learnings I and II, Bateson makes use of behaviouristic concepts in order to account for how an organism, which responds to a stimulus from its environment, is able to make a revision of choice within an unchanged set of alternatives. When organisms are able to construct internal representations of the environment, Bateson talks about Learning I. When the complexity of these internal representations increases, a new type of learning emerges, Learning II, which is still formulated within the behaviouristic theoretical framework, but now with a cognitive component related to the fact that adaptation at this higher level has become based on a revision of the set from which the choice is to be made (p. 287). Whereas Learning I implies a change in the organism that is based on the apparatus of trial and error, Learning II implies a creative, reflective process, in which the organism is able to observe itself as having different options for acting, related to different outcomes in the environment; it thus becomes able to judge between different responses according to the situation (pp. 294–98).
Incorporating a cognitive component and the turn to Neo-Platonism
As Learning II incorporates a cognitive component, it focusses on the internal construction of a representation of the environment. Within Bateson’s theoretical construction, this cognitive component functions as a bridge to the neo-platonic theory, which he uses to explain Learning III, defined as a ‘profound reorganization of character’ (p. 301).
Learning III appears when the whole, within which the organism operates – rather than the individual organism itself – is taken as the point of departure. This is what may happen during religious conversion, therapy and other types of processes, through which the organism views its own internal organisation as subject to change. Here, rather than adapting to the environment, or changing the understanding of the environment, the organism changes the underlying principles by which the relationship between the self and its environment is governed in such a way that it ‘reveals a world in which personal identity merges into all the processes of relationship in some vast ecology or aesthetics of cosmic interaction’ (p. 306).
At this level, the structure of the whole reveals itself in the part: The world in a grain of sand, or ‘Heaven in a Wild Flower’ as Bateson writes, quoting William Blake (p. 306). Bateson (2000 [1972]) re-interprets this entity as an immanent structure, based on the neo-Platonic idea of unity in multiplicity, and relates it to emic accounts of mystical experiences achieved through the use of lysergic acid diethylamide (LSD) (p. 469).
Whereas Bateson (1979) does not explain how this should be understood in Steps, he does argue in Mind and Nature that learning at this level converges with evolution, as the two different stochastic systems ‘fit together into a single ongoing biosphere’ (p. 149). The first system, which is individual, ‘is called learning; the other is immanent in heredity and in populations and is called evolution’ (p. 149). This articulation of systems demonstrates how Bateson operates with an idea of an internal, formal telos, which directs learning and evolution towards each other; when they finally meet we reach the Learning IV level.
This description of Bateson’s levels of learning demonstrates how Bateson merges the theory of evolution, which is based on the assumption that development is based on stochastic processes, with behaviourism, where learning is based on trial and error and Platonic mysticism, where learning is a matter of arriving at a particular understanding, based on wholeness.
In Bateson’s systems theory, these different ideas are seen as levels of learning, and evolutionism and behaviourism – despite that it goes against the premises of these theories – thus become steps to a Platonic insight, where the individual realises that he or she is a part of a whole, and thus able to think based on an understanding of the totality of which one is part.
Creating a continuity of explanation with mystical ideas
Summarising Bateson’s hierarchy of learning has demonstrated how he ends up creating a continuity of explanation with mystical ideas. Even if Bateson was critical towards others like Teilhard de Chardin, whom Bateson believed ‘confused evolution and cognition with false notions of a divine creation . . .’ (Harries-Jones, 2016: 91–92), Bateson ends up doing a similar thing with Platonic mysticism.
The role of Platonism in Bateson’s thoughts is to provide a way of combining ontological and epistemological domains. Bateson writes that the thesis of Mind and Nature is, that ‘The pattern which connects is a metapattern. It is a pattern of patterns’ (p. 11), and he talks about ‘the Platonic thesis of the book’, with reference to the idea: that epistemology is an indivisible, integrated meta-science whose subject matter is the world of evolution, thought, adaptation, embryology, and genetics – the science of mind in the widest sense of the word. (p. 87)
On one hand, epistemology is perceived as a meta-science, which shall discover mind; on the other hand, Bateson already knows the structure of reality, which is to be discovered, thus the investigation becomes a question of how to fit different scientific ideas into the frame outlined by the ontology of connectivity.
This last step to the ecology of mind, which fits the pieces into a whole, demands a leap of faith, which Bateson frames in the following way: ‘I surrender to the belief that my knowing is a small part of a wider integrated knowing that knits the entire biosphere or creation’ (p. 88).
Bateson here uses the explanations given by philosophers and mystics as a foundation for his reasoning. The result is that Bateson’s theory can be seen as a reverberation of Neo-platonic motifs (Baracchi, 2013), where Bateson’s theory recapitulates an idea found in Plato’s Timaeus: ‘the vision of the living cosmos, the total animal, all-encompassing life’ (p. 210), and the motif of ‘a connective tissue of all that is, the communicational web of contacts, exchanges, and transmissions’ (p. 204).
This analytical conclusion resonates with the fact that contemporary philosophers, such as David Fideler (2002), aiming at re-interpreting Neoplatonism in a contemporary light, have found inspiration in Bateson. Admitting that Plato’s idea ‘that cosmos is a single living creature which encompasses all the living creatures that are within us’ (Fideler, 2002: 107–108) is riddled with paradoxes (p. 113), Fideler argues that we may turn to ‘Gregory Bateson’s philosophy of Mind’ in order to escape some of these paradoxes (p. 114). Bateson’s account of how mind makes out a ‘metapattern, a pattern that connects’, and a ‘system of parts in which information flows that makes a difference’. This pattern may function, as Fideler argues, as a foundation for reformulating the platonic idea of unity in multiplicity related to the notion of nous.
Based on Bateson’s theory, Fideler argues that it is possible to defend the idea that ‘the psyche is not distinct from cosmos’ and that the individual psyche may be interpreted as ‘the Mind of the living universe in search of its own nature’ (p. 117).
Bateson is also highly praised by thinkers such as Morris Berman (1981), who wish for a re-enchantment of modernity. Bateson, Berman argues, should be seen as one of the greatest thinkers of the twentieth century. Bateson’s work, according to Berman, is unique, not due to its ‘cybernetic/biological metaphor’ but due to the synthesis of ideas, which it has created, and in particular, the extraction of the concept of Mind from its traditionally religious context, and the demonstration that it is an element inherent in the real world. With Bateson’s work, Mind (which includes value) becomes a concrete reality and a working scientific concept. (Berman, 1981: 196)
What makes Bateson appealing to modern thinkers is its holistic outlook, which is also what turns critics against him, such as Kirkebøen (1995), who argues that the interest in Bateson within psychology should be viewed as a turn towards ‘guru worship and mysticism’ (p. 50).
Bateson versus Durkheim: Understanding social phenomena
Having presented five problems in Bateson’s mode of innovation, I will now demonstrate the consequences these problems have for Bateson’s interpretation of social phenomena.
I will focus on five phenomena, which are chosen due to the fact that they sum up the central line in Bateson’s critique of the modern, Western worldview and epistemology, making it possible to view Bateson’s thoughts through a Durkheimian lens:
Wisdom as the perception of totality
The idea of the self and its relation to totality
Totemism as a state of societal equilibrium with nature
Evolution towards a new equilibrium with nature
Alcoholics Anonymous (AA) as a case of conversion to a true version of the self
Wisdom as the perception of totality
As we saw in relation to Bateson’s theory of learning types, the highest form of knowledge is an understanding, where the structure of the whole reveals itself in the part. Wisdom is the realisation of the whole, and a type of thinking which takes the whole as a point of departure. In order to become wise, one must overcome the limit of one’s own perspective, and thereby let go of conscious purpose, in order to take the larger system as point of departure for one’s own thinking.
Bateson’s idea of wisdom – viewed through the lens of Durkheim
Bateson’s idea of wisdom as a matter of perceiving oneself and one’s relation to the world from the perspective of the totality establishes a continuity of explanation with mystical ideas.
Durkheim – in his discussion of ancient mystical or philosophical ideas – makes a very different type of continuation than that of Bateson. Where Bateson uses the mystical explanations in order to develop his own understanding, Durkheim uses science to explain the phenomena that the philosophers only have named, but failed to explain. This type of continuation is one of naming rather than of explaining, as will be exemplified here in relation to the totality of things.
If, Durkheim and Mauss (1963) write, ‘the totality of things is conceived as a single system, this is because society itself is seen in the same way’ (p. 83). Following this idea, it is not – as the religious thinkers believed – the universe in itself which constitutes the totality, but the conceptual understanding of it, which exists within a given society. It is us, not as individuals, but as a society which produces and forms the collective representations by which the universe may be perceived as a totality.
The perception of totality: Towards a continuty of naming
Durkheim’s explanation of the perception of totality constitutes a continuity of naming in relation to the ideas of Plato, but not a continuity of explanation. According to Durkheim, ‘totality’ is a mental category which organises our collective representations of the world. For, as argued by Durkheim (1995 [1912]), ‘Each civilization has its own ordered system of concepts, which characterizes it’ (p. 437). He continues, Before this system of ideas, the individual intellect is in the same situation as the νοῦς of Plato before the world of Ideas. He strives to assimilate them, for he needs them in order to deal with his fellow men, but this assimilation is always incomplete. Each of us sees them in his own way. Some escape us completely, remaining beyond our range of vision, while others are glimpsed in only some of their aspects. (p. 437)
This quotation demonstrates how Durkheim stands in the shadow of Plato (Meštrović, 1982), just as Bateson does, and how both thinkers refer to the platonic idea of the νοῦς. Unlike Bateson, who as we saw above continues the Platonic explanation of νοῦς, the continuity between Plato and Durkheim is not one of explanation: Durkheim only refers to Plato and the νοῦς as a name for that which he attempts to explain based on social scientific assumptions.
Totality is therefore no longer a totality of mind and nature, but a totality of ideas, the structure of which the individual intellect must assimilate in order to become integrated into society. ‘The unity of knowledge’ is not the unity of reality as such, it is the ‘unity of the collectivity, extended to the universe’ (Durkheim and Mauss, 1963: 84).
Based on the assumption that each individual must construct its own version of the collective representations of the group in which it lives, wisdom must be conceived as a quality of this epistemological construction, rather than a matter of grasping an ontological wholeness.
This difference is essential to understanding Bateson through the lens of Durkheim and for understanding the extent to which Bateson’s foundational looping takes him of the track of a modern scientific understanding. Bateson’s idea that mind is a pattern embedded in the universe, rather than a representational construction by which the universe is percived, thus mistakes the collective representation of totality for the totality of the world itself. In order to explore the extent to which this foundational loop expands, we will have to view how Bateson perceives the genealogy of the self.
The idea of the self – and its relation to totality
It is as he sets out to achieve his central goal, to correct the epistemological flaws of Western thought, that Bateson performs his most significant case of foundational looping. Bateson’s diagnosis of the Western world begins with the contemporary ecological crises, and he claims that this crisis is the consequence of an epistemological crisis that takes form during the evolution of the eco-mental system as a whole.
According to Bateson, the first eco-mental system evolved as Totemism, which he interpreted as a case of man empathising with nature and man taking cues from nature. However, Bateson argues, with the advent of animism, the process was reversed and man began to take cues from himself and apply them to nature.
The development of an idea of god, as a separate mind, transcending nature, introduced what Bateson (2000 [1972]) calls a lethal error, namely, the separation of mind and nature, which with the advance of technology becomes more and more critical (pp. 492–493). During the development of Christianity and modern philosophy, the idea of a separation of mind and nature became part of our everyday epistemology, and forms the basis of the contemporary, Western mode of subjectivity.
The goal of epistemology, according to Bateson, is to re-establish the forgotten unity in the relationship between man and environment, which was expressed in the worldview of Totemism, which even if it was ‘nonsense’, as Bateson writes, made ‘more sense than most of what we do today’ (p. 492).
Bateson’s main idea is thus the existence of an epistemological error (p. 493), or certain errors in ‘the thinking and attitudes of Occidental culture’ (p. 498), which should be corrected by turning to systems theory, and thus to re-establish the eco-mental system, Totemism, on a new and higher level.
Totemism as a state of societal equilibrium with nature
As we saw, Bateson views Totemism as the original type of eco-mental system, which existed in a state of equilibrium with nature. Bateson defines Totemism in the following way: man in society took clues from the natural world around him and applied those clues in a sort of metaphoric way to the society in which he lived. That is, he identified with or empathised with the natural world around him and took that empathy as a guide for his own social organization and his own theories of his own psychology. (p. 492)
Bateson is aware of the similarity between his own ideas and the ideas inherent in the system of Totemic thought, and he defends this affinity by stating that the Totemism analogy ‘is both more appropriate and more healthy than the analogy, familiar to us, which would liken people and society to nineteenth-century machines’ (Bateson, 1979: 140).
Bateson’s view of Totemism through the lens of Durkheim
Bateson, in accounting for the development of eco-mental systems, constructs a version of the well-known romantic developmental narrative by which an original wholeness, which was broken, is reconstituted at a higher level (Kirschner, 1996). Viewed through the lens of Durkheim, this narrative is a historicist mythos. First of all, the definition of Totemism that Bateson uses – man taking clues of nature – is quite surprising. Durkheim had already argued that it is a misinterpretation to view Totemism as a case of man taking clues from nature; rather, what humans does is to use natural objects as symbols for the social group.
According to Durkheim, it is in Totemism that the notion of the ‘soul’ is born. In Totemism, each clan member incarnates the totem of the clan and, as Durkheim argues, the soul is in fact the ‘totemic principle incarnated in each individual’. It is the model of how the collective soul is subdivided among the members, and ‘[e]ach of these fragments is a soul’ (Durkheim, 1995 [1912]: 252).
Based on this historical explanation, it is clear how Bateson’s (2000 [1972]) idea that ‘there is a larger Mind of which the individual mind is only a subsystem’ (p. 467) follows the very same principle as Totemism, without the analytical distance to it that Durkheim has. Thus, whereas Durkheim ends up with an explanation of the totemic principle, Bateson ends up using Totemism as a way of explaining other things, for instance, the problems inherent in modern Western society.
Bateson’s history of the Western self through the lens of Durkheim
Durkheim not only has a different understanding of Totemism than Bateson, but this understanding fits into an entirely different interpretation of the development of the Western world. Rather than seeing ideas such as animism and god as indicative of a great fall from original unity with nature, Durkheim views all religions as expressions of the anonymous forces of the social group, and he views their systems of representation as different modes by which these forces are turned into objects of mental activity and social communication.
Totemism thus is the reflection and symbolization of human society and this process develops through the different phases of religious history and philosophy. While all religions have the same function and thus value, what we see in the development of the history of the Western world, is that ‘higher mental faculties’ come into play, and ‘ideas and feelings’ become richer, and successive religions ‘contain proportionately more concepts than sensations and images, and they are more elaborately systematized’ (Durkheim, 1995 [1912]: 2).
Consequently, what happens in secular modernity is the realisation that a religion does not necessarily imply symbols and rites, properly speaking . . . Essentially, it is nothing other than a body of collective beliefs and practices endowed with a certain authority. (Durkheim in Bellah, 1973: 51)
Thus, according to Durkheim, our understanding of human nature has advanced rather than decreased and contemporary forms of religions – where science and human life itself is endowed with religious respect – reflect this. Durkheim’s treatment of the genealogy of the self, including his understanding of religion, symbolism and ritual behaviour, is based on an interpretation of cultural evolution, which is qualitatively different from that of Bateson, since it is founded on scientific theories.
Evolution towards a new equilibrium with nature
Bateson believed that he was able to re-think the idea of evolution, which he developed as a dialogue with Lamarck and Darwin, from his systems-theoretical perspective. Bateson begins by recognising Lamarck’s contribution. Before Lamarck, Bateson (2000 [1972]) writes, ‘the living world, was believed to be hierarchic in structure, with Mind at the top . . .’ (p. 455). Lamarck’s influence, he writes, was to turn that chain upside down: ‘[W]hat had been the explanation, namely, the Mind at the top, now became that which had to be explained’ (p. 456).
It is this task of explaining mind from an evolutionary perspective which Darwin – according to Bateson – fails to acknowledge, as he places radomness at the centre of the process of evolution. Early critics of Darwin, such as Samuel Butler, saw this problem and tried to solve it by developing the idea of a nonrandom mind at work in evolution: A view Bateson writes of as mysticism.
However, Bateson believes to have found a third way between Darwin and Butler, by which the Larmarckian project of explaining the evolution of mind may be realised. His argument is that ‘there is a nonrandom selective process’, which causes ‘certain of the random components to “survive” longer than others’ (Bateson, 1979: 147). This nonrandom selective process is part of a ‘single ongoing biosphere’, which in the end constitutes mind (p. 149). In this way, Bateson is able to situate his idea of ‘wholeness’ within the theoretical framework of evolutionary theory, as we saw in his account for learning.
According to Oliveira (2013), Bateson here re-interprets the idea of Mind as the top of the hierarchy of being, which ‘has been defined as supreme, usually in transcendent manner to the universe, many times as being God’ (p. 530). Rather than succumbing to mysticism, Bateson thus believes that he is redefining the meaning of religious and philosophical terms, so that they fit his evolutionary worldview. His idea of ‘the larger Mind’ is, as he writes, ‘comparable to God’, but he re-interprets the latter, so that it comes to mean an immanent quality ‘in the total interconnected social system and planetary ecology’ (Bateson, 2000 [1972]: 467).
Bateson’s view of evolution through the lens of Durkheim
Viewed through the lens of Durkheim, Bateson’s idea of a nonrandom selective process at play in evolution is a step in the right direction, but instead of just claiming the existence of a nonrandom process and equating it with the non-empirical entity ‘god’, Durkheim’s argument is that it should be explained by the empirical investigation of society.
This is why Durkheim invents his sociological theory – to account for the nonrandom process at play in evolution, namely, social reality, and consequently it is by explaining social reality that we arrive at a scientific explanation of realities such as god or larger mind.
Within the process of evolution, social phenomena such as collective representations and social skills, and socially defined types of attractiveness exert a selection pressure, which affects the directions of human evolution. The point of sociology is to decode the laws of this nonrandom selective process.
It is this project that Bateson leaves as he via the Spencerian analogy loops back to the argument that a single ongoing biosphere is an immanent quality in the total interconnected social system and planetary ecology.
How close he comes to Spencer, may be illustrated by citing a paragraph from a work that Spencer published before Darwin’s The Origin of Species, in which he argued that progress ‘is not an accident, but a necessity’, and consequently, The modifications mankind have undergone, and are still undergoing, result from a law underlying the whole organic creation; and – provided the human race continues, and the constitution of things remains the same, those modifications must end in completeness. (Spencer, 2019 [1851]: 65; italics added)
In this paragraph, we find the same kind of thinking about evolution as directed towards an immanent goal, as that, which Bateson describes as Learning IV in his taxonomy of learning: Learning IV would be change in Learning III, but probably does not occur in any adult living organism on this earth . . . The combination of phylogenesis with ontogenesis, in fact, achieves Level IV. (Bateson, 2000 [1972]: 293)
Like Spencer’s idea of progress, Bateson’s idea of evolution is that it is immanently oriented towards a specific goal, namely, the convergence of phylogenesis and ontogenesis; like Spencer’s idea of organic creations, Bateson’s idea of the meta-pattern is based on the imagination of a general state of completeness, where the parts merges into the whole.
From Durkheim’s perspective, we are here dealing with modern versions of the totemic principle. According to Durkheim, as we have seen the totemic principle is a religious way of representing the relationship between society and the individual, which should be explained rather than being used as explanation.
Furthermore, from a Durkheimian perspective, the reason why evolution and learning may converge in Bateson’s understanding is that Bateson fails to acknowledge that humans have a double centre of gravity: ‘an individual being that has its basis in the body . . ., and a social being that represents within us the highest reality in the intellectual and moral realm . . . society’ (Durkheim, 1995 [1912]: 15–16; Fish, 2013). Thus, according to Durkheim, within the individual, an antagonism exists between the biologically driven type of learning and a secondary process of cultural learning, associated with the fact that individuals acquire collective representations shared in the environment. Also within modern psychology, as argued by Natalie Bulle, with reference to Lev Vygotsky, the human mind is treated as a so-called dual process; that is as consisting of two different lines of development: ‘one ancient, associated with animal development, and the other recent, associated with man’s social development’ (Bulle, 2014: 150; Evans and Stanovich, 2013).
Conversely, Durkheim, Vygotsky and many others argue that social reality is a reality, which penetrates the organism and provides it with the cognitive tools, which makes mental development possible.
Viewed through the lens of Durkheim, Bateson fundamentally disregards the difference between natural and cultural evolution, and the consequence it has for learning. He reduces the symbolic forms of culture and society to being a complex environment, called the habitat. The consequences of this fundamental difference for the understanding of social phenomena shall be unpacked in the following sections, where I will compare Bateson’s analysis of AA with a Durkheimian.
AA as a case of conversion to a true version of the self
Bateson’s analysis of AA is among his most famous.
AA is a fellowship founded in 1935 by Bill Wilson and Bob Smith with the intention of curing alcoholism. The AA’s 12 steps are a process during which – according to Bateson’s interpretation – the alcoholic is forced to leave one mind-set and give way to another.
The first step is to give up the idea of being in control and submit oneself to the idea of a superior mind. Bateson identifies in this ritual the very process he is theorising: The letting go of the idea of the Western self as a separate, autonomous unit while understanding the self as part of an all-encompassing, superior mind. Bateson goes so far as to interpret the AA ritual as a correction of the systemic fallacy of the modern idea of the self. The argument is as follows: As long as the alcoholic identifies himself with the Western idea of the autonomous self, his feeling of pride will be dependent on his success at being, in William Ernest Henley’s famous formula, the captain of his soul – able to govern all aspects of his inner environment, such as the desire to drink. Within the Western mind-set, the only way the alcoholic can gain respect is by demonstrating the central virtue of self-control and the power to overcome temptations. The only way the alcoholic can demonstrate that he can beat the bottle is to expose himself to drinking. In this way, the alcoholic is held in his addiction by the very idea that one part of him, his conscious self, should be able to successfully compete with another part of himself, namely, his desire to drink. Bateson uses his concept of schismogenesis – and the distinction between symmetrical and complementary types of schismogenesis – to account for the process.
By symmetrical schismogenesis, Bateson refers to the relation between parts, which are of equal status; by complementary schismogenesis, Bateson refers to a relationship between parts that have an asymmetrical power relation, which fits into the same system as is the case in the relationship between behaviours of dominance and submission (Bateson, 2000 [1972]: 323–26). Based on this distinction, Bateson argues that the intervention of AA works because it turns a mind-set of symmetrical competition between two equal parts of the self into a complementary relationship between the self and a superior being. As Bateson writes, the religious conversion of the alcoholic when saved by AA can be described as a dramatic shift from this symmetrical habit, or epistemology, to an almost purely complementary view of his relationship to others and to the universe or God. (p. 326)
By submitting one’s will to powers stronger than oneself, the process within the self changes: It is no longer a matter of being ‘the captain of the ship’ but a matter of seeing oneself as ‘part of a much larger field of interlocking processes’. It is by realising that it is this larger system, rather than the individual itself, which does ‘the thinking, acting, and deciding’ that individuals are cured from their addiction (p. 331).
Bateson’s case study through the lens of Durkheim
Bateson (2000 [1972]) was aware that the AA movement has the characteristics of ‘a Durkheimian religion’ (p. 333), but he did not analyse it as such, since he – rather than explain how a religious perspective helps individuals to gain control over themselves – took on the religious perspective himself. Bateson therefore mistakes the experience of truth felt as solidarity within a group, with an epistemological notion of truth.
According to a Durkheimian interpretation, it is not the conversion to an epistemological truth, which cures the alcoholic, but the ritual submission of oneself to the power of the group. The AA is able to cure alcoholism because it creates a community, where alcohol is set apart and tabooed. Consequently, it is because the different members follow the same rules, and identify with the same totem, alcohol, and the same taboo, that they experience solidarity, and it is this solidarity which constitutes the forces that the members experience as something internal. It is the warm affection of the group which pulls the individuals in the direction of sobriety, and the social pressure, created by the shared rules, that supports them in remaining sober.
This Durkheimian interpretation is not just different from Bateson’s; it is more in line with the facts: Bateson mistakes what is a subjective experience of meaning for an epistemological fact. In addition, he fails to see how the real effect of joining the mechanical solidarity of the AA group is that the members become able to handle the challenges created by modern, individualised Western societies. An AA-membership does not change the fact that society demands the individual to be the captain of the ship. On the contrary, AA in fact helps people to gain exactly that control and autonomy which modern society demands. By creating a ritual where individuals declare their dependence on a power greater than their own, these same individuals paradoxically acquire the spiritual power to act as independent individuals in control of their own lives.
Thus, there is no argument for the claim that AA ritual cures an epistemological error of the Western world. On the contrary, it is quite evident how AA creates a community, held together by mechanical solidarity, which takes form within a social structure organised around organic solidarity.
Conclusion and reflections on the legacy of Bateson
Durkheim would have agreed with Bateson’s point that sociology should address fundamental assumption concerning human life, rather than simply combine data with heuristic concepts. However, as we have seen, when viewed through the lens of Durkheim, Bateson’s attempt at developing fundamentals by turning to cybernetics did not advance the understanding of social phenomena such as Totemism or social reality in general. On the contrary, Bateson returns to ideas that were already rejected in the field of sociology and to pre-sociological interpretations of social phenomena.
Thus, while Bateson in no way simply recycled the orthodoxy within particular fields, he did recycle both non-scientific ideas and abandoned scientific ideas – taken from the philosophy of Plato and the analogy of Spencer – and based his innovative theories on them.
Even if Bateson, as argued by Harries-Jones (2016), tried ‘to ensure that his arguments would not be mistaken as a type of worldview’ (p. 91), the only coherent way of interpreting Bateson’s ecology of mind is as a worldview. Bateson used cybernetics as a matrix within which he could recycle pre-modern philosophy and modern scientific ideas into a meaning giving worldview.
It may now be hypothesised that the reason why Bateson’s ideas never gained a real foothold within social thought is not that they are transdisciplinary or too innovative, but rather that the fundamental assumptions, on which they are based, fail to meet the requirements of a social scientific understanding of reality.
This conclusion may further help us understand the particular legacy of Bateson’s thought. What we have seen is that while theoretically based fields, such as sociology, have neglected Bateson’s contribution, applied fields such as therapy and management development have celebrated his ideas. Soren Eilertsen, a consultant, writes that Bateson’s theories help people who have ‘grown up under the Western mindset’ to acknowledge that our ‘mindset (paradigms) limit our perspective on a situation’ (Eilertsen and London, 2013: 2). Eilertsen argues that it is by changing one’s mind-set, paradigms and modes of learning that it becomes possible to ‘take the organization to a new level’ (p. 2). Bateson teaches ‘us’, another consultant writes in a tribute to Bateson, how we should learn to see organisations as ‘living systems or semi-bounded ecologies, where individuals contribute to the shaping of the whole organization but are also shaped by the system they inhabit’ (Hawkins, 2004: 411).
As with the AA-case, the task of consultants and management developers is to change people’s minds by offering a new worldview to which they should convert. Besides management consultancy, Bateson’s theories have been widely used within family therapy and psychotherapy (Berger, 1978; Tramonti, 2018), where Bateson has achieved an ‘iconic status’ (Krause, 2007: 915) and is considered a guiding star (Kozin, 2003). That being the case, surveys of the use of Bateson’s ideas within these fields suggest that there is a tendency to merely cite Bateson as a beacon, whereas substantial elaboration on his ideas is rare (Thomas et al., 2007). And, as argued by Holl (2007), the fact that Bateson has ‘for a long time acquired a real “cult status” [. . .] tends to forestall a critical reflection’ on his main doctrines (p. 1052).
In relation to scientific fields, it is not only within the social sciences that Bateson is rarely cited; even within fields where Bateson’s legacy is celebrated, such as bio-semiotics (Hoffmeyer, 2008), it is noticed that Bateson’s work ‘never did find the broad audience it deserved’ (p. 27). Nuckolls (1995) has also argued that the legacy of Gregory Bateson may be seen as ‘misplaced’ and ‘mixed’ since, even if Bateson tackled questions of emotions and cognition, his ‘legacy within psychological anthropology is not terrible great’ (p. 392). More generally, Nuckolls suggests that it is as a ‘humanist and aesthete, not a theory-builder’ that Bateson should be seen, and thus he suggests that ‘it is the poetry of his work and not the science of it that appeals to many’ (p. 392).
This complex legacy demonstrates why we should be careful how we look at progress within the social sciences. Researchers such as James B. Rule (1997) have argued for a pragmatic turn in the understanding of progress in the social sciences, and that emphasising that the notion of truthfulness should be replaced by its utility and the ‘ability to solve problems’ (p. 13).
This article has demonstrated that theories such as those by Bateson may provide new ways of coping with problems without developing our understanding of the reality of which they are about. I would therefore opt for truthfulness as more important than utility when considering Bateson’s contribution.
The aim of this critique of the main doctrines of Bateson’s work is not only to argue against some of Bateson’s claims, but also to contribute to a more in-depth understanding of his ideas. Pointing to the problem that Bateson’s critique of the modern worldview is based on a step back to a pre-critical and pre-modern philosophy of wholeness is not the same as ruling out the central intuition at work in Bateson’s theories, namely, that our mode of thinking challenges our chances of surviving. However, in order to make a theoretically convincing argument for this, we need to develop this intuition based on a critical understanding of the relation between mind and society. In short, a sociology of mind should be the first step to an ecology of mind.
Footnotes
Author’s Note
This article has profited from comments made by the three anonymous reviewers, as well as Anders Kruuse Ljungdahl, Oliver Kauffman, Lars-Henrik Schmidt and Brian Kjær Andreasen.
Declaration of conflicting interest
The author(s) declared no potential conflicts of interest with respect to the research, authorship and/or publication of this article.
Funding
The author(s) received no financial support for the research, authorship and/or publication of this article.
