Gregory Bateson

Gregory Bateson, born 1904, came of an English scientific heritage, his father being the Cambridge biologist who experimentally proved Mendel's theories on heredity and, coincidentally, coined the term "genetics." Bateson studied zoology and biology, beginning his own scientific career as an anthropologist working in New Britain and New Guinea, where he met Margaret Mead, with whom, after their marriage, he undertook fieldwork in Bali. Other disciplines he worked in include linguistics, ethnology, psychiatry, communications theory and cybernetics (where he was party to a portion of its development and elaboration). He never relinquished his interest in animal behavior and, at various times, conducted research with otters and octopuses, and into dolphin communication (with John Lilly).

Bateson stuck his nose into just about every scientific discipline that speaks to living things. In a time when it wasn't fashionable to be inter-disciplinary, he was beyond multi-disciplinary, off operating in his own meta-disciplinary domain. In later life he characterized the primary concern of that meta-disciplinary domain as “the pattern that connects”: “What pattern connects the crab to the lobster and the orchid to the primrose and all the four of them to me? And me to you? And all the six of us to the amoeba in one direction and to the back-ward schizophrenic in another?”

Those questions range pretty wide. He sought his answers in the “overlap between formal premises and actual behavior,” saying, “I have studied the area of impact between very abstract and formal philosophical thought on the one hand and the natural history of man and other creatures on the other.”

Since his meta-disciplinary domain didn't exist outside of his own work there was no scientific field to claim him as their own, to support his work while he was alive or his legacy after his death. Nonetheless, he has influenced many other thinkers who have worked in a number of areas. For instance, he is held in high esteem by the world of family therapy (though this could not be accounted a scientific discipline) because the research which led to his “Double Bind Theory of Schizophrenia” was innovative in its examination of the relationship between the designated patient and the rest of their family system. Members of Bateson's research group, and those who worked closely with them, became some of the first to develop a systemic family therapy approach. He was also a pioneer, in this and other areas, of the use of photographic, audiotape and filmic records for research purposes.

Bateson's work was considered difficult to understand, and the difficulty remains that there are few readers who will have a background in all the disciplines he touches upon. At the same time, the cultural trajectory of ideas in the years since his death has led to a more receptive background, making his writing easier to grasp today than when it was written. His writing style, however, is at odds with the current tendency toward the prolix, being neither garrulous nor chatty. On the contrary, it exhibits a succinct concision that, at times, has a kinship to poetry. In recordings of his later talks, his aging voice is the voice of wisdom, carried on a tone of wry amusement. Since his death others have developed his ideas further and much experimental work has been undertaken. Still it is his writing that remains a stimulus to thought as, through his words, we experience his thoughts unfold. His work still lives and its import remains profound.

Readings:

Gregory Bateson. Steps to An Ecology of Mind

Gregory Bateson. Mind and Nature: A Necessary Unity

Gregory Bateson. A Sacred Unity

Gregory Bateson & Mary Catherine Bateson. Angels Fear: Towards an Epistemology of the Sacred

David Bohm

The late David Bohm came to feel that the significance of meaning (which could also be described as the significance of significance) went deeper even than our concluding claim in the “Meaning” post that meaning “may well be the most important factor in human life.”

As a physicist who counted among his friends both Einstein and Krishnamurti, Bohm's activities spanned the material and immaterial realms. Toward the end of his life the question of meaning and its relationship to matter and mind became a focus of considerable interest for him.

Bohm characterized the conventional position as holding that the mental and the physical realms are different, though somehow related. In contrast, he considered them inseparable, and saw meaning as the bridge between them. In order to avoid the term psycho-somatic, which he considers introduces the idea of two different kinds of entities, he proposes the term "soma-significance" to emphasize the unity between somatic/physical and significance/mental. In elaborating this relationship Bohm points out that any particular significance is based on some somatic structure, and any somatic configuration has a meaning. In parallel, there is a "signa-somatic" relation through which meaning affects the soma. He gives the example of a shadow seen on a dark night. Depending upon a person's past experience, this may be viewed as merely a shadow or as an assailant. The physical consequences on the human body are very different. If the shadow is perceived to mean danger, adrenaline will be pumped into the blood stream, the heartbeat will increase, blood pressure will rise, a wash of neuro-chemicals will flood the brain, etc. What Bohm wants to show is that “any change of meaning is a change of soma, and that any change of soma is a change of meaning.” (“is” or “causes”)

For Bohm meaning is not something that exists only in the mind. Meaning is being. He says that in order to characterize what sort of person someone is we would have to include how that person behaves under various circumstances, and the way that person behaves stems from what things mean to that person. In the soma-significant and signa-somatic flow, meaning and being become one another.

Bohm's views have taken us from the level of human meaning to the level of neuro-chemical interactions. Remember, though, that he is a theoretical physicist. He takes the investigation down to the quantum level. We will not present his lengthy arguments here but only give a flavour of where his thinking comes to rest. In parallel to what has been said as characterizing a person, if we asked what an electron is, we would also, says Bohm, have to include a description of how it behaves under various circumstances. Different theories of physics give different descriptions. Classical physics considers an electron as a mechanical entity influenced only by external forces and pressures. In quantum theory, though, an electron is said to be able to respond to information and, thus, in this view, the meaning of the information is essential to what the electron is. Drawing on his notion of implicate and explicate orders, Bohm speaks of the particles of matter as the more explicate, somatic level of activity while the Schroedinger wave field is a more implicate, mind-like level. He views this hierarchical pattern continuing to finer and finer levels, where every more subtle somatic level is guided by a finer, more subtle level of information, which is the somatic level for a finer level for a yet finer level beneath. Within this view, even the quantum mechanical laws are only scratching the surface. While the mode of description, again, implies two types of activity, the content of the description makes it clear that Bohm sees them as being the same. What are considered as mental events merge with matter, and vice versa. There is no split between mind and matter; they are two sides of one process. He suggests we might speak of mind-matter, or matter-mind. “Meaning” is the term he uses to connect them when he says, “In this one totality, meaning provides all being and, indeed, all existence.”

Readings:

David Bohm, Unfolding Meaning, (1985) Ed. Donald Factor.

David Bohm, “Meaning and Information” in The Search for Meaning: The New Spirit in Science and Philosophy, (1989) Ed. Paavo PylkkŠnen.

Alfred Korzybski

The Polish Count Alfred Korzybski, born in 1879, was the originator of the aphorism, “The Map is Not the Territory,” widely invoked in service of the proposition that we have no direct, unmediated contact with the external world, or with Reality (which is commonly considered the same thing). The territory, in this aphorism, is the world and the map is the web of generalizations which we use to make sense of it. (Gregory Bateson was one to fruitfully employ Korzybski's aphorism.)

Korzybski’s work in General Semantics, as he called his discipline, was aimed at dealing with the problems due to, what he saw as, faulty thinking exacerbated by the unreflective way we use language. His appreciation of the benefits of language, which he saw as differentiating us from other animals and as being responsible for the accomplishments of human culture, was tempered by an equal appreciation of the harm it could do. He had lived through the further reaches of this harm in the First World War (during which time he moved to North America).

An enthusiast for the scientific method and mathematical description, Korzybski wanted to bring these to bear on everyday human behavior. In addition, he developed a training program designed to teach people how to use language, which may sound like a quixotic pursuit, but might better be considered a training in how to think. Because we generalize from our experience we are able to pass on knowledge to others, even to other generations. But, of course, generalizations are summaries of, that is, abstractions from, a much larger body of experience. In living from these generalizations we can lose touch with the concrete experiences of our day to day lives. While our experiences might share many similarities, those which are picked out in generalizations, they are also each, individually, different one from another. To the extent we lose sight of the unique texture of every moment of ongoing experience, our life migrates into an abstract realm where we easily find ourselves caught up in the twists and turns of tangled skeins of thought. And that can hurt. As Billy Name once said, “Thought is a mean dragon.”

As a corrective, Korzybski advocated a number of methods to tie thinking down to clear referents and to reveal the levels of abstraction in play (the descriptions we give of our descriptions, the feelings we have about our feelings, and the thoughts we have about the thoughts we've had, etc.). One illustration he was fond of using in his lectures was to point to a chair and announce, “This is not a chair.” That party-piece must have been a bit of a brain-stopper in the Thirties. His intent was to bring home that the word “chair” is not something we sit upon. (Rene Magritte's painting showing a pipe and, written beneath, the words “This is not a pipe” makes the same point, with the added fillip that the pipe itself is not a real object but a painting.)

Alfred Korzybski, Science and Sanity: An Introduction to Non-Aristotelian Systems and General Semantics, 1933, fifth edition, 1994.

Alfred Korzybski, Collected Writings: 1920-1950, edited by M. Kendig (1990)