[Xmca-l] Bateson on thinking relatively

[mike cole]

Darned if I did not find that Bateson passage online! Amazing.
Here it is from *Steps to an Ecology of Mind.*

mike
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Consider a tree and a man and an axe. We observe that the axe flies through
the air and makes certain gashes in a pre-existing cut in the side of the
tree. If we now want to explain this set of phenomena, we shall be
concerned with differences in the cut face of the tree, differences in the
retina of the man, differences in the central nervous system, differences
in his different neural messages, differences in the behaviour of his
muscles, difference in how the axe flies, to the differences which the axe
then makes on the face of the tree. Our explanation will go round and round
that circuit. If you want to explain or understand anything in human
behaviour, you are always dealing with total circuits, completed circuits.
(Bateson, 1972, p. 433)



Later in the same paper he writes about how difficult it is to adopt this
epistemology:



I can stand here and I can give you a reasoned exposition of this matter;
but if I am cutting down a tree, I still think ‘Gregory Bateson’ is cutting
down a tree. I am cutting down the tree. ‘Myself’ is to me still an
excessively concrete object, different from the rest of what I have been
calling ‘mind’.



The step to realizing – to making habitual – the other way of thinking – so
that one naturally thinks that way when one reaches out for a glass of
water or cuts down a tree – that step is not an easy one.


.... Once we have made this shift, our perspective fundamentally changes.
We firstly start focusing on relationships, flows and patterns; and
secondly realize that we are part of any field we are studying.