I met Gregory Bateson in the summer of
1976
in Boulder, Colorado, where I was giving a course at a Buddhist summer school when he came to give a lecture. This lecture was my first contact with Bateson's ideas� I had heard quite a lot about him he had become a sort of cult figure at DC Santa Cruz-but I had never read his book,Steps to an Ecology of
Mind.
During the lecture I was extremely impressed by Bateson's vision and his uniquely personal style� but most of all I was amazed by the fact that his central the shift from objects to relationships-was virtually identical with the conclusions I had drawn from the theories of modern physics. I spoke to him briefly after the lecture, but I would not really get to know him until two years later, during the last two years of his life, which he spent at the Esalen Institute on the Big Sur coast. I went there quite frequently to give seminars and to visit people in the Esalen community who had become my friends.
74 UNCOMMON WISDOM
and also physically; very tall and very big, very imposing at all levels. For many people he was quite intimidating, and I, too, was somewhat overawed by Bateson, especially at the be
ginning. I found it very difficult to just engage in casual con versation with him; I always felt that I had to prove myself, to say something intelligent or ask some intelligent question, and it was only very slowly that I could have some small talk with him. Even then, that did not happen too often.
It also took me quite a while to call Bateson "Gregory." In fact, I don't think I would have ever called him by his first name had he not lived at Esalen, which is an extremely in formal place. Even there it took me quite a while and, actually,
Bateson himself seemed to have a hard time calling himself Gregory. He usually referred to himself as Bateson. He liked to be called Bateson, maybe because of his upbringing in British academic circles, where this is customary.
When I got to know Bateson in
1978,
I knew he did not care too much about physics. Bateson's main interest, his in tellectual curiosity, and the strong passion he brought to hisscience were concerned with living matter, with "living things," as he would say. In
Mind and Nature
he wrote:In my life I have put the descriptions of sticks and stones and billiard balls and galaxies in one box . . . and have left them alone. In the other box, I put living things: crabs, people, problems of beauty . . .
This "other box" is what Bateson studied; this is where his passion was. So, when he met me he knew that I came from the discipline that studied those sticks and stones and billiard balls, and he had a kind of intuitive mistrust of physicists, I think. Bateson's lack of interest in physics could also be seen from the fact that he was prone to making errors of the kind nonphysicists often make when they talk about physics; con fusion between "matter" and "mass" and similar errors.
So when I met Bateson I knew that he had a prejudice against physics, and I was very eager to show him that the kind of physics I was engaged in was, in fact, extremely close to his own thinking. I had an excellent opportunity to do so shortly after I met him, when I gave a one-day seminar at Esalen to which he came. With Bateson in my audience I felt very in
THE PATTERN WHICH CONNECTS 75
whole day. I tried to present the basic concepts of twentieth century physics, without distorting them in any way, in such a manner that the close kinship with Bateson's thinking was ob vious. I must have managed pretty well because I heard after ward that Bateson was very impressed by my seminar. "What a bright boy!" he said to a friend.
After that day I always felt that Bateson respected my work; more than that, I felt he began to genuinely like me and to develop a certain fatherly affection for me.
During these last two years of his life I had many very animated conversations with Gregory Bateson: in the dining lodge of the Esalen Institute, on the terrace of his house over looking the ocean, and in other places on this beautiful mesa on the Big Sur coast. He gave me the manuscript of
Mind and
Nature
to read, and I vividly remember sitting for hours in the grass high above the Pacific Ocean on a clear, sunny day, hear ing the waves break as they rolled in regular rhythms, being visited by beetles and spiders, while reading Bateson's manu script:What pattern connects the crab to the lobster and the orchid to the primrose and all four of them to me? And me to you?
When I came to Esalen to give seminars, I would often meet Bateson in the dining lodge, and he would beam at me: "Hello, Fritjof; did you come to do a show?" After the meal he would ask : "Coffee?" and bring coffee for both of us, and we would continue our conversation.
My conversations with Gregory Bateson were of a very special kind, owing to the special way in which he himself pre sented his ideas. He would lay out a network of ideas in the form of stories, anecdotes, jokes, and seemingly scattered ob servations, without spelling anything out in full. Bateson did not like to spell out things in full, knowing, perhaps, that a better understanding is reached when you are able to grasp the connections yourself, in a creative act, without being told. He would spell out things minimally, and I remember very well the gleam in his eye and the pleasure in his voice when he saw that I was able to follow him through this web of ideas. I was by no means able to follow him all the way through, but maybe a little further, every now and then, than other people, and that gave him great pleasure.
76 UNCOMMON WISDOM
In this way, Bateson would lay out his web of ideas and I would check certain nodes in this network against my own understanding with brief remarks and quick questions. He would be especially pleased when I was able to jump ahead of him and skip a link or two in the network. His eyes would light up on those rare occasions indicating that our minds resonated. I have tried to reconstruct a typical conversation of that kind from my memory. * One day we were sitting on the deck
outside the Esalen lodge and Bateson was talking about logic. "Logic is a very elegant tool," he said, "and we've got a lot of mileage out of it for two thousand years or so. The trouble is, you know, when you apply it to crabs and porpoises, and butter flies and habit formation"-his voice trailed off, and he added after a pause, looking out over the ocean-"you know, to all those pretty things"-and now, looking straight at "logic won't quite do."
"No?"
"It won't do," he continued animatedly, "because that whole fabric of living things is not put together by logic. You see, when you get circular trains of causation, as you always do in the living world, the use of logic will make you walk into paradoxes. Just take the thermostat, a simple sense organ, yes?" He looked at me, questioning whether I followed and, see ing that I did, he continued.
"If it's on, it's off; if it's off, it's on. If yes, then no; if no, then yes."
With that he stopped to let me puzzle about what he had said. His last sentence reminded me of the classical paradoxes of Aristotelian logic, which was, of course, intended. So I risked
•
a Jump.
"You mean, do thermostats lie?"
Bateson's eyes lit up: "Yes-no-yes-no-yes-no. You see, the cybernetic equivalent of logic is oscillation."
He stopped again, and at that moment I suddenly had an insight, making a connection to something I had been inter ested in for a long time. I got very excited and said with a provocative smile:
"Heraclitus knew that! "
"Heraclitus knew that," Bateson repeated, answering my smile with one of his.
* The ideas touched upon in this conversation are spelled out in greater detail below.
THE PATTERN WHICH CONNECTS 77
"And so did Lao Tzu," I pushed on.
"Yes, indeed; and so do the trees over there. Logic won't do for them. "
"So what do they use instead?" "Metaphor. "
"Metaphor? "
"Yes, metaphor. That's how this whole fabric of mental interconnections holds together. Metaphor is right at the bot tom of being alive."
Stories
Bateson's way of presenting his ideas was an essential and in trinsic part of his teaching. Because of his special technique of blending his ideas with the style of presentation, very few people understood him. In fact, as R.
D.
Laing pointed out at a seminar he gave at Esalen in honor of Bateson: "Even the few people whothought
they understood him,he
did not think understood him. Very, very few people, he thought, understood h· " 1m.This lack of understanding also applied to Bateson's jokes. He was not only inspiring and enlightening; he was also won derfully entertaining, but his jokes, again, were of a special kind. He had a very keen English sense of humor, and when he was joking he would only spell out
20
percent of the joke and you were supposed to guess the rest; sometimes he would even tone it down to5
percent. As a consequence, many of the jokes Bateson made in his seminars were met with complete silence, punctuated only by his own chuckle.Shortly after I met Bateson he told me a joke of which he was very fond, a joke which he told many times to many audi ences. I think that this joke can serve as a key to understanding Bateson's thinking and his way of presenting ideas. Here is how he would tell it:
There was a man who had a powerful computer, and he wanted to know whether computers could ever think. So he asked it, no doubt in his best Fortran: "Will you ever be able
to think like a human being?" The computer clicked and rattled and blinked, and finally it printed out its answer on a piece of paper, as these machines do. The man ran to pick up the printout, and there, neatly typed, read the following
78 UNCOMMON WISDOM
Bateson considered stories, parables, and metaphors to be essential expressions of human thinking, of the human mind. Although he was a very abstract thinker, he would never deal with any idea in a purely abstract way but would always pre sent it concretely by telling a story.
The important role of stories, in Bateson's thinking, is inti mately connected with the importance of relationships. If I had to describe Bateson's message in one word, it would be "relationships" ; that was what he always talked about. A cen tral aspect of the emerging new paradigm, perhaps
the
centralaspect, is the shift from objects to relationships. According to Bateson, relationship should be the basis of all definition; bio logical form is put together of relations and not of parts, and this is also how people think; in fact, he would say, it is the only way in which we can think.
Bateson often emphasized that in order to describe nature accurately one should try to speak nature's language. Once he illustrated this rather dramatically by asking: "How many fingers do you have on your hand?" After a puzzled pause several people said timidly, "Five," and Bateson shouted, "No ! " ; then some tried four and again he said no. Finally, when every
body gave up, he said: "No! The correct answer is you should not ask such a question; it is a stupid question. That is the answer a plant would give you, because in the world of plants, and of living beings in general, there are no such things as fingers; there are only relationships."
Since relationships are the essence of the living world one would do best, Bateson maintained, if one spoke a language of relationships to describe it. This is what stories do. Stories, Bateson would say, are the royal road to the study of relation ships. What is important in a story, what is true in it, is not the plot, the things, or the people in the story, but the relationships between them. Bateson defined a story as "an aggregate of formal relations scattered in time," and this is what he was after in all his seminars, to develop a web of formal relations through a collection of stories.
So Bateson's favorite method was to present his ideas in terms of stories, and he loved to tell stories. He would approach his subject from all kinds of angles, spinning out time after time variations on the same theme. He would touch on this and touch on that, making jokes in between, switching from the
THE PATTERN WHICH CONNECTS 79
description of a plant to that of a Balinese dance, to the play of dolphins, to the difference between Egyptian and Judeo Christian religion, to a dialogue with a schizophrenic, and on and on. This style of communication was highly entertaining and fascinating to watch, but it was very difficult to follow. To the uninitiated, to somebody who could not follow the complex patterns, Bateson's style of presentation often sounded like pure rambling, but it was much more than that. The matrix of his collection of stories was a coherent and precise pattern of rela tionships, a pattern which for him embodied great beauty. The more complex the pattern became, the more beauty it exhib ited. "The world gets much prettier as it gets more compli
cated," he would say.
Bateson was very taken by the beauty manifest in the complexity of patterned relationships, and he derived a strong esthetic pleasure from describing these patterns. In fact, that pleasure was often so strong that he would get carried away. He would tell a story and while telling it would be reminded of another link in the pattern, which led him into another story. Thus he would end up presenting a system of stories within stories involving subtle relationships, laced with jokes that further elaborated these relationships.
Bateson could also be very theatrical, and it was not with out reason that he jokingly referred to his Esalen seminars as
"shows. " And so it would often happen that he got so carried away by the poetic beauty of the complex patterns he was de scribing, by making all kinds of jokes and stringing together anecdotes, that in the end he did not have enough time left to pull everything together. When the threads he had spun during a seminar would not come together to form the whole web in the end, it was not because they did not connect, or because Bateson was unable to bring them together; it was simply because he got so carried away that he ran out of time. Or he would get bored after speaking for an hour or two and would think that the connections he had shown were so obvious that everybody should be able to pull them together into an inte grated whole without his further help. At those times he would simply say: "I guess that's it-time for questions," whereupon he would generally refuse to give straight answers to the ques tions asked but would reply with yet another collection of stories.
80 UNCOMMON WISDOM
"What it's all about"
One of the central ideas in Bateson's thought is that the structure of nature and the structure of mind are reflections of each other, that mind and nature are of a necessary unity. Thus epistemol ogy-"the study of how it is that you can know something," or, as he sometimes put it, "what it's all about"-ceased to be ab stract philosophy for Bateson and became a branch of natural history. *
One of Bateson's main aims in his study of epistemology was to point out that logic was unsuitable for the description of biological patterns. Logic can be used in very elegant ways to describe linear systems of cause and effect, but when causal sequences become circular, as they do in the living world, their description in terms of logic will generate paradoxes. This is true even for nonliving systems involving feedback mecha nisms, and Bateson often used the thermostat as an illustration of his point.
When the temperature drops, the thermostat switches on the heating system; this causes the temperature to rise, which causes the thermostat to switch off the heating system, thereby causing the temperature to drop, and so on. The application of logic will turn the description of this mechanism into a para dox: if the room is too cold, then the heater will come on; if the heater is on, then the room will get too hot; if the room gets too hot, then the heater will be turned off, etc. In other words, if the switch is on, then it is off; if it is off, then it is on. This, Bateson says, is because logic is timeless, whereas causality in volves time. If time is introduced, the paradox turns into an oscillation. Similarly, if you program a computer to solve one of the classical paradoxes of Aristotelian logic-e.g., a Greek says: "Greeks always lie." Does he tell the truth?-the com puter will give the answer YES-NO-YES-NO-YES-NO . . . turning the paradox into an oscillation.
I remember being very impressed when Bateson presented this insight to me, because it further illuminated something I had often noticed myself. Philosophical traditions which have
* Bateson often preferred to use the term "natural history," rather than "biology," probably in order to avoid associations with the mechanistic biology of our time.
THE PATTERN WHICH CONNECTS 81
a dynamic view of reality, a view containing the notions of time, change, and fluctuation as essential elements, tend to emphasize paradoxes. They will often use these paradoxes as a teaching tool to make students aware of the dynamic nature of reality, in which the paradoxes dissolve into oscillations. Lao Tzu in the East and Heraclitus in the West are, perhaps, the best known examples of philosophers who made extensive use of this method.
In his study of epistemology, Bateson emphasized again