GREGORY BATESON

The Tao of Physics

was published at the end of

1975

and was received enthusiastically in England and the United States, generating an enormous interest in the "new physics" among a wide range of people. As a consequence of this strong interest I traveled extensively, lecturing to professional and lay audi­

ences and discussing with men and women from all walks of life the concepts of modern physics and their implications. In these discussions I was often told by people from various disci­

plines that a change of world view similar to the one that oc­

curred in physics was now happening in their fields; that many of the problems they were facing in their disciplines were con­

nected, somehow, with the limitations of the mechanistic world VIew. •

71

72 UNCOMMON WISDOM

These discussions prompted me to take a closer look at the influence of the Newtonian paradigm· on various disciplines, and in early

1977

I planned to write a book on the subject with the working title "Beyond the Mechanistic World View." The basic idea was that all our sciences-the natural sciences as well as the humanities and social sciences-were based on the mechanistic world view of Newtonian physics; that serious lim­

itations of this world view were now becoming apparent; and that scientists in various disciplines would therefore be forced to go beyond the mechanistic world view, as we have done in physics. In fact, I saw the new physics-the conceptual framework of quantum theory, relativity theory, and especially of bootstrap physics-as the ideal model for new concepts and approaches in other disciplines.

This thinking contained a major flaw, which I realized only gradually and which took me a long time to overcome. By presenting the new physics as a model for a new medicine, new psychology, or new social science, I had fallen into the very Cartesian trap that I wanted scientists to avoid. Descartes, I would learn later, used the metaphor of a tree to present human knowledge, its roots being metaphysics, the trunk physics, and the branches all the other sciences. Without knowing it, I had adopted this Cartesian metaphor as the guiding principle for my investigation. The trunk of my tree was no longer New­

tonian physics, but I still saw physics as the model for the other sciences and hence physical phenomena, somehow, as the pri­

mary reality and basis for everything else. I did not think so explicitly, but these ideas were implicit when I advocated the new physics as a model for other sciences.

Over the years I experienced a profound change of percep­

tion and thought in this respect, and in the book that I finally wrote,

The Turning Point,

I no longer presented the new phys­

ics as a model for other sciences but rather as an important special case of a much more general framework, the framework of systems theory.

The important change in my thought from "physics think­

ing" to systems thinking occurred gradually and as a result of many influences, but more than anything else it was the influ-

* It was only later that I appreciated the pivotal role of Descartes in the development of the mechanistic world view and hence adopted the term

"Cartesian paradigm."

THE PATTERN WHICH CONNECTS 73 ence of one individual, Gregory Bateson, that changed my per­

spective. Shortly after we met, Bateson said jokingly to a com­

mon friend: "Capra? The man is crazy! He thinks we are all electrons." This comment gave me the initial jolt and my subse­

quent contacts with Bateson over two years changed my think­

ing in profound ways and provided me with the key elements of a radically new view of nature, which I came to call "the systems view of life."

Gregory Bateson will be regarded as one of the most in­

fluential thinkers of our time by future historians. The unique­

ness of his thought came from its broad range and its gener­

ality. In an age characterized by fragmentation and over­

specialization, Bateson challenged the basic assumptions and methods of several sciences by looking for patterns behind pat­

terns and for processes beneath structures. He declared that relationship should be the basis of all definition and his main aim was to discover the principles of organization in all the phenomena he observed, "the pattern which connects," as he

would put it.

Conversations with Bateson

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 before 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 Bate­

son's vision and his uniquely personal style� but most of all I was amazed by the fact that his central message 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.

Bateson was a very imposing figure: a giant intellectually

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 his science 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

spired, although I don't think he said anything during the

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 me "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 who

thought

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 to

5

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

words : "THAT REMINDS ME OF A STORY."

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

central aspect, 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.