Gregory Bateson – and Beauty, Aesthetics and ‘Grace’.Lecturing to a professional psychiatric audience in 1969, Bateson explained the link between contexts and aesthetic process. After discussing the nature of social systems such as cities or ecosystems in which much of the system’s behavior has become ‘hard programmed’, habitual, he asks how such deeply held attitudes can be modified. “… a certain characteristic of the behavior of the system is so deeply built into the system that it affects almost everything the system does, and nothing short of very violent change will change that deep programming. This is the problem of psychotherapy after all…”. This is our problem in the 21st Century also. How can we change our hard-programmed economic and political attitudes? Bateson goes on to ask how it can be possible that entities which form their habitual behavior from their contexts recognize other similar systems or minds. This, he suggests, is where aesthetics and systems theory are linked. When, in the words of Wordsworth’s poem we see “The primrose by the river’s brim…”, what do we really see? Wordsworth’s aesthetically blind observer sees a yellow primrose and “nothing more”. Bateson claims that if we do see ‘something more’ aesthetically, then that recognition is a realization that “the primrose contains formal characteristics of symmetry, imperfect symmetry, complex interwoven patterning, and so forth which indicate that the primrose itself is a mentally governed piece of morphogenesis… the aesthetic thing is a recognition of that, for better or worse, for beauty or ugliness. That is one of the matters I’m now rather interested in.” These were the final words of Bateson’s lecture and it is clear that this was his key point. It can be summarized as: to experience an aesthetic response is to recognize a fellow mental process. Lecture: Mind/Environment. Reprinted in Bateson, G. A Sacred Unity: Further Steps to an Ecology of Mind, Rodney E. Donaldson, ed., Harper Collins, New York, 1991. pp.161-173). Bateson was to claim, increasingly, that aesthetic engagement is a tool that we can use in seeking ecological wisdom. This ‘tool’ is, itself, related to religious and ‘spiritual’ concerns. If we would spend time in wild nature: walking in the woods, being with birds and animals, gardening or maybe just lying in the grass, then we can begin to recover our lost sense of membership of the living world. Also, participation in human artistic process can offer the same possibilities of re-accessing this ‘grace’. Singing, dancing, painting and sculpture, poetry and metaphor – these and other aesthetic activities can help us to recover our ecological wisdom, the wisdom we have already within us, accrued through millions of years of evolution. We can learn again that we are not in charge of the Earth, we are not ‘stewards’. We are co-dependent members of the living world – dependent on all the complex systems of Earth, which we do not and cannot hope to understand and manipulate. “The point… I am trying to make… is that mere purposive rationality unaided by such phenomena as art, religion, dream and the like, is necessarily pathogenic and destructive of life… it’s virulence springs specifically from the circumstance that life depends upon interlocking circuits of contingency, while consciousness can see only such short arcs of such circuits as human purpose may direct.” The potential of aesthetic engagement for our recovery of ‘the grace’ of feeling reverence for all the sacred life-forms of Earth is another of the key areas of Understanding Gregory Bateson, where I examine these possibilities in connection with the work of Bateson and other thinkers. |