a legacy for Tao - IV

Jeroen Anthoniszoon van Aken called Hieronymus Bosch, the Master of Hertogenbosch
Ship of Fools
oil on wood, 1494
Musée du Louvre, Paris

Angels Fear Revisited:
Gregory Bateson’s Cybernetic Theory of Mind
Applied to Religion-Science Debates

Mary Catherine Bateson

Bateson and Religion

Gregory used to quote Kipling’s lines, “There are nine and sixty ways of constructing tribal lays, And—every—single—one—of—them—is—right.”. That is, I think, a fairly interesting way of talking about religion: to say that there is something that human religions are trying to get at that matters. And they get at some of it in many different ways which include vast amounts of nonsense, much of it dangerous, but we perhaps do not yet have a better way of getting at it, whatever it is. For Gregory, that something could be approached by describing mind in cybernetic terms and recognized aesthetically in the similarities of living systems, the pattern that connects.

Gregory was profoundly ambivalent about what we generally call religion, but deeply concerned with the alienation created by the Cartesian mind–body partition that has been so liberating for science and yet leads to a whole series of isomorphic dualisms separating the sacred from the secular and our species from the rest of nature . He said that he “had always hated muddle-headedness and always thought it was a necessary condition for religion”. He grew up exposed to religious texts, reading the Bible in order – it was hoped – to avoid “empty-headed atheism”, and exposed to the art that surrounds religion, great master drawings and above all the works of William Blake collected by his father. There was an extraordinary Blake water color of “Satan Exulting over Eve” hanging in the dining room in his childhood (now in the Tate Gallery in London).

According to David Lipset, William Bateson, the pioneering geneticist who was Gregory’s father, was not a great student of the prophetic books of Blake – but Gregory went on to read them and other religious texts and poetry, puzzling over the content as well as the aesthetic value. Gregory grew up in a family that sturdily insisted that orthodox religion was nonsense, and at the same time he was stimulated by exposure to religious images, metaphors and poetry that demanded a different kind of understanding.

Gregory planned the book that became Angels Fear to discuss religion and aesthetics as ways of knowing that might prove to be indispensable to human survival and to that recognition of the larger interactive system of the biosphere he called wisdom. “The sacred (whatever that means) is surely related (somehow) to the beautiful (whatever that means)”. For him, as a scientist, to begin to talk about religion and aesthetics was to step onto dangerous ground – Where Angels Fear to Tread – places he felt it was essential to venture, but where he was going to get into trouble with his colleagues, and he knew it. Yet the exclusion of certain ideas – the Cartesian partition of ways of knowing – seemed to him damaging.

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a legacy for Tao - III