- ISBN13: 9780226039053
- Condition: NEW
- Notes: Brand New from Publisher. No Remainder Mark.
Gregory Bateson was a philosopher, anthropologist, photographer, naturalist, and poet, as well as the husband and collaborator of Margaret Mead. With a new foreword by his daughter Mary Katherine Bateson, this classic anthology of his major work will continue to delight and inform generations of readers. “This collection amounts to a retrospective exhibition of a working life. . . . Bateson has come to this position during a career that carried him not only into … More >>
Take all the buzzwords in fashion in psychology and philosophy: classification, genotype, flexibility, somatic, discrete, threshold, characteristics, analytic… mix everything together and you get this book.
In other words there’s not an ounce of meaning in those 700 pages, it’s all worthless. No case studies, no examples, long phrases full of self importance written by someone who thinks he’s an authority in everything from zen to medecine to evolution theory to archeology. Not only does he prove he doesn’t understand anything, you’ll laugh yourself silly reading any paragraph of the book at random.
If you have to read this for an assignment, you’d better change major and give it to your worst enemy for toilet paper. That’s how low I think of this. And to think that a tree was felled for this. Ha !
Rating: 1 / 5
no, no- Bateson wasn’t a sloppy thinker at all. Yet, he wasn’t fond of interiors or dead thoughts. His limitations (and i don’t pretend to consider that my greatest capacities begin anywhere near his greatest limits)rest in his eternal (as it should be, i think) struggle with epistemology. Throught his later years he seemed to have a guiding intuition that there was not yet an adequit epistemology to address our modern crises. He would probably be the first to admit he only took small steps in helping this situation. His steps, however small, misguided and/or sloopy, were nevertheless extremely creative and point in a significant direction. If he had read Rudolf Steiner’s “Truth and Knowledge” he would have laughed quite a bit, died later, and then re-read it in a much graver (pun intended) tone. Or not, but…
Rating: 5 / 5
Gregory Bateson had a number of insights that appear to be, in retrospect, quite precient. He was talking about notions like the “mind of nature” even before James Lovelock codified his Gaia Hypothesis. It’s very tempting to look back at Bateson’s writing and see him as a very forward thinker.
The problem is that he was a very sloppy thinker. One reviewer spoke of him in the context of the postmoderns, and that’s a very apt comparison. Like the postmoderns, Bateson’s essays and arguments didn’t come so much from obervation and evidence as they did from a certain cleverness, an ability to draw a complex and compelling picture without much reference to the known world. He throws out a lot of string statements about the world, but he never quite quite gives you any justification.
Consider this quote:
“The individual mind is immanent but not only in the body. It is immanent also in pathways and messages outside the body; and there is a larger mind of which the individual mind is only a sub-system. This larger mind is comparable to God and in the total interconnected social systems and planetary ecology.”
That’s an interesting notion, but hardly a new one. It’s the core thesis of Hobbes’ “Leviathon”, dressed it up in contemporary language with contemporary allusion. A number of current theorists and philosophers hold similar notions, but as part of a larger and hopefully self-consistant framework that Bateson lacks.
“An interesting intermediate between the iconic coding of animals and the verbal coding of human speech can be recognized in human dreaming and human myth.” (p. 421) Cleverly put, and possibly true, but he has no evidence for making this statement. It’s completely hypothetical, and very much ad-hoc.
Bateson’s followers tend to have an almost religious fervor- and yet you’ll find few if any citations of his work in the serious works of others. There just wasn’t much there other than glib notions without any sort of attempt at building an integrated thoery from which these notions might arise.
Bateson is still worth reading, both for historical reasons and for his clever ways of expressing some of these ideas. But he’s not quite the genius his fans would have us believe.
Rating: 3 / 5
Really, what is the difference between a nip and a bite? They look the same, when you are watching kittens playing, how can you tell if they are biting in earnestness or just fooling around? Well you can’t really tell, because a nip is a bite and isn’t a bite all at the same time. However, you can tell, of course you can, because a nip has a sign posted on it saying “this is play”, a bite on the other hand has a sign saying “this is for real”. Moreover tells us Bateson – one of the greatest minds in social thought – whoever cannot tell the difference between a bite and a nip is in big trouble, because the sign stating “this is play” enables us to tell reality from imagination, thus safeguarding our sanity. “Steps in the ecology of the mind” is a profound statement on the mechanisms that make us tick, on the human condition.
Rating: 5 / 5
Bateson’s writings are profoundly layered with meaning that a brief glance will overlook. His prolific influence can be found in sundry fields of study, including psychiatry, communication theory, and marriage and family therapy to name a few.
This is the type of book (among few) that can be read over and over again while discovering new facets of understanding every time.
I highly recommend the metalogues.
Rating: 5 / 5