For Bateson, mind existed as part of an integrated system that also involved elements of the world. He gives the example of a lumberjack cutting down a tree with an axe. Bateson argues that any definition of this woodcutter’s mental processes that doesn’t also include the axe, the tree, and the feedback loop back to the human body, is both incomplete and dangerously misleading. Although Bateson doesn’t make this comparison, his view is aligned with Heidegger’s concept of being-in-the-world, which allowed the German philosopher to bypass many of the paradoxes and problems created by out tendency to divide our schemas into subject and object.
As Bateson saw it, these narrow definitions of selfhood weren’t just problems related to philosophy but could easily turn into crises in the environment. People who see their mental existence as operating against the world take very different courses of action — hostile, exploitive, narcissistic — than those who understand their connectedness to their environment and social network.
Gregory Bateson, Steps to an Ecology of Mind (1972)
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