Leituras pela manhã - Steps to an Ecology of Mind

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.

Bateson anticipated that the single biggest breakthrough in human development would come from inculcating a culture that fosters a sense of this larger connectedness. He believed he had only made the first steps on this journey during his own lifetime and worked to enlist others to join in this mission. He cherished situations that took people out of their subjective orientations — which for him could be listening to music, ingesting LSD, or nurturing a sense of spiritual connection. But he knew that just seeking episodic relief from self-centered behavior wasn’t enough. If we exclude our surrounding habitat from our projects of self-care — in the plugged-in, screen-obsessed manner of contemporary culture — the larger systems we have ignored will eventually degrade and fail to support us. By all indications, that danger is far greater today than it was during Bateson’s lifetime. Indeed, we may be approaching a breaking point.

Gregory Bateson, Steps to an Ecology of Mind (1972)