Gregory Bateson is my new intellectual hero; not so much for particular things he thought or wrote, but more for his methodology and the diversity of fields that he explored. I had come across his name in a number of books, but it was upon reading a remembrance by John Brockman that I was encouraged to give Bateson’s Steps To An Ecology of Mind a read.
My first reading of this book coincided with the revival of my interest in photography, so I was attracted first to his ideas about meaning in art & their application to the interpretation of serendipity in photographs. These ideas, along with what else Bateson wrote about, are also applicable to my interest in biology and evolution (particularly the evolution of ideas or “mind”).
I’ve studied a lot about Artificial Life and it’s roots in the Macy Conferences and cybernetics, so much of Bateson’s overall perspective was not new to me. Yet it was enlightening to read about his specific approaches and methodologies, e.g., that it’s okay to have fuzzy concepts at the beginning of an investigation, as long as you keep in mind that they are abstractions only (“Experiments in thinking about observed ethnological material”).
Much of Bateson’s thinking was seen as fuzzy by other students of evolution. He insisted on the persistence of patterns & forms of interaction over a strict study at only one level of analysis (for example, organisms or genes). Organisms vs. genes as the unit of selection or species as the unit of evolution is a subtle resurgence of the essentialism supposedly overturned by populationist thinking. The units of selection are reliable characters (Oyama, The Ontogeny of Information, 48) existing at any of many possible levels.
The differences in these wider viewpoints don’t come up when discussing the specific results of functional or evolutionary biology. Rebecca Goldstein points out that ”physicists who disagree radically on the interpretation of physical theories…can collaborate qua physicists.” This is similarly true for biologists. Where interpretational differences emerge is in the larger applications of this work to what it is to be human and, as a more practical manifestation, the kinds of questions we ask in the first place. (I might even go so far to compare this to Husserl’s notion of not upsetting any particular technical achievements when he prompts scientists to reflect radically back to the life-world).
I wonder if it is still possible to be a generalist like Bateson. While some workers are now specializing in single molecules, bio-chemical pathways, or species, I feel that there are too many things that I want to study. Bateson, with his unconfined research agenda, was attempting to tie it all together.