Customer Reviews

Steps to an Ecology of Mind: Collected Essays in Anthropology, Psychiatry, Evolution, and Epistemology

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It is unbelievable that this masterpiece has been out of print for so long. I have been looking fruitlessly for a copy for some years, having eventually had to return a loan copy. I am delighted that it is available again.

Organised as a collection of relatively short essays, this has a legitimate claim to be the outstanding book of the 20th century for anyone interested in mind, change, evolution, systems thinking, ecology, epistemology, organisations, therapy and more. Be warned - it can be very dense in places, but the effort is worth it. On the right day it's really stimulating - on a bad day, I'd read something easier!

'Form, Substance and Difference', 'Conscious Purpose versus Nature' and 'The Logical Categories of Learning and Communication' are absolutely central texts for anyone considering how we need to respond to the current world crisis. Other key papers include 'The cybernetics of "Self": A theory of alchoholism' and 'Social Planning and the Concept of Deutero Learning'. If you work in the field of Organisational Development you will probably be familiar with some of the content through the many writers who have built on Bateson's work. Fritjof Capra writes about him a great deal. The original is best though.

The fact that it is back in print is tremendous. How can something this good have been out of print for so long?

David Ballard

It's unfortunate that Bateson died before postmodern thought really made it over the Atlantic since it appears he was quite concerned about many of the old views held by North American philosophers. The chapters concerning contextualization and language use echo what Foucalt, Lyotard and Derrida have been trying to get across except Bateson really managed to put these ideas into somewhat more accessible form.

Bateson was around for the beginnings of information theory and cybernetics and again, he was probably very disappointed in their state when he died. However, if one now looks at what people like Perlovsky and Chaitin have worked on one may begin to see that science is finding more and more problems with maintaining even the idea of objectivity.

In particular, if one looks at the work of Wilson ("Spikes, Decisions, and Actions") and Prigogine then the theory of objectivity within the physical world comes falling down. The only book close to giving a complete overview like Bateson managed is Jantsch's "Self-Organizing Universe", now out of print.

This is well worth reading and pondering. One can only hope more people begin to realize that we have a great opportunity for advancing ourselves (instead of rushing towards anhilation)if we can just change some of present system of thought.

Out of the hundreds of books that I was forced to read through high school and college, maybe five caught my imagination. This was one of them. Before anyone was really interested in thinking about thinking, Bateson sat down and did so. He was attempting to raise a bunch of questions that might help some to in-form their search for understanding in the world, or at least for points to be curious about, which in his mind is where science has to begin if it wants to know anything. It certainly helped to inform my thinking.

Not only did Bateson do a bang-up job of getting me to think in interesting or useful or maybe somewhat cleaner ways, he's actually pretty good at writing. ....

This is a book that has grown on me since my first exposure to it around 1980. I'll find myself thinking of a point and need to go find the book are reread the essay.

One of the things that fascinates me about the book, as I come to understand some of Bateson't thinking, is when these essays were written. He and colleagues were attempting to understand an unformed (and unnamed) topic for which no adequate vocabulary yet existed. I mean, look at the title "Steps to an Ecology of Mind" -- He's trying to understand "ideas" and how they interact. He defines "idea" as "a difference that makes a difference" -- He's grappling with concepts that were ultimately (in 1947) named "information" -- and Bateson's "idea" is Shannon's "bit". He's doing it in a much broader context than computers and formal communications, but he's studying information. One essay that more obviously shows this is "A Reexamination of Bateson's Rule" where he's looking at how much information is needed to specify living forms by examining the types of failures when something goes wrong.

As a computer scientist, information is the basic medium I study / manipulate, and I've spent significant time trying to understand how to create and manage complex software systems. In Bateson's terms, I've spent my career studying one small part of an Ecology of Mind.

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.

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.

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.

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...

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 !