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This is the major life's work of one of the great thinkers
of our time. Gregory Bateson's contributions to anthropology, biology, psychiatry,
and other social sciences have won him international fame. Here he does no less
than provide a new way of thinking about the world around us. We must, he says,
learn to "think as Nature thinks," if we are to learn to live in harmony
on the planet. And insofar as "we are a mental process, to that same extent
we must expect the natural world to show similar characteristics of mentality."
Thus the startling theme of this book is that biological evolution
is a mental process. Occidental quantitative thinking (the kind of thought
that too often results in the philosophy of "bigger is better") is actually
unnatural, or contrary to the natural order; we must move away from this
thinking and begin to delve deeply into the actual patterns of the world around
us. Around these themes Bateson has woven one of the most fascinating, challenging,
and truly important discussions yet published on the human condition. A brilliant
teacher, Bateson has filled his book with intriguing examples from the world of
nature he knows so well. A crab's claw becomes a lesson in Nature's symmetry,
an elephant's trunk a clue to the roles that context and function play in the
natural order. What pattern, asks Bateson, connects the crab to the lobster and
the orchid to the primrose -- and all the four of them to me? Indeed, this book
is a lively exploration of the pattern that connects all the living beings
of our planet.
Gregory Bateson was born in 1904, the son of William
Bateson, a leading British biologist and a pioneering geneticist. He completed
his degree in anthropology and left England to do field work in New Guinea.
In the years to follow, Bateson became a visiting professor
of anthropology at Harvard (1947); was appointed research associate at the Langley
Porter Neuropsychiatric Institute in San Francisco; worked as Ethnologist at the
Palo Alto Veterans Administration Hospital. He worked with dolphins at the Oceanographic
Institute in Hawaii and taught at the University of Hawaii. In 1972 he joined
the faculty of the University of California at Santa Cruz. The
author of Balinese Character: A Photographic Analysis,
Naven, and Steps
to an Ecology of Mind, Gregory Bateson has markedly influenced
an entire generation of social scientists, including the British psychiatrist
R. D. Laing -- and he is considered one of the "fathers" of the family
therapy movement. Appointed by Governor Jerry Brown as a member of the Board of
Regents of the University of California in 1976, he now lives in Ben Lomond, California,
with his wife, Lois, and daughter, Nora. |
