WE LIVE IN ANTICIPATION. IT IS A LOCATION IN TIME-SPACE. IT IS NOT IN YOUR HEAD.
‘Each choice that he makes has implications for his future. Each turn of the road he chooses to travel brings him to a fresh vantage point from which he can judge the validity of his past choices and elaborate his present pattern of alternatives for choices yet to be made. Always the future beckons him and always he reaches out in tremulous anticipation to touch it. He lives in anticipation; we mean this literally; he lives in anticipation! His behavior is governed, not simply by what he anticipates - whether good or bad, pleasant or unpleasant, self-vindicating or self-confounding - but by where he believes his choices will place him in respect to the remaining turns in the road. If he chooses this fork in the road will it lead to a better vantage point from which to see the road beyond or will it be the one that abruptly brings him face-to-face with a blank wall?
[George Kelly 1958]
CHRISTMAS TREES, SCHIZOPHRENIA & FAMILY STABILITY
"First and foremost, that which is characteristic of the natural history of families which contain schizophrenic or near-schizophrenic individuals is a very tough stability which Jackson has referred to as to feel well, homeostasis. ... When the identified patient begins we observe all sorts of subtle pressure being exerted to perpetuate his illness. However, as is well known, there are many cases in which, as the patient gets well, some other member of the family starts to show symptoms of psychiatric stress. It follows that these families are not simply homeostatic around the invalid status of the particular identified patient. It would seem then that the variables which must at all costs be kept constant are somewhat more abstract or more secret in nature. It is not that at all costs the identified patient must be kept confused; rather it seems as if the patient himself is an accessory - even a willing sacrifice - to the family homeostasis. If he ceases to play this role, there is a likelihood that some other member of the family will assume it in his place. Like many complex homeostatic systems, the pathogenic family seems to be able, like a newt, to regenerate a missing limb.....
Analogous phenomena also occur in many biological systems. If, for example, the apical shoot of a Christmas tree is cut off, one of the first whorl of branches below the cut will bend upward and replace the lost apex. This branch will then lose its former bilateral symmetry and become radially symmetrical like any other apical shoot. Such systems are perhaps best thought of as, in some sense, competitive. The various individuals [in this case branches] of which the system is composed would seem to be so mutually related, that, by their interactions, one will always be selected as the ‘winner’ or as the ‘loser’. This individual then becomes specialised in the functions of this position and in performing these functions actively prevents the other individuals from taking over this specialised role."
[Gregory Bateson - A Sacred Unity - p. 113 / 114]
THE " SYMPTOM" VS THE "SYSTEM" FOCUS
"Think of traffic. There are too many cars on the roads and too many restless people; and too much pollution of the atmosphere by the cars. Altogether that makes up what the doctors call a ‘syndrome’, a nest of symptoms. Of course this syndrome has its roots in overpopulation and unwisely applied engineering skills, and in medical victories over epidemics. Public health, just like individual medicine, is symptom-activated. We all share in the pathology which we would blame on the doctors. At the social level, what happens is simple: Somebody gets paid to make the pathological trend more comfortable. We treat the symptoms - we make more roads for the more cars, and we make more and faster cars for the restless people; and when people [very properly] die of overeating or pollution, we try to strengthen their stomachs or their lungs. [Insurance companies hate death]. For overpopulation, we build more houses. And so on. That is the paradigm: Treat the symptom to make the world safe for the pathology. But, it’s a little worse that that: We even look into the future and try to see the symptoms and discomforts coming. We predict the jamming of traffic on the highways and invite bids for government contracts to enlarge the roads for cars that do not yet exist. In this way, millions of dollars get committed to the hypothesis of future increase in pathology. So, the doctor who concentrates upon the symptoms runs the risk of fostering the pathology of which the symptoms are parts."
Gregory Bateson - A Sacred Unity [1991, p.296]
MARY CATHERINE BATESON ON PLURALISM AND ON GREGORY'S INSISTENCE ON JOINTNESS AS OPPOSED TO UNILATERALITY
"I believe that Gregory's
rejection of political action came out of his World War 2
experiences, when politics were directed toward the defeat of an
enemy, and Gregory's own role in psychological warfare involved
the deliberate corruption of communication. Thus, I see him
rejecting an action program that, by defining purposes and
particularly the purpose of victory, would embrace a deliberate
blindness. We have, however, in our heritage from the Greeks,
side by side with the idea that politics are about domination and
power over the other, the idea that politics are about
conversation - that the process benefits from disagreement and
difference.
We are mistaken, I believe, if we search for a single way of
seeing the human condition that might be adopted world-wide, that
everyone might be persuaded [or coerced] to accept. We do well if
we promote in human institutions that essentially ecological
pattern that has been called pluralism. Perhaps there is no
single vision that everyone should agree on; perhaps the
essential wisdom will be woven through the discourse of diverse
communities. Perhaps I am right only by virtue of being
contradicted, but whoever drowns out my words, for whatever
reason, is surely wrong. ....
I do not think it was an accident that 1990 saw an upsurge of
environmentalism, for as long as the planet was sharply polarised
politically, it was almost impossible for many people to see
either its unity or diversity - and equally difficult to achieve
joint responses to problems. That year did not see the end of
history, but it did see the decline, I hope forever, of a kind of
'us-against-them' view of the world.
We need to move on from an adversarial view of the truth.
Whatever conflicts and antagonisms the future brings... we may be
able now to work toward the health of the planet without seeing
it as divided between two monolithic views, one politically right
and the other wrong, one of which should dominate or replace the
other. Not every participant will visualise the health of the
larger whole, so that health is best achieved by preserving
multiple voices. "
Mary Catherine Bateson - Afterword 1991 in Our Own Metaphor
[1991] - p.p. 319-320.
Finding the ultimate
explanation of something is about the same kind of quest as
trying to capture certainty in a formula or truth in a dogma. For
the time being, we are going to have to accept explanations that
fall short of such conclusive pronouncements. Besides, I am not
sure most of us would care to be dragged, kicking and screaming ,
through life by its certainties, or to have our burning
curiosities extinguished by being doused with a bucketful of
truth.
[George Kelly - 1969 - p.43]
HUMAN EXISTENCE IN LANGUAGING by Humberto Maturana
'We human beings exist only as we exist as self-conscious entities in language. It is only as we exist as self-conscious entities that the domain of physical existence exists as our limiting cognitive domain in the ultimate explanation of the human observer's happening of living. ...Human existence is a cognitive existence and takes place through languaging, yet, cognition has no content and does not exist outside the distinctions of the observer. That the physical domain of existence should be our limiting cognitive domain, does not alter this. Nature, the world, society, science, religion, the physical space, atoms, molecules, trees ..., indeed all things, are cognitive entities, explanations of the praxis or happening of living of the observer, and as such, as this very explanation, they only exist as a bubble of human actions floating on nothing.'
Humberto R. Maturana. [1986]. The Biological Foundations Of Self Consciousness And The Physical Domain Of Existence. [Unpublished Manuscript]
THE ISSUE OF THERE BEING NO FIRM GROUND-ING UPON WHICH AN OBSERVER MAY STAND by Francisco Varela
The first cut, the most elementary distinction we can make, may be the intuitively satisfactory cut between oneself qua experiencing subject on the one side, and one's experience on the other. But this cut can under no circumstances be a cut between oneself and an independently existing world of objective objects. Our 'knowledge'...must begin with experience, and with cuts within our experience--such as, for instance, the cut we make between the part of our experience that we come to call 'ourself' and all the rest of our experience, which we call our 'world'. Hence this world of ours, no matter how we structure it, no matter how well we manage to keep it stable with permanent objects and recurrent interactions, is by definition a world codependent with our experience ...although the world does look solid and regular, when we come to examine it there is no fixed point of reference to which it can be pinned down; it is nowhere substantial or solid.
[Francisco Varela 1979]
Seeking Out Mental Dis-Satisfactions
'The scientist's urge to ponder new problems and break new paths in seeking to solve them, presents us with the essential restlessness of the human mind, which calls ever again in question any satisfaction that it may have previously achieved. We may trace this back primordially to the level of the animal. It is true that when provoked into action by a problematical situation the animal tends to establish a new habit which meets the situation and renders further intelligent effort unnecessary, but in higher animals this general trend is occasionally opposed and overcome by playfulness. Animals at play seek excitement, and even when they have outgrown the playful stage they need activity. Human beings develop this desire for tension in a variety of forms. Man is one of the few animals who continue to play throughout adult life. Men have also at all times gone out in search of adventure and enjoyed tales of adventure. We all appreciate feats of craftiness, or the solving of puzzles, and enjoy in innumerable ways the sudden relaxation of a tension in which we have become involved, whether by actual participation or merely in imagination. Our gigantic modern amusement industry betokens the popular forms of this desire, but our craving for mental dissatisfaction enters also into the highest forms of man's spontaneous originality.'
[Michael Polanyi [1958] - Personal Knowledge. ]