Gregory Bateson > Quotes

“The major problems in the world are the result of the difference between how nature works and the way people think”
― Gregory Bateson

“We create the world that we perceive, not because there is no reality outside our heads, but because we select and edit the reality we see to conform to our beliefs about what sort of world we live in. The man who believes that the resources of the world are infinite, for example, or that if something is good for you then the more of it the better, will not be able to see his errors, because he will not look for evidence of them. For a man to change the basic beliefs that determine his perception - his epistemological premises - he must first become aware that reality is not necessarily as he believes it to be. Sometimes the dissonance between reality and false beliefs reaches a point when it becomes impossible to avoid the awareness that the world no longer makes sense. Only then is it possible for the mind to consider radically different ideas and perceptions.”
― Gregory Bateson, Steps to an Ecology of Mind: Collected Essays in Anthropology, Psychiatry, Evolution, and Epistemology

“Information is a difference that makes a difference.”
― Gregory Bateson

“It takes two to know one.”
― Gregory Bateson

“Thirty years ago, we used to ask: Can a computer simulate all processes of logic? The answer was yes, but the question was surely wrong. We should have asked: Can logic simulate all sequences of cause and effect? And the answer would have been no.”
― Gregory Bateson, Mind and Nature: A Necessary Unity

“The rules of the universe that we think we know are buried deep in our processes of perception.”
― Gregory Bateson, Mind and Nature: A Necessary Unity

“We are most of us governed by epistemologies that we know to be wrong”
― Gregory Bateson, Steps to an Ecology of Mind: Collected Essays in Anthropology, Psychiatry, Evolution, and Epistemology

“Earlier fundamental work of Whitehead, Russell, Wittgenstein, Carnap, Whorf, etc., as well as my own attempt to use this earlier thinking as an epistemological base for psychiatric theory, led to a series of generalizations: That human verbal communication can operate and always does operate at many contrasting levels of abstraction. These range in two directions from the seemingly simple denotative level (“The cat is on the mat”). One range or set of these more abstract levels includes those explicit or implicit messages where the subject of discourse is the language. We will call these metalinguistic (for example, “The verbal sound ‘cat’ stands for any member of such and such class of objects”, or “The word, ‘cat’ has no fur and cannot scratch”). The other set of levels of abstraction we will call metacommunicative (e.g., “My telling you where to find the cat was friendly”, or “This is play”). In these, the subject of discourse is the relationship between the speakers. It will be noted that the vast majority of both metalinguistic and metacommunicative messages remain implicit; and also that, especially in the psychiatric interview, there occurs a further class of implicit messages about how metacommunicative messages of friendship and hostility are to be interpreted.”
― Gregory Bateson

“There is a quasi-scientific fable that if you
can get a frog to sit quietly in a saucepan of cold water, and if you then
raise the temperature of the water very slowly and smoothly so that there
is no moment marked to be the moment at which the frog should jump,
he will never jump. He will get boiled. Is the human species changing
its own environment with slowly increasing pollution and rotting its
mind with slowly deteriorating religion and education in such a saucepan?”
― Gregory Bateson

“Rigor alone is paralytic death, but imagination alone is insanity.”
― Gregory Bateson, Mind and Nature: A Necessary Unity

“It is as if the stuff of which we are made were totally transparent and therefore imperceptible and as if the only appearances of which we can be aware are cracks and planes of fracture in that transparent matrix. Dreams and percepts and stories are perhaps cracks and irregularities in the uniform and timeless matrix. Was this what Plotinus meant by an 'invisible and unchanging beauty which pervades all things'?”
― Gregory Bateson, Mind and Nature: A Necessary Unity

“A little hypocrisy and a little compromise oils the wheels of social life”
― Gregory Bateson, Steps to an Ecology of Mind: Collected Essays in Anthropology, Psychiatry, Evolution, and Epistemology

“We commonly speak as though a single 'thing' could 'have' some characteristic. A stone, we say, is 'hard,' 'small,' 'heavy,' 'yellow,' 'dense,' etc.

That is how our language is made: 'The stone is hard.' And so on. And that way of talking is good enough for the marketplace: 'That is a new brand.' 'The potatoes are rotten.' 'The container is damaged.' ... And so on.

But this way of talking is not good enough in science or epistemology. To think straight, it is advisable to expect all qualities and attributes, adjectives, and so on to refer to at least -two- sets of interactions in time. ...

Language continually asserts by the syntax of subject and predicate that 'things' somehow 'have' qualities and attributes. A more precise way of talking would insist that the 'things' are produced, are seen as separate from other 'things,' and are made 'real' by their internal relations and by their behaviour in relationship with other things and with the speaker.

It is necessary to be quite clear about the universal truth that whatever 'things' may be in their pleromatic and thingish world, they can only enter the world of communication and meaning by their names, their qualities and their attributes (i.e., by reports of their internal and external relations and interactions).”
― Gregory Bateson, Mind and Nature: A Necessary Unity

“The psychedelics are a powerful educational tool. They are the surest way to learn the arbitrariness of our ordinary perception. Many of us have had to use them to find out how little we knew.”
― Gregory Bateson

“When we think of coconuts or pigs, there are no coconuts or pigs in the brain.”
― Gregory Bateson, Mind and Nature: A Necessary Unity

“On the whole, it was not the crudest, the simplest, the most animalistic and primitive aspects of the human species that were reflected in the natural phenomena. It was, rather, the more complex, the aesthetic, the intricate, and the elegant aspects of people that reflected nature. It was not my greed, my purposiveness, my so-called 'animal,' so-called 'instincts,' and so forth that I was recognizing on the other side of that mirror, over there in 'nature.' Rather, I was seeing there the roots of human symmetry, beauty and ugliness, aesthetics, the human being's very aliveness and little bit of wisdom. His wisdom, his bodily grace, and even his habit of making beautiful objects are just as 'animal' as his cruelty.”
― Gregory Bateson, Mind and Nature: A Necessary Unity

“We have been trained to think of patterns, with the exception of those of music, as fixed affairs. It is easier and lazier that way but, of course, all nonsense. In truth, the right way to begin to think about the pattern which connects is to think of it as primarily (whatever that means) a dance of interacting parts and only secondarily pegged down by various sorts of physical limits and by those limits which organisms characteristically impose.”
― Gregory Bateson, Mind and Nature: A Necessary Unity

“We are beginning to play with ideas of ecology, and although we immediately trivialize these into commerce or politics, there is at least an impulse still in the human breast to unify and thereby sanctify the total natural world, of which we are. ... There have been, and still are, in the world many different and even contrasting epistemologies which have been alike in stressing an ultimate unity, and, although this is less sure, which have also stressed the notion that ultimate unity is aesthetic. The uniformity of these views gives hope that perhaps the great authority of quantitative science may be insufficient to deny an ultimate unifying beauty.

I hold to the presupposition that our loss of the sense of aesthetic unity was, quite simply, an epistemological mistake.”
― Gregory Bateson, Mind and Nature: A Necessary Unity

“All science is an attempt to cover with explanatory devices-and thereby to obscure-the vast darkness of the subject. It is a game in which the scientist uses his explanatory principles according to certain rules to see if these principles can be stretched to cover the vast darkness. But the rules of the stretching are rigorous, and the purpose of the whole operation is really to discover what parts of the darkness still remain, uncovered by explanation.

But this game has also a deeper, more philosophic purpose: to learn something about the very nature of explanation, to make clear some part of that most obscure matter-the process of knowing.

(Epilogue, 1958)”
― Gregory Bateson, Naven, Second Edition

“Certain mysteries are for formal reasons impenetrable, and here is the vast darkness of the subject.”
― Gregory Bateson, Naven: A Survey of the Problems suggested by a Composite Picture of the Culture of a New Guinea Tribe drawn from Three Points of View

“The playful nip denotes the bite, but it doesn’t denote what would be denoted by the bite.”
― Gregory Bateson, Steps to an Ecology of Mind: Collected Essays in Anthropology, Psychiatry, Evolution, and Epistemology