Tuesday, September 23, 2008

Beyond rationality ...

... Everything is connected. (Hat tip, Dave Lull.)

The curious nature of Bateson's "epistemological" approach was that it prevented him from proposing remedies to the problems he identified. His thinking contained a kind of catch-22: the conscious mind, his own included, was of its nature incapable of grasping the vast system of which it was only a very small and far from representative part; hence any major intervention to "solve" a given problem would always be ill-informed and inadvisable. ... Dreams, religious experience, art, love - these were the phenomena that still had power, Bateson thought, to undermine the rash/rational purposeful mind.

I confess my own thinking has been heading in this direction.

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