Abstract
What does it mean to think ‘ecologically’ about mind; where ‘mind’ is meant in the more-than-human senses of the term? In the first section of this chapter, I focus on Charles Hartshorne’s essay, ‘Minds and Bodies,’ in The Zero Fallacy in order to review some key features of process thought that set it within a more ‘holist’ perspective, with particular reference to Hartshorne’s discussions of panpsychism, and the resonance of process with elements of cybernetic theory. In Sect. 2, I draw on some insights from cybernetics with examples taken from the work of Maturana and Varela on the question of ‘behaviour’ and ‘learning’ that cut across human and animal worlds. In Sects. 3 and 4, focusing upon Gregory Bateson’s work, I return to some of the questions posed within evolutionary theories of transmission and transmutation, and the ever more urgent problems of the destruction of the environment, asking: What is our place, and what is our future, in our overwhelmingly more-than-human world?
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Notes
- 1.
To repeat Hartshorne’s worries about thinking the zero degree is not to ignore other philosophical attempts to contemplate absence (most notably, Sartre’s lengthy engagement with this topic in his Being and Nothingness). Setting aside any attempt to answer the problem definitively, I will return to the significance of the zero degree when I turn to Bateson’s speculations in the final sections of this chapter.
- 2.
His references include Julian Huxley and Bernhard Rensch; the latter even wrote a work entitled Biophilosophy, though the resulting effort is far less convincing than the endeavour promised by the appealing title.
- 3.
Cf. Henri Bergson’s discussions, in texts such as his essay ‘Life and Consciousness,’ in Bergson (1975), of the example of the amoeba to illustrate the lowest level of conscious activity in animal life.
- 4.
As Bateson explains further: ‘Both kinesics and paralanguage have been elaborated into complex forms of art, music, ballet, poetry, and the like, and, even in everyday life, the intricacies of human kinesic communication, facial expression, and vocal intonation far exceed anything that any other animal is known to produce. The logician’s dream that men should communicate only by unambiguous digital signals has not come true and is not likely to. […] This burgeoning evolution of kinesics and paralanguage alongside the evolution of verbal language indicates that our iconic communication serves functions totally different from those of language and, indeed, performs functions which verbal language is unsuited to perform’ (Bateson 1987, p. 418).
- 5.
Cf. Niels Bohr’s discussion of the invasiveness of physical investigations that can destroy the thing it seeks to discover: the ‘vitality’ of a living organism.
- 6.
Hartshorne defends this position as a ‘true physicalism.’ It is not simply that he is a ‘spiritualist’ or idealist, but that what we understand physicality and spatial position to be require reformulation: ‘If physical means spatial then mentalism or psychicalism is physicalism, for space is how sentient beings have neighbors (Peirce) with whom they react, and their basic operations (Whitehead) are prehensions, feelings of (others’) feelings’ (Hartshorne 1997, p. 150).
- 7.
The following account from Bateson could just as easily be lifted from one of Bergson’s texts: ‘Consciousness operates in the same way as medicine in its sampling of the events and processes of the body and of what goes on in the total mind. It is organized in terms of purpose. It is a short-cut device to enable you to get quickly at what you want; not to act with maximum wisdom in order to live, but to follow the shortest logical or causal path to get what you next want’ (Bateson 1987, p. 439). Bergson’s biophilosophy is by no means a popular theory in contemporary philosophy of biology, but it is one that nevertheless proves its potency and relevance in dialogue with the much later cybernetic stance presented by Bateson.
- 8.
See Barnes (2001). As Porphyry, in his Life of Pythagoras, tells us: ‘But it became very well known to everyone that Pythagoras said, first, that the soul is immortal; then, that it changes into other kinds of animals; and further, that at certain periods whatever has happened happens again, there being nothing absolutely new’ (Barnes 2001, p. 33).
- 9.
In his Commentary on the Physics, Simplicius includes a summary of Pythagorean thought: ‘One might wonder whether or not the same time recurs, as some say it does. Now we call things “the same” in different ways: things the same in kind plainly recur – e.g. summer and winter and the other seasons and periods; again, motions recur the same in kind – for the sun completes the solstices and the equinoxes and the other movements. But if we are to believe the Pythagoreans and hold that things the same in number recur – that you will be sitting here and I shall be talking to you, holding this stick, and so on for everything else – then it is plausible that the same time too recurs’ (Barnes 2001, p. 35). See also R. G. Collingwood (2014): ‘[Pythagoras] showed that the qualitative differences between one musical note and another depend not on the material of which the strings producing these notes are made but solely on their rates of vibration: that is to say, on the way in which any given string successively, in a regular rhythm, takes up a determinate series of geometrical shapes. Alter the tempo of this rhythm and you alter the note; produce the same rhythm in two different strings, and you make them both yield the same note’ (Collingwood 2014, p. 52).
References
Barnes, Jonathan. 2001. Early Greek Philosophy. London: Penguin.
Bateson, Gregory. 1979. Mind and Nature: A Necessary Unity. London: Wildwood House.
Bateson, Gregory. 1987. Steps to an Ecology of Mind. Northvale, NJ and London: Jason Aronson Inc.
Bergson, Henri. 1975. Mind-Energy: Lectures and Essays, trans. H. Wildon Carr. Westport, CT: Greenwood Press.
Bergson, Henri. 1998. Creative Evolution, trans. Arthur Mitchell. New York: Dover.
Canguilhem, Georges. 1988. Ideology and Rationality in the Life Sciences, trans. Arthur Goldhammer. Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press, 1988.
Collingwood, Robin George. 2014. The Idea of Nature. Mansfield Centre, CT: Martino Publishing.
Hartshorne, Charles. 1997. The Zero Fallacy and Other Essays in Neoclassical Philosophy. Chicago and La Salle: Open Court.
Maturana, Humberto R., and Francisco J. Varela. 1992. The Tree of Knowledge: The Biological Roots of Human Understanding. Boston and London: Shambhala.
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Khandker, W. (2020). Plasticity. In: Process Metaphysics and Mutative Life. Palgrave Perspectives on Process Philosophy . Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-43048-1_6
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