ABSTRACT
In honour of the centenary of Gregory Bateson’s birth (1904), this article revisits some of the themes of his posthumous publication, Angels Fear. Some of the book goes over ground that Bateson had covered in prior publications, yet it contains three new themes. The first of these concerned recursion. Generally unnoticed by the reviewers of the book is that Bateson presents a reply in his discussion of ‘structure’ to the concepts and topology of structure- determined recursion articulated in Maturana and Varela’s notion of autopoiesis. The second and third of these themes are those of ecology and aesthetics, and their juxtaposition as ecological aesthetics. These are viewed from his communicative perspective and in an entirely novel way he links ecological aesthetics to epistemology. For example, he argues that the science of biology required an ecological aesthetic because biology, like any self-recursive communication system, must become aware of the disruption of its own relations with the unity of nature or forever continue to conduct bad science.

The final section of the article steps outside Angels Fear to address briefly issues raised by the introduction of two processes of recursion, the one semantic and interpretative (Bateson), the other structural (Maturana). The first exemplar raised is family therapy, the second exemplar is that of biology itself. It concludes that the world of signals and signs seem to be a universal aspect of living systems, a veritable ‘semiosphere’ of signification and interpretation neglected by biological science . If there are new topologies of recursion to be found, they will be found in the recursive processes of this ‘semiosphere’ (Hoffmeyer, 1966).

1. A SUMMARY VIEW
Gregory Bateson’s posthumous publication, Angels Fear: Towards an Epistemology of the Sacred, authored together with Mary Catherine Bateson is, like many posthumous publications, a strange book (Bateson and Bateson, 1987). For that reason, some reviews of this publication did not engage its themes (Marcus, 1988) and of those that did, some could not decide on its merit (Krippendorf, 1988). The idea of the book was originally set out by Bateson in his concluding sections of Mind and Nature. He proposed to discuss questions of unity and integration of ideas on and about the relations between mind and nature, by re-casting notions of aesthetics from the prevailing perspectives of artistic taste and/or cultural capital and join aesthetics to the ecological as a necessary part of ecological science.

Bateson did not refer to the ecological literature but had he done so he would have found a stream of writing supporting the view that aesthetics is indeed part of an ecological vision (Callicott, 1989) There is in fact a wide range of writing in the ecological field suggesting that an aesthetic vision is intrinsic to human perspective on life as is evident in religious activity, in artistic endeavour and in a variety of skilled practices, which is why books about ecology are sometimes written in terms of a spiritual quest, rather than in terms of a scientific appraisal. In some of the more influential books, like those of Arne Naess, they are conjoined (Naess, 1990).

A thumbnail summary of Angels Fear might be as follows: the book proposes a search for the unity of life, akin to the notion of the unity inherent in the sacred aspects of religion. The study of unity requires an epistemology, a set of procedures about how one might investigate the phenomenon of unity and that derive from further understanding of holism, its order and its organization. Science has its own conventions of the sacred, but most of these lie in a scientific method dedicated to the study of ‘parts.’ Science rarely, if ever, deals with wholes. Those aspects of the world that scientific method cannot determine through its investigation of parts – that which is deemed to be unknown – is usually fobbed off into the realm of mystery and spirituality, and remains unexamined. This is non-science, more akin to seeking solutions in magic than in science (1987: Chapter V).

It has become too easy for modern science to continue to treat the biosphere as it had treated any other mechanism since the sixteenth century. An investigation of ecology as a holistic phenomenon would be a very different sort of undertaking, not only in a switch of focus from the physical dimensions of biomass and energy to a study of ecological form, but also in the methodological path it takes. If the so-called ‘mystery’ of ecological unity was to be investigated , then explanations derived from quantitative examination of ecological formation would have to be reconsidered or abandoned, as would the inferences drawn from these correlations. The major investigation would be one of how parts fit into a holistic order, and vice versa, how holistic order is contained in the development of parts. Such an investigation would also require premise very different from the premises of rationality driving modern science. An adequate epistemology of holism incorporating aesthetics was not meant to promote a return to a mediaeval realm of the sacred, nor did it mean uncritical acceptance of any particular spirituality or world-view of peoples either inside or outside major religions. It did mean acceptance of the idea that holism, unity and beauty were coincident with each other and should be an integral part of any modern science deciding to investigate the game of life. Otherwise a science of ecology would be bad science.

Part of the book’s strangeness is that Bateson’s critique of the epistemology of modern science was scattered throughout the book. Marcus could not find its central focus and accused Bateson of a simple re-cycling of previous ideas. Yet Bateson’s own conversational style was quite deliberately staged in order to unfold in such a way as to render it impossible for his listeners to detect any facile outline in his stories. They were also irritated by his lack of conclusiveness in his writing style. Both responses are why many people find his writings difficult to understand, and why, as Bateson himself reported, his students saw him as someone who ‘knows, but won’t tell you’. These elements of the Bateson style, well rehearsed in various guises over a long period of time, reappear in Angels Fear, Marcus is certainly correct about that. However, Marcus neglected to examine changes of context within which the recycling of ideas appears. Thus he ignores an important aspect of the history of social sciences which Bateson’s writing reflects particularly well.

changing scientific epistemologies
In the immediate post World War II period, Bateson aimed his concerns at those social sciences, including anthropology, which seemed to be following unthinkingly in the intellectual footsteps of the physical sciences. Before the war, this follow-my-master procedure might have been forgiven. Bateson himself admitted in Naven that he too had paid unthinking attention to mechanistic views of equilibrium in society and its corresponding fictions (Bateson, 1958). The premises of natural science and the importance of these to anthropology were central to the influence of Bateson’s mentor, A. R. Radcliffe-Brown, in his successful attempt to establish anthropology as a world-wide discipline. For Bateson, as for others, the Manhattan Project and the dropping of the first atomic bombs was a world changing moment for the physical sciences. Physics had produced a technology that could destroy humanity and was either unwilling or unable to place moratorium on further research. Research continued to make total destruction more efficient. It was appropriate, Bateson argued in a series of lectures in 1946, that social sciences take account of this abrupt shift of context. The Manhattan Project had altered the whole position of the science of physics in both purpose and ethical contribution. The broader challenge, as he was to develop it, was to re-cast our understanding of survival and of change in terms of the new ‘king’ of the physical sciences, biology.

In the years in between his initial warnings of change of context and Angels Fear, biology became the successor to the supreme position held by physics in the 19th century. Yet in Bateson’s view biology, with its sub-division ecology, had yet to contemplate or to criticize sufficiently its intellectual debt to physics, nor examine reflexively the consequences thereof. Physics had declared the separation of mind from matter, and the separation of natural science from nature, a separation first established in the 16th century. Biology still held to a tradition of natural history until the 19th century but in the 20th century began to privilege investigation of organic material, bio-energetics and biomass, leaving the study of biological form as a relative backwater of the discipline. Biological science had to become aware of the consequences of the break in natural harmony that this decision about its practices brought about. A continuing insistence on the premises of dualism, borrowed from physics, had led to increasing ignorance of the unity of biological organization.

Biology, like any self-recursive communication system must become aware of disruption its own relations. This means becoming aware of the myths by which we live and the way in which these myths establish a pattern that results in our becoming that which we pretend (1987: Chapter XVI). The myths of dualism, body separate from mind, are among the most conspicuous of these myths. In contrast to the ever increasing public interest in whatever product that biological science could provide, Bateson claimed that a new conception of holism will certainly draw us toward an awareness of a larger more inclusive system than the one in which most biologists and ecologists currently work and enable us to see the beauty of its formal patterning.

To fully catch the meaning of ‘towards an epistemology of the sacred,’ the subtitle, requires background information in biology and in the relationship of biology to the social sciences through the practices of family therapy that Bateson merely alludes to and never confronts head-on in the book. The discovery by James Watson, Francis Crick and Maurice Wilkins of the structure of DNA in 1953, the genetic code, was as transformative in biology as the success of the atom bomb in physics. It could be argued, and was argued, that this knowledge was as destructive of life as the atom bomb, if used improperly, although the destructive effects would inevitably take much more time. Much depended on how molecular biologists who seemed to take over the direction of biological investigation in the wake of the Watson-Crick-Wilkins discovery felt about this accomplishment. James Watson has always been at one end of the argument since the 1950s. Commenting recently on his own role in the discovery of DNA coding and its implications for humanity, said: ‘If we don’t play God, who will?’ Watson dismisses the critics who challenge the wisdom of biology ‘playing God’ either in the past or in the future by saying that the course of biology and biotechnology since the discovery of the code has been ‘just trying to use common sense.’ He believes that the modern course of biology is no more god-like than the aggregation of a myriad of practical solutions and the continuing bold pursuit of these practical solutions with technology available (Moore, 2004). Not all biologists endorse James Watson’s position.

Bateson’s argument in Angels Fear is that the consequences are grave when humans presume to ‘play God’ armed only with their supposed ‘common sense.’. The presumption that humans can play God tempts Fate in the same way that all acts of hubris tempt Fate and Bateson has a section of the book devoted to this particular theme. He separates this theme from other sections of the book where he speaks as a developmental biologist, a branch of biology that has generally been critical of the over-arching claims of the molecular biologists who have insisted since 1953 that they have discovered the blue-print of life. If one put the two sections together, his rebuttal to those who have the same attitude as James Watson’s is ‘you have no blue-print’ and ‘you have a wrong sense of the sacred.’ The nature of sacrament is always related to increasing our awareness of interconnection with holisms.

2. RECURSION: PROCESS ONE
Investigation of social and biological systems is not equivalent to investigation of physical systems, Bateson states, for all social and biological science is participant investigation, unlike the observer-oriented science of physical systems. Living systems are recursive systems, any substantial investigation of them will always come around to stab you in the back. This is the first rule of recursion. One may continue as both scientist and religious practitioner to indulge in the hubris of asking questions but we need humility in acceptance of our answers (1987:Chapter XIII), the humility that comes with awareness of insufficient holism which in turn stems from non-knowledge of wider dimensions of the rules of life (1987:Chapter V) . Moreover, we should bear responsibility for our non-knowledge. An ecological aesthetics at the very least gave insight into holistic patterns pertaining to the unity of life and provides a contrast to the ad hoc science of parts of patterns.

Bateson supplies his own analysis of Greek drama to underline the inevitable destiny of those caught up in acts of hubris and their tempting of Fate (1987: Chapter XIII ). One of the original words in Greek for ‘soul’ was psyche, and Bateson illustrates the interrelation between the two in a classic tale of Greek drama. The interrelation should not be missed. He combines his Greek tale with a short passage immediately before on a theme that appears in many other of his writings, namely that individual beliefs become self-validating in human interaction. Repeated human interaction provides the redundancy whereby beliefs, hopes and fears ‘clot together’ to create ‘aggregates’ or embodiment of themes of which the individuals may be unconscious; yet these themes shape the actions of believers. Out of the very flexible and viscous nature of the psyche pathology can arise. Despite the relatively abrupt introduction of this passage recounting the tale of Oedipus, Fate and hubris, it immediately precedes another passage which summarizes his approach to his book. The myths in our own society, our hubris, makes all the more necessary a perspective oriented towards recursion in biological systems and the development of an appropriate recursive epistemology to match.

Angels Fear provides the longest discussion on the specific topic of biological recursion in Bateson’s writing, although this should be qualified by acknowledging that cybernetics is a science of recursive systems and Bateson wrote a great deal about cybernetics in relation to biological systems in his other published work. There are also interesting passages about biological recursion in unpublished sections of Mind and Nature (Harries-Jones, 1995). Angels Fear links his discussion of recursion to the notion of ‘structure,’ structure being a perennial problem for both biologists and social scientists. In the original manuscript the section devoted to ‘structure’ is so long – a ‘recensus’ as Bateson expressed it – that had it been published as written, the whole book would have had an unwieldy edge to it. The reason for this is that Bateson was wrestling with two processes of recursion and attempting to resolve the two. He was also examining the processes of recursion in two different contexts, those of biology and those of pathology in human interaction. The book shifts, sometimes abruptly, between the two. This sort of comparison of context, or abduction of thematic material in two very different realms of experience in order to draw patterns of connection between them, is very characteristic of Bateson’s style.

Many regularities contribute to their own determination, he says, and this recursiveness is close to the root of the notion of structure. Information, news of its regularity, or injunctive aspect of recursiveness, is fed back recursively to control action at the next instant. Recursive regularities cannot be simply read-out as if they were regularities derived from the code of a control programme, nor can information be treated solely in the context of a digital control mechanism. Those that treat DNA as a blueprint of life neglect two important aspects of biological recursion. First, biologists need knowledge of the rules for injunctional steps (i.e. be silent, be expressive, spin this way, spin that way) and second they need to know how the order of steps, the ‘recipe’ for any outcome is being interpreted in developmental sequences. One is a meta-control issue that arises in developmental biology and the study of evolution, the other is an order of knowledge that arises ‘between the lines’ of text of genetic control.

Recipes for sequence are injunctions that lie between the lines of the commutative or distributive laws of mathematical logic. The former concerns relationships between things, their continuity or discontinuity, the latter is, in effect, an issue of participant interpretation. For example, the embryo must know the order of steps for its epigenesis, within the algorithm of its development. In a striking image, ‘the developing embryo is always there to witness and critique its own development, to give the orders and control the pathways of change and response.’(1987:155). Both sets of information are different from the notion of DNA as a series of computational instructions that can be accessed through the mathematics of computational analysis. Bateson pointed towards morphogenesis as an exemplar, but here his arguments begin to reach a slippery edge because he held that the genesis of form is an aspect of communication rather than an aspect of substance, and in all questions of form, biological material and its manifestation must be re-conceptualized as invoking processes of communication.

By no means do all biologists who study morphogenesis subscribe to morphogenetic development as development of a communicative form. Nevertheless, they might subscribe to the notion that morphogenesis i.e. the whole enters into the parts of the whole of the developmental process. Genes do not control; they cooperate in producing variations on generic themes produced by the dynamics of morphogenetic fields (Goodwin, 1994:41) What sort of processes of recursion may, therefore, be regarded as its typical features, and in what way does discussion of the recipe for embryonic development, the embryo interpreting the environment of that which it is part, differ from other rules of interpretation?

Krippendorf’s review of Angels Fear is a help in this respect. He points out that for many years the processes of communication that Bateson had investigated were linked in one way or another to the forms of recursion but he only provided examples of how to type (catalogue) recursive change. He did not investigate the dynamics of morphogenetic fields. Bateson’s particular emphasis had been with the way in which communicative order in its recursive form had an abstract underpinning in the Theory of Logical Types and in the ways in which human beings find difficulty distinguishing the difference between ‘maps’ and ‘territories.’ Logical Typing of distinctions gives rules about how maps can be distinguished from territories within given contexts of observation. But the ordering rules can never work in any complete and deterministic sense in communicative systems. The context of the self attempting to observe the ‘self’, is a quintessential participant situation, and in this sort of situation the likely result is that maps and territories begin to mutually define each other. A mapping of the self involves humans in a constitutive, self-defining circularity, thus breaching the rules of Logical Typing. Nevertheless ‘the self’ habituates and justifies such breaches.

For Bateson there were evidently no ‘cures’ to this elemental problem of typing. One cannot in any practical sense take Logical Typing as a cure to errors of participant self-definition. It was all very well for the originator of Logical Types, Bertrand Russell, to solve mathematical paradox in set theory in this manner, because he was able to be an observer outside the paradox he was trying to resolve, but not for observers inside paradoxes of communication. Any attempts they made to communicate either to themselves or to others as if they lived only in an observer-defined world, could quickly end in pathological communication. A fundamental paradox occurs and recurs again in a participant world of communication; namely, those self-definitions and circularities which can be ruled out in an observer-world by the very rules which the Theory of Logical Types employs, cannot be avoided in a participant one.

Communicators always live in a forked universe of being both participants and observers. The ‘cure’ is that they must be able to handle the very different perspectives that this situation engenders. In some situations communicators evidently are able to play with the difference between perspectives leading to humour, jokes, and metaphors we live by. On the other side lies self-destructive confusion about differences in observer and participant perspectives. When, for one reason or another there is a prohibition on communication that effectively blocks the elaboration of difference in perspectives, pathology is most likely to occur. Most frequently this occurs among people who are intimate with one another.

3. RECURSION: PROCESS TWO
Krippendorf points out that a second pattern of recursiveness which Bateson discusses in Angels Fear, is of processes that permit rather than deny circularity at the point of re-entry. These processes ‘bootstrap’ circularity so that any ‘top’ is continuously re-cycled through a ‘bottom’ and thus all cycles in- between are able to support themselves in their own circularities. For another problem of the rules of Logical Typing was that essentially they deny circularity at the point of re-entry in a recursive system. The processes are temporal.

This pattern of recursiveness permits a very different calculus for self-reference. Such a calculus was initiated by Gordon Spencer-Brown and Francisco Varela while Bateson was alive. They showed that neither the presence of re-entry nor appropriate response to circularity required the sort of prohibitions that Russell’s method of logical types had suggested. To the contrary the presence of re-entry can be regarded as a pre-condition for understanding the abstract logic of recursion. The pattern of self-reference employed by Varela was that of continuous transformation undertaken autonomously by its own participants. Further, for any calculus for self-reference to be viable, its order of ‘top’ and ‘bottom’ must be very different from the top and bottom of a hierarchy of logical types.

A fanciful metaphor for Varela’s continuous transformation in recursion might be that of “the breath of scandal” and how tiny observations in a scandal-ridden situation are able very quickly to reframe the whole perspective of what is going on – once they are communicated to a wide audience – only to have that frame of reference completely turned around by another “breath” of the same scandal puffing up from below a few days later.

Maturana and Varela introduced two conceptions to comply with their conditions for their logic of recursion. The first of these, autopoiesis denoted a living system engaged in the production of its living components; and, since production was an organized procedure, and that organized procedure laid down its own path, the process of self-production gave those living components coherence. As a result the coherence in the process of self-production also recursively engaged in further self-production. The self-producing system contrasted with passive production, production ordered externally by others, in mechanical systems.

The second concept was that of ‘structural determination.’ Maturana and Varela held every living system existed in a medium or environment where it became co-ordinated with other living systems and that the relation between the structure of co-ordination and the organization of the living system could not be separated or reduced one to the other. The structure of such a system determines everything that occurs in it or to it, that is to say, what it might encounter in an interaction in its media, and internal changes made in order to adjust to changes in that medium as well. In effect, structural determination proposes that each living system is an irreducible whole in which there is a reciprocal generation of changes between the two phenomenal domains, autopoiesis and structural determination.

In Maturana and Varela’s scheme there could no longer be any reports of environment acting upon organism to induce change, only reports of the structural dynamics of the living system, and of the domain in which living systems act as totality. How observers see and explain change in and among such irreducible wholes requires a big shift away from the conventions of empiricism, behaviourism and functional explanation that dominate biology and some, at least, of the social sciences.

Bateson acknowledged the importance of the newer version of recursion before he wrote Angel’s Fear, stating that this version demonstrated how the whole of any biological structure was able to participate recursively in the development of its parts (Harries-Jones, 1995). Varela, and Maturana had accounted for the logic of coherence of any ecosystem, he said, and why self-reference, self-production, self-reproduction, and self-cycling are fundamental characteristics of living systems. The main problem for Bateson was that in Maturana’s explanation, the transformations undertaken autonomously by the living system clashed with his own version of recursion, its conception of process and its conception of structure. Somehow the one had to be reconciled with the other.

Bateson’s position now required some defence. Bateson had argued that classification was an essential component of order in relation to mind. As befits any system of observation, logical types permit discrete jumps between levels; the classes or sets of one level are distinctive from the classes or sets of another in the next level, with classes and their classifiers stretching away in an infinite regress of meta-levels, though the most important meta-levels were the two proximate to the level of classification. Bateson’s therapeutic examples show the type of change one might expect in re-classification were movements from less inclusive systems to more inclusive systems, and that these would be marked by changes in interactive relationships corresponding to ‘changes of mind.’ What the reviewer, Marcus, termed a ‘recycling’ of Bateson’s ideas in Angels Fear was more of an attempt to go through his ideas again in the light of the second process of recursion. In one brief section, Bateson admits error: His dialectic of mind that he had devised in Mind and Nature needed revision. There, he admitted, he had considered both process and structure (or form) to be discontinuous in their characteristics, and had illustrated them both as being composed of discontinuous steps. Now, he said, ‘**It was surely correct to see the form or structure side as discontinuous and hierarchical, but incorrect to project that discontinuity onto the process side**.’ He had been too hasty in attributing to the process side of his argument characteristics derived from the form side – as if form and process, the two elements of the dialectic were in every respect isomorphic to each other in both nature and social life. That is to say, Varela was correct so far as “process” was concerned (Bateson, 1987: 166).

The shape of his defence follows his admission of error. Yes, of course, his analysis had been an exercise which assumed too great an isomorphism between the form of structure and process. The recursiveness that Maturana and Varela investigated is immanent in all biological phenomena – message material, injunctions and formal patterns are already there, for this is what it is to be internally organized and alive. But if forms and messages are already there – internally in a participant system of production – this does not mean that the pattern of distortions which arise in any communicative system suddenly disappear from the domain of structural dynamics nor that they are filtered out in the process of self-production. Distortions and discontinuities inherent in any scheme of observation holds true at any level of communicative order in living systems, he argues. These are their respective data. Thus discontinuity and distortion are part of the recursive process to be investigated in biological systems. ‘They are to total process as the axle is to the wheel’ and are necessary if we are to understand ‘both the freedoms and the rigidities of living systems.’ (1987: 166). The metaphor of axle and wheel is striking because it is usually used as an elemental example of mechanics in relation to physical forces: momentum. Clearly Bateson did not intend a reference to the dynamics of levers, rather that if there are unnamed principles of recursion characteristic of biological systems, these will run against the oscillations of error and pathology that are always present (in the wheel of life) because both process and structure in living systems is communicative.

The nearest one can come to his meaning in the image of the axle and the wheel is a metaphor for double cybernation: the axle embraces the spokes while the spokes constant perturbations embrace, in the sense of being ordered around, the wheel. In the language of cybernation, the spokes control the wheel as much as the wheel controls the spokes, in the language of Maturana and Varela, there is mutual coordination of mutual coordination.

I do not know whether Bateson’s defence was also motivated by the possibility that Maturana and Varela’s version, derived from biological research, would end as the definitive version of recursion which would place in some doubt his own version of recursion. For reasons that lie deep in the epistemology of dualism in the west, the chances of biological findings becoming a source of explanatory value and application in social systems is much greater than the reverse, cases where psycho-social findings become expanded to biology and ecology. Maturana and Varela created a perspective of biological networks that was a magnificent treatise on the differences between living systems and the dead hand of artificial intelligence; it decisively rebutted many of the claims that artificial intelligence was able to ‘mirror’ the dynamics of living systems. They also explained how dynamic transformations in living systems did not rely upon the usual import/export processes of either energy nor information applicable to artificial intelligence machines. Autopoietic, self-producing systems, need only be explained with regard to system components and their configuration, both within the boundaries of the system, and with the way in which a system develops a recursive determinism of the whole through mutual co-ordination with other systems, i.e. mutual coordination of mutual coordination which invoked a spiral of recursive activity.

Today, Maturana and Varela are often cited as the originators of the recursive view. There is also the re-iterated belief that they won the debate with Bateson over recursion on the grounds that they were grounded in ontology, while Bateson’s whole edifice remained purely ‘epistemological’ (Dell, 1985; Capra, 1996). This judgement misses major points of agreement between the three. They agree that biological approaches are dominated by erroneous interpretations in which a function – standing for part-of-a-whole – is considered to be an imputed causal mechanism in nearly all of biology. Bateson contemplated ways in which a new science might take as its subject the way in which wholes and parts relate to each other. Maturana worked systematically through the alternative proposition of whole, rather than part, being a causal mechanism. In doing so he held that structure-determined systems are ontologically ‘perfect’ in the sense that they never make mistakes; they always behave according to their structure. It is only because a system behaves according to the autonomous dictates of its own structure that it can be out of phase with its environment and make what we call ‘mistakes’ in the first place (Dell, 1985:11).

Bateson’s appraisal of ‘structure’ is somewhat different. The structure we devise of any system is incomplete and conspicuously full of holes. That incompleteness enters into the organism’s relations that we are trying to describe. The ‘full of holes’ structure of relations gained from outside observation also appears in every aspect of the organism’s own structural information i.e. its interrelated aggregate of messages in the media in which it participates. This is why, unlike the physical world, both error and pathology are possible both in the process of observation and within the recursive cybernation of the organism observed: the map always differs from the territory. Yet ‘structure’ is all that we can know, the ‘reality’ of that which is (1987: Chapter XV).

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