Goethe, Bateson, and the Sacred: Natural Philosophy, Systems Theory, and the Logic of Metaphor

Goethe’s Science completes itself as Natural Philosophy. It links to ancient traditions that begin in Western Philosophy with the pre-Socratics and continue through Plato and Aristotle, Plotinus and Kant, and in the Near- and Far-East that is echoed in Sufi, Hindu and Buddhist literature. Bortoft (1996) has written persuasively on Goethe’s relevance for modern philosophy and science, arguing that Goethe’s work, far from being an outmoded curiosity, points the way for a new science based upon quantum and relativity theory. In that respect we may point to the work of Bohm (2002) who has distinguished between ‘implicate’ and ‘explicate’ relations; challenging the view that connections between physical events occur between parts external to one another, he argues for the priority of a whole whose parts enjoy implicative relations.

Such a viewpoint clearly stands alongside Goethe’s idea of connectivity and the phenomenolo- gist’s notion of the pre-reflective world. It is also possible to perceive in morphology a precedent for a research emphasis, not so much concerned with testing hypotheses derived from theory, but with an open-mindedness seeking connections, as well as a welcoming of the idea of relativity necessitated by the acceptance of the observer’s presence in the measurement of phenomena. However, it is quite clear that the work of modern science has not required the company of natural philosophy for its undoubted success. It has benefited greatly from advances in technology that has revealed the basic elements of the natural world for examination and experimental manipulation.

Modern science unites its various fields around the concept of information. To understand how something works or fails in its purpose we must inquire into the ways in which information is transmitted between the parts of a system: a biologist researching the immune system, a psychologist attempting to understand perception or memory, the ecologist attempting to define the success or failure of a natural world of plants and animals, or the anthropologist observing the customs of a society, are all concerned with assessing the structures of communication in their different worlds. Information is now the term mediating the interaction of material and formal causal explanation: the material carries the form, the form guides the material, through the existence of communicative networks within organised systems (forms, wholes). We need therefore to develop models which specify the types of operation whose function is necessarily associated with the expression of form. Of course, this synthesis of function and structure occupied both Aristotle and Goethe, but in the mid-Twentieth Century two new disciplines emerged which together transformed our thinking - General Systems Theory and Cybernetics.

Cybernetics, the science of information processing, proposed a model in which the self-monitoring activity of feedback in a system is responsible for its relative stability. Whereas the Second Law of Thermodynamics states that in a closed system all thermodynamic processes move towards statistical states of increased homogeneity or disorder, information in a feedback situation from its source forms a local structure which can preserve itself against entropy. Norbert Wiener proposed the term ‘negentropy’ to suggest this localised resistance to chaos and death. Ross Ashby built upon Wiener’s ideas in demonstrating the link between a feedback system and the biology of adaptation.

He pointed out that creatures who constantly respond to changes in their environment to achieve a steady state do so through feedback mechanisms governed by the critical variables of their situation. A cat sitting in front of a fire, he argues, may be seen to change its position when becoming over- or under-heated; it is learning to operate within a desired range of a critical variable. This homely example provides the clue to the wider significance of feedback mechanisms, namely, that they provide the organism with the means of securing its adaptation to the environment. Through feedback circuits patterns of behaviour adapted to the environment become stable, “internalised” forms of response.

Bateson’s (2000) work refined and extended these ideas. He argued that, however varied information and communication patterns are, they always contain the element of “news” of some kind of concrete situation. A fundamental requirement in all communication is therefore the organism’s capacity to differentiate between what is new and what is repetition. A definition of the meaning of a new message could not be captured by a material or quantitative measure, such as signal clarity, but required a reference of a qualitative nature. A clear signal has physical dimensions, but the meaning of the physical event lies in patterns or forms that are quite distinct from those of a binary material impulse.

With this assertion Bateson, to his great credit, acknowledges that any system which is to model “man in nature” must take account all of the variety of forms which carry forward meanings of news, that is, of difference between past and present patterns. Differences in imagery and narrative, communications in metaphor, irony and paradox, must be reckoned with, as must the context in which communication occurs. Even apparently redundant information, dismissed conventionally as noise in the system, is part of the context in which new meanings may arise.

These ideas are radical in the light of Bateson’s project for a model which can situate the human and the natural worlds in a unified system. Surely, we can see that a great deal of human communication is metaphorical and that our using metaphors is a means of our understanding the natural world, but is this not imposing upon the natural world qualities quite foreign to it? Such talk belongs to poets, not scientists! But Bateson is adamant.

In his last book, written in association with his daughter, Mary Catherine Bateson (2005), he proceeds to propose what seems at first glance a scientifically outrageous solution: that the logic of metaphor is the “logic upon which the biological world has been built” and also “the major characteristic of our mental processes in our attempts at understanding that world”. It appears outrageous because we have become accustomed to thinking of metaphor as a relatively sophisticated way of representing relations which are more to do with feeling than with thought. We have neglected thereby the distinctive character of the underlying logic of metaphorical relations.

It is distinctive in the first place in not being the logic of classes. Bateson points out that that the traditional, Aristotelian syllogism attaches predicates to classes of objects or events. If all men are mortal and Socrates lies within the class of men, it follows that he is mortal. This logic would judge the syllogism, “Grass dies, men die, men are grass”, as illegitimate. In addition to making the mistake of "affirming the consequent”, its conclusion only confuses two distinct classes of objects - humans and plants. But the syllogism can readily be viewed as a metaphor of “is” and “is not”, in which the terms, men and grass, are linked through their mortality. (Did not Walt Whitman name his collection of poems ‘Leaves of Grass’?).

This is a logic which puts two quite different classes of things in a shared relationship; the two do not need to exist in the same class to be in that relationship. The logic is not then that of subsuming one under the other but of granting to each independence in a common concern. The focus of attention is now on that relationship as the form that unites the two. Bateson suggests that this insight was first built upon by Goethe’s morphology which revealed that the correct units of description are not, say, leaves and stem, but the relation between them, so that leaf and stem are part of a functional relation: the leaf is that which grows out of a stem, has a bud at its angle, from which grows another stem. The leaf is not a stem and the stem is not a leaf but they form a developmental whole, the plant, through the medium of the bud. It’s this kind of explanation, that advancing beyond classification, serves as a model of comparison among plants and allows us to see the plant kingdom as a whole.

This is the primal from of relating. It is, in David Bohm’s terms implicate, rather than explicate, for Merleau-Ponty, a reflection of the lived as opposed to the objective world, for Cassirer and for Wittgenstein, the fundamental form of knowing, that of seeing the individual as an example or aspect of a possible whole. We should remind ourselves at this juncture of our earlier reliance upon the idea of the “situation" that defines a possible whole, a perspective under which instances can be subsumed or denied.

The context of learning, then, is not simply an additional factor alongside the task in hand, but the central part of the process of recognising differences among resemblances and resemblances among differences. For example, we would not in our everyday interactions with others undertake to administer electric shocks to them, but when placed within a “research" environment, complete with men in white coats carrying stethoscopes, that context may appear to legitimate that course of action. But of course it need not: the possibility of denying the implications of the interpretations of a situation are always present; you will say, “I’m not the sort of person who inflicts physical pain on others under any circumstances". This is the self saying to itself what kind of self it is in its relation to others, a twofold relation of self and other and self with itself whose function is to define the parameters in which communication occurs within the system.

Bateson refers to his methodology as that of abduction (borrowing from the philosophy of Charles Sanders Pierce). A complex, evolving system cannot be adequately described through induction or deduction. Abduction seeks insight into that complexity through an attempt to scan the significant variables of relations in order to understand their interweaving in the fabric of being. There is an aesthetic quality to this approach, he recognises, which mirrors the aesthetic nature of existence. Indeed, Bateson’s methodology could be characterised as a phenomenology that aims to unite mental and natural descriptions. In all his writing he was keen to avoid both the extreme of the mechanical and the too-easy lapse into the mystical. Thus, whilst his work forms a foundation for an ecological perspective, he had no desire to join the hippie community, whilst at the same time his fellow scientists found the largeness of his vision disconcerting. He did not wish to assign precision to Science and the soul to the Arts, believing, I think, that to do so would result in an underestimation of each and the absence of a unifying perspective.

It is this belief that underpins the great variety of academic disciplines that served as the basis for his abductions: he ranges over Anthropology, Psychiatry, Biology, and the Social Sciences searching for the commonalities that could form the basis of Systems Theory. It is a prerequisite of any research based upon abduction that no a priori limits are placed upon the topics to be included. We have noted how Bateson’s science included an aesthetic element. In his later work, believing that there was still a missing element in the whole, he turned his attention to those experiences which greet us as having special significance.

He refers, for example, to the enlightenment experienced by the Ancient Mariner at the sight of the sea snakes: "O happy living things! no tongue/ Their beauty might declare:/ A spring of love gushed from my heart/ And I blessed them unaware”, and comments on such episodes of enlightenment that they are "a sudden realisation of the biological nature of the world in which we live. It is a sudden discovery or realisation of ‘life’. He refers in another note to an investigator’s wish to film the religious ceremonies of a North American Indian tribe; this suggestion, made for the benefit of anthropological evidence, was rebuffed by members of the tribe - they judged their ceremony would not have the same kind of quality if recorded: its integrity would have been jeopardised, the sacred space invaded, contaminated by the profane.

Their last work is subtitled Towards an Epistemology of the Sacred (Bateson & Bateson, 2005). Religion, he argues, as the embodiment of the sacred, must be viewed as meeting a need, that is, serving a function, that remains unsatisfied by other systems of knowledge. - essentially forms of knowing embracing metaphor and paradox, indeed, all works of imagination whose boundary is never closed and which forever suggests something that marks our identity but remains in some sense "beyond ourselves”. Religion can be seen as a cognitive system that attempts the answer to the troubling question of psychological survival, that of achieving a symbolic balance between inner and outer reality. In this sense, religion is a special evolution designed to meet a critical problem. But it is much more than that.

The necessity of belief underlies all the ways in which we communicate with the world. But it is assumed, hidden, unexpressed, because it is the origin ‘and’ confirmation of our perception and thinking. When we say, "Seeing is believing”, we express a hidden order, that of our dependency upon a necessary faith in the correspondence of what we perceive with what exists. Faith, in its elemental form, is the intentionality of consciousness that assumes the mutual causality between inner and outer worlds to create, in Wordsworth’s words, "a balance, an ennobling interchange of forces from within and from without”. Or we can refer to Marcel’s idea of availability to describe how belief functions to maintain the integrated fabric of mind.

Of course, belief developed in overtly religious paradigms acquires different representations in the diverse and often divisive interpretations of organised religion. But perhaps a unity of viewpoints may become apparent when we consider that their common and original denominators are essentially aesthetic: the assertion of those special experiences of enlightenment, the safeguarding of the religious experience in the sacred place, that vital faith present in everyday life which supports a meaningful being in the world, and a life that can be lived to reflect the unity of mind and nature: all occasions in which faith itself becomes the uniting idea. This is the Platonic idea of faith: you identify, not with the customs of particular faiths, but with the idea of faith itself, in the same way that one identifies with the ideas of love or beauty, or truth.

Ultimately, though, we should ask whether the idea of the sacred demands something more than the perspective of the co-relation of mind and nature. Whilst Aristotle and Goethe could live with both the earthly immanent and the divinely transcendent, modern Science denies the need to consider the existence of a realm that transcends the earthly. The mind is the formal residing in the material, and it is to the material that the researcher looks to account for any experiences of a transcendent reality; Bateson, for example, looks always to the patterns of feedback in communicative networks in describing both discontinuity and continuity - discontinuity of patterns to mark the difference between "normal” states of consciousness and states of enlightenment such as the Ancient Mariner’s, and a continuity of the normal and the aesthetic through their shared metaphorical structures. But it is difficult to see how a description which provides aesthetic satisfaction, noble though it may be, can do justice to the sense of an enlargement of being that faith demands - one that expresses itself in ethical and religious terms.

Such a higher symbolic order will transcend the ancient division of subject and object in which the subjective can only reach a fulfilment in a measure provided by the objective world. It is this prejudice which is countered by Kierkegaard (1941) in his Concluding Unscientific Postscript. The quality of the subjective is inevitably destroyed, he argues, when one attempts to re-write it as an objective fact. His maxim that "truth is subjectivity” is much maligned.

Wrongly, I think, because his definition of subjectivity is "inwardness’, and the truth of inwardness lies in its own fulfilment as the ethical and spiritual completion of the individual in relation to the world as lived. Kierkegaard addresses himself to the individual because this completion demands the presence of a self whose existence forms itself around the idea of the necessity of the task. The aesthetic falls short of the required determination, since it aims to turn reality into endless possibility, whereas the faith of the ethical rests upon the desire to transform the possible into a reality of purpose. Even sharing one’s efforts with others has its dangers for Kierkegaard since it may shift the focus away from the individual who has to make the leap of faith. Ultimately, it is the individual self that achieves a faith of the truth which places the person in a direct and unhindered relation to a transcendent whole - the fourfold vision of Blakes’ Infinity.

Auerbach (1984) has shown how in the Christian tradition a specific form of symbolism was called upon to interpret the historical nature of religious thought. The guiding idea of this interpretation is that earlier events and figures may be understood as anticipating or prefiguring later ones; thus the early Christians looked at the Old Testament to discern anticipations of their historically later religion; revealing, for example, the Messiah as a second Moses, whose work both fulfils and annuls that of his predecessor. Auerbach calls this kind of metaphorical interpretation ‘figural’:

Figural interpretation establishes a connection between two events or persons, the first of which signifies not only itself but the second, while the second encompasses or fulfils the first. The two poles of the figure are separate in time, but both, being real events or figures, are within time, within the stream of historical life. Only the understanding of the two persons or events is a spiritual act, but this spiritual act deals with concrete events whether past, present or future, and not with concepts or abstractions. (1984, p. 53)

But, occurring in historical time, the events themselves are provisional and incomplete. All history therefore remains open, pointing to a truth that is concealed and awaits further expression. Auerbach points out that this form of the tentativeness of events is distinct from the widely accepted modern view that, a provisional event is treated as a step in an unbroken historical process; in the figural system the interpretation is always sought from above; events are considered not in their unbroken relation to one another, but torn apart, individually, each in relation to something other that is promised and not yet present. (Auerbach, 1984, p. 59)

In Bateson’s terms, the religious mind has cast a pattern ahead of itself, an ideal model of temporal events which unites them as inadequate reflections of the ideal. The figures are tentative but they are tentative forms of something timeless.

This perspective appears to have something of the Platonic eternal form about it, so that knowing becomes recollection. But it is not recollection that is required in this model but creative repetition, as each age issues different manifestations of the ideal. The concept of the figural indicates neither an unchanging archetype nor a personality trait; it is an acknowledgment of the empirical within an eternal quest for ultimate meaning. We can observe this creative repetition at work since the beginning of the symbolic encounter with reality and its manifestations across quite different cultures.

The model returns us to the historical and anthropological interpretations of Vico whose theory situated historical and social events within the framework of "Divine Providence”, the idea of the eternal soul providing the opportunity for our imperfect expressions. In the first place, in its relation to the individual, it resolves the paradox of Nietzsche’s "Become what you are”, for what you are prefigures without finality what you may become; but, secondly, in relation to the transcendental, what you become is guided by the ideal of an inherently universal, ethical principle which must always test itself and show itself as examples of its existence. This practice signifies that the form of development is, as Goethe pointed out, not a fixed, completed "Gestalt”, but that of a process described by the term "Bildung” which suggests a developing form of self-completion, an education.

The Gestalt idea of "the whole being other than the sum of its parts” is a familiar one, but its significance may perhaps be fully appreciated once we understand how the parts of a form have an implicative relation such that each prefigures other parts in the growth of the whole. The metaphor that comes most readily to mind that describes this interpenetration of parts is Merleau- Ponty’s "a closely woven fabric”, in which the threads combine throughout the finished garment. I think this metaphor has two highly significant implications for the ways in which we can think about any model of the mind that attempts to mirror natural events.

In the first place, psychological concepts themselves reveal the patterns formed by the intrinsic relations of meanings; love, for example, would not be love or would be a false love if it did not unite aspects of caring, belief in the other, humility and the desire to understand. It thus contrasts with control which stands in direct opposition as a structure of meaning: you should attempt to control a useful machine, but "usefulness” is alien to the meaning of love. Note that each meaning type is ultimately a question of a permeating value. Secondly, the underlying psychological processes - perception, imagination, self-reflection, for example, - similarly function as whole in any explanatory framework; they are correctly seen as ‘aspects’ of the working of a whole, not as some modern equivalent of a faculty which is switched on when necessary. It follows that the absence of imagination in perception or self-reference is a pathology of the whole - Musil’s "abridgement of consciousness”. Perhaps, the fundamental opposing pattern in the mind is that identified by Marcel (1949), the distinction between Being and Having. Once you begin to talk about the mind in terms of its "having” or "not having” certain characteristics, you reify and separate aspects of a being in the process of becoming, aspects which have an intrinsic relation to each other - which support one another in our normal creative adaptations or fail to do so when our "intentional hold” on reality is blocked or is no longer sustained.

References: Arber, A. (1950). The natural philosophy of plant forms. Cambridge University Press. Aristotle. (1955). The ethics of Aristotle. Thomson, J. A. K. Trans. Penguin.

Aristotle. (1998). Metaphysics. Penguin.
Aristotle. (2004). The metaphysics. Lawson-Tancred, H. Trans. Penguin.
Aristotle. (2013). Poetics (A. Kenny, Trans.). University Press.
Auerbach, E. (1984). Essay on “Figura" in scenes from the drama of European literature. University of Minnesota Press.

Bateson, G. (2000). Steps to an ecology of mind. University of Chicago Press.
Bateson, G., & Bateson, M. C. (2005). Angelsfear: Towards an epistemology of the sacred. Hampton Press.
Bohm, D. (2002). Wholeness and the implicate order. Routledge.