bateson's block

Gregory Bateson insisted that developing our aesthetic sense through the arts was necessary for us to get in touch with our more-than-rational selves. He pointed out that the workings of our “mind”, which he understood as the information circuits that pass through and beyond us into the ecosystems within which we are embedded, does not operate in a linearly causal manner. The conscious/rational mind is a rather recent invention in this system, and one that often disrupts the larger mind that our body and non-rational selves have evolved to gracefully inhabit. It does this by positing very short-term and local goals for itself, goals which appear linear, but only because the conscious mind is incapable of grasping all the implications and chains of pathways that come out of the action. When engaged in art, we allow ourselves to influence and be influenced by our artwork in a continuously recursive, albeit non-logical way. This provides a miniature feedback loop that compares with the larger one that we are also continuously engaged in. It also shows how a process of perpetual non-logical adjustment creates beauty, the same sort of beauty that has emerged in organisms and landscapes. However, it is clear to me that developing our aesthetic sense, on its own, is not sufficient to make our larger mental circuits sane. Many artists are known to be self-absorbed and hardly considered socially or environmentally sensitive in their actions. Bateson is therefore correct in attempting to teach the importance of his ecological perspective along with his claims that we develop our aesthetic senses, undoubtedly recognizing that either one, on its own, is likely to cause a great deal more damage than good. But here lies the paradox that so chilled him: this plan, is it not... planned? And if I deliberately don’t plan it, then isn’t that also, in an important sense, a ... ?