Bateson belonged to no academic discipline. In his formation and career he was an "original," an "autodidact." His knowledge and sense of problem were formed in an exceedingly rich early intellectual milieu, by his lifelong informal intellectual network (which included a good sample of the century's better thinkers), by a genius for close observation of what fascinated him (essentially the structures and processes of the reality created through communication), and perhaps by some painful alienation from the ordinary. Although highly cultured in his understanding of European tradition, he was no scholar of contemporary documents in the social sciences. His favorite references are to William Blake, Samuel Butler, Larmarck, Alfred Wallace, Darwin, C. H. Waddington, R. G. Collingwood, Whitehead, Russell, the Bible, St. Augustine, Von Neumann, Norbert Wiener, and Lewis Carroll.
In part, his idiosyncratic path was a result of his institutional isolation. But he was not essentially a scholar, a critic of other's writings, so much as a natural scientist, for whom "nature was his book" is no banal characterization. He used anything that he could learn from others, integrated into his own vision (for he was polar opposite of an eclectic) to read that book.
Bateson's formal training under A. C. Haddon, whom he met late in his undergraduate career, was by present standards brief and sketchy. And although he wished to escape from zoology because his interest in it was "purely intellectual and not heartfelt" (as he wrote his parents in 1925), his anthropological concerns were rooted in the natural biological sciences, not only as a result of his undergraduate training but from the intense informal education he got during his childhood and adolescence from his father and his father's circle. His father's interest in biological morphology (particularly questions of symmetry and asymmetry) and its generation, maintenance, and disruption was shared by the son and, enlarged to include the morphology of behavior, constituted a leitmotiv of his life's work from his concept of processes of schismogenesis in Iatmul culture (Naven1936, 1965) to the concerns of the book,Mind and Nature, which appeared a year before he died.
His interest in behavioral morphology, which for him involved structures of meaning and communication, led him from his early career to be distrustful of simple reductionistic models of cause and effect, which seemed to leave out too much and to distort understanding. He felt that explanations (and thought in general) that were not of the proper complexity in relation to the events he was trying to describe, were not only false in ways that he tried to specify, but were dangerous in that they led to destructive action. Bateson felt deeply that ways of understanding the phenomena of the world of communication necessarily have active moral consequences. We will return to this.
Someone has said that all thinkers (seen, of course, from the opposite camp) are either simpleminded or muddleheaded. For the simpleminded, Bateson with his subtle and complex models was a prince of the muddleheaded. In fact, this is the blindness of the two camps. Bateson's essays in understanding (including his criticism of the limits and implications of less adequate models) set standards, we believe, of logical coherence unexcelled by anyone writing in the social sciences today. Each of his essays assumes understanding of much that he has written before; but when they are understood in their entirety, a clear, integrated, and powerful vision emerges.
However,theinterrelatedwebofhisideas,aswellashisspecialpointofview,makesitdifficulttounderstandfullymanyofhisessaysinisolation(andthisistrueallthemoreofisolatedphrases)untilthepointofviewandgeneraloutlinesofhissystemofideasaregrasped.Asentencesuchas"thetransformofadifferencetra
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