The cure for the inadequacies of consciousness, of purposive rationality, is not to reject it in favor of a passionate nonrationality (and here Bateson separates himself from the extreme Romantic position) but to augment and complete it. For Bateson the inadequacies of linear, purposive, discursive processes of consciousness are corrected by enlisting the aid of the nondiscursive, pattern-comprehending, emotionally saturated "primary processes," in Freud's sense, processes which to Bateson, however, quoting Blake's "A tear is an intellectual thing," represented legitimate aspects of knowing. Art, aspects of religion, and complex symbolic form are vehicles for conveying necessary information. Taking his metaphor here from religious language, art, for example, is "part of man's quest for grace." He thought of grace as involving the integration of "diverse parts of the mind - especially those multiple levels of which one extreme is called 'consciousness' and the other the 'unconscious' (1972:129).When the world is viewed as circuits of information and meaning in which the submind of the actor participates, then the world's problems centrally include, as we have noted, failures of conscious understanding that involve for Bateson errors in the epistemology of individuals.
Bateson's intellectual analysis, then, had deeply moral or - if one prefers - ideological implications. This was a source of his attraction to some, a problem for others. He felt that the proper understanding of mind or "creatura" entailed an understanding of proper action (including when not to act), as an understanding of human physiology does to the ideal physician. Starting from such a conviction he had to explain the sources of what he took to be human error, and his analysis of consciousness or, in some moods, "Western" consciousness, derived from this. In his morality, ignorance was responsible for evil.
It is of some value, we think, to anthropologists to comment on the growth of his moral position. Bateson's early work on the patterning of culture, of thedeutero truths(that is, what is true is what a particular community agrees to be true) that grew out of the structure of experience and learning (deuterolearning) in such communities, shares with the anthropology of the time two morally significant assumptions. First, the patterning of the system has ontological priority over the "individual" (the latter being a problematic construct to Bateson). This dissolving of the individual as a focus of praise or blame, of responsibility for noncivilized behavior (to take it back a step to Boas), was an important liberal response to colonial and racist ideologies. (An interesting ideological climax of this stance was Ronald Laing's antipsychiatry, influenced by Bateson, which saw the family system as responsible for the victim's schizophrenia.) Second, and allied to the decentering of the individual, was an implication that each culture provided an alternate, equally valid, and equally arbitrary way of phrasing reality and creating the illusion of sanity.
This relativisitic assumption about the cultural creation of reality out of the "unpunctuated flow of events," this devaluation of innocent common sense about the realness of the world (to which Bateson's analyses so powerfully contributed) with its implication for tolerance but beyond this resignation, solipsism, or worse, was gradually countered in Bateson's thought.
The tension is conveyed in an afterword he wrote in 1977 to a collection of celebratory essays,About Bateson:
In solipsism you are ultimately isolated and alone, isolated by the premise "I make it all up." But at the other extreme, the opposite of solipsism, you would cease to exist, becoming nothing but a metaphoric feather blown by the winds of external "reality." . . . Somewhere between these two is a region where you are partly blown by the winds of reality and partly an artist creating a composite out of the inner and outer events. [p. 245]
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