The contribution of Angels Fear to metaReality: Gregory Bateson and Roy Bhaskar’s idiosyncratic approaches to the sacred

ABSTRACT

Gregory Bateson’s career from anthropologist, through his development of cybernetics and systems theory, to developing ideas around ‘the sacred’, has parallels with Roy Bhaskar’s intellectual journey. This paper proposes that as well as Bateson’s theory of cybernetics and systemic thought making a contribution to basic and dialectic critical realism, his final and posthumously published Angels Fear: Towards and Epistemology of the Sacred adds to our understanding of Bhaskar’s metaReality. Similarities between the development of Bateson’s work from 1936 to 1987 and Bhaskar’s work from 1975 to 2016 enable the development of theory that adds to both of their respective appreciations of metaReality and the sacred. Thus, by starting a conversation between Bateson and Bhaskar, we can develop a higher order understanding of the world than proposed by Bhaskar’s metaReality alone.

KEYWORDS:

• Bateson
• Bhaskar
• metaReality
• sacred

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Notes

1 The identity of whose author has been lost to history.

2 Many of the chapters of Bateson’s Steps to an Ecology of Mind are transcripts of his presentations at the Macy and other conferences (Bateson 1973).

3 Symmetry is explored below and was a constant concern for Bateson, who showed an interest in symmetry at all levels, from the symmetry of the earth and our orientation to it, to the symmetry of embryos and, finally, the symmetry of ideas (Bateson [1936] 1958; Bateson 1973; Bateson 1979; Bateson and Bateson [1987] 2005).

4 Having read much of Bateson’s published work for this paper, I can attest to the efficacy of this therapeutic style.

5 This similar trajectory might be explained by Bhaskar and Bateson working and developing their ideas within a shared historical paradigm, during the 1950–70s when hippy and new age movements resulted in a non-religious quest for the sacred. Curiously, it could be argued that Bateson kick- started the hippy movement. He gave LSD to Ken Kesey as part of his US Government funded clinical trials in Palo Alto Veteran's Hospital in the 1950s. Subsequently, Kesey stole the drug from Bateson's office and went on his road trip to ‘turn on’ the youth of America. Bateson writes about his thinking developing as a result of the few occasions he took LSD as part of these trials (Bateson 1973; Wolfe 1971).

6 A proposal that has been extensively corroborated in recent years by research into the quasi neurological networks of tree roots and mycelia in forests (Sheldrake 2020; Simard 2021).

7 Martin Buber also proposes that we ought to commune with a world beyond that traditionally proposed to be living,

It by no means needs to be a man of whom I become aware. It can be an animal, a plant, a stone. No kind of appearance or event is fundamentally excluded from the series of the things through which from time to time something is said to me. Nothing can refuse to be the vessel for the Word. The limits of the possibility of dialogue are the limits of awareness (Buber 1947, 12).

Additional information

Funding

This work was supported by Economic and Social Research Council [grant number ES/W005786/1].