Bateson could take a lesson from Walt Whitman, who preached essentially the same overcoming of single vision but took greater care to contact and guide his readers. Through his jumpy and oddly juxtaposed paragraphs, one may pick one’s way with great care - perhaps with occasional irritation - and now and then catch glimpses of the promised world ahead. With such high, democratic aims, Bateson’s prose is strangely difficult. His theory of what is wrong and his hope for a truly transformative, holistic philosophy, are very much in the main line of western regional writing and will seem familiar to students of the field. Bateson means to be subversive, and to do his part toward the ultimate healing which has already been suggested by systems theory, cybernetics, ecology, and humanistic psychology, not to mention the works of John Muir, Mary Austin, Frank Waters, Gary Snyder, Joseph Wood Krutch, and many other western American writers.

Further more, they lead, in Bateson’s view, to “greed, monstrous overgrowth, war, tyranny, and pollution.” Unfortunately, however, they continue to run the world. That is, they do not fit the systematic nature of things, which Bateson embodies in the book’s title and subtitle. In brief, it is a series of proofs that Cartesian dualism and Lockeian sense-data theory - and be hind them, one might say, the entire dominant epistemology of Western Civilization - are incorrect. 238 pages, $12.95.) This book is the capstone to the philosophical edifice which Gregory Bateson has been building for several decades. In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:ġ50 Western American Literature Mind and Nature: A Necessary Unity.

Gregory bateson mind and nature