Steps to an ecology of mind

This book is a collection of the papers that Bateson wrote over his long career. It starts with a series of metalogues between Bateson and his daughter, which cover with a playful dialectic structure the widest possible range of topics.

What is striking in those conversations is that they often proceed illogically, as if ideas were simply muddling up. But then the two speakers get somewhere with their talking, and it is the muddles that helps. “If we both spoke logically all the time – the father says – we would never get anywhere. We would only parrot all the old clichés that everybody has repeated for hundreds years” (1972: 15).

Every student, every teacher, every curios person I would say, should absolutely read this incredible book. Because it really explores the way in which research and learning are carried out, the way in which we all start without even knowing where we are going.

It is a book about everything end everybody, one where all people can find a great deal of themselves. Because it is primarily a book about what a man learnt on his way, about what he was interested in during the different stages of his life, about how his thinking evolved and his knowledge grew. And apart from the contents, which go from anthropology to psychiatry, the process of learning is a journey that everybody goes on.

Bateson, G. (1972). Steps to an ecology of mind. Chicago/London: University of Chicago Press