Bateson contra Fowles

"No, you see it's not possible to map beauty and ugliness onto a flat piece of paper.  Oh yes, a drawing may be beautiful and on flat paper but that's not what I'm talking about.  The question is onto what surface shall a theory of aesthetics be mapped?"

Ok, so I'm setting up two dead English dudes to talk about something very important to me, in a very, very, very abstract and probably incomprehensible way, but wtf, it's my party.

Bateson has an intricate and yet earthy mind.  He never seems to take the bait that leads so many of the intellectually ambitious into the maze of irrelevant abstractions that is academic philosophy.

This idea of surfaces and "mapping onto" is important.  It's something that we all learn to do as we  learn to become more or less conscious, and because it is how we built up consciousness, the mapping and the surfaces onto which we map onto are not something that we remember to be conscious of.

"...it is the primary definition of mind that has to accommodate the theories of aesthetics and consciousness.  It's onto that primary definition that the next step must be mapped."

Now Bateson spends most of the book on the functional definition of mind, and it's some heavy-duty stuff, but the title of the book is "Mind and Nature: A Necessary Unity" so that will give you a hint that his idea of "mind" is not limited to the patch of gray matter at the apex of the spine of human beings.

So to knock all of this gobbledygook down to a super-simple and concrete example: it matters A LOT whether we map our most basic level of consciousness onto the warmth and intelligence of a human body and maybe a human breast or onto the cold geometries of a crib and a plastic nipple. The one in the crib is going to spend their whole lives frantically piling up non-living things to remake the security of the crib. AKA consumerism.  That's definitely a dumbing down and maybe a complete bastardization of what Bateson's getting at, but maybe not...