The title of this book of
collected essays and lectures is intended precisely to define the contents.
The essays, spread over thirty-five years, combine to propose a new way of
thinking about ideas and about those aggregates of ideas which I call “minds”.
This way of thinking I call the “ecology of mind”,
or the ecology of ideas. It is a
science which does not yet exist as an organized body of theory or knowledge.
But the definition of an “idea”
which the essays combine to propose is much wider and more formal than is
conventional. The essays must speak for themselves, but here at the beginning
let me state the belief that such matters as the bilateral symmetry of an
animal, the patterned arrangement of leaves in a plant, the escalation of an
armaments race, the processes of courtship, the nature of play, the grammar of a
sentence, the mystery of biological evolution, and the contemporary crises in
man’s relationship to his environment, can only be understood in terms of such an ecology of ideas as I propose.
[BATESON, 2000: XXIII]
BATESON, Gregory. 2000. Steps to an
Ecology of Mind. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.
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