Fechner / Bateson / Rappaport

["McIntyre, Mike S." <***>]

Dan,

Thanks for the positive feedback.  It's interesting you should mention
Gregory Bateson, in connection with Fechner.  I recently found a refer-
ence to Fechner in Bateson's posthumously published book, Angels Fear.
After devoting two or three pages to a discussion of the so-called
Weber-Fechner laws, Bateson writes (beginning on p. 123):

"Fechner was surely a very remarkable man, at least a hundred years
ahead of his time.  He seems to have seen even then that the mind-body
problem could not be settled by denying the reality of the mind.  It
was not good enough to assert that all biological causation was simply
a materialistic impact of billiard balls.  Nor was it good enough to
assert that mind was a separate transcendent agent, a supernatural
which could be divorced from body.

"Fechner avoided both these forms of nonsense by asserting the logarith-
mic relation between a message as carried in the communcation systems of
the body and the materialistic quantities characterizing the impacts of
the external 'corporeal' universe.

"Arguably it was Fechner who took the first steps, but much remains to
be done. ..."

I also wanted to mention that I've uploaded an essay by the late Roy A.
Rappaport, an anthropologist, called "Adaptive Structure and its Dis-
orders," which is from Rappaport's 1979 book, Ecology, Meaning, and
Religion.  Here is the link to it:

http://www.homestead.com/dogbreedersguild/files/adaptive.pdf

Bateson's work influenced Rappaport a great deal.  Rappaport saw clearly
that ecology is necessarily incomplete if it is based solely on reason,
materialistic flows, cost/benefit analysis, and the like.  A complete
ecology has also to include an examination of "the holy," says Rappaport.
While such a tack might lead some to expect facile endorsement of gurus
or new-age mysticism, Rappaport's approach is nothing of the kind.  He
argues -- convincingly, in my opinion -- that religion is adaptive and
necessary to mankind because it ameliorates the corrosive effects of
language (the "lie" and the "alternative").  His completest exposition
of this argument is contained in his magnum opus, Ritual and Religion
in the Making of Humanity, a book which was published in 1999 (two years
after his death).

Best regards,
Mike McIntyre

P.S.
Here is one the better passages, in my opinion, from the latter book:

Inversion in the order of knowledge
(from Ritual and Religion in the Making of Humanity, p. 449 ff.)

We see, then, that the holy is not excluded from the generalization that
new and often unprecedented problems inhere in all evolutionary advances.
Over the past few centuries we have witnessed, and generally admired as
heroic, the struggles of our most gifted thinkers to escape from ortho-
doxy's constraints.  It seems clear that the success of their liberated
efforts to discover the laws constituting the physical world and to de-
mystify the social world have contributed to the growing disrepute of
the sacred in particular and the holy in general.  Given the ills to
which holiness is prone and to which it contributes in the literate,
state-organized societies which now dominate the world, we could easily
regard its decline as a blessing, as a great leap forward into the lib-
eration of the human mind.  But the liberation of science and secular
thought from the sacred has also had its costs.  Once again, all evolu-
tionary advances set new problems as they ameliorate older ones, and
neither secularism's nor science's successes constitute exceptions.

With the Enlightenment, and more particularly with the emergence of
modern science, an order of knowledge very different from Egypt's Ma'at,
the Zoroastrian Asha or Maring ~nomane~ comes to prevail.  Indeed, the
new order of knowledge inverts the structure of Logoi generally.

Ultimate knowledge in all the Logoi discussed in chapter 11 is sacred
knowledge, knowledge which, because numinously grasped or liturgically
accepted, is unquestionable.  Ultimate Sacred Postulates, taken to be
eternally true, sanctify, which is to say certify, other sentences --
axioms concerning the enduring structure of the Cosmos, values grounded
in those structural principles, rules for realizing them.  Worldly fact
is, as it were, at the bottom of such hierarchies.  Mundane knowledge is
generally regarded as interesting and important, but it is taken to be
obvious, transient, low in or devoid of sanctity, and contingent or
instrumental, rather than fundamental.

When, in the course of evolution, secular thought in general and sci-
entific thought in particular, is liberated from religion this structure
of knowledge is stood on its head.  Ultimate knowledge becomes knowledge
of fact.  Facts are, to be sure, subsumed under generalizations called
"theories," but theories continue to fall victim to anomalous facts.
If facts are, at one and the same time, both ultimate and transient cer-
tainty disappears.  Theories, moreover, are not only transient but of
limited scope.  Attempts to apply concepts developed in one domain to
another, let us say animal ecology to human society, tend to be dismissed
as "mere analogies" or even improper "reductions" and what we have called
"middle-order meaning," the meaningfulness that emerges from the recog-
nition of similarities hidden beneath the surfaces of apparently disparate
things, shrivels.  Knowledge may become more precise, but it also becomes
more fragmentary, and if oneness is intrinsic to the conception of Logos,
Logos is threatened with dissolution.

Not only are facts sovereign but there are more of them.  Facts breed
facts, and as knowledge of facts burgeons the domains into which they are
organized are severed into yet smaller pieces, as individuals and their
knowledge become increasingly specialized.  The result is the loss of the
sense of the world's wholeness.  ~Sarma~ prevails over Logos.

When facts become sovereign, what is the fate of that which had been
ultimate knowledge?  In the realm of fact nothing is sacred except,
perhaps, the maxim "Nothing is sacred," and knowledge that had been
sacred is no longer knowledge at all.  It is "mere belief," belief now
being reduced to the status of ~doxa~.  Values sanctified by the ulti-
mately sacred are degraded to the status of tastes or preferences.  They
are relativized, and ~idia phronesis~, in the form of economic rationality,
is not only given free rein but is elevated to the status of general or-
ganizing principle and may even claim sanctity.  The Business of America
is Business.  ~Homo economicus~ becomes the moral as well as natural model
of humanity.

Finally, unlike Logoi, which makes moral and emotional claims on those
who follow them, the new order of knowledge makes explicit that its claim
on those operating in accordance with its ideals is no more than intel-
lectual.  Explorers are supposed to be disengaged from the worlds they
objectively explore.  Participation in scientific acts of observing and
analyzing the world in accordance with scientific epistemology differs
from participation in ritual acts constructing and maintaining the world
in accordance with Logos.  Rituals, and ultimately meaningful acts of
participation in orders the performances themselves realize, become
"mere rituals," empty or even hypocitical formalisms.  Under such circum-
stances highest order meaning and the quest for it are dismissed as
"mystical" or even stigmatized as "fanatical" or "weird."  The world
becomes a less meaningful place as the sacred certainty on which all
human certainty is built, whether rock-like as Hans Kung would have it
(1980: 1) or made of words as I would have it, is threatened.  Ritual
as an instrument for establishing the foundation of human worlds has not
been devastated but it has been seriously damaged, and it is not clear
that other means as effective for establishing such foundations have yet
been developed or, for that matter, ever will.