ABSTRACT
Conventional ways of thinking are part of the problem of widespread human alienation and of the breakdown of the world biological ecosystem. For Gregory Bateson the grass syllogism affirms and embraces metaphor. To say that men are like grass in that both forms of life die is not the same as to say that men are grass. The “partly exact” aspect of totemism is for Bateson what is scientific because human relations in totemism are organized to resemble the relationship found in nature, and as biologists affirm, all living things are connected in an interdependent ecosystem of which man is a part. Bateson is arguing that logic through its emphasis on distinctions and classes of things, tears apart the basic unity of living systems. Pathologies, including the possibility of nuclear disasters, are all aspects of such an “epistemological mistake” that have been for a long time in man’s history, and ordinary logic and “objective” language are part of the error.
