ABSTRACT
This chapter offers a reading of converging ideas within the works of British anthropologist and biologist Gregory Bateson and French post-structuralist philosopher Gilles Deleuze. At the heart of Bateson's work is his insistence that wisdom consists in understanding our embeddedness in the systemic nature of all life. Difference is the moving elemental force of this overriding system linking individual, society and ecological system. For Bateson, epistemological error in the modern Western rationalist paradigm the belief in the separation between the internal and the external, or between the objective mind and the world beyond has initiated a destructive process, bringing their to imminent ecological disaster. Education is the willingness to both recognize the play of difference in every living relationship, biological or cultural, and the necessary responsibility that they have for seeing to it that life flourishes, and communities are safe and happy. This is no small task of course, and one way or another difference will be at work.
