Definition #3: Grace

This is the third in a series where I record influential definitions of famous concepts

In his essay "Style, grace and information in Primitive Art" Gregory Bateson offers a vision of life as a work of art. But it is not just any kind of work of art. It is a graceful work of art. Drawing on Aldous Huxley and Walt Whitman, Bateson argues that animals are in a state of grace and as such God or divinity is actually closer to animals than it is to Man i.e animals have a naivete and simplicity that Man has lost.

For Bateson, art is Man's quest for grace. The possibilities of true and false and the possibility of lying only arise with conscious thought. If I say the cat is on the red mat - I could be lying. The cat could be hidden in my closet and not on the mat at all or I could have mistaken the orange mat for the red one.

When I swim, run, walk or dance - this question of whether I am lying or whether I am truly swimming or falsely swimming or deceitfully swimming - none of these make sense. It is only when I make some statement about my swimming or dancing that the possibility of truth or falsehood or lying arises - I say I'm a great dancer but turn out to be a crappy dancer for instance. This moment for Bateson seems to be our fall from grace - the moment when we make statements about what we do.

Bateson points out that the better we become at something - the more automatic that something becomes for us. This is the paradox of knowledge - the better you know something, the less aware you are of it. Most non-native speakers of a language likely have a better grasp on the grammar rules than native speakers, yet probably make more grammatical errors than native speakers. If I know the route to a place my home..I am less aware of my surroundings and what Im doing than when Im new to a place and trying to find my way.

In this way, Bateson flips the Freudian categories on its head. For Freud - the unconscious was what was in need of explaining and was the volatile part of us. For Bateson, the sub-conscious or the unconscious is the seat of all that is secure while the conscious part where the possibility of both falsehood and lying reside that is a source of volatility.

There are 4 type of sub-conscious that Bateson mentions - 1) The more we know something, the less aware we are of it and trust our sub-conscious control over it 2) Even a simple act such as when to cross the street seems to involve rapid fire calculations taking into account distance, speed of approaching vehicles etc. and we remain totally unconscious of such calculations 3) The unconscious as the closet or cupboard where we confine/ store away thoughts or memories that disturb us, that we are ashamed of, that make us uncomfortable etc. 4) I didn't get the 4th type which seems to involve metaphors.

Bateson posits that the artists job - that great art (which for him is synonymous with grace) is art that can bring into harmony and integrate "the reasons of the mind with the reasons of the art" i.e. art that can integrate the conscious and subconscious levels.

The phrase reasons of the heart is significant for Bateson. There is this whole other notion as we've already mentioned with Freud but going even much further back wherein that which was available to language and the conscious mind - that could be subjected to tests of truth and false - was seen as rational while everything else which fell outside the scope of this was seen as irrational. For eg we might say instead that the heart wants what the heart wants or that love is blind etc. For Bateson however, it is not that the heart or the subconscious is irrational - it just has a different kind of rationality and logic. As he says "feelings and emotions are the outward signs of precise and complex algorithms."

It is bringing these two kinds of rationalities in agreement with each other that is the artists job - to create a work of art that is a harmonious whole - certainly something you can talk about but this talking about wont fully explain or exhaust everything that the work of art is.

Bateson brings up the famous quote of Isadora Duncan -"If I could talk about it, there would be no point dancing it." We could certainly talk about the dance but if the dance is a truly great and in Bateson's terms a truly graceful work of art - then there must be things about the dance that by necessity should be left unsaid. Whenever a critic is telling us what the work of art is really about - either they are making an incomplete statement and really only selecting from a vast menu of potential statement or they are talking about an inferior work of art - one that lacks grace.

So we now have some idea of what Bateson means by grace - grace is that which integrates into an irreducible complex whole its constituent parts which are both conscious and sub-concsious. But how does this integration work? How does a work of art appear or become graceful?

"A shark is beautifully shaped for locomotion in water but the genome of the shark surely does not contain direct information about hydrodynamics. Rather the genome must be supposed to contain information or instructions which are the complement of hydrodynamics. Not hydrodynamics, but what hydrodynamics requires, has been built up in the shark’s genome. Similarly a migratory bird perhaps does not know the way to its destination in any of the senses outlined above but the bird may contain the complementary instructions necessary to cause it to fly right."

The shark swimming is a great example. The shark's genome does not contain instructions i.e. an on/ off switch that triggers the shark into swimming. What it has is "raw" ingredient and the very process of swimming cooks these raw ingredients into the act of swimming if that makes sense. That is the shark interacts with tis environment, makes a decision every single moment and through this process of decision making and negotiating the environment that it is able to swim. Swimming for the shark according to Bateson is not like following a pre-loaded map. It is more akin to mapping the territory as one goes along.

When we confront a work of art, we bring our tastes, images, memories, perceptions, thoughts, feelings, processes etc. The work of art has no essence no meaning prior to this encounter. It becomes something through this encounter. It does not contain grace but contains the ingredients necessary for grace. In encountering the work of art we take these ingredients and cook it into something graceful - using our tastes, memories, perceptions etc

Like swimming, dancing etc. it does not make sense to ask if the work of art is false or if the work of art is lying. The work of art first and foremost simply is and simply does. One can ask if scientific claims are accurate, true or false - but such questions don't make sense of a work of art.

It is for this reason that Bateson speaks of the arts of life and the arts of living rather than the science of life and the science of living. Science can only speak of life by reducing it. What art does with life or to life is something I am yet to figure out.