Psychotherapy East & West. Alan WattsЧитать онлайн книгу.
have suggested, organism/environment is a unified pattern of behavior somewhat like a field in physics — not an interaction but a transaction. As Gardner Murphy has put it:
We cannot define the situation operationally except in relation to the specific organism which is involved; we cannot define the organism operationally. . .except in reference to the situation. Each serves to define the other.16
To define operationally is to say what happens, to describe behavior, and as soon as we do this we find that we are talking about transactions. We cannot describe movements without describing the area or space in which they occur; we would not know that a given star or galaxy was moving except by comparing its position with others around it. Likewise, when we describe the world as completely as we can, we find that we are describing the form of man, for the scientific description of the world is actually a description of experiments, of what men do when they investigate the world. Conversely, when we describe the form of man as completely as we can — his physical structure as well as his behavior in speech and action — we find that we are describing the world. There is no way of separating them except by not looking too carefully, that is, by ignorance.
The human behavior that we call perception, thought, speech, and action is a consistency of organism and environment of the same kind as eating. What happens when we touch and feel a rock? Speaking very crudely, the rock comes in touch with a multitude of nerve ends in our fingers, and any nerve in the whole pattern of ends which touches the rock “lights up.” Imagine an enormous grid of electric lightbulbs connected with a tightly packed grid of push buttons. If I open my hand and with its whole surface push down a group of buttons, the bulbs will light up in a pattern approximately resembling my hand. The shape of the hand is “translated” into the pattern of buttons and bulbs. Similarly, the feeling of a rock is what happens in the “grid” of the nervous system when it translates a contact with the rock. But we have at our disposal “grids” far more complex than this — not only optical and auditory but also linguistic and mathematical. These, too, are patterns into whose terms the world is translated in the same way as the rock is translated into nerve patterns. Such a grid, for example, is the system of coordinates, three of space and one of time, in which we feel that the world is happening even though there are no actual lines of height, width, and depth filling all space, and though the earth does not go ticktock when it revolves. Such a grid is also the whole system of classes, or verbal pigeonholes, into which we sort the world as things or events; still or moving; light or dark; animal, vegetable, or mineral; bird, beast, or flower; past, present, or future.
It is obvious, then, that when we are talking about the order and structure of the world, we are talking about the order of our grids. “Laws, like the law of causation, etc., treat of the network and not of what the network describes.”17 In other words, what we call the regularities of nature are the regularities of our grids. For regularity cannot be noticed except by comparing one process with another — e.g., the rotation of the earth about the sun with the strictly measured rotation of the clock. (The clock, with its evenly spaced seconds and minutes, is here the grid.) In the same way, what appear to be necessities of nature as a whole may be no more than necessities of grammar or mathematics. When anyone says that an unsupported body which is heavier than air necessarily falls to the ground, the necessity is not in nature but in the rules of definition. If it did not fall to the ground, it would not fit what we mean by “heavier than air.” Consider the way in which a great deal of mathematical thinking is actually done. The mathematician does not ask whether his constructions are applicable, whether they correspond to any constructions in the natural world. He simply goes ahead and invents mathematical forms, asking only that they be consistent with themselves, with their own postulates. But every now and then it subsequently turns out that these forms can be correlated, like clocks, with other natural processes.
The puzzling thing is that some of the “grids” which we invent work, and some do not. In the same way, some animal behaviors seem to fit the environment and some do not. Those of ants, for example, have remained stable for millions of years, but the huge fangs of the saber-toothed tiger, the vast bulk of the Sauria, and the great nose horns of the Titanotheriidae were experimental failures. It would perhaps be more exact to say that they worked for a while, but not for as long as the experiments of other species. But what seems to happen in most of these cases is that the organism/environment relationship “splits”: the organism’s attack upon or defense against the environment becomes too strong, so isolating it from its source of life. Or it may be that the organism is too conservative for a swiftly changing environment, which is really the same situation: the pattern is too rigid, too insistent on survival, and thus again isolated. Or it may be that the organism, considered as a field in itself, is in self-contradiction: the weight of the nose horn is too much for the muscles. Turning to the human species, we may wonder whether such a split is taking place in the development of the overisolated consciousness of the individual.
If this be so, we must be careful of a false step in reasoning. We must not say to the individual, “Watch out! If you want to survive you must do something about it!” Any action along these lines will simply make things worse; it will simply confirm the individual in his feeling of separation. It will become, like the nose horn, a survival mechanism frustrating survival. But if it is not up to the individual to do something, what is there to be said or done, and to whom and by whom?
Is it entirely unreasonable to suppose that the situation may correct itself, that the “field pattern” man/universe may be intelligent enough to do so? If this happens, or is happening, it will at first appear that individuals are initiating the changes on their own. But as the required change takes place, the individuals involved will simultaneously undergo a change of consciousness revealing the illusion of their isolation. May not something of the same kind be happening when a research worker, thinking that he has made an independent discovery, learns to his astonishment that several other people hit upon it at about the same time? As scientists sometimes say, the field of research had developed to the point where this particular discovery might naturally break out at several places.*
If we turn now to the social institution of language, or the “grid of words,” we can easily see the ways in which it may be splitting organism from environment, and aspects of the environment from one another. Languages with such parts of speech as nouns and verbs obviously translate what is going on in the world into particular things (nouns) and events (verbs), and these in turn “have” properties (adjectives and adverbs) more or less separable from them. All such languages represent the world as if it were an assemblage of distinct bits and particles. The defect of such grids is that they screen out or ignore (or repress) interrelations. This is why it is so difficult to find the words to describe such fields as the organism/environment. Thus when the human body is analyzed and its organs are attached to nouns, we are at once in danger of the mechanical, overspecialized type of medicine and surgery which interferes at one point heedless of a disturbance of balance which may have unforeseen “effects” throughout the system. What else must the surgeon do if he has to remove a cancerous thyroid? Similar dangers arise in almost every sphere of human activity.
Let us suppose that social group A has an enemy, group B. The fact that B periodically attacks A keeps the members of A on their toes and “prunes” its population. But group A considers its own side good and B’s side bad, and because good and bad are irreconcilable the actual service which B does for A is ignored. The time comes when A mobilizes its forces and either exterminates B or makes it incapable of further attack. A is then in danger of breeding itself out of existence, or of debilitation through lack of “tonus.” An inadequate system of classification has made it too difficult to understand that there can be an enemy/friend and a war/collaboration. Obviously there is a similar relationship between virtue and vice. It has been pointed out so often, but society finds it too treasonable to take it seriously. As Lao-tzu said, “When everyone recognizes goodness to be good, there is already evil. Thus to be and not to be arise mutually.”18 It is that simple, but it just cannot be admitted! It is true that social action may get rid of such particular evils as judicial torture, child labor, or leprosy, but after a brief lapse of time the general feeling of being alive remains the same. In other words, the freezing