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II. SOCIETY AND SANITY

Though it cannot as yet be shown that a society is a body of people in the same way that a man is a body of cells, it is clear that any social group is something more than the sum of its members. People do not live in mere juxtaposition. To sum is to collect things together in a one-to-one correspondence with a series of numbers, and the relationship between 1 and 2 and 3 and 4 is so simple that it does not begin to resemble the relationship of people living together. A society is people living together in a certain pattern of behavior — a pattern which makes such physical traces as roads and the structure of towns, codes of law and language, tools and artifacts, all of which lay down “channels” determining the future behavior of the group. Moreover, a society is not “made up” of people in the same way that a house is composed of bricks, or even in the same way that an army is gathered together by recruitment. Strictly speaking, society is not so much a thing as a process of action which is really indistinguishable from human beings and animals, and from life itself. That no human organism exists without male and female parents is already society.

As a pattern of behavior, society is above all a system of people in communication maintained by consistent action. To keep the system going, what is done has to be consistent with what has been done. The pattern is recognizable as a pattern because it goes ahead with reference to its own past; it is just this that establishes what we call order and identity, a situation in which trees do not suddenly turn into rabbits and in which one man does not suddenly behave like another so that we do not know who he is. “Who” is consistent behavior. System, pattern, coherence, order, agreement, identity, and consistency are all in a way synonymous. But in a pattern so mobile and volatile as human society, maintaining consistency of action and communication is not easy. It requires the most elaborate agreements as to what the pattern is, or, to put it in another way, as to what are the rules, the consistencies, of the system. Without agreement as to the rules of playing together there is no game. Without agreement as to the use of words, signs, and gestures there is no communication.

The maintenance of society would be simple enough if human beings were content just to survive. In this case they would be simply animals, and it would be enough to eat, sleep, and reproduce. But if these are their basic needs, human beings go about getting them in the most complicated way imaginable. If what must be done to survive is work, it would seem that the main concern of human beings is to play, yet at the same time pretending that most of such play is work. When one comes to think of it, the boundary between work and play is vague and changeable. Both are work in the sense that they expend energy; but if work is what must be done to survive, may we not ask, “But is it really necessary to survive? Is not survival, the continuation of the consistent pattern of the organism, a form of play?” We must be careful of the anthropomorphism which asserts that animals hunt and eat in order to survive, or that a sunflower turns in order to keep its face to the sun. There is no scientific reason to suppose that there are such things as instincts for survival or for pleasure. When we say that an organism likes to go on living, or that it goes on living because it likes it, what evidence is there for this “like” except that it does in fact go on living — until it doesn’t? Similarly, to say that we always choose what we prefer says no more than that we always choose what we choose. If there is a basic urge to live, there must also, as Freud thought, be a basic urge to die. But language and thought are cleaner without these ghostly instincts, urges, and necessities. As Wittgenstein says, “A necessity for one thing to happen because another has happened does not exist. There is only logical necessity.”¹⁰

An enduring organism is simply one that is consistent with its environment. Its climate and its food agree with it; its pattern assimilates them, eliminating what does not agree, and this consistent motion, this transformation of food and air into the pattern of the organism, is what we call its existence. There is no mysterious necessity for this to continue or discontinue. To say that the organism needs food is only to say that it is food. To say that it eats because it is hungry is only to say that it eats when it is ready to eat. To say that it dies because it cannot find food is only another way of saying that its death is the same thing as its ceasing to be consistent with the environment. The so-called causal explanation of an event is only the description of the same event in other words. To quote Wittgenstein again, “At the basis of the whole modern view of the world lies the illusion that the so-called laws of nature are the explanations of natural phenomena.”¹¹

More complex organisms, such as human beings, are more complex consistencies, more complex transformations of the environment. Not only are they patterns of transforming food, but their agreement or consistency with the environment changes nuclear vibrations into sound and light, weight and color, taste and smell, temperature and texture, until finally they generate elaborate patterns of signs and symbols of great interior consistency. When these mesh with the environment it becomes possible to describe the world in terms of sign patterns. The world is thus transformed into thought in the same way that food was transformed into body. The agreement or consistency of body pattern or thought pattern with the pattern of the world goes on as long as it goes on. To say why it starts or stops is only to describe particular consistencies or inconsistencies.

To say that there is no necessity for things to happen as they do is perhaps another way of saying that the world is play. But this idea is an affront to common sense because the basic rule of human societies is that one must be consistent. If you want to belong to our society, you must play our game — or, simply, if we are going to be consistent, we must be consistent. The conclusion is substituted for the premise. But this is understandable because, as we have seen, human society is so complex and volatile that consistency is difficult to maintain. Children keep slipping out of the patterns of behavior that we try to impose upon them, and for this and similar reasons our social conventions have to be maintained by force. The first rule of the game, put in another way, is that the game must continue, that the survival of the society is necessary. But we must not lose sight of the fact that the consistencies or regularities of nature are patterns that do occur, not patterns that must occur. Natural events do not obey commandments in the same way that human beings obey the law.*

Or put in still other words, the first rule of the game is that this game is serious, i.e., is not a game. This might be called the primordial “repression.” By this I do not mean that it is an event at the temporal beginnings of human life, but rather that it may be our most deeply ingrained social attitude. But just as soon as we feel that certain things, such as survival, are serious necessities, life becomes problematic in a very special sense quite different from, say, the problems of chess or of science. Life and problem become the same; the human situation becomes a predicament for which there is no solution. Man then behaves as a self-frustrating organism, and this behavior can be seen in many different ways. For example, one of our greatest assets for survival is our sense of time, our marvelously sensitive memory, which enables us to predict the future from the pattern of the past. Yet awareness of time ceases to be an asset when concern for the future makes it almost impossible to live fully in the present, or when increasing knowledge of the future makes it increasingly certain that beyond a brief span we have no future. If, too, man’s growing sensitivity requires that he become more and more aware of himself as an individual, if social institutions are designed more and more to foster the unique person, not only are we in great danger of overpopulating but also we are betting and concentrating upon man in his most vulnerable and impermanent form.*

This self-frustrating activity is samsara, the vicious circle from which the ways of liberation propose release. Release depends upon becoming aware of that primordial repression which is responsible for the feeling that life is a problem, that it is serious, that it must go on. It has to be seen that the problem we are trying to solve is absurd. But this means far more than mere resignation to fate, far more than the stoic despair of recognizing that human life is a losing battle with the chaos of nature. That would amount only to seeing that the problem has no solution. We should then simply withdraw from it and sit aloof in a kind of collective psychosis. The point is not that the problem has no solution, but that it is so meaningless that it need not be felt as a problem. To quote Wittgenstein again:

For an answer which cannot be expressed the question too cannot be expressed. The riddle does not exist. If a question can be put at all, then it can also be answered. . . .For doubt can only exist where there is a question; a question only where there is an answer, and this only where something can be said. We feel that even if all possible scientific questions be answered, the problems of life have still not been touched at all. Of course there is then no question left, and just this is the answer. The solution of the problem of life is seen in the vanishing of this problem. (Is not this the reason why men to whom after long doubting the sense of life became clear, could not then say wherein this sense consisted?)¹²

When a psychiatrist asked a Zen master how he dealt with neurotic people he replied, “I trap them!” “And just how do you trap them?” “I get them where they can’t ask any more questions!”

But the idea that human life need not be felt as a problem is so unfamiliar and seemingly implausible that we must go more deeply into the social origins of the problematic feeling. In the first place, the opposition of human order to natural chaos is false. To say that there is no natural necessity is not to say that there is no natural order, no pattern or consistency, in the physical world. After all, man himself is part of the physical world, and so is his logic. But it should not be hard to see that the kind of order which we call logical or causal necessity is a subtype of order, a kind of order which appears in the world but is not characteristic of it as a whole. Similarly, the order of the rational integers 1, 2, 3, etc., is in the world, but mathematics would be a poor tool for describing the world if it were confined to simple arithmetic. We could say that the order of probability describes the world better than the order of causality. This is the same sort of truth as that a man with a saw can cut wood better than a man with a stone ax. The world is to us as we have means of assimilating it: patterns of thought-language in whose terms we can describe it. Yet these patterns are physical events, just as much as those which they describe. The point is surely that the world has no fixed order. We could almost say that the world is ordering itself ever more subtly both by means of and as the behaviors of living organisms.

We saw that primitive organisms consist with their environments by the transformation of food, etc., into the patterns of their bodies. This can be put the other way around by saying that environments consist with organisms by being of such a nature that this is possible. Ecologists speak of the evolution of the environment as well as the evolution of the organism. As Dewey and Bentley,¹³ Angyal,¹⁴ Brunswik,¹⁵ and many others 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 and the boiling of our emotions remain the same whether the scale lies between 0 and 100 centigrade or 32 and 212 Fahrenheit. At the same time, a contest between virtue and vice may remain as important as the contest between group A and group B. To see this, however, is to understand that the contest is a game.

All classification seems to require a division of the world. As soon as there is a class, there is what is inside it and what is outside it. In and out, yes and no, are explicitly exclusive of one another. They are formally opposed, like group A and its enemy, group B; good and bad; virtue and vice. The separation between them seems to be as clear-cut as that between a solid and a space, a figure and its background. The separation, the difference, is therefore what we notice; it fits the notation of language, and because it is noted and explicit it is conscious and unrepressed. But there is also something unnoticed and ignored, which does not fit the notation of the language, and which because it is unnoted and implicit is unconscious and repressed. This is that the inside and the outside of the class go together and cannot do without each other. “To be and not to be” arise mutually. Beneath the contest lies friendship; beneath the serious lies the playful; beneath the separation of the individual and the world lies the field pattern. In this pattern every push from within is at the same time a pull from without, every explosion an implosion, every outline an inline, arising mutually and simultaneously so that it is always impossible to say from which side of a boundary any movement begins. The individual no more acts upon the world than the world upon the individual. The cause and the effect turn out to be integral parts of the same event.

Wrestling as we are with languages whose forms resist and screen out insights of this kind, it is understandable that at present this view is only hypothetical in the behavioral sciences however well verified it may be in the physical. This is perhaps due in part to the fact that it is much easier to describe pure process and pattern in mathematics than in words, with their subjects, verbs, and predicates, their agents and acts. But we have not as yet gone very far in the mathematical description of living behavior. Yet it is not so hard to imagine a language which might describe all that man “is” and does as doing. After all, we can speak of a group of homes as housing without feeling impelled to ask, “What is it that is housing?” I do not think that such a language would be impoverished, any more than the sciences are impoverished through having given up such mysterious entities as the ether, the humors, phlogiston, and the planetary spheres. On the contrary, a language would be greatly enriched by making it easier for us to understand relationships which our present languages conceal. Described simply as pattern in motion, the mystery of what acts and what is acted upon, of how the cause issues in the effect, would be as easy as seeing the relationship between the concave and convex sides of a curve. Which side comes first?

The difficulty, however, is not so much in finding the language as in overcoming social resistance. Would it really do to find out that our game is not serious, that enemies are friends, and that the good thrives on the evil? Society as we know it seems to be a tacit conspiracy to keep this hushed up for fear that the contest will otherwise cease. If these opposites are not kept fiercely separate and antagonistic, what motivation will there be for the creative struggle between them? If man does not feel himself at war with nature, will there be any further impetus to technological progress? Imagine how the Christian conscience would react to the idea that, behind the scenes, God and the Devil were the closest friends but had taken opposite sides in order to stage a great cosmic game. Yet this is rather much how things stood when the Book of Job was written, for here Satan is simply the counsel for the prosecution in the court of Heaven, as faithful a servant of the court as the advocatus diaboli at the Vatican.*

The problem is, of course, that if men are patterns of action and not agents, and if the individual and the world act with each other, mutually, so that action does not originate in either, who is to be blamed when things go wrong? Can the police then come around asking, “Who started this?” The convention of the individual as the responsible, independent agent is basic to almost all our social and legal structures. Acceptance of this role or identity is the chief criterion of sanity, and we feel that if anyone is reducible to actions or behaviors with nobody doing them, he must be no more than a soulless mechanism. Indeed, there is at first glimpse an element of terror in this universe of pure activity; there seems to be no point from which to make a decision, to begin anything. It is not at all unlikely that some kind of slip into this way of feeling things may sometimes touch off a psychotic break, for the individual might well feel that he had lost control of everything and could no longer trust himself or others to behave consistently. But supposing one understood in the first place that this is the way things are anyhow, the experience itself would be far less unnerving. In practice it happens that just as soon as one gets used to this feeling and is not afraid of it, it is possible to go on behaving as rationally as ever — but with a remarkable sense of lightness.

Setting aside, for the time being, the moral and ethical implications of this view of man, it seems to have the same sort of advantage over the ordinary view that the Copernican solar system has over the Ptolemaic. It is so much simpler, even though it means giving up the central position of the earth. This is, moreover, the kind of simplicity which is fruitful rather than diminishing: it leads to further possibilities of play, greater richness of articulation. On the other hand, the ordinary conventional view seems increasingly to fail in what it purports to achieve.

One of the best accounts of the social and conventional character of the ego is in the work of George Herbert Mead.¹⁹ He points out that the difference between the social and the biological theories of the origin of individual self-consciousness corresponds to the difference between evolutionary and contract theories of the origin of the state. In the latter, discredited view the social community is formed by deliberate contract between self-conscious persons. He reasons, however, that the individual cannot become an object to himself by himself, and in any case no animate individuals have ever existed by themselves.

The view that mind [ i.e., the ego] is a congenital biological endowment of the individual organism does not really enable us to explain its nature and origin at all: neither what sort of biological endowment it is, nor how organisms at a certain level of evolutionary progress come to possess it.²⁰

He goes on to show that the “I,” the biological individual, can become conscious of itself only in terms of the “me,” but that this latter is a view of itself given to it by other people.

The individual enters as such into his own experience only as an object, not as a subject; and he can enter as an object only on the basis of social relations and interactions, only by means of his experiential transactions with other individuals in an organized social environment. . . only by taking the attitudes of others towards himself — is he able to become an object to himself.²¹

As a result the mind, or psychological structure of the individual, cannot be identified with some entity inside his skin.

If mind is socially constituted, then the field or locus of any given individual mind must extend as far as the social activity or apparatus of social relations which constitutes it extends; and hence that field cannot be bounded by the skin of the individual organism to which it belongs.²²

And that is just the paradox of the situation: society gives us the idea that the mind, or ego,* is inside the skin and that it acts on its own apart from society.

Here, then, is a major contradiction in the rules of the social game. The members of the game are to play as if they were independent agents, but they are not to know that they are just playing as if! It is explicit in the rules that the individual is self-determining, but implicit that he is so only by virtue of the rules. Furthermore, while he is defined as an independent agent, he must not be so independent as not to submit to the rules which define him. Thus he is defined as an agent in order to be held responsible to the group for “his” actions. The rules of the game confer independence and take it away at the same time, without revealing the contradiction.

This is exactly the predicament which Gregory Bateson²³ calls the “double-bind,” in which the individual is called upon to take two mutually exclusive courses of action and at the same time is prevented from being able to comment on the paradox. You are damned if you do and damned if you don’t, and you mustn’t realize it. Bateson has suggested that the individual who finds himself in a family situation which imposes the double-bind upon him in an acute form is liable to schizophrenia.* For if he cannot comment on the contradiction, what can he do but withdraw from the field? Yet society does not allow withdrawal; the individual must play the game. As Thoreau said, wherever you may seek solitude men will ferret you out “and compel you to belong to their desperate company of oddfellows.” Thus in order to withdraw, the individual must imply that he is not withdrawing, that his withdrawal is happening, and that he cannot help himself. In other words, he must “lose his mind” and become insane.

But as “genius is to madness close allied,” the schizophrenic withdrawal is a caricature of liberation, including even the “lamasery” of the insane asylum or the peculiarly exempt status of the old-fashioned village idiot. As the terminology of Zen Buddhism implies, the liberated man also has “no mind” (wu-hsin) and does not feel himself to be an agent, a doer of deeds. So also it is said in the Bhagavadgita:

The man who is united with the Divine and knows the truth thinks “I do nothing at all,” for in seeing, hearing, touching, smelling, tasting, walking, sleeping, breathing; in speaking, emitting, grasping, opening and closing the eyes he holds that only the senses are occupied with the objects of the senses.²⁴

But in liberation this comes to pass not through an unconscious compulsion but through insight, through understanding and breaking the double-bind which society imposes. One does not then get into the position of not being able to play the game; one can play it all the better for seeing that it is a game.

The schizophrenic withdrawal affects a minority, and it occurs in circumstances in which the double-bind imposed by society in general is compounded by special types of double-bind peculiar to a special family situation.* The rest of us are in differing degrees of neurosis, tolerable to the extent to which we can forget the contradiction thrust upon us, to which we can “forget ourselves” by absorption in hobbies, mystery novels, social service, television, business, and warfare. Thus it is hard to avoid the conclusion that we are accepting a definition of sanity which is insane, and that as a result our common human problems are so persistently insoluble that they add up to the perennial and universal “predicament of man,” which is attributed to nature, to the Devil, or to God himself.

If what has been said up to this point is intelligible, it is only partly so; otherwise the reader would have been liberated forthwith! As I have suggested, there are unavoidable verbal difficulties even in describing the paradox we are in, let alone in describing the actual field pattern in which human life takes place. The trouble is that we are describing the difficulty with the very language structure that gets us into it. It has to say, “We are describing” and “Gets us into it,” confirming at every step the reality of the agent-entity presumed to stand behind the activity, or to be enduring it when it is understood to be coming from some other source. Common sense balks at the notion of action without agent just as it balks at the idea of pattern without substance, whether material or mental. But 1 + 2 = 3 and x – y = z are intelligible statements of relation without our having to ask what any of the symbols stand for, whether things or events, solids or spaces.

Thus the whole difficulty of both psychotherapy and liberation is that the problems which they address lie in the social institutions in whose terms we think and act. No cooperation can be expected from an individual ego which is itself the social institution at the root of the trouble. But these institutions are observable; we do not have to ask, “By whom?” They are observable here, for, as William James pointed out, “The word ‘I’ . . . is primarily a noun of position like ‘this’ and ‘here.’”²⁵ If they are observable they are subject to comment, and it is the ability to comment upon it that breaks the double-bind. On the one hand, social institutions like the grid of language create, or better, translate, the world in their terms, so that the world — life itself — appears to be self-contradictory if the terms are self-contradictory. On the other hand, social institutions do not create the world ex nihilo. They are in and of the pattern of nature which they in turn represent or misrepresent.

The pattern of nature can be stated only in terms of a language; but it can be shown in terms of, say, sense perceptions. For a society whose number system is only “1, 2, 3, many,” it cannot be a fact that we have ten fingers, and yet all the fingers are visible. People who know, for whom it is a fact, that they are egos or that the sun goes around the earth can be shown that their facts are wrong by being persuaded to act consistently upon them. If you know that the earth is flat, sail consistently in one direction until you fall off the edge. Similarly, if you know that you are an independent agent, do something quite independently, be deliberately spontaneous, and show me this agent.

That there is a pattern of nature can be shown; what it is can be stated, and we can never be certain that what we have stated is finally correct because there is nothing about which we can act consistently forever. But when we are employing institutions in whose terms we cannot act consistently, we may be sure either that they are self-contradictory or that they do not fit the pattern of nature. Self-contradictions which are not observed and patterns of nature which the language screens out are, in psychological terms, unconscious and repressed. Social institutions are then in conflict with the actual pattern of the man-in-the-world, and this comes out as distress in the individual organism, which cannot be inconsistent with itself or with nature without ceasing to exist. Freud was therefore right as far as he went in tracing neurosis to the conflict between sexual feeling and the peculiar sexual mores of Western cultures. But he was only scratching the surface. For one thing, his view of the sexual “instinct” itself was heavily conditioned by those very mores. As Philip Rieff has said:

Not only did Freud employ sexuality to deflate the pride of civilized man, he further defined it pejoratively by those qualities which make the sexual instinct intractable to a civilized sensibility. . . .While urging, for the sake of our mental health, that we dispense with such childish fantasies of purity as are epitomized in the belief that Mother (or Father) was too nice to have done those nasty things, Freud at the same time comes to the tacit understanding that sex really is nasty, an ignoble slavery to nature.²⁶

For another, Freud’s interpretation of the id and its libido as blind and brutish urges was simply a reflection of the current philosophy that the world is basically “mere” energy, a sort of crude volatile stuff, rather than organic pattern — which is, after all, another name for intelligence.

But what our social institutions repress is not just the sexual love, the mutuality, of man and woman, but also the still deeper love of organism and environment, of Yes and No, and of all those so-called opposites represented in the Taoist symbol of the yang-yin, the black and white fishes in eternal intercourse. It is hardly stretching a metaphor to use the word “love” for intimate relationships beyond those between human organisms. In those states of consciousness called “mystical” we have, I believe, a sudden slip into an inverse or obverse of the view of the world given in our divisive language forms. Where this slip is not, as in schizophrenia, a tortured withdrawal from conflict, the change of consciousness again and again brings the overwhelming impression that the world is a system of love. Everything fits into place in an indescribable harmony — indescribable because paradoxical in the terms which our language provides.

Now our language forms, our grids of thought, are by no means wholly wrong. The differences and divisions in the world which they note are surely there to be seen. There are indeed some mere ghosts of language, but in the main the categories of language seem to be valid and indeed essential to any description of the world whatsoever — as far as they go. But a given language cannot properly express what is implicit in it — the unity of differences, the logical inseparability of light and darkness, Yes and No. The question is whether these logical implications correspond to physical relations. The whole trend of modern science seems to be establishing the fact that, for the most part, they do. Things must be seen together with the form of the space between them. As Ernst Cassirer said as long ago as 1923:

The new physical view proceeds neither from the assumption of a “space in itself,” nor of “matter” nor of “force in itself” — it no longer recognizes space, force and matter as physical objects separated from each other, but . . . only the unity of certain functional relations, which are differently designated according to the system of reference in which we express them.²⁷

While we must be careful not to overstress analogies between physics and human behavior, there must certainly be general principles in common between them. Compare what Cassirer said with Gardner Murphy:

I have believed for a long time that human nature is a reciprocity of what is inside the skin and what is outside; that it is definitely not “rolled up inside us” but our way of being one with our fellows and our world. I call this field theory.²⁸

The ways of liberation are of course concerned with making this so-called mystical consciousness the normal everyday consciousness. But I am more and more persuaded that what happens in their disciplines, regardless of the language in which it is described, is nothing either supernatural or metaphysical in the usual sense. It has nothing to do with a perception of something else than the physical world. On the contrary, it is the clear perception of this world as a field, a perception which is not just theoretical but which is also felt as clearly as we feel, say, that “I” am a thinker behind and apart from my thoughts, or that the stars are absolutely separate from space and from each other. In this view the differences of the world are not isolated objects encountering one another in conflict, but expressions of polarity. Opposites and differences have something between them, like the two faces of a coin; they do not meet as total strangers. When this relativity of things is seen very strongly, its appropriate affect is love rather than hate or fear.

Surely this is the way of seeing things that is required for effective psychotherapy. Disturbed individuals are, as it were, points in the social field where contradictions in the field break out. It will not do at all to confirm the contradictions from which they are suffering, for the psychiatrist to be the official representative of a sick system of institutions. The society of men with men and the larger ecological society of men with nature, however explicitly a contest, is implicitly a field — an agreement, a relativity, a game. The rules of the game are conventions, which again mean agreements. It is fine for us to agree that we are different from each other, provided we do not ignore the fact that we agreed to differ. We did not differ to agree, to create society by deliberate contract between originally independent parties. Furthermore, even if there is to be a battle, there must be a field of battle; when the contestants really notice this they will have a war dance instead of a war.

* In his superb essay “Human Law and the Laws of Nature,” in Vol. 2 of Science and Civilization in China, Joseph Needham has shown that, largely because of Taoist influence, Chinese thought has never confused the order of nature with the order of law. As a way of liberation Taoism, of course, brings to light the manner in which men project their social institutions upon the structure of the universe.

* This is perhaps comparable to a shift in the level of magnification so as to observe the individual members of a colony of microorganisms instead of its overall behavior.

* I, for example, as an “independent philosopher” could not possibly be saying what I am if I were really independent. “My” ideas are inseparable from what Northrop Frye calls “the order of words,” i.e., the total pattern of literature and discourse now being unfolded throughout the world.

* I find it, likewise, difficult to read the stories of the Last Supper without getting the impression that Jesus commanded Judas to betray him.

* Mead himself does not use the term “ego” in quite this sense, for he associates it with the “I” rather than with the “me.” But since he is also associating the “I” with the organism, this seems quite inconsistent, for the ego is almost invariably considered as something in the organism, like the chauffeur in a car, or a little man inside the head who thinks thoughts and sees sights. It is just this ego feeling that is the social construct.

* While he has assembled a good deal of evidence in support of this suggestion, he does not claim to have proved it. Other research is suggesting that schizophrenia may be explained chemically as a toxic condition, but the two points of view do not necessarily exclude each other. The stress induced by the double-bind situation could have something to do with generating the toxin.

* As when a mother requires her child to love her and yet withdraws from expressions of affection.