A Snowball in Hell

This article reconsiders the role of aesthetic experience in Gregory Bateson’s work, reading Bateson’s accounts of the double bind and “the external pathways of the mind” alongside developments in brain-centered biological psychiatry. The article discusses Bateson’s response to these modernizing developments before examining one of his aesthetic engagements in detail. Noting that Bateson quotes the same line from Wordsworth’s much-maligned narrative poem Peter Bell twice, in two essays published in consecutive years and both later included in Steps to an Ecology of Mind, the author argues that Wordsworth’s Peter Bell becomes a counterexample for Bateson, a figure who stands opposed to the form of ecological thought that Bateson develops in his writings in the late 1960s and 1970s. Bateson suggests, with Wordsworth, that such a figure can be taught and that his indifference and insensibility need not be abiding or untreatable. But what would treatment or teaching mean in this context? Returning to Wordsworth’s poem with Bateson’s work in mind can help us answer this question and appreciate the implications of Bateson’s thought for contemporary aesthetic theory

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