Recensies

Review: Angels fear

Redactionele recensie - Kirkus Reviews

From the late, esteemed anthropologist/philosopher Bateson (Mind and Nature, Steps to an Ecology of Mind), ponderings on the immanence of the sacred in the natural world, edited and substantially added to by his anthropologist daughter (With a Daughter's Eye). Ms. Bateson states that this book, in progress when her father died, represents a radical step in his thought, a deliberate attempt to yoke the unity of nature affirmed in Mind and Nature with his new understanding of the sacred. (As such, she conscientiously demarcates with initials or brackets her own material from her father's.) The book features two modes of discourse: essays (mostly by Bateson); and ""metalogues"" (most written by his daughter), imagined dialogues between the two that amplify, the more rigorous and abstruse essays. Bateson builds his bridge to the sacred on two categories established by Jung: Plemora (the physical domain governed by forces: stones, for example) and Creatura (""the domain governed by distinctions and differences,"" life, for instance). He writes primarily of Creatura here, and through analogies and metaphors lapping into nature, mathematics, and poetry, argues in lively but dense ruminations that the sacred is evidenced in the hierarchy of relationships within Creatura. Front this base, the two authors digress on matters ranging from the Balinese view of death, to addiction, to psychic phenomena (which Bateson debunks), all the while rejecting both a solely material natural world and a nonmaterial spirituality, continually insisting on a sacred that is woven into and induciable from the very fabric of nature. Difficult reading, not for browsers; but Bateson-philes and those who hunger for the sacred will find here challenging food for thought.