Small Arcs of Larger Circles: Framing through Other Patterns

by Nora Bateson

become familiar with processes that take place between disciplines instead of walling up their work within singular fields of study. These rogues have been shunned and rewarded in equal measurement.

crime; it gives the illusion of making life easier to make sense of and to control.

Could our habit of separating the world into parts, which we imagine gear together to function as wholes, be contributing to the segregation of ideas, people, ecologies, and more?

The habit of drawing divisions between natural processes, between cultures, or between disciplines, and believing that those divisions are necessary cogs in a purposeful mechanism is indeed useful, but only within limits.

Perhaps systems theory needs more dimensions.

Identity is also not singular in context.

Cultural identity is impossible to ignore, but equally impossible to pin down:

It is these paradoxes of defining characteristics within multiple contexts that bring another sort of clarity to our understanding.

While it may sound abstract to say life is transcontextual it is also the most basic practical understanding of nature, starting with our own existence as individuals.

The presuppositions are not in what is said or unsaid, but exist in the dimension of what it is possible to say, or to understand as having been said.

find the gap this fascist thinking squeaked though, I notice that thinking of life in terms of parts and wholes is assumed.

and also too sure of themselves...scientists are unsure

The socio-economic patterns we live in are deadly.

I have no doubt that the most desirable real estate in Europe ten years from now will be in the places where the integration of incoming refugee and immigrant groups was treated with the most grace.

Lately I have been asked to describe where I see hope for the future. Or, in fact if I see hope. I do. I see hope in the possibility of adding another ingredient to our stew of ideological notions about how we make sense of our world, and altering the flavor of that stew slightly.

life as mutual learning contexts.

war is also a parts and wholes activity

The existing word, ‘system,’ while useful in many cases, does not suggest the contextual fields of simultaneous learning that are necessary for life.

The notion of systems as an arrangement of parts and wholes has become a distraction from the new systemic vision,

evolution emerges in interrelationality, not in arrangement.

A jungle can be understood best as a conversation among its flora and fauna,

Greek words syn/sym (together) and mathesi, (to learn),

The downside is that the idea of things being arranged into ‘parts and wholes’ blinds us to the developing interactions that take place in life.

Vita (noun; plural: vitae): (Pronounced: veet-a and veet-eye) Any aspect of a living entity that, through interfaces of learning, forms a larger living entity or symmathesy. For example, the ‘members’ of a family, organs in the body, or flora and fauna in a forest.

The ability to perceive paradox, and avoid the impulse to choose a path down one side or the other, is essential for our future interactions with complex systems.

Instead of ‘parts’ and ‘wholes,’ let us think of vitae whose boundaries in a symmathesy act as interfaces of learning.

I love this!