Symmathesy, and the audacity of coining new words (Across the Sundering Seas, #20)
Hello again, readers! This post comes to you a couple days later than normal because I spent most of Saturday helping friends move from one apartment to another, in a city an hour away. Great workout, not so much with the having-time-to-write.
This week you can describe the theme as thinking about systems. Systems of all sorts: biological systems (if that’s even the right word for them), organizations, software… the kinds of things where the sum of the whole often has emergent properties that are functions of the way their individual elements compose and the nature of the boundaries between them: porous or sealed, flexible or firm.
I first bumped into the subject of today’s essay—Nora Bateson’s Symmathesy: A Word in Progress, published November 2015—a few years ago. I’m not sure exactly when. Sometime during my years in seminary. It had fallen off my radar, but I stumbled back onto it via a technical blog which uses the eponymous word in its site subtitle, and was reminded how much I like not just the essay (is that what this sprawling, wonderful thing is? I’m not sure) but also the ambition of the thing.
The word—a lovely little neologism—means “learning together.” Bateson attempts to bring together a coherent and distinctive description of the kinds of “systems” in which we find ourselves. And she coined the word because “system” with all its mechanical connotations seems quite inappropriate as a descriptor for the incredibly non-mechanistic way that living things interact with each other:
Biology, culture, and society are dependent at all levels upon the vitality of interaction they produce both internally and externally. A body, a family, a forest or a city can each be described as a buzzing hive of communication between and within its vitae. Together the organs of your body allow you to make sense of the world around you. A jungle can be understood best as a conversation among its flora and fauna, including the insects, the fungi of decay, and contact with humanity. Interaction is what creates and vitalizes the integrity of the living world. Over time the ongoing survival of the organisms in their environments requires that there be learning, and learning to learn, together. Gregory Bateson said, “The evolution is in the context.” So why don’t we have a word for mutual learning in living contexts?
And again:
It is difficult if not impossible to find a subject to study in the living world that is definable within a single context. Transcontextual research offers multiple descriptions of the way in which a ‘subject’ is nested in many contexts. This information provides descriptions of interactions that seem to erase the boundaries of what we might have previously considered to be parts and wholes. Medicine is entwined in culture, food, environmental conditions, education, economic stability, and more. Economy is formed through culture, transportation, resources, communication and media, education etc. To study the biological evolution of a pond it is imperative that other contexts in which the pond exists be included in the study. These might include the geological history of the region, human interaction (including food culture, sport culture, economics of tourism etc), chemical balance, weather patterns, concentrations of various species. Research without the study of multiple contexts renders the information about a given subject as though it were isolated from the many systems it is within, and therefore a great deal of data is not visible.
So, having butted up against a concept, a reality about reality that she doesn’t have a word for, Bateson did something rather daring: she coins a word. Symmathesy.
More on the word itself in a moment. I must first stop and marvel at the magnificent audacity of this, though! We get neologisms from popular culture sometimes, and crossovers from sub-dialects into the shared vernacular. But how often does someone just try to shove a word into existence, just because there is a hole in the language right where an idea is? We circumlocute instead, fill up that whole with long, ambulatory phrases that wander toward the center of what we’re trying to say. Sometimes that’s the best we can do. But careful coinage like this—getting right to the heart of the thing with a quick, precise leap—well, we don’t really do that very much in English.
Almost as much as the coining of the word, I love that Bateson managed to identify that kind of gap. We have a hard enough time seeing what’s right in front of us; seeing the gaps is an order of magnitude more difficult. One of the wonders of learning and studying deeply, it seems to me, is how digging deep can let us see those spaces between things we otherwise overlook. Can let us see, I say, not causes us to see because even with deep study there is no guarantee of that kind of insight. (And perhaps, to coin a neologism of my own, it is more like “outsight”: not so much seeing into the truth of a thing more clearly, but seeing outside our previous frames for the world.)
Back to symmathesy, though. Bateson offers a definition:
- Symmathesy
- noun: An entity composed by contextual mutual learning through interaction. This process of interaction and mutual learning takes place in living entities at larger or smaller scales of symmathesy.
- verb: to interact within multiple variables to produce a mutual learning context.
(I would tweak this slightly: the verb not symmathesy but symmathetize.)
Bateson gets at this via a whole variety of illustrations. From the point when she introduces the definition, in fact, she offers almost 10,000 words illustrating and illuminating this definition.
Just two of those, here—
At the level of food:
The complexity of this sort of inquiry [into contextual, multilayers systems] is daunting. If we are to study, for example, the way in which food impacts our lives, a multi-faceted study of ecology, culture, agriculture, economy, cross-generational communication, media and more must be brought to our study in a linking of interfaces that together provide a rigorous beginning place from which we may better understand what is on our plates. From that beginning position our inquiry into eating disorders, poverty and hunger, and the dangers of GMOs, can be approached in another fashion altogether. How do these contexts interface with one another?
And, at the level of our own bodies:
We need not look further than our own hand for an illustration of how multiple description increases the visibility of the necessary shift in our way of defining what a part is. Is a hand the thing at the end of your arm? What is a hand? A violinist has memory and ongoing learning in her hands. A sculptor has another sort of learning in his hands. We each have handwriting that is almost but never quite consistent. We know the touch of our partner. A deaf person uses the hand to express language. We gesture, we stroke, we sense, we know, we learn through our hands… So what is a hand?
A hand is a part of a human, in other words, but not in such a way as to be separable from a human being. My hand is me, and I am my hand, and my hand is part of me such that I could lose my hand and still be myself—if not without a real sense of alteration of myself!—and I learn through my hand, and my hand learns (how to type or play piano, for example), and I may not know exactly what my hand knows noetically, but surely the “I” that includes my hand still knows what my hand knows! The use of the word “being” in the phrase “human being” is very much more apt than I considered before first encountering Bateson’s long piece-of-thought/essay/blog post those years ago.
I could say more—much more—but instead I encourage you to read this whole long meditation on things-which-are-learning-together. And then we can symmathetize!