The Relationships Are More Important than the Elements

Da muss ich noch ein paar Zitate zu nachtragen, weil sie so schön sind.

„He who breaks a thing to find out what it is, has left the path of wisdom.“ (Gandalf the Grey / JRR Tolkien)

Und das aller schönste:

„The reason we had no idea how cats worked was because, since Newton, we had proceeded by the very simple principle that essentially, to see how things work, we took them apart. If you try to take a cat apart to see how it works, the first thing you have in your hands is a nonworking cat.“ (Douglas Adams: Is there an Artificial God?)

Und vielleicht sollte ich auch anmerken, dass Bateson, glaube ich, nie „The relationships are more important than the elements“ gesagt hat. Aber irgendjemandem muss ich es ja in die Schuhe schieben. Und ich habe es wirklich von ihm. Was er gesagt hat ist:

„(…) consider a blind man with a stick. Where does the blind man’s self begin? At the tip of the stick? At the handle of the stick? Or at some point halfway up the stick? These questions are nonsense, because the stick is a pathway along which differences are transmitted under transformation, so that to draw a delimiting line across this pathway is to cut off a part of the systemic circuit which determines the blind man’s locomotion.“ (Gregory Bateson)

und

„But I could not then see that the evolution of the horse from Eohippus was not a one-sided adjustment to life on grassy plains. Surely the grassy plains themselves were evolved pari passu [at an equal pace] with the evolution of the teeth and hooves of the horses (…). Turf was the evolving response of the vegetation to the evolution of the horse. It is the context which evolves.“

Aber dem fehlt natürlich der feine Humor von DNA.