Learning the “language of connections”. The value of art in the thinking of Gregory Bateson

The current tendency to subordinate education to the needs of society, in other words to produce a ‘pragmatic’ knowledge which is useful in the context of global capitalism, often risks sacrificing the most authentic task of thinking: that is, as the philosopher Zizek suggests, «not only to offer solutions to problems posed by society, but to reflect on the actual form those problemsassume». A reflection on the ‘form’ of the problems, instead, leads us to the affirmation of a ‘Paideia of complexity’ founded on the cognitive idea of interdependence and on the attention to the afferent contexts and relational dynamics.Thus, in a complex framework the dominion of the technical-pragmatic knowledge appears to be insufficient because it is far removed from the actual nature of this framework (and as we shall soon see this concerns the social as well as the natural aspects of the living world). But above all its final aim and utilitarian objective is necessarily partial with regard to the concrete need for today’s subject to exert a critical and conscious thinking which helps him or her to interpret the different aspects of ‘what is real’.The ‘no man’s land’ in which we find ourselves is witnessing the end of an age which also requires pedagogical reflection to delineate new, more coherent paradigms that can respond to the challenges of the complex society. Just like other fields of knowledge, the pedagogical field is engaged in redefining its own telos to face the advance of a single thinking and of utilitarian pressures. Thus, for those of us who are engaged in education, what suggestions can we draw? It might be an approach to knowledge and to the processes of teachinglearning which is nourished by ‘other languages’ besides those of rationality, calculus, simplification. In other words, it is the need – we might even suggest it is a ‘natural’ need – to include the aesthetic languages (figurative art, dance, music, drama, cinema, literature, poetry…) in every educational process as ‘the languages of connection’. Not because they are better; not because they will ‘tame’ the left hemisphere (by continuing to respond to the logic of separation); but because in this necessary reform of thinking which we mentioned at the beginning of this article, they lead to a knowledge ‘through connections’ which is more in line with how the living world moves and with its complexity.