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<p>Modern <i>Homo sapiens</i> face multiple existential crises, including ecological breakdown and civilisational disorientation. While Gregory Bateson and Martin Heidegger each diagnosed the pathological self‑understanding underpinning these crises, existing scholarship has not integrated their insights into a unified explanatory framework. This paper fills that gap by proposing the <i>Alcoholic mode</i>: a recursive pattern of system–milieu interaction in which a system, acting on the flawed premise of a transcendent “I” (a self conceived as an independent entity of control), generates from its own operations the need for correction and the conditions for it, thereby locking itself into an escalating loop that ends in collapse. The study argues that <i>Homo sapiens</i>, as a species with no privileged status within the natural order, has become trapped in a <i>pathological control loop</i> with the world owing to its transcendent essentialist self‑understanding, and may therefore be described as an <i>alcoholic species</i>. Drawing on Bateson’s cybernetic epistemology and Heidegger’s ontology, it traces the internal logic of this loop and its ecological manifestations. To escape this loop, <i>Homo sapiens</i> must cultivate two interrelated existential stances: <i>releasement</i> (<i>Gelassenheit</i>), Heidegger’s term for a non‑willing, non‑dominating openness to the world, and <i>flexibility</i>, which Bateson defines as a system’s uncommitted potential for change, or positive entropy. Together, these two stances offer a path beyond the twin dead ends of technocratic managerialism and theological redemption, pointing toward an ecological understanding of mind as immanent in the organism‑milieu circuit and toward a freedom that requires no transcendent guarantee.</p>

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Get out of the pathological control loop: Heidegger, Bateson, and the existential crisis of Homo sapiens

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  • 发表日期：

    2026年8月5日

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  • Jiaqi Wu

摘要

Modern Homo sapiens face multiple existential crises, including ecological breakdown and civilisational disorientation. While Gregory Bateson and Martin Heidegger each diagnosed the pathological self‑understanding underpinning these crises, existing scholarship has not integrated their insights into a unified explanatory framework. This paper fills that gap by proposing the Alcoholic mode: a recursive pattern of system–milieu interaction in which a system, acting on the flawed premise of a transcendent “I” (a self conceived as an independent entity of control), generates from its own operations the need for correction and the conditions for it, thereby locking itself into an escalating loop that ends in collapse. The study argues that Homo sapiens, as a species with no privileged status within the natural order, has become trapped in a pathological control loop with the world owing to its transcendent essentialist self‑understanding, and may therefore be described as an alcoholic species. Drawing on Bateson’s cybernetic epistemology and Heidegger’s ontology, it traces the internal logic of this loop and its ecological manifestations. To escape this loop, Homo sapiens must cultivate two interrelated existential stances: releasement (Gelassenheit), Heidegger’s term for a non‑willing, non‑dominating openness to the world, and flexibility, which Bateson defines as a system’s uncommitted potential for change, or positive entropy. Together, these two stances offer a path beyond the twin dead ends of technocratic managerialism and theological redemption, pointing toward an ecological understanding of mind as immanent in the organism‑milieu circuit and toward a freedom that requires no transcendent guarantee.