Oikos,The Incorruptible: The Ecological Reasons of the Sacred

In this article, I will show how the notion of ecology of mind developed by Gregory Bateson (1972, 1979; Bateson and Bateson 1987), constitutes a third way, with respect to those two trends that I have here called naturism and realism. I will try to show how Bateson's notion of ecology of mind (that sometimes I will call briefly ecosystemic) is closely linked to notions of epistemology and of the sacred, and how it can highlight potential complementarities between the realist and the naturist tendencies. The discussion will be divided into two parts: from ecology to the sacred, and from the sacred to ecology.