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make clear is that I had no power in the matter. The series of events ran with
perfect smoothness and quite irresistibly, taking not the slightest notice of
whatever conscious views I may have had. Others may talk of freewill and
the individual's power to direct his life's story. My personal experience has
convinced me over and over again that my power of control is great—where
it doesn't matter: but at the important times, in the words of Freud, I do not
live but 'am lived.' ”
By the early 1950s, then, Ashby's understanding of himself and God and
his cybernetics all hung together, with questions of time and change as their
pivot. I take this as another instance of the fact that ontology makes a dif-
ference—here in the realm of spirituality and self-understanding, as well as
brain science and much else: time worship and “I am lived” as an ontology of
performative becoming in action.
19
The social basis of Ashby's Cybernetics
Turning from ontology to sociology, it is evident already that there are again
clear parallels between Ashby and Walter. Ashby was telling no more than
the truth when he described his early work—up to 1940, say—as having no
social basis, as “a hobby I could retreat to”: something pursued outside his
professional life, for his own enjoyment. Even after 1940, when he began to
publish, his work for a long time retained this extraprofessional, hobbyist
quality, very largely carried on in the privacy of his journals. In an obituary,
his student Roger Conant (1974, 4) speaks of Ashby building the homeostat
“of old RAF parts on Mrs Ashby's kitchen table” and of writing his two topics
“in Dr. Ashby's private padded cell” at Barnwood House.
20
When he did begin to publish his protocybernetic theorizing, Ashby sub-
mitted his work initially to the journals in which his earlier distinctively psy-
chiatric papers had appeared. His very first paper in this series (Ashby 1940)
appeared in the leading British journal for research on mental pathologies,
the
Journal of Mental Science
. It appears that there was no great response to
Ashby's work within this field, outside the narrow but important circle de-
fined by himself, Grey Walter, Frederick Golla, and G. W. T. H. Fleming, the
editor of the journal in question. And one can understand why this might have
been: clinical psychiatrists and psychologists were concerned with the practi-
cal problems of mental illness, and, besides its oddity as engineering, Ashby's
work sticks out like a sore thumb in the pages of the psychiatric journals—
his theoretical work offered little constructive input to psychiatric practice
(though more on this below).
