Alfred Korzybski

Alfred Korzybski
Born	(1879-07-03)July 3, 1879 Warsaw, Vistula Country, Russian Empire
Died	March 1, 1950(1950-03-01) (aged 70) Lakeville, Connecticut, USA
Occupation	Engineer, philosopher, mathematician
Influenced by	Ludwig Wittgenstein, Vienna Circle, Charles Sanders Peirce
Influenced	Jacque Fresco

Alfred Habdank Skarbek Korzybski ([kɔˈʐɨpski]) (July 3, 1879 – March 1, 1950) was a Polish-American philosopher and scientist. He is remembered for developing the theory of general semantics. Korzybski's work argued that human knowledge of the world is limited both by the human nervous system and by the structure of language.

Korzybski thought that people do not have access to direct knowledge of reality; rather they have access to perceptions and to a set of beliefs which human society has confused with direct knowledge of reality. Korzybski is remembered as the author of the dictum: "The map is not the territory".

Early life and career

Alfred Korzybski's family coat-of-arms

(List of Polish coats of arms Abdank coat of arms)

Korzybski was born in Warsaw, Poland which at that time was part of the Russian Empire. He was part of an aristocratic Polish family whose members had worked as mathematicians, scientists, and engineers for generations. He learned the Polish language at home and the Russian language in schools; and having a French governess and a German governess, he became fluent in these four languages as a child.

Korzybski was educated at the Warsaw University of Technology in engineering. During the First World War Korzybski served as an intelligence officer in the Russian Army. After being wounded in a leg and suffering other injuries, he moved to North America in 1916 (first to Canada, then the United States) to coordinate the shipment of artillery to Russia. He also lectured to Polish-American audiences about the conflict, promoting the sale of war bonds. After the War, he decided to remain in the United States, becoming a naturalized citizen in 1940. He met Mira Edgerly, a painter of portraits on ivory, shortly after the Armistice, and married her in January, 1919. Their marriage lasted until his death.

His first book, Manhood of Humanity, was published in 1921. In the book, he proposed and explained in detail a new theory of humankind: mankind as a "time-binding" class of life (humans perform time binding by the transmission of knowledge and abstractions through time which are accreted in cultures).

General semantics

Korzybski's work culminated in the initiation of a discipline that he named general semantics (GS). As Korzybski said, GS should not be confused with semantics, a different subject. The basic principles of general semantics, which include time-binding, are described in the publication Science and Sanity, published in 1933. After the publication of Science and Sanity he traveled about teaching briefly in many schools and universities. In 1938 Korzybski founded the Institute of General Semantics in Chicago. The post-World War II housing shortage in Chicago cost him the Institute's building lease, so in 1946, he moved the Institute to Lakeville, Connecticut, USA, where he directed it until his death in 1950.

Korzybski's work maintained that human beings are limited in what they know by (1) the structure of their nervous systems, and (2) the structure of their languages. Human beings cannot experience the world directly, but only through their "abstractions" (nonverbal impressions or "gleanings" derived from the nervous system, and verbal indicators expressed and derived from language). Sometimes our perceptions and our languages actually mislead us as to the "facts" with which we must deal. Our understanding of what is happening sometimes lacks similarity of structure with what is actually happening.

He stressed training in awareness of abstracting, using techniques that he had derived from his study of mathematics and science. He called this awareness, this goal of his system, "consciousness of abstracting".

His system included modifying the way we consider the world, e.g., with an attitude of "I don't know; let's see," to better discover or reflect its realities as revealed by modern science. One of these techniques involved becoming inwardly and outwardly quiet, an experience that he termed, "silence on the objective levels".

"To be"

Many devotees and critics of Korzybski reduced his rather complex system to a simple matter of what he said about the verb "to be." His system, however, is based primarily on such terminology as the different "orders of abstraction," and formulations such as "consciousness of abstracting." It is often said that Korzybski opposed the use of the verb "to be," which is an exaggeration (see "Criticisms" below).

He thought that certain uses of the verb "to be", called the "is of identity" and the "is of predication", were faulty in structure, e.g., a statement such as, "Elizabeth is a fool" (said of a person named "Elizabeth" who has done something that we regard as foolish). In Korzybski's system, one's assessment of Elizabeth belongs to a higher order of abstraction than Elizabeth herself. Korzybski's remedy was to deny identity; in this example, to be aware continually that "Elizabeth" is not what we call her. We find Elizabeth not in the verbal domain, the world of words, but the nonverbal domain (the two, he said, amount to different orders of abstraction). This was expressed by Korzybski's most famous premise, "the map is not the territory". Note that this premise uses the phrase "is not", a form of "to be"; this and many other examples show that he did not intend to abandon "to be" as such. In fact, he said explicitly that there were no structural problems with the verb "to be" when used as an auxiliary verb or when used to state existence or location.

It was even all right sometimes to use the faulty forms of the verb "to be," as long as one was aware of their structural limitations. This was developed into the language "E-Prime" by one of his students 15 years after his death (E-Prime a form of the English language in which the verb "to be" does not appear in any of its forms; for example, the sentence "the movie was good" could translate into E-Prime as "I liked the movie", thereby distinguishing opinion from fact).

Anecdotes

One day, Korzybski was giving a lecture to a group of students, and he interrupted the lesson suddenly in order to retrieve a packet of biscuits, wrapped in white paper, from his briefcase. He muttered that he just had to eat something, and he asked the students on the seats in the front row if they would also like a biscuit. A few students took a biscuit. "Nice biscuit, don't you think," said Korzybski, while he took a second one. The students were chewing vigorously. Then he tore the white paper from the biscuits, in order to reveal the original packaging. On it was a big picture of a dog's head and the words "Dog Cookies." The students looked at the package, and were shocked. Two of them wanted to vomit, put their hands in front of their mouths, and ran out of the lecture hall to the toilet. "You see," Korzybski remarked, "I have just demonstrated that people don't just eat food, but also words, and that the taste of the former is often outdone by the taste of the latter."

William Burroughs went to a Korzybski workshop in the Autumn of 1939. He was 25 years old, and paid $40. His fellow students—there were 38 in all—included young Samuel I. Hayakawa (later to become a Republican member of the U.S. Senate), Ralph Moriarty deBit (later to become the spiritual teacher Vitvan) and Wendell Johnson (founder of the Monster Study).

Reception

See also: General Semantics#Criticism

Korzybski's work influenced Rational Emotive Behavior Therapy, and Neuro-linguistic programming (especially the Meta model, Korzybski's critique of cause-effect thinking, and ideas behind human modeling for performance). As reported in the Third Edition of Science and Sanity, The U.S. Army in World War II used his system to treat battle fatigue in Europe with the supervision of Dr. Douglas M. Kelley, who also became the psychiatrist in charge of the Nazi prisoners at Nuremberg. Other individuals influenced by Korzybski include Alejandro Jodorowsky, Kenneth Burke, William S. Burroughs, Frank Herbert, Albert Ellis, Gregory Bateson, John Grinder, Buckminster Fuller, Moshe Feldenkrais, Douglas Engelbart, Stuart Chase, Alvin Toffler, Robert A. Heinlein (Korzybski is mentioned in the 1940 short story "Blowups Happen" and the 1949 novella Gulf), L.Ron Hubbard, A. E. van Vogt, Robert Anton Wilson, Alan Watts, entertainer Steve Allen, and Tommy Hall (lyricist for the 13th Floor Elevators); and scientists such as William Alanson White (psychiatry), physicist P. W. Bridgman, and researcher W. Horsley Gantt (a former student and colleague of Pavlov). He also influenced the Belgian surrealist writer of comics Jan Bucquoy in the seventh part of the comics series Jaunes: Labyrinthe, with explicit reference in the plot to Korzybski's "the map is not the territory".

Some of the General Semantics tradition was continued by Samuel I. Hayakawa, who did have a dispute with Korzybski. When asked because of what, Hayakawa is said to have replied: "Words."^{[citation needed]}

Quotation

• "There are two ways to slide easily through life: to believe everything or to doubt everything; both ways save us from thinking."

See also

• General Semantics
• The map is not the territory
• Structural differential
• E-Prime
• Institute of General Semantics
• Robert Pula
• Alfred Korzybski Memorial Lecture

References

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Further reading

• Kodish, Bruce. 2011. Korzybski: A Biography. Pasadena, CA: Extensional Publishing. ISBN 978-0-9700664-0-4 softcover, 978-09700664-28 hardcover.
• Kodish, Bruce and Susan Presby Kodish. 2011. Drive Yourself Sane: Using the Uncommon Sense of General Semantics, Third Edition. Pasadena, CA: Extensional Publishing. ISBN 978-0-9700664-1-1
• Alfred Korzybski, Manhood of Humanity, foreword by Edward Kasner, notes by M. Kendig, Institute of General Semantics, 1950, hardcover, 2nd edition, 391 pages, ISBN 0-937298-00-X. (Copy of the first edition)
• Science and Sanity: An Introduction to Non-Aristotelian Systems and General Semantics, Alfred Korzybski, Preface by Robert P. Pula, Institute of General Semantics, 1994, hardcover, 5th edition, ISBN 0-937298-01-8, (full text online)
• Alfred Korzybski, Collected Writings 1920-1950, Institute of General Semantics, 1990, hardcover, ISBN 0-685-40616-4
• Montagu, M. F. A. (1953). Time-binding and the concept of culture. The Scientific Monthly, Vol. 77, No. 3 (Sep., 1953), pp. 148–155.
• Murray, E. (1950). In memoriam: Alfred H. Korzybski. Sociometry, Vol. 13, No. 1 (Feb., 1950), pp. 76–77.

External links

• Manhood of Humanity at Project Gutenberg
• Science and Sanity Complete work online.
• Alfred Korzybski and Gestalt Therapy Website
• Institute of General Semantics