Alfred Korzybski

From Philosopedia

Korzybski, Alfred Habdank Skarbek (3 July 1879 - 1 March 1950)

A Polish linguist and mathematician, a Count before his American naturalization and the creator of “General Semantics,” Korzybski expanded semantics from its ordinary concern with only the meaning of words into a new system of understanding human behavior. “In the old construction of language,” he held, “you cannot talk sense.” Because of Aristotelian thinking habits, which he thought outmoded, men do not properly evaluate the world they talk about. As a consequence, words lose their accuracy as expressions of ideas, if ever they had such accuracy. Life, he explained, is composed of nonverbal facts, each differing from another and each forever changing. Too often, he contended, people get their thought-speech processes confused, so that they speak before observing and then react to their own remarks as if they were fact itself. General semantics, he explained, has to do with living, thinking, speaking, and the whole realm of human experiences. To say a rose “is” red,” for example, is a delusion because the red color is only the vibration of light waves. In 1921 his Manhood of Humanity—The Science and Art of Human Engineer caused a stir in the intellectual world. For one thing, his “time-binding theory” was explicitly non-theological in its premises. Science and Sanity, An Introduction to Non-Aristotelian Systems and General Semantics in 1933 was his landmark book. In it, he wrote,

When I was five years old, my father, an engineer, gave me the feel of the world’s most important scientific discoveries of the nineteenth century, which prepared the groundwork for the scientific achievements of the twentieth century and remain fundamentally valid today. The feel of the differential calculus, as well as non-euclidean and four-dimensional geometries, which he conveyed to me at that time shaped the future interests and orientations of my life, and became the foundation of my whole work.

. . . A functional analysis, free from the old mythological and zoological assumptions, showed that humans, with the most highly developed nervous systems, are uniquely characterized by the capacity of an individual or a generation to begin where the former left off. I called this essential capacity “time-binding.” This can be accomplished only by a class of life which uses symbols as means for time-binding. Such a capacity depends on and necessitates “intelligence,” means of communication, etc. On this inherently human level of interdependence time-binding leads inevitably to feelings of responsibility, duty toward others and the future, and therefore to some type of ethics, morals, and similar social and/or socio-cultural reactions. . . . The mechanisms of time-binding are exhibited in most humans except those with severe psycho-biological illnesses. However, some inaccessible dogmatists in power, particularly dictators of every kind, have blocked this capacity considerably. Clearly police states of secrecy, withholding from the people knowledge of, and from, the world, or twisting that knowledge to suit their purposes, “iron curtains,” etc., must be classified as saboteurs among time-binders, and certainly not a socio-cultural asset to the evolution of humanity. . . . .

Metaphysicians of many kinds or many creeds since time immemorial tried to solve the . . . perplexities by postulating different “prime movers” or “final causes,” beyond which the further “why” is ruled out as leading to the logically “verboten” “infinite regress.” Originally religions were polytheistic. Later, in the attempt for unification, perhaps to strengthen the power of the priesthood, and also because of the increasing ability of humans to make generalizations, monotheisms were invented, which have led to the most cruel religious wars. Different rulers, dictators, “fuehrers,” etc., have followed similar psycho-logical patterns with historically known destructive or constructive results. . . .

Religions and sciences are both expressions of our human search for security, and so predictability, for solace, guidance, feelings of “belonging,” etc., culminating in self-realization through a general “consciousness of abstracting,” the main aim of my work.

Although Korzybski joined no freethought or naturalistic humanist groups, he illustrated by his outlook that he was a non-theist as well as an anti-theist.

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