Alfred Habdank Skarbek Korzybski (July 3, 1879 – March 1, 1950) was a Polish-American philosopher and scientist. He is most remembered for developing the theory of general semantics.
Early life and career
He was born in Warsaw, Congress Poland. He came from an aristocratic family whose members had worked as mathematicians, scientists, and engineers for generations. He learned Polish at home and Russian in the schools; and having a French governess and a German governess, he became fluent in four languages as a child. As an adult, he chose to train as an engineer.
Korzybski was educated at the Warsaw University of Technology. During the First World War Korzybski served as an intelligence officer in the Russian Army. After being wounded in his leg and suffering other injuries, he came to North America in 1916 (first to Canada, then the United States) to coordinate the shipment of artillery to the war front. He also lectured to Polish-American audiences about the conflict, promoting the sale of war bonds. Following the war, he decided to remain in the United States, becoming a naturalized citizen in 1940. 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.
Korzybski's work culminated in the founding of a discipline that he called general semantics
(GS). As Korzybski explicitly said, GS should not be confused with semantics
, a different subject. The basic principles of general semantics, which include time-binding, are outlined in Science and Sanity
, published in 1933. In 1938 Korzybski founded the Institute of General Semantics
and directed it until his death in Lakeville, Connecticut
Korzybski's work held a view 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 going on sometimes lacks similarity of structure with what is actually going on. 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 approach the world, e.g., with an attitude of "I don't know; let's see," to better discover or reflect its realities as shown by modern science. One of these techniques involved becoming inwardly and outwardly quiet, an experience that he called, "silence on the objective levels."
Korzybski and to be
Many supporters 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," an unfortunate 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, "Joe is a fool" (said of a person named 'Joe' who has done something that we regard as foolish). In Korzybski's system, one's assessment of Joe belongs to a higher order of abstraction than Joe himself. Korzybski's remedy was to deny
identity; in this example, to be continually aware that 'Joe' is not
what we call
him. We find Joe 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 in 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 expressly said 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 'OK' 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 E-prime
by one of his students 15 years after his death.
Anecdote about Korzybski
One day, Korzybski was giving a lecture to a group of students, and he suddenly interrupted the lesson 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 throw up, put their hands in front of their mouths, and ran out of the lecture hall to the toilet. "You see, ladies and gentlemen", 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." Apparently his prank aimed to illustrate how some human suffering originates from the confusion or conflation of linguistic representations of reality and reality itself.
See the criticism section
of the main General Semantics article.
Korzybski's work influenced Gestalt Therapy
, Rational Emotive Behavior Therapy
, and Neuro-linguistic programming
(especially the Meta model
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 under 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 Kenneth Burke
, William S. Burroughs
, Frank Herbert
, Albert Ellis
, Gregory Bateson
, John Grinder
, Buckminster Fuller
, Douglas Engelbart
, Stuart Chase
, Alvin Toffler
, Robert A. Heinlein
(Korzybski is mentioned in the 1949 novella Gulf
), L. Ron Hubbard
, A. E. van Vogt
, Robert Anton Wilson
, 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
, with explicit reference in the plot to Korzybski's "the map is not the territory
In part the General Semantics tradition was upheld by Samuel I. Hayakawa, who did have a falling out with Korzybski. When asked over what, Hayakawa is said to have replied: "Words".
- Manhood of Humanity, Alfred Korzybski, forward 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.