My reader J has said "I'm not very interested in time-binding..." He must have a lot of patience since I have given over a great deal of this blog space so far to discussing time-binding. I'm asking J and others who may feel similarly to have even a bit more patience with me.
Having now spent more than four years working on a biography of Korzybski (getting near completion now), I have felt obligated to deal with time-binding in some depth and detail, since (in his own eyes) it played such an important role in the development of his work. He devoted his first book, Manhood of Humanity, to the notion. And, as he said on numerous occasions, all of his subsequent work—which he subsequently called "general semantics" developed out of his efforts to clarify and elaborate the mechanism of time-binding, i.e., how time-binding worked.
He didn't talk or write much explicitly about time-binding after the 1933 publication of Science and Sanity, until the last few years of his life when he returned to the subject with renewed vigor. He had been working for some time on a new introduction to the Second Edition of Manhood but was unable to complete it before his death in March 1950.
Korzybski was very interested in time-binding. I have come to agree with Korzybski as to its importance. Because of this, I have felt compelled to spend a fair amount of time dealing with time-binding in my book and, as a result, in this blog.
But this only begins to touch on the question "So what?"
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