62nd Alfred Korzybski Memorial Lecture and GS Symposium- October 24-26, 2014

If you're in New York City or environs this weekend, the Institute of General Semantics is holding its annual Alfred Korzybski Memorial Lecture on Friday, October 24 featuring Jack El-Hai, author of a very interesting biography of one of Korzybski's students, psychiatrist Douglas M. Kelley, M. D. The lecture will be followed by a weekend symposium, Making Sense Through Time-Binding, which looks to have many thought-provoking presentations. Although I will not be going this year, many friends will attend, and if I lived closer I would definitely try to make it there.

Two of my friends from India will be honored with the J. Talbott Winchell Award for their work in promoting and teaching GS in India through the Balvant K. Parekh Centre for General Semantics and Other Human Sciences. Prafulla Kar, Director of the Centre, and Devkumar Trivedi will receive the award jointly. Professor Kar, the able administrator of the Centre's programs has developed a network of people and programs throughout India for teaching GS. Mr. Trivedi, a long time friend of the late Balvant K. Parekh—who introduced GS in modern times to India—is the lead Korzybskian-GS lecturer at the Centre's educational programs. My wife Susan and myself are among those who have previously received the prestigious Winchell Award and we both send our hearty congratulations to Prafulla and Dev for their well-deserved honor.

The Institute's 2014 Book Prize will go to Elizabeth Kolbert 
for her book The Sixth Extinction: An Unnatural History, a current look at depredations to the natural environment perhaps significantly caused by human action. Will the so-called sixth extinction include us? William Vogt, an early environmentalist noted for his book, The Road to Survival, applied GS in his 1948 analysis of ecological damage already taking place and was an early pioneer of environmentalism, a subject close to Korzybski's heart. So this book prize certainly seems appropriate for anyone interested in long term time-binding. Her book, which I haven't yet read, looks excellent. Congratulations to Elizabeth Kolbert, from an earlier Book Prize winner.  

Mary Lahman, Professor of Communication Studies at Manchester University and author of the book Awareness & Action: A General Semantics Approach to Effective Language Behavior will receive The 2014 Sanford I. Berman Award for Excellence in Teaching General Semantics. Dr. Lahman, worked with Professor Greg Thompson and former IGS Director, Steve Stockdale to produce a highly successful, free web-based GS course for the Canvas Network. Congratulations to Professor Lahman for her great contribution. 

I'm sorry that I won't be there to meet Jack El-Hai and hear him discuss his book, The Nazi and the Psychiatrist: Hermann Göring, Dr. Douglas M. Kelley, and a Fatal Meeting of Minds at the End of WWII. Kelley studied with Korzybski, before the war, and as I wrote in Helping Soldiers and Veterans Readjust did important work during World War II applying GS to rehabilitate soldiers in the European Theatre of War suffering from PTSD, what was then referred to as "combat exhaustion". Immediately after the war, Kelley still in the U.S. Army was assigned to the prison at Nuremberg to interview high level Nazi prisoners, like Herman Göring, being held there. Presumably, Kelley's job was to help ensure that the German prisoners stayed healthy enough to be able to attend their trial. Kelley saw his job as a psychiatrist mainly to study the men in order to understand what led them to commit their crimes. Kelley left after the first month of the trial. His book 22 Cells in Nuremberg: A Psychiatrist Examines the Nazi Criminals, written soon afterwards, remains well worth reading. 

El-Hai covers Kelley's interesting family history (he was descended on his mother's side from the man who found the infamous Donner party), Kelley's early life, the story of his developing friendship with Göring (he and another physician weaned Göring from his addiction to heroin), and his later outwardly successful career as an academic psychiatrist and criminologist before his gradual descent into alcoholism and madness over the next ten years. (Kelley killed himself in front of his family in 1958 by swallowing cyanide—the method that Göring used at Nuremberg Prison.) I learned of Kelley's suicide years before, and, as others at the Institute then did, wondered at what could have happened to one of Korzybski's most promising students. El-Hai, given access to Kelley's papers and archives by Kelley's son, provides the story of Kelley's downfall—in dramatic and compelling detail.

But El-Hai did fall down in his limited, somewhat inaccurate treatment of Korzybski and of the role of GS in Kelley's life, thus missing some of the depth of tragedy of the psychiatrist, who could not apply the principles of sanity that he espoused to himself and his own personal quandaries. As El-Hai's book suggests, Kelley seemed burdened by difficult and disturbing questions about himself and others as a result of his encounter with the Nazi prisoners, especially Göring. Encounters with serious psychopaths/sociopaths can do that. (The study of psychopaths/sociopaths—still controversial, but highly relevant to the Nazis that Kelley met—had just gotten off the ground with the 1941 pioneering work, The Mask of Sanity, by another of Korzybski's seminar students, psychiatrist Hervey Cleckley.) I felt a slight sinking sensation when I read El-Hai's description of general semantics as 'the use of words and their meanings to shape behavior'. El-Hai's relative neglect of a study (Korzybski's GS) that was so important to Kelley, leaves a hole in his book for those familiar with Korzybski's work. Still, this book will remain important and useful for anyone interested in the history of GS. Kelley's troubles provide a tragic reminder that talking and writing eloquently about GS (which Korzybski called "a theory of sanity) is not enough. No amount of intellectual understanding will suffice. Applying it to others in therapy and research (as Kelley did) is not enough. Personal application remains a sine qua non, an essential condition, of the discipline. And sometimes even the best and brightest of us require help, sometimes a great deal of help—perhaps with medication too—to apply it to ourselves (a life-long endeavor). Kelley looked into an abyss when he met and befriended Göring; the abyss looked back at him. Eventually—without Kelley seeking the help he needed—it swallowed him whole.

The Problems Of Knowing What Korzybski Actually Taught

The problems of knowing what Korzybski actually taught started to get complicated even during his lifetime as inadequate popularizers—the most prominent of whom was probably S.I. Hayakawa—began the process of watering it down. This became one of the major hassles at the end of Korzybski's life that he had to deal with. The not-so-pleasant details of his conflict with Hayakawa and other of his students, takes up a good part of the last section of my Korzybski: A Biography.

After Korzybski's death, Hayakawa very much became Mr. General Semantics, in the eyes of the media and general public, and through his own writing and his editorship of ETC. then published by the International Society of General Semantics (ISGS). Although, he did help promulgate knowledge and interest in Korzybski's work to some extent, at the same time his work gave the impression to many that they had gotten Korzybski's essence from reading his, Hayakawa's, and others' more limited, non-rigorous takes.

Meanwhile, the Institute of General Semantics (IGS), founded by Korzybski and run by his students and student's students, remained the center of specifically korzybskian general-semantics, with publication of the GSB and books by Korzybski and others as well as an ongoing educational training program continued for just over fifty years after Korzybski's death.

However, over the last 10 years, that korzybskian thread got snipped and lost at the Institute of General Semantics. The ISGS folded, the IGS took over its assets, mainly some bookstore books, some documents, and the journal ETC. GSB got retired with no fanfare and we now have people running the IGS who for better or worse were never significantly involved in studying, transmitting, and building upon the specific korzybskian tradition that existed there before their time. The present IGS seems more in the pattern  of the old ISGS rather than the old IGS  with, for example, ETC. now the official IGS journal. This kind of thing can happen. People die and move away, etc. Others who get involved afterwards don't know what happened before them and fail to ask necessary questions. History and tradition gets forgotten. It may happen especially to organizations that have been around for a long while. As a result, the long-term culture of the organization can  sometimes change drastically. It has happened at the Institute of General Semantics (founded in 1938). Dating. 

The fact remains that now the IGS has lost a large part of the specific korzybskian tradition (much of it 'oral') that developed there. For example, I don't see how anyone of my teachers and co-workers in the old IGS would have chosen to name a book award after S.I. Hayakawa—with all due respect to him (he did do some good work along with all the confusion he caused). I have written about this institutional loss of memory publicly, addressing the issue directly in my presentation at the 2011 IGS International Conference in New York City, where I was given the IGS's 2011 S.I. Hayakawa Book Prize (Oh, the irony). Here's a link to the audio and text of my presentation: http://korzybskifiles.blogspot.com/2011/11/korzybskis-legacy-what-is-it-how-do-we.html

As one of the few alive, like Jeff Mordkowitz and my wife Susan Presby Kodish, who apprenticed with Korzybski's students, I feel an obligation now to help inform everyone interested of what that tradition consists of. I 'inherited' (as the person appointed by Charlotte Schuchardt Read to serve as Korzybski's literary executor following her and Robert Pula) a tremendous amount of material after the IGS closed Read House in Texas in 2009 (and then the nearby rented office in 2010). I intend to share as much as I can of the material that I have from there as well the large amount of stuff I've gathered over a lifetime of korzybskian study and research. 

But people who care  and desire to learn must ask questions.

Will you dare to inquire?  

Shakespeare Recast in E-Prime

I dug this out of some 'ancient' notebooks of mine, from the first general-semantics seminar-workshop I ever attended—a two-week one back in 1979. The Institute of General Semantics had a long tradition of a mid-seminar party on Saturday night, where participants and staff would put on some kind of 'behavioral performance'. Everyone could do something. Skits, songs and other musical performances, dramatic presentations, etc., all provided ample opportunity to play on themes and issues related to what we were studying in this intensive course in 'general-semantics': the endlessly fascinating topic of evaluation and mis-evaluation in human behavior—not only in others' behavior, but in our own as well. The talent displayed in the shows I saw over the years awed me. In this one, besides some wonderful playing of his original piano compositions, lead lecturer Robert P. Pula, presented this recasting of Hamlet's soliloquy in his friend David Bourland's E-Prime, a program for eliminating all forms of the verb "to be" from written and spoken English. Bob didn't qualify as a major fan of this approach and decided to give it a little poke with this performance piece which, I recall, he hammed up wonderfully, lots of laughs. His friend Andy Hilgartner's suggestion to verbalize some nouns also came in for some good-natured ribbing. After the show, I asked Bob for his index card notes and tucked them away in my notebook, till now. So now here, published for the first time: Shakespeare's Soliloquy for Hamlet Recast in David Bourland's E-Prime by Robert P. Pula, with the assistance Stuart A. Mayper (1979) and a little editing from me (2013):  

"Existing or not existing. That constitutes the questioning. Whether we postulate the greater nobility of tolerating in our neuro-linguistic systems the slings and arrows of what we perceive as outrageous fortunes or to take arms, legs, thoraxes, et cetera, against a sea of troubles and by opposing end them. To die, to sleep no more and by a sleeping to say we end the heartache and the thousand natural shocks that flesh seems heir to: I formulate this as a consummation devoutly wished. Sleeping, perchance dreaming, ay, that constitutes the rubbing—for in that death sleeping what dreamings may come when we have shuffled off this mortal coil, must give us pause. The respect that makes calamity of so long living consists in that. Who would seminars bear, grunting and sweating under a weary life but that fear of something after death, that undiscovered country from whose Bourland no traveler returns, puzzles the will and makes us rather bearing familiar illings than flying to others not known. Thus consciousness of abstracting doth make cowards of us all, and thus the native hue of resolution sicklies o'er with the pale castings of semantic reactions, and enterprises of great pith and moment, with this regarding, their currents turn away and lose the naming, action."  

"When I Told Her She Was Sexy..." – A Poem by Kenneth G. Johnson

When I Told Her She Was Sexy...
by Kenneth G. Johnson*

"You're projecting," she said, 
Her face turning red, 
"The sexiness you see 
is all in your head." 

"You're right!" I agreed
With the lovely objector,
"But I like the way
You run my projector." 


*The late Kenneth G. Johnson—Professor, Department of Mass Communication, University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee—authored the popular General Semantics: An Outline Survey, among other works. Ken remains one of the most important of the scholar-teachers of korzybskian GS at the Institute of General Semantics after Korzybski's death. 

"Authoritarian" – A Poem by Kenneth G. Johnson

Authoritarian
by Kenneth G. Johnson*

A perfect world 
This would be
If everyone 
Would be like me. 

Or better than
The way I am, 
The way I like 
To think I am. 

*The late Kenneth G. Johnson—Professor, Department of Mass Communication, University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee—authored the popular General Semantics: An Outline Survey, among other works. Ken remains one of the most important of the scholar-teachers of korzybskian GS at the Institute of General Semantics after Korzybski's death. 

"Expectations Anticipated" – A Poem by Kenneth G. Johnson

Expectations Anticipated
by Kenneth G. Johnson*

I do what I do 
Because what I do 
Is what I believe
You expect me to do. 

You do what you do
Because what you do
Is what you believe 
I expect you to do.

How can I know you? 
How can you know me? 
When reflexpectations
Distort what we see?


*The late Kenneth G. Johnson—Professor, Department of Mass Communication, University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee—authored the popular General Semantics: An Outline Survey, among other works. Ken remains one of the most important of the scholar-teachers of korzybskian GS at the Institute of General Semantics after Korzybski's death. 

"To A Neurone" – A Poem by Kenneth G. Johnson

To A Neurone

by Kenneth G. Johnson*

Twitter, twitter little neurone

Though the impulse be not your own

For without your ceaseless twit

I would cease to be—a wit?

*The late Kenneth G. Johnson—Professor, Department of Mass Communication, University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee—authored the popular General Semantics: An Outline Survey, among other works. Ken remains one of the most important of the scholar-teachers of korzybskian GS at the Institute of General Semantics after Korzybski's death. 

"GS Seminar" - A Poem by Kenneth G. Johnson

GS Seminar
by Kenneth G. Johnson*

We learn we are creative stuff
And that five senses aren't enough
We learn to feel that which we sit on
And what to do when we are spit on. 
Delay your reactions — that's the trick,
Until the cortical neurones click. 
And then with every thought intact
Take careful aim and spit right back. 

*The late Kenneth G. Johnson—Professor, Department of Mass Communication, University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee—authored the popular General Semantics: An Outline Survey, among other works. Ken remains one of the most important of the scholar-teachers of korzybskian GS at the Institute of General Semantics after Korzybski's death. 

The Institute of General Semantics - 75 Years and Still Standing

     For several days in March, 1938, Alfred Korzybski lectured the medical staff at Peoria State Hospital, Peoria, Illinois. His presentation there marked the end of his career as an independent, itinerant teacher (which had ramped up ever since the publication five years earlier of Science and Sanity). By the time of his Peoria lectures, Korzybski and a few of his closest students had already begun the process of setting up the Institute of General Semantics (IGS) in Chicago, which the state of Illinois incorporated in May 1938 as a non-profit institution for "Linguistic Epistemologic Scientific Research and Education". Remarkably today, seventy-five years later, the Institute still exists. It has never been easy. 

Until his death on March 1, 1950—Korzybski would carry on his work at the Institute (which moved to Lakeville, Connecticut in 1946). Korzybski: A Biography provides a detailed account of IGS history during those first 12 turbulent  years. Accounts of the Institute's subsequent years can be found in various now-somewhat-hard-to-find articles by Charlotte Schuchardt Read and others. I've provided some recent updates of the last somewhat tumultuous decade (See my 2011 presentation at the IGS Annual Conference in New York City and my January 2013 blogpost The State of Organized GS-2013: A Blunt Assessment, which both focus on recent organizational difficulties.) However, as Korzybski: A Biography clearly documents, from its beginnings the IGS  struggled with difficulties of various kinds, some of which threatened its survival—even with Korzybski at the helm. Difficulties, sometimes severe, continued after Korzybski's death. (In my years, starting in 1979, of serious involvement in IGS educational, management, and publication activities I was one of a number of people who had to deal with many of these problems). But somehow the Institute survived it all. And despite recent problems and organizational downsizing, it still does. 

Will the Institute of General Semantics survive as a viable organization carrying on Korzybski's legacy for another 75 years? I don't know. I do feel confident that if it is to do so, those people who run the organization now, its Board of Trustees, will need to do a lot more than they already have done to renew their understanding of Korzybski's work and of the aims and history of the organization they are responsible for. And they will need to renew their commitment to carrying on the legacy that Korzybski and others left us. Not just words but actions are needed. Complacency and indifference have a way of sneaking up on even the best of us. And the creeping organizational amnesia (which I've alluded to elsewhere and which may have started long before any of its present members sat on the Board of Trustees) will have to be reversed. Without a deep and thorough knowledge of the discipline of GS, including the history and traditions of the Institute,—which I presently see lacking in the organization—it will be impossible to adequately build upon what's been done already. That's what conscious time-binding requires. In order to learn, it's necessary to realize that you don't already know something. Those who don't know can then get help if they seek it, because there are still a few people around who know quite a bit—hint, hint.

In the meantime, I send the Institute of General Semantics my best wishes—Happy 75th Anniversary and Many More!

The State of Organized GS-2013: A Blunt Assessment

On January 10, I'll be flying to India, where I will stay for almost four weeks, to teach introductory and advanced seminar-workshops and give other presentations on "Radical General-Semantics" on behalf of the Balavant K. Parekh Centre for General Semantics and Other Human Sciences, located in Vadodara, Gujarat in Western India. 

Many, if not most, people now interested in Korzybski's work don't know that organizational GS has begun to thrive in India over the last decade, while the original GS organizations in the U.S. have concurrently gone into sharp decline. I need to go into a little recent history to make that point clearer. This will put the amazing growth of GS in India in a fuller context. 

By the first decade of the 21st Century, the San Francisco Bay-Area International Society for General Semantics (ISGS), one of the two main GS organizations, could no longer sustain continued existence. It was absorbed into the Institute of General Semantics (IGS) in 2003-2004. Within a few years the IGS—after the promising opening of a dedicated teaching and archival center in Fort Worth, Texas—became ridden with contention-filled internal disputes among its board of trustees, and between some board members and the then Executive Director, Steve Stockdale.  Mr. Stockdale eventually resigned under difficult circumstances at the end of 2007. In 2009, the board of trustees of the by-then hobbled IGS, sold the Fort Worth center, "Read House" and moved to a rented office about a mile away, until relocating to the New York City area in 2010, where the office now appears to be a post office box in Queens. 

Most of the archival material so carefully preserved for years, then brought together at Read House by Mr. Stockdale and used by me in researching Korzybski: A Biography, was destroyed in the move and the small amount of remaining material is now orphaned—scattered among a few individuals, including myself, who managed to scavenge it before it got dumped as well. Most of the members of the IGS Board and its then Executive Director, Dr. Lance Strate knew nothing of the trashing of the archives by the few board members responsible. Both he and a few other members of the board were informed of the travesty by me after I found out.  

I want to emphasize here that I have the highest esteem for Dr. Strate, a man of great integrity and a friend, who later resigned his position. Dr. Corey Anton, another friend and man of integrity, remains on the IGS board, and has produced with Dr. Strate, the recent excellent volume Korzybski And..., published by the IGS. This and other activities of those two men represents a high point in the generally dismal recent history of the Institute. So things don't seem entirely doom and gloom for the Institute—just mainly. 

Presently, the severely downsized IGS—despite the presence of some good people on its board—suffers from a significant case of organizational amnesia, a loss of connection to the 'spirit' of Korzybski's work, and a subsequent loss of vitality, passion, and fruitful action. And honesty. As a result, the Institute of General Semantics (2012) no longer qualifies, as it did for just over 50 years after Korzybski's death, as the world center of korzybskian tradition, scholarship, and training. A painful admission for me. I openly addressed some of these issues, although in more general terms, in my 2011 presentation at the IGS Annual Conference in New York City). 

I have worked behind the scenes for a number of years to attempt to get redress for some of the mistakes that the IGS Board of Trustees bears responsibility for, sorely hoping not to have to make public the Institute's 'dirty laundry'. But I have finally come to the conclusion that the Institute of General Semantics' ongoing problems cannot be addressed and its healthy survival ensured until the painful history of past mistakes is faced and openly acknowledged by those involved. I guess that most of the present Board of Trustees don't know anything of what transpired. Those who do know something don't seem to have enough power yet to deal with those few colleagues directly responsible for the archives disaster. Given my long and public history with the organization, people from around the world interested in the korzybskian non-aristotelian outlook have contacted me—especially since the publication of Korzybski: A Biography—wanting to learn more and get involved with the Institute. It is difficult to refrain from telling them that mainly 'there is no there, there' at the IGS anymore. I do tell people who ask and wonder what's going on at the Institute, not to expect too much. 

The korzybskian stream still flowed strongly at the IGS for most of the years that my wife and I worked there in many capacities, however difficult the financial and organizational challenges that we faced at the time. But however much money the IGS has now, mainly from bequests, the korzybskian stream there has pretty much dried up. Unless mistakes are acknowledged, the lost links with the Institute's history and tradition restored, and present-day organizational challenges addressed openly and with action; I'm afraid that the Institute will slowly fade away. In its present condition, it seems to me more than anything else an impediment to carrying on Korzybski's legacy in the 'information age'. 

This little bit of painful history puts in clearer context the growth of Korzybski's work in India, where the Parekh Centre founded in 2009 by philanthropic industrialist Mr. B. K. Parekh, head of Pidilite Industries, has been thriving. Under the steadfast leadership of Professor Prafulla Kar and his staff and associates, the Parekh Centre has indeed become the most active and engaged independent GS organization on the planet with a dedicated building; a regular newsletter; a new journal, Anekant; and a vital and varied educational program offering a large number of courses and trainings all over India. The 'spirit' of doing and a desire to connect to the korzybskian tradition seems quite apparent there. Interest in GS is growing throughout the subcontinent nation. Thus the Parekh Centre's invitation to me, as perhaps the most prominent of the small number of living korzybskian-GS scholar-practitioners. (Accurate; though it sounds pretentious, even to me. It hasn't gone to my head; a fish can't get very big in a very, very small pond.)

So Korzbyski's work has really taken off in India. I'm looking forward to my trip there and want to give the Indians a giant  korzybskian boost; they've already given a huge boost to me. People interested in Korzybski's work in India and elsewhere, including the United States, should no longer look to the present Institute of General Semantics as a significant center of the discipline. Maybe this can change, but under its present leadership and board of trustees, the Institute of General Semantics has lost its direction. Right now, it's time to look to India, for the future of Korzybski's work.*

*There is also a lively, very active group in Australia, which I would be remiss in not at least acknowledging here. More on them later. 

"How About 'Evaluatics" – A Letter from the ETC. Archives

I don't particularly care for 'general semantics'—that is, the term 'general semantics'. And I'm not alone. Many of the most dedicated students of and builders-upon Alfred Korzybski's work, popularly know as 'general semantics' have had to deal the problems associated with the term 'general semantics'. 

Because of how people tend to automatically interpret the term—as an elaboration of 'semantics', the linguistic/philosophical study of 'word meanings'—there has always existed the tendency to understand the work as 'all about' language and linguistic 'meaning'—an excessively limiting viewpoint for those of us who have studied Korzybski's "up-to-date epistemology" with any significant seriousness. 

At the time when I was most active at the Institute of General Semantics, Korzybski's co-workers such as my friend and mentor Charlotte Schuchardt Read, were still teaching and working there, and for them the term 'general semantics' remained as much of a problem as ever. For a time, those of us involved in the scholarly publishing and teaching then going on at the Institute, decided to insert a hyphen as in 'general-semantics' to at least mark it more clearly as a unified term. However we later decided against imposing this usage in any formal way, and stopped it as an Institute policy. (Although I prefer the hyphenated spelling and sometimes still use it, definitely correct and clarifying according to the Chicago Manual of Style when using a two-word term as a modifier as in "a general-semantics approach.") In my Radical General-Semantics classes today, I keep a special contribution box for any student to deposit a fine whenever they use the term 'semantics' when actually referring to 'general semantics'. (Writing or saying "GS" provides another way to avoid triggering  automatic reactions associated with seeing or hearing the word 'semantic(s)'.) 

As I fully document in Korzybski: A Biography, the confusion between 'general semantics' and 'semantics' had become problematic even for Korzybski. In the final years of his life he had come to realize the difficulties caused by people's signal reactions to the term 'general semantics' for his general theory of evaluation and to the term 'semantic' used as a modifier synonymous with evaluational. By the time of his sudden and unexpected death on March 1, 1950, various methods were being considered by him and his students to deal with the problem. If he had lived longer, it seems very likely to me that he would have changed the name of the discipline he had founded and modified the terminology even more than he already had done.

Here is a terminological solution proposed by one student, J. Russell Bruff, printed in the Correspondence section of the Spring 1949 issue (Volume 6, Number 3) of ETC.: A Review of General Semantics (published at that time, not by the  Institute of General Semantics, but by the Society for General Semantics.) The Editor of ETC. at that time, S. I. Hayakawa was one of the people whom Bruff was referring to as using 'semantics' when talking about 'general semantics' and thus helping to perpetuate the confusion. (To his credit, Hayakawa did publish Bruff's letter.) However you evaluate Bruff's proposal, he pinpoints quite well some significant aspects of what remains an ongoing problem for those of us in 2012 who want to promote and develop Korzybski's work. 

Sirs: In getting started in general semantics, I found myself seriously misevaluating the discipline at first depending solely on the printed word, I progressed but slowly. Gradually I came to understand that I was unconsciously permitting my older evaluation patterns of 'the meaning in the word,' etc ., to block my efforts to develop the new pattern in which the emphasis is placed upon the individual evaluating the symbol. And it became apparent to me that writers on general semantics were often encountering the same difficulty and fostering it by what they wrote. Thus 'language' was observed to be linked with 'action,' implying that language may function as an operationally effective agent influencing the passive object, the individual. 

To free myself from this frequent unconscious reversion to the former orientation toward human behavior in sign-symbol situations as the outcome resulting from the effective operation of sign and/or symbols upon the individual, and to maintain more constantly the orientation toward human behavior as primarily an evaluation process occurring in an individual, I have found it helpful to avoid the use of certain terms. The words avoided were those which, because of past and present usage, I seemed persistently to associate with the older evaluation patterns. 

Among these terms were the words meaning (as applied to symbols), signification, and, most important of all, semantics. The use of these words seemed too often to be associated with a misorientation and a misevaluation when judged in terms of the basic formulations of general semantics. Whenever I used these terms I seemed to be implying that in a situation involving a 'human individual in a sign-symbol field' the effective operator causing action was located outside the individual in the signs and/or symbols.

I finally considered the advisability of discarding the label 'general semantics.' Because much of my own difficulty in getting at the essential features of this discipline seemed traceable to my evaluations when the word semantics was encountered, I now feel that a new term should be selected to refer to this field. This conviction has been reinforced by my experience in trying to explain it to others. I have found myself faced with the difficult task of separating general semantics from semantics. Since general semanticists are frequently referred to as 'semanticists' and the term 'general semantics' is frequently shortened to' semantics,' it now seems to me that the verbal foundation has been laid for much unnecessary confusion.

In other areas of scientific work the scientist does not hesitate to discard a term when its use seems no longer suitable. If the use of the words 'meaning,' 'signification,' and 'semantics' is customarily associated with a misorientation in which the effective agent in behavior, occurring in a sign-symbol situation, is projected into the sign and/or symbol, then these terms should be avoided. And along with them the adjective 'semantic .' It may seem presumptuous of me to suggest discarding a well-established label such as 'general semantics.' But one should bear in mind that all I am attempting to do is to clarify my own thinking, to make the formulations of this new 'science of man' more effective in my own life, and also to facilitate my helping others to achieve a similar result. 

The label which I have adopted as a replacement for 'general semantics' is derived from the word 'evaluate.' The process of evaluation in this discipline seemed to occupy a key position in relation to which the various other operational phases of general semantics were tributary. Therefore, from the word evaluate I have coined the term evaluatics for my use, and now whenever I encounter the expression 'general semantics,' I translate it, for my own use, into evaluatics or symbol-evaluatics. Where 'semantic' occurs as an adjective, I substitute the term 'evaluatic.' I should be happy to accept any other label than evaluatics if it should seem more appropriate. But with the current growth of the field of 'semantics,' which differs fundamentally from 'general semantics,' it seems to me imperative to adopt a new label to replace 'general semantics' if workers in this area are to escape unnecessary confusion .

—J. RUSSELL BRUFF Santa Ana College, Santa Ana, California

"Korzybski's Legacy: What Is It? How Do We Carry It On?" - presented by Bruce I. Kodish, Author of Korzybski: A Biography, at the 2011 Institute of General Semantics (IGS) Weekend Symposium, "Communicating in the 21st Century", on 10/29/11 at the Princeton Club, New York City

Here are links to the text and audio of the presentation I gave at the Institute of General Semantics (IGS) Symposium - "Communicating in the 21st Century" on Saturday, Oct. 29, 2011 at the Princeton Club in New York City. 


Marty Levinson, President of the IGS Board of Trustees introduced me to the group. Marty organized a great conference and I want to thank him and the IGS Board for inviting me and being willing to listen even though I had some difficult things to say about the present state of GS and the IGS. I felt nervous delivering this talk and you'll probably tell when you hear it.  But I consider it one of the most important presentations I've ever made, and a valuable one for someone who wants to get a running start as to what Korzybski and his work are about. 


Here's the opening paragraph:
Korzybski’s legacy: what ‘is’ it? How do we carry it on? In the way that I’m using the term legacy here, as “a thing handed down by a predecessor,” Korzybski’s legacy has a number of related aspects. Partly, it consists of tangible objects: artifacts and archives left behind. Partly it consists of the Institute of General Semantics itself. However, mainly today I want to focus on what Korzybski taught, the legacy of the wide-ranging system of formulations, known as GS (‘general semantics’). Korzybski advised that when you study someone’s work “…read not only what you read, but study the author.”[1] In other words, do your best to get inside his or her head, find out what problems they tackled, what questions they asked, what they wanted to say. I’ve studied the author and I want to share with you some of what I’ve learned about Korzybski’s work. What constitutes the core of what he taught, his legacy? How has it come down to the present? What opportunities exist for us now to carry it on?

---

[1] Korzybski: A Biography, p. 8

I want to thank my friend Heron Stone of Gendo for his help in editing the audio recording and getting it up on the Gendo podcast, which I heartily suggest that you subscribe to. He's the closest thing to an internet Socrates I've met. 


Here's the audio link of Gendo Podcast 689


Here's a link to the pdf of the edited and augmented text  

"Acceptance Speech" by Bruce Kodish on receiving the 2011 S. I. Hayakawa Book Prize from the Institute of General Semantics for Korzybski: A Biography

It seemed like just a few days after Steve Jobs died that his biography came out. It took 61 year for Alfred Korzybski's. Why did it take so long? Interesting question, I'm not going to answer now. But if you wonder why I wrote Korzybski: A Biography, I thought it had been long enough.


My friend Robert P. Pula, extraordinary scholar and teacher of korzybskian general-semantics and a former Executive Director of the Institute of General Semantics, had been working on a biography of Korzybski for many years. After he died unexpectedly in early 2004, I felt impelled 'to pick up the torch'. What Korzybski and his co-workers developed and taught was not entirely written down but had an oral and tacit dimension received through personal contact and handed down in often unspoken and even un-speakable, i.e., silent and non-verbal, ways. As a long-time close friend and co-worker of Charlotte Schuchardt Read—Korzybski's confidential secretary and literary assistant—I wanted to convey the feel of Korzybski and his work that I had gotten from her (and others) which I feared might otherwise get lost. 


I first encountered Korzybski's work in the early 1960s around the age of 13. I've studied it most of my life and worked at the Institute of General Semantics on its education and publication staffs for several decades in its post-Korzybski but still quite korzybskian heyday in the latter half of the 20th Century. I pursued and obtained a doctoral degree in Applied Epistemology/'General Semantics'. I spent seven years researching and writing Korzybski: A Biography. In all that time, I've managed to learn something. So don't be intimidated by the size of my book (694 pages including endnotes, bibliography and index): If you want to get to the core of what Korzybski taught, then I think that all of my time will save you a great deal of your own time. Besides, I did my best to make it a good read.


To conclude: I want to thank Marty Levinson [President of the IGS Board of Trustees], Jackie Rudig [IGS Vice-President] and the entire Institute Board of Trustees for giving me this award and for the opportunity to be here with all of you. Let's celebrate Korzybski here, his work, all of those who've carried it on and built upon it up to the present. And let's celebrate the Institute of General Semantics, which had its 73rd anniversary this year. Let's do it!


—Bruce I. Kodish, 
October 28, 2011

Korzybski's Trouble-Shooting Life

Korzybski took hardly a day off; then only, it seems, when forced by exhaustion or illness. He was mainly speaking for himself, when he told Ken Keyes in 1947 that,

"We just work and work and work. No rest for the wicked, Saturday or Sunday….We have some years ago discovered that once a week we simply have to take one day off completely. Simply we are dull the next week, and unfortunately as far as I am concerned, it turns out that I never have a Saturday or Sunday. When the weekend comes, then I have to start on something else to work, but occasionally I am just dead. Naturally." [Keyes Document, pp. 420-421]

Such devotion to work in his later years was not anything new, of course. He had always devoted himself with extra measure to whatever task he had set before him. And from his childhood on the farm at Rudnik when he was told “Alfred, do it!” and began to sort out troubles there among the peasants, soldier workers, horses, etc.; he functioned as a trouble-shooter.

His engineer father had given Alfred—5 or 6 years old— ‘the feel of the calculus’, a sense of the world as a dynamic net of relationships, fascinating to explore, at least partly understandable, and—however imperfectly—changeable for the better. Well before engineering school, he learned an engineer’s way of approaching troubles: to observe and study, figure out possible mechanisms, fiddle around to see what worked to get desired changes—and continue to observe, figure and fiddle along the way as conditions changed and you refined your methods. Continuing to develop his trouble-shooting skills, he had gotten through engineering school at Warsaw Polytechnic; and traveled in Europe; then managed his family’s properties; all the while studying on his own and contemplating the state of science, technology and the society around him in the Poland of Tsarist Russia.

By the time World War I broke out, he had gotten rather good at trouble-shooting. The ‘Great War’ would give him a lot more practice; first on the Eastern Front gathering wartime intelligence for the Russian Army; then in Canada and the U.S. working at Camp Petawawa, and in shipyard and factory, and traveling and speaking for the Polish-French Army and the U.S. Fuel Administration. Marrying portrait painter Mira Edgerly, another ‘work-a-holic’, and inspired by her idealistic devotion to spreading the golden rule; he’d decided that human stupidity (which he wasn’t exempt from himself) had entered significantly into the troubles he’d observed and experienced, including the waste of the war that sickened the both of them. Mira’s idealism needed grounding to bring her vision of peace into practice. From an engineering, trouble-shooting point-of-view, Alfred considered that this required understanding the nature and possibilities of human intelligence—the dynamics of human stupidity and human achievement. Digging to the core of this, he finally wrote Manhood of Humanity in white heat.

We humans needed to understand ourselves as time-binders, whose accumulative capacity to benefit from and build upon the experiences of others could be quashed or encouraged, held back or set free. His subsequent 12-year effort to explain the mechanisms of time-binding—culminating in Science and Sanity— aimed at a practical goal: to develop teachable methods to nurture time-binding to help people solve their practical problems—not just their scientific and professional ones, but their personal ones as well. Indeed, his research in the mid-1920s at St. Elisabeths, the Federal Psychiatric Hospital in Washington, D.C., and his study of psychiatry and the continuum of ‘insane’ to ‘unsane’ to ‘sane’ behavior, highlighted for him the prime importance of dealing with this personal aspect.

After publishing Science and Sanity, when he began to teach what he had developed, eventually founding the Institute of General Semantics; he remained in the trouble-shooting business, working with individual students. He described this work in terms of translation:

“…you have personal difficulties….And what I do I translate…your life history which I supposedly know into the new terms, but I date, I index and date.” [Keyes Document 1947, pp. 419-420]

It seemed all so simple but in practice oh so difficult. If he got satisfaction from his seemingly endless work, it also had its dark, unhappy aspects:

"I went through life watching the human immaturity, the human stupidity. And I am still doing that. Of course in a way, it’s a peaceful occupation, in a way. From another point of view, it’s a sad one. If things don’t look cheerful [it’s] just because I deal with human stupidity, lack of sanity, which does not mean insanity. We are dealing with problems which are on the borderline of the change of the tempo of one phase of human civilization to another. And I was the observer and from observation I got formulation how to handle that increasingly impossible situation." [Keyes Document 1947, p. 420]

'Breaking Through'

In August 1947, the Institute of General Semantics had just become a membership organization and Alfred Korzybski sent a letter to new members. It nicely summed up what he wanted to accomplish with his work. His simple words can still serve as useful guidance for those of us who wish to continue upon the path he pioneered:

Dear Students and Friends:

In 1941 I wrote in my introduction to the Second Edition of SCIENCE AND SANITY: ‘Present day scientific researches and historical world developments show there is not doubt that the old aristotelian epoch of human evolution is dying. The terrors and horrors we are witnessing in the East and the West are the death-bed agonies of that passing epoch. …A non-aristotelian re-orientation is inevitable; the only problem today is when, and at what cost.’

‘Young birds,’ wrote Tolstoy, ‘..know very well when there is no longer room for them in the eggs’, nor ‘…can the fledgling be made to re-enter its shell.’ It often happens that the beak of the little bird is too soft or the shell is too hard, and the result is a rotten egg, utilized sometimes in political debates.

Whitehead said, more abstractly, ‘A civilization which cannot burst through its current abstractions is doomed to sterility after a very limited period of progress. …almost any idea which jogs you out of your current abstractions may be better than nothing.’

Our human shell of habits and prejudices is very hard and our old aristotelian beaks are not strong enough for us to emerge to mature and fuller life. In my work I tried to forge a method to break through the confining shell, but one man’s effort is not enough. My co-workers and I need your help, now.

We live in a period of socio-cultural spasms, and we as individuals must unite in a concerted effort toward more maturity, to bring about the eventual ‘manhood of humanity’.

August, 1947 Warmly, yours as ever
A Korzybski
Director
(Alfred Korzybski Collected Writings: 1920–1950, p. 585)

'Null-A' and Void

I've noticed that even some people who have a fairly solid grasp of Korzybski's work continue to say and write 'Null-A' when referring to the 'A with a bar above it' which Korzybski used as an abbreviation for 'Non-Aristotelian'. However, understanding the confusion that so many people have had about Korzybski's take on Aristotle and aristotelian logic, it seems to me a mistake to use the term 'Null-A' when seriously referring to Korzybski's work.

Neither Korzybski, nor any of his close students who taught for years at the Institute of General Semantics like Charlotte Read and Allen Walker Read, nor his students' students like Robert Pula, ever used the term 'Null-A' to refer to what Korzybski purposely called 'Non-Aristotelian'. Indeed, Pula, the lead lecturer at Institute seminars across four decades, specifically advised eschewing the term 'Null-A' except when talking about the titles of A.E. Van Vogt's science fiction works. As far as I know, the term 'Null-A' seems to have first been used by A.E. Van Vogt in his 1945 science fiction stories and the 1948 hardback novel published from those stories. Van Vogt specifically used the term 'null-A' to refer to Korzybski's symbolic abbreviation for 'non-aristotelian'. The original title of the book simply used the symbol, The World of [an A with a bar above it]. The book's title was changed to 'The World of Null-A' in later editions. In light of the science fiction origin of the term that Korzybski never used, why use it when seriously discussing his work?

Korzybski stated in numerous places that he did not intend non-aristotelian as 'anti'-aristotelian. Contrariwise, 'null' tends to get interpreted as negation, absence, elimination, anti-, etc. Since the socio-cultural-historical 'baggage' of a term can influence those who use it and hear it (what I have called elsewhere the 'neuro-linguistic undertow' of a term), it seems to just increase the probablity of misunderstanding to use 'Null-A' when seriously writing about or teaching Korzybski's system.

Needless to say—but better to say it—Korzybski had no interest at all in 'nullifying' Aristotle's logic. For him, aristotelian logic remained useful where it applies. He didn't want to do away with it. He simply didn't think that it, or rather the underlying structural assumptions about the world that tend to accompany it, should be used as a general orientation for life. General orientation, cultural and personal. That—not 'logic'—mainly concerned him.

William Burroughs and Korzybski

The eclectic mix of students likely to attend an Institute of General Semantics seminar given by Alfred Korzybski might include artists, businessmen, college professors, college students, engineers, doctors, housewives, lawyers, psychiatrists, salesmen, scientists, secretaries, writers, and an occasional mystic. In that regard, the 1939 August Intensive—which ran from August 25 to September 2 (the personal interviews continued until September 6)—had a typical group. However, a number of notable participants also made it one of the more remarkable groups in the history of Korzybski’s Institute seminars. (Not that the 'notable' participants necessarily seemed 'notable' at the time.)

One of these was twenty-five year old William Seward Burroughs II from Clayton, Missouri, grandson to the inventor of the Burroughs Adding Machine, who labeled himself as a “student” on his seminar registration form. One of the future creators of what became known as the Beat movement of mid-Twentieth Century American literature, he had graduated from Harvard in 1936 with an English degree. Since then he had studied anthropology and hoboed around America and Europe. He had already read Science and Sanity and noted on his registration form that he was interested in the “interrelations of language and cultures.” While in Chicago, he stayed at the Y.M.C.A. He had perfect attendance at the thirty-five hour seminar. I have not found any correspondence between the two men but Korzybski and his work undoubtedly had a significant impact on Burroughs. Many years later in 1974 at an interview he said that at the seminar he “…was very impressed by what [Korzybski] had to say. I still am. I think that everyone, everyone, particularly all students should read Korzybski. [It would] save them an awful lot of time.” (1)

For more information on William Burroughs, you might want to check out www.nakedlunch.org which some Burroughs fans have put together as part of the celebration of the 50th anniversary of his most well-known novel.

Note
(1) William Burroughs. Press Conference at Berkeley Museum of Art, November 12, 1974. Internet Archive audio. http://www.archive.org/details/BurroughsPressConf

Gaston Bachelard And Korzybski

It surprises me that more people interested in what is called "Continental Philosophy" have not pursued the links between the work of Gaston Bachelard and Alfred Korzybski. The formulating of each man connects to and informs that of the other. And the two men actually knew and respected each others' work.

Gaston Bachelard agreed to become an Honorary Trustee of the Institute of General Semantics in 1940. (1) Bachelard’s 1934 book Le Nouvel Esprit Scientifique, which Korzybski had gotten, already showed the French epistemologist as a compatible formulator.

Since he had written that book, Bachelard had come to know Korzybski’s work and to give it considerable importance. The following excerpt (part of a larger discussion of Korzybski and his work) comes from the English translation of Bachelard’s 1940 book La Philosophie du Non: Essai d’une philosophie de nouvel esprit scientifique. (A translation of this done by a student of Korzybski, G. C. Waterston, was published in the U.S. in 1969 as The Philosophy of No: A Philosophy of the New Scientific Mind.):

Those of us who are trying to find new ways of thinking, must direct ourselves towards the most complicated structures. We must take advantage of all the lessons of science, however special they may be, to determine new mental structures. We must realize that the possession of a form of thought is automatically a reform of the mind. We must therefore direct our researches towards a new pedagogy. In this direction, which has attracted us personally for a number of years, we shall take as our guide the very important work of the non-Aristotelian school, founded in America by Korzybski, which is so little known in France. …The psychological and even physiological conditions of a non-Aristotelian logic have been resolutely faced in the great work of Count Alfred Korzybski, Science and Sanity,... [p. 108]. (2)

Note
(1) In 1939, Korzybski had taken up the idea (probably proposed by M. Kendig, his 'right hand woman' at the Institute of General Semantics) to invite a group of well-known academics, professionals, government officials, etc., to have their names associated with Korzybski as "Honorary Trustees" of the Institute of General Semantics and thus to express their support of the aims and program of the Institute. Honorary Trustees had no official duties.

(2) You can link here to the earlier (1953) J. Samuel Bois translation of Bachelard's full discussion of Korzybski and His Work in The Philosophy of No. The Bois translation appeared in General Semantics Bulletin 12 & 13.