The Symbolic Form of Life: Korzybski and Cassirer

In Science and Sanity, Alfred Korzybski memorably wrote: 

The affairs of man [humankind] are conducted by our own, man-made rules and according to man-made theories. Man’s achievements rest upon the use of symbols. For this reason, we must consider ourselves as a symbolic, semantic [evaluational] class of life, and those who rule the symbols, rule us. (Science And Sanity, Fifth Ed., p. 76)

Independently of Korzybski, philosopher Ernst Cassirer also saw the defining importance of symbolism in understanding human life. Cassirer published the three volumes of his work, Philosophy of Symbolic Forms, in 1923-1929, a few years after Korzybski’s Manhood of Humanity. In a later work, An Essay on Man, Cassirer—apparently unaffected by Korzybski's work, although the two men had corresponded—wrote the following:

Man has, as it were, discovered a new method of adapting himself to his environment. Between the receptor system and the effector system, which are to be found in all animal species, we find in man a third link which we may describe as the symbolic system. This new acquisition transforms the whole of human life. As compared with the other animals man lives not merely in a broader reality; he lives so to speak, in a new dimension of reality.…Reason is a very inadequate term with which to comprehend the forms of man’s cultural life in all their richness and variety. But all these forms are symbolic forms. Hence, instead of defining man as an animal rationale, we should define him as an animal symbolicum. By so doing we can designate his specific difference, and we can understand the new way open to man––the way to civilization. (pp. 24-26)

Korzybski, who had carefully read Cassirer’s work, would differ from Cassirer in this way: he insisted from the time of his 1921 work Manhood of Humanity onwards, that this new psycho-biological way open to humanity, took humanity out of animal existence and merited its placement into an entirely new taxonomic "kingdom" of life—as time-binders. "Man", he repeated often, "is not an animal!"   

In spite of this difference, not so little to Korzybski,  he dedicated his book Science and Sanity to the works of Cassirer (1), among others, which “greatly influenced my enquiry.” Such scholarly acknowledgement was typical of Korzybski. 

Also typically of Korzybski (trained as an engineer), he formulated the symbolic mechanism in terms of time-binding, in order to provide a practical way to apply Cassirer’s and others’ insights about human culture to living life—your life. In 1925 he wrote to Cassirer, then still in Germany,  

As a engineer I am trying to formulate modes of action but this involves a host of theoretical issues, some as yet unresolved, and until the scientists scrutinize the theoretical issues, it will never become a mode of action. It seems to me that the conditions of the world are deeply upset mostly [due] to the exposure (destructive) of old doctrines, which were false and at present a lack of a general theory of human action... (Korzybski to Cassirer, April 28, 1925)

Notes

(1). Cassirer's books, Substance and Function and Einstein's Theory of Relativity, published in one volume in English by Open Court in 1923, affirmed Korzybski's general view of epistemology, and of all Cassirer's writings probably had the deepest effect on Korzybski. 

Science and Sanity at 80

This month, October 2013, marks the 80th anniversary of the publication of Alfred Korzybski's Science and Sanity: An Introduction to Non-Aristotelian Systems and General Semantics. 

When the book finally came out on October 10, 1933, the U.S. was in the first year of F.D.R.'s first administration. Despite whatever lift people's spirits may have had from the president's multiordinal, inaugural day reassurance in March that they had nothing to fear but fear itself, from his "New Deal" plans, and from the much anticipated ending of alcohol prohibition; the U.S. still seemed sunk in the depths of the Great Depression. Internationally, news didn't seem so good to Korzybski either: Hitler had become the Chancellor of Germany and the Nazi Party had begun to consolidate its tyrannical control there. Along with Stalin, ensconced in Soviet Russia, and the Japanese Empire spreading itself across East Asia, the world didn't seem like such a happy place. To Korzybski, with what he called his "theory of sanity", it seemed like as good a time as any to offer his own infusion of sanity, as much as the world could take.

It was no easy task. He had begun writing what would become Science and Sanity in 1921, just after the publication of his first book, Manhood of Humanity. It had taken 12  demanding years devoted to writing and research. By 1932 with the book mainly done, Korzybski and his wife Mira turned down a few publishers willing to publish the book if Korzybski could guarantee the production cost by means of advanced sales. Under such terms the book could sell for as much as $10 retail (over $100 in today's money), a price that surely would have put off most potential readers during a major economic depression. Instead, the Korzybskis started The International Non-Aristotelian Library and Publishing Company (INALPCO), financed primarily through Mira's work painting portraits on ivory for "the rotten rich" (as they sometimes referred to her  wealthy clients). As self-publishers they could offer the book for a more reasonable "educational discount" price of $5.50, when ordered directly from their printer/distributor, Science Press. 

With the Korzybskis' considerable expenses in getting the book published (they remained in debt for a few years afterwards), the book's price certainly wasn't intended to make them rich. But Korzybski offered his "educational discount" to make the book as accessible and as available as possible to his main audience: the 'average intelligent layman'. And he never wavered from his view that the work that his book introduced, perplexingly labeled "general semantics", was not intended mainly for academic and scientific/technical specialists, but for that average intelligent man, woman, and even child, on the street. For years, he had paid membership dues to a British group, The World Association for Adult Education whose motto seemed just in line with his own efforts: "The multitude of the wise is the welfare of the world." 

Until his death 17 years later, Korzybski developed the implications of his work, promoting research, refining his insights, and reaching thousands of students individually and in group seminars, mainly through the auspices of the Institute of General Semantics which he founded in Chicago as a non-profit educational organization in 1938 with a few of his close students, his most serious "co-workers" as he liked to call them. 

By the time of his death on March 1, 1950, he had already  made a notable cultural impact in the U.S. and elsewhere, reaching perhaps the high point of critical appreciation of his work. Numerous popularizations of his work had already appeared. By 1949, one year before his death, he had begun receiving serious academic recognition at such places as Yale University, where he was invited by faculty there to conduct a seminar and lecture; the Cooper Union, where he addressed an audience of about 800 people on "Time-Binding: The Foundation for General Semantics"; the University of Denver where he taught a seminar before attending the "Third American Congress on General Semantics", sponsored by that university; and the University of Texas where he was the only independent, non-academic scholar invited to present a paper as part of a symposium on perception, along with a panel of some of the best and brightest figures in the behavioral/social sciences of that period. (Korzybski died while completing the editing and his  personal secretary and literary assistant, Charlotte Schuchardt, went to Texas alone to present his final paper, "The Role of Language in the Perceptual Processes".)

Since his death, Korzybski's bright light has slowly faded. With the hindsight of 80 years since Science and Sanity's publication, what Korzybski actually taught has gotten somewhat obscured by the perpetuation of the errors made by a torrent of inept but influential critics, like Martin Gardner. Perhaps even more damagingly, it has gotten obscured by 'followers' like S. I. Hayakawa whose light and popular writing on 'semantics' showed an inadequate grasp of Korzybski's work, focusing mainly on Hayakawa's limited applications to language teaching, just one aspect of Korzybski's substantial, deep, and multi-faceted general theory of human evaluation. Depending on inadequate accounts as well as simply through the passage of time, Korzybski's work has thus become widely unread and, where acknowledged, often misread and superficially understood. 

But if you hear the siren call to plumb the depths of Korzybski's system of applied epistemology and his foundational framework for human knowledge and personal and social sanity, there is no substitute to reading Science and Sanity, now in its Fifth Edition. (Don't forget Manhood of Humanity and Collected Writings either!) Don't get put off by the size of the book or mathematical formulas within. Those of you who hear the call, may actually find Science and Sanity—and his other works—as I do: compellingly written with a rare combination of clarity, rigor, wit, and usefulness for living. 

And finally a shameless plug.  If you do feel that you need to ease into Korzybski's own writing with some introductory reading first, Drive Yourself Sane, written by myself and my wife Susan and now in its Third Edition, does present Korzybski's system in a brief, but accurate and comprehensive manner. Following that, there exists no better source than my own Korzybski: A Biography if you wish to follow Korzybski's own advice that "...when you read a book. Read not only what you read, but study the author." Korzybski: A Biography captures the adventure of his extraordinary life while tracing in detail the development of his work. Then, you'll definitely be ready to tackle Science and Sanity, and the rest of his work as well.  

Stoicism – General-Semantics' Family Tree

Marshall McLuhan proposed one way (among others) to understand any particular human innovation: asking what earlier innovations, inventions, form(s) of media/technology, does this recall? An interesting exercise to do with Alfred Korzybski's General-Semantics (GS). 


Despite its potentially confusing name, GS is not primarily focused on language and 'meaning' as commonly understood.
Korzybski explicitly said that he was investigating human nature, i.e., time-binding, which he considered the defining activity of human existence. After his first, 1921 book Manhood of Humanity, where he explored time-binding and it's implications, he spent the rest of his life exploring the mechanism of time-binding, how it works and the practical application of this understanding by individuals. 


It boils down to the old stoical adage: live according to nature. Which means in part, finding out about your own species and individual natures. The stoics, saw human capacity for 'reason' as what differentiated us from animals, and they taught their students practical ways to apply 'reason' in their lives. 


I have found no better way to understand Korzybski's work and its place in the long span of human intellectual achievement, than to see him as one of the great figures in the stoic tradition though he did not emphasize that. His work appears to me a great contribution to that still living stream of practical wisdom for living. 

Korzybski's Books in Two Sentences

In Manhood of Humanity (1921), Korzybski developed a theory of how humans function as a species—time-binding. In Science and Sanity (1933), he elaborated upon the mechanism of time-binding and how an individual could use this mechanism to develop his or her human potential.

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]

The Gap, The Gap, Oh, The Gap....

In his 1921 book Manhood of Humanity, Korzybski had observed the gap between the advancing scientific/technological progress and the limited social/ethical progress of mankind. Or should I say man-unkind? This gap, he posited would grow and grow and lead to more deadly future disruptions—wars, revolutions, wars, revolutions, etc.—until humanity somehow found how to consciously appropriate its time-binding potential and carry it into all areas of human life, not just science and technology. Indeed, Korzybski's desire to close the deadly gap in human affairs drove him to develop general semantics.

As the Second World War was coming to a close in 1944 and 1945, he felt a certain amount of ruefulness, frustration, pessimism at the waste of human life, the suffering, the destruction of Poland, the mass-murder of European Jewry, the insanity of Nazism, etc. Many people at the time felt similarly. The writer Ben Hecht, contemplating his lost Jewish 'brothers' and 'sisters', sadly expressed it like this, in his bookA Guide for the Bedeviled:

If civilization is to be measured by the progress of human rationality, we can still use the yardstick of the cynic—which is no longer than a sigh.

And yet... Korzybski wasn't inclined to say "people are bad, the world is bad, etc." and thus to sink into depression and despair. As he said 'I was born with a good liver'. He did say this: "The world is hopeless." Unless we as individuals work at changing the way we 'think' about 'things'. Then we might have some legitimate hope. Are we there yet?

"Time-Binding" : An Overview & Review

Here in one convenient place, I have put the previous postings I've done on Alfred Korzybski's formulation of time-binding. "Time-Binding" the subject of Korzybski's first book, Manhood of Humanity (1921), provided the foundation of what he subsequently formulated, as he sought to understand the mechanism of time-binding—how it works and how can we get it to work better. He felt profoundly convinced that, as he used to say 'Man is not an animal!'

Following each linked post below, in order, will give the reader a short but comprehensive overview of time-binding: how Korzybski developed it, his motivation for doing so, his unique approach to the phenomenon of human behavior,
implications of the notion of time-binding, previous viewpoints touching on the subject, etc.

What you read below is based on a careful, long-term study of Korzybski's writings, including rarely seen material from the Korzybski archives.

Remember, you're reading about yourself. What's in it for you?

...and the vermin were humans...and the streetcar

Korzybski's Formulation of "Time-Binding"

More on Time-Binding

Time-Binding and the Language and Logic of Nature

Man As An Exponential Power

Consequences of Time-Binding (Part I)

Consequences of Time-Binding (Part II)

Forerunners to the Time-Binding Notion (Part I)

Forerunners to the Time-Binding Notion (Part II)

Forerunners to the Time-Binding Notion (Part III)

Forerunners to the Time-Binding Notion (Part IV)

Forerunners to the Time-Binding Notion (Part V)

Forerunners to the Time-Binding Notion (Part VI)

Forerunners to the Time-Binding Notion (Part VI)

Interest in the idea of “progress” had become widespread by the mid-19th Century due in part to the work of Auguste Comte, founder of the discipline of sociology and of “positive philosophy.” Korzybski’s distinction between the childhood and the manhood of humanity echoed Comte’s discussion of the three phases in the development of human knowledge: the Theological, the Metaphysical, and the Scientific or “Positive” stages. The flavor of optimism and sense of the inevitability of human progress expressed by Comte seem clearly present in Manhood of Humanity as well.

By the late 19th Century, in his work Progress and Poverty (a volume in Korzybski’s personal library), American political economist Henry George, demonstrated a sense of both the transmission of culture and of progress, consistent with the notion of time-binding.

The narrow span of human life allows the individual to go but a short distance, but though each generation may do but little, yet generations, succeeding to the gain of their predecessors, may gradually elevate the status of mankind, as coral polyps, building one generation upon the work of the other, gradually elevate themselves from the bottom of the sea. (1)

Then in the first decade of the 20th Century, writer Henry Adams—noting the breathtaking changes brought on by expanding scientific knowledge and technological advances—had suggested a historical law of acceleration to account for them. Adams did not supply an actual equation, although he did suggest its exponential nature. Clearly, the main factors that entered into Korzybski’s formulation of time-binding had been recognized by many others before him.

Granted, he stood on their shoulders. Still Korzybski’s formulation of time-binding did something new. It brought together under one unifying, functional formulation the various related factors that others had previously noted. Making time-binding, the distinguishing feature of the human class of life gave the phenomenon a greater significance. His formula PR^T and his emphasis on the implications and applications of conscious time-binding for human welfare gave added value to the formulation. It seemed to him that his new definition, with these accompanying aspects, constituted a proper starting point for an applied science of humanity—a new art and science of human engineering.

Forerunners to the Time-Binding Notion (Part V)

In his manuscript and book, Korzybski had observed that

…in animal life time does not play the role it plays in human life. Animals are limited by death permanently. If animals make any progress from generation to generation, it is so small as to be negligible. A beaver, for example, is a remarkable builder of dams, but he does not progress in the way of inventions or further development. A beaver dam is always a beaver dam. (1)

There is no indication that he was aware at the time he wrote this of Abraham Lincoln’s “Lecture on Discoveries and Inventions” first delivered in 1858. In this lecture, Lincoln clearly pointed out the difference between humans and animals (also using the example of beavers) that Korzybski had observed.:

All creation is a mine, and every man, a miner…In the beginning, the mine was unopened, and the miner stood naked, and knowledgeless, upon it. Fishes, birds, beasts, and creeping things, are not miners, but feeders and lodgers, merely. Beavers build houses; but they build them in nowise differently, or better now, than they did, five thousand years ago. Ants, and honey-bees, provide food for winter; but just in the same way they did, when Solomon referred the sluggard to them as patterns of prudence. Man is not the only animal who labors; but he is the only one who improves his workmanship. This improvement, he effects by Discoveries, and Inventions.(2)

In the rest of his speech Lincoln provided a brief history and discussion of the conditions of human progress as he saw it. Lincoln noted the importance that cooperation, the use of speech, and the inventions of writing and the printing press, had in the sharing and transmission of knowledge. He pointed out a given generation’s dependence on the discoveries and inventions of the past, including the discovery and invention of methods of discovery and invention. He also mentioned the accelerating aspect of the growth of human knowledge especially notable after the invention of the printing press: “…discoveries, inventions, and improvements followed rapidly and have been increasing their rapidity since.”(3)

Notes
(1). Manhood of Humanity (1921), p.111.
(2). "Discoveries and inventions: A lecture delivered by Abraham Lincoln in 1860." (1915), San Francisco: John Howell. Also available at << http://showcase.netins.net/web/creative/lincoln/speeches/discoveries.htm >> (accessed 5/31/2006). Lincoln gave another version of this speech in February 1859 (see The Library of America’s Abraham Lincoln: Speeches and Writings 1859-1865, pp. 3-11.) Lincoln appeared devoted to the subject but the lecture was generally not considered a success (See Harold Holzer’s Lincoln At Cooper Union: The Speech That Made Abraham Lincoln President, pp 19-20, 210.)
(3). Ibid.

Forerunners to the Time-Binding Notion (Part IV)

By the mid-1800s, some notion of the process of transmission basic to time-binding had become widely accepted. George Boole, creator of the first system of mathematical logic, was able to clearly describe it in this passage from his address on “The Social Aspects of Intellectual Culture” to the Cuvierian Society, a science club in Cork, Ireland:

Each generation as it passes away bequeathes to its successor not only its material works in stone and marble, in brass and iron, but also the truths which it has won, and the ideas which it has learned to conceive; its art, literature, science, and, to some extent, its spirit and morality. This perpetual transmission of the light of knowledge and civilization has been compared to those torch races of antiquity in which a lighted brand was transmitted from one runner to another until it reached the final goal. Thus it has been said do generations succeed each other, borrowing and conveying light, receiving the principles of knowledge, testing their truth, enlarging their application, adding to their number, and then transmitting them forward to coming generations—Et quasi cursores vitai lampada tradunt [And like runners they pass on the torch of life]. (1) [Boole was quoting a line from De Rerum Natura by the poet-philosopher Lucretius who lived from 99 B.C.E.–55 B.C.E.. Greeks like Lucretius, not surprisingly, had also recognized aspects of the process of time-binding, almost 2 millennia before.]

Note
(1) George Boole, qtd.George Boole: His life and work. By Desmond MacHale. Dublin: Boole Press (1985), p. 123.

Forerunners to the Time-Binding Notion (Part III)

Korzybski’s study of the humanist tradition of Europe, strongly represented in Poland, probably exerted a direct effect on Alfred’s formulation of the time-binding notion. Renaissance thinkers like Leonardo da Vinci (1452-1518) showed how one could acknowledge and learn from the past to develop one’s excellence in the present and in this way contribute to future generations. In his 1902 biographical novel, The Romance of Leonardo da Vinci (English translation 1928), Russian writer Dmitri Merejkowski described a passage from da Vinci’s notebooks:

Once, desiring to present the development of human spirit, he drew a row of cubes: the first, falling, knocks down the second; the second, a third, the third, a fourth, and so on, ad infinitum. Underneath he wrote: “One jolts the other.” And he also added: “The cubes designate the generations of mankind and the stages of its knowledge.” On another drawing he represented a plough, turning up the earth, with the inscription: “Persistent Rigour.” He believed that his turn, too, would come in the row of falling cubes, — that at some time or other men would respond to his summons also. (p. 345)

Korzybski had long had the habit of reading a book by studying its author. His formulation of time-binding generalized this and thereby continued the humanist theme of the human origins of human culture. It implied that any aspect of culture had an author—in fact multiple authors. In his later writing and teaching, Alfred would often emphasize art, mathematics, religion, science, etc., as “manmade and nothing but.” This didn’t necessarily make them dependant on entirely arbitrary foundations but, on the contrary, seemed to provide a necessary approach for understanding, appropriating, and using them more effectively. And revising them when needed.

Forerunners to the Time-Binding Notion (Part II)

A number of decades before Alfred’s birth, the Polish national poet Adam Mickiewicz had called Poland, “the Christ of the Nations.” Jesus, as we know, was a Jew. Poles had lived for hundreds of years in relative harmony among, what became for a time, the largest concentration of Jews in the world. The Jews, the people of Israel, had managed for millennia to preserve an independent social-cultural life and sense of peoplehood under the most trying conditions of oppression and exile from their ancient homeland. Does it take a great leap of imagination to consider that post-partition Poles, interested in preserving their unique culture and sense of nationhood, may have learned something from the example of the Jews in their midst? It would be surprising if Korzybski, who had a major life-long interest, if not obsession, with Jews and Jewish themes, was not affected.

From ancient days, the Jewish tradition had certainly displayed an early recognition of the phenomenon that Korzybski labeled time-binding. An important part of the Jewish tradition had always been its emphasis on the importance of tradition itself. The Hebrew word for tradition, masorah or masoret, originally had referred to a “bond” or “fetter." The obligation for all Jews to study and transmit this tradition l’dor v’dor (from generation to generation) as well as the mechanism for interpreting and applying it to new conditions (Talmudic discourse), remained accepted and important parts of the tradition. Acceptance of this tradition as the birthright of every Jew led to the high literacy rates among Jews compared to other groups.

Forerunners to the Time-Binding Notion (Part I)

Although they resulted from his own process of questioning, observation, and discovery, Korzybski would have been the first to admit that the ideas expressed in his manuscript were not entirely original. He had predecessors.

First of all, he had been prepared for the formulation of time-binding by the very time and location of his birth. By 1879, even a Pole born in Warsaw was in a real sense born into exile. For Poland did not exist—except in the history, culture, language, and literature that ethnic Poles sought to preserve and carry on to their younger generation. Since the beginning of the 19th Century, Poles had been emigrating in large numbers from the oppressive conditions of post-partition existence. To remain a Pole required conscious effort whether one remained in the former Polish lands or went abroad. The mere fact of Alfred’s beginning his life as a Pole seems likely to have sensitized him to the significance of preserving and transmitting a culture under difficult circumstances. In addition, Korzybski’s emphasis in Manhood on the value of a scientific-mathematical attitude to human affairs—leading to a “human engineering”—also seems like a natural outgrowth of his upbringing by an engineer father in the heyday of Polish positivist philosophy and its esteem of science.

Consequences of Time-Binding (Part II)

When he was writing his first book in 1920, Korzybski spent considerable effort elaborating on the economic implications of time-binding. In terms of time-binding, wealth consisted of

...those things––whether they be material commodities or forms of knowledge and understanding––that have been produced by the time-binding energies of humanity, and according to which nearly all the wealth of the world at any given time is the accumulated fruit of the toil of past generations—the living work of the dead. (1)

Economically, money represented but didn’t constitute wealth. Korzybski warned “against confusing the ‘making’ of money by hook or crook, by trick or trade, with the creating of wealth, by the product of labor.”(2)

Clearly, for Korzybski, knowledge constituted the basis of wealth. Later on in the 1930s, Austrian economist Freidrich Hayek—following in the free market tradition of Adam Smith—began to explore in depth the role of knowledge in human social-economic life. However, there is little visible indication that Hayek or his colleagues ever had any awareness of Korzybski’s earlier formulation of time-binding. Korzybski didn’t pursue any connection with Hayek’s work. Indeed, in 1920, Korzybski still seemed to tilt somewhat strongly toward socialistic views and denounced Adam Smith as an apostle of selfishness and greed (his animus against Smith got somewhat toned down in the journey from manuscript to published book.) After writing Manhood, Korzybski interests shifted from the political-economic applications of time-binding and he never made any major study of economics.

From his time-binding view of wealth, Korzybski criticized both capitalists and socialists in the pages of the book:

There are capitalists and capitalists; there are socialists and socialists. Among the capitalists there are those who want wealth––mainly the fruit of dead men’s toil—for themselves. Among the socialists there are those—the orthodox socialists—who seek to disperse it. The former do not perceive that the product of the labor of the dead is itself dead if not quickened by the energies of living men. The orthodox socialists do not perceive the tremendous benefits that accrue to mankind from the accumulation of wealth, if rightly used. (3)

He suggested that “ ‘capitalistic’ lust to keep for SELF and‘proletarian’ lust to get for SELF are both of them space-binding lust––animal lust––beneath the level of time-binding life.” (4)

Korzybski proposed that an alternative political-economic approach must result from a time-binding perspective. He did not elaborate its details, but at its base it would involve a political-economic order, neither ‘socialist’ nor ‘capitalist’ as many people understand those terms, but focused on cooperation which would benefit all humans.

In his related political-economic analysis of the causes of the First World War, Alfred placed major, but not sole, responsibility on Germany. He noted the Germans’ first rate ability to maintain group cohesion and apply their time-binding energies, i.e., scientific/technical prowess, in concerted mass effort toward narrow national aims. The Allies had barely won the war with great difficulty. Apropos German and other forms of nationalism, to the extent that members of different nations could not extend their views beyond their narrow group interests, further conflicts seemed inevitable.

NOTES
(1). Manhood of Humanity (1921), p. 115.
(2). Ibid.
(3). Ibid, pp. 132-133.
(4). Ibid., p. 198.

Consequences of Time-Binding (Part I)

With his behavioral definition of humanity and his exponential formula of Progress in hand, Korzybski sought to draw out the social-cultural implications of time-binding. For one thing, he now had an answer to the second question that had bothered him for so long: “Why do our social institutions collapse while bridges mostly don’t?” (Except for some rewriting for brevity, form and order, most of his analysis in the first draft found its way into the published book.)

Our social institutions continued to collapse because of the growing gap between our increasing knowledge of and power over the ‘physical’ world (exemplified by bridge-building technology) and our inadequate and/or inadequately-applied knowledge of ourselves and our social relationships. According to Korzybski, this growing gap accounted to a significant degree for the continuing cycle of wars and revolutions, as humans unsuccessfully attempted to cope with the effects of increasing technological progress. He predicted that more and greater disasters would ensue—collapsing social structures—until humans somehow managed to narrow the divide between science and human affairs.

A major step in narrowing the gap would occur according to Korzybski, when we abandoned supernatural and zoological definitions of ourselves. He insisted that humans could not understand themselves adequately if they continued defining themselves as some additive combination of supernatural (‘soul’,‘spirit’, etc.) and ‘animal’. To Alfred, this view (man as an animal plus a 'divine' spark) appeared to make a comprehensive scientific study of humanity impossible.

Neither could humans understand themselves adequately if they insisted on viewing themselves simply as ‘animals’ destined to play out brutal competitive games for goods and territory. This view—“man is an animal”—diminished humanity and could justify the worst kind of behavior as “survival of the fittest.” Rather, viewing ‘Man’ as a time-binder would naturally include altruism:

..."survival of the fittest” for human beings as such––that is, for time-binders––is survival in time, which means intellectual or spiritual competition, struggle for excellence, for making the best survive. The-fittest-in-time—those who make the best survive––are those who do the most in producing values for all mankind including posterity. (1)

(1) Manhood of Humanity (1921), pp. 147-148.

Man As An Exponential Power

In 1920 as he was writing Manhood of Humanity, Korzybski believed that the growth of knowledge in the sciences and technology exemplified time-binding progress. Could he represent this mathematically? If time-binding was cumulative, the result of time-binding in any generation would be proportional to the amount of knowledge already present. This would have to involve an exponential or geometrical function. By early May, he was playing with this kind of progression—Y= 2^x—on a piece of scrap stationary that he had already used to draft some letters. On the stationary he also doodled some branching lines whose geometric growth followed the equation. It was a diagram of what 25 years later would become widely known as a “chain reaction”—the secret of the atomic bomb. (1) Starting with x=1, then 2, then 3, etc., he had written the successive values of Y: 2, then 4, 8, 16, 32, 64, 128, 256, 512, 1024, etc. The series showed an accelerating rate of growth since each number was proportional to the quantity already present––i.e., it came from multiplying its predecessor by the value of the exponent x. Underneath this set of numbers, Alfred had written the arithmetical or linear sequence of Y=2X: 2, 4, 6, 8, 10, 12,14,16,18, 20, etc. Relative to the geometric sequence, this sequence grew at a constant, slow rate because each number came from adding—not multiplying—2 to its predecessor.

For Korzybski, it seemed that he had gotten to the core of the distinguishing characteristic of humanity: “…a man is some exponential function where the exponent or power is Time.” (2) But what was the specific function? As an examination of both the draft and final versions of the book shows, “Power” was an important term for Korzybski—not only in its limited sense as a mathematical exponent. For him, time-binding involved ‘power’ in both the physical science and the social-cultural senses. The accumulated achievements of past generations provided the present generation with increasing means of power for doing productive work. Starting from the notion of power in physics and extending this into the social-cultural realm led Alfred to what he considered “the natural law for the human class of life.” (3)

In the physics formula for power, P=W/T. P stands for power, W stands for work (defined in term of energy—force times distance) and T stands for time. The formula defines power as the rate at which work (energy) is expended. Multiplying both sides by T gives the formula W=TP, Work equals Time x Power. It seemed to Alfred that if ‘Man’ was a part of the natural universe, human social-cultural life could be understood by extending the framework of such physical terms.

Wealth could be viewed, for example, in terms of work, i.e., as the accumulated work or products of work of previous generations. He made P equal to progress (the accumulated time-bound work inherited from the dead at any point in time). T times P gave it the same kind of unit as W. To account for the growth from one time-binding generation to the next, he brought in a factor R which represented the ratio of progress having the exponent of time—i.e. R^T. The time exponent T could be represented most simply by an integer showing the number of generations. Voilà—he had a formula for time-binding—W=TPR^T—with Wealth equaling human progress as an exponential function of time.

In the published book, Korzybski dropped T as a factor, and ended up with the basic formula, PR^T:

The typical term of the progression is PR^T where PR denotes the ending progress made in the generation with which we agree to start our reckoning. R denotes the ratio of increase, and T denotes the number of generations after the chosen ‘start.’ The quantity PR^T of progress made in the Tth generation contains T as an exponent, and so the quantity, varying as T passes, is called an exponential function of time.(4)

Korzybski theorized that the growth of knowledge in the physical sciences and technology approaches exemplary time-binding. Its relatively high rate of growth seemed to show a rapidly-rising exponential character—its curve growing steeper with each generation of scientists as more and more knowledge accumulated. For the most part, our social/behavioral knowledge—law, politics, economics, morals, human relationships, etc.—did not appear to represent successful time-binding. These areas of knowledge, what Korzybski called the semi-sciences, seemed to grow at a much slower rate, as if in an arithmetical straight line, in comparison with the more rapidly rising geometrical growth curve of science.

Notes
1. Doodle from draft of letters to Charles Armour and the Blackstone Hotel manager, N.d. (probably early May 1920), Alfred Korzybski Digital Archives (IGSDA).
2. The Manhood of Humanity and its Universal Language, Unpublished First Draft of Manhood of Humanity , p. 34. IGSDA.
3. Manhood of Humanity (1921), pp. xii-xiii.
4. Ibid., pp. 110-111.