Chapter 24 - A Visitor From Mars: Part 4 - A Visitor From Mars

Korzybski: A Biography (Free Online Edition)

Copyright © 2014 (2011) by Bruce I. Kodish 

All rights reserved. Copyright material may be quoted verbatim without need for permission from or payment to the copyright holder, provided that attribution is clearly given and that the material quoted is reasonably brief in extent.

The start of the new year also brought some excellent news from Keyser. He had delivered the manuscript of Mathematical Philosophy to Macrae who was readying it for publication. Alfred wrote back with his congratulations and his own big news:

...Mira came to stay here with me for several weeks. Now there is a big news which you and Mrs. Keyser are the only [ones] to know (except Ritter of course). We both want very badly to have a child, when we married we think there was something but Mira fell down from an automobile and probably harmed herself in the first month, she was ill for several months and since nothing has happen. Mrs. Ritter was a practicing physician in Berkeley and litteraly “made” a baby with incubator etc etc to Prof. Lange wife, who happens to be a life long friend of Mira. Well we thought that it would be very wise to start something of this kind here. Mrs. Ritter was very enthusiastic about it, she has a friend very successful surgeon in S.D [San Diego] and few days ago they “stretched” Mira, which apparently having a splendid body and splendid health had a too little opening in her uterus. The doctors decided that the opening is small, but they only got the idea how small it was after the operation. No ordinary instrument would enter the opening was so small, finally they had to use some little thing of the thickness of a hat pin, and then they gave poor Mira a thorough stretching, and inserted a special metal mushroom which she will wear for two months. Of course all this was made under gas. Mira was two days in the hospital in La Jolla, and she came “home” today. She feels fine absolutely like if nothing would have happen. Our hopes run high, very high indeed, the metal little thing does not prevent conception. We have decided that if we have a boy his name will be Alfred Cassius K. in memory of my beloved friend whom you probably know. (14)

Mira and Alfred kept up their hopes for the next few years, even corresponding with a fertility clinic to find out if there was any other thing they could do. The clinic was run by Doctor J. R. Brinkley, who specialized in goat testicle transplants (not mentioned in his correspondence with Alfred) and was eventually revealed as a quack. He preyed on desperate people and did his best to solicit the Korzybskis’ business, to no avail. Mira and Alfred were not quite that desperate.(15) Their chances of having a child had already been reduced due to their ages when they married. Eventually they resigned themselves to the realization that a child was not in their future.

In the meantime, they were together now in La Jolla. William A. Cyr, a reporter for The San Diego Union newspaper dropped in to interview them for a lengthy feature article on time-binding which appeared in the Tuesday morning, January 17, 1922 edition of that paper:

I found them Sunday at the Biological Institute, in Cottage 3, their little California cottage, in a room blue with smoke, sitting comfortably about a large table littered with interesting looking papers and letters. Both the count and madame are informal and friendly at all things, with a real charm and poise.  

Count Korzybski I found to be a man small in stature, a bit lame, with a head clean shaven and giving the appearance altogether of a strong, frank thinker, not devoid of sentiment or in the least cold by any means. Sharp, piercing eyes, keen and expressive, a mouth twisted almost constantly with humor, compelled by instant and uninterrupted attention. And when he discussed his book, “...Manhood of Humanity, the Science and Art of Human Engineering,” he became the incarnation of his exalted conception of man, possessed of the dignity and the dynamic which he believes man to have... 

Count Korzybski intends to remain in San Diego for several weeks yet. He is at present working on a new book which will deal with world problems in the light of man as a time-bound agent. He is to give an informal talk on his work to a group of intellectuals to be gathered by Frederick Gronberg, on Jan. 29. He spoke to a La Jolla audience on Dec. 10. 

Madame Korzybski is preparing to give an exhibition of her paintings at Coronado next month and probably will make portraits of prominent men and women there. (16) 

Although generally pleased with the article, Korzybski could not let pass the subheading labeling him a “Russian Nobleman”. He wrote a friendly but stern letter to Cyr and the error was corrected in a second article with the headline “Polish Scientist To Lecture On Nature Of Man”.(17) 

About 25 people from around San Diego who had read or were reading Manhood attended the January 29 lecture at Gronberg’s Artemesia Bookstore.(18) Cyr’s newspaper report of the talk summarizes well Korzybski’s work to date:

…Count Alfred Korzybski, noted Polish scientist and soldier, held a selected audience spellbound during a two-hour discourse of his new theories at A. Frederic Gronberg’s shop on Sixth street Sunday evening. 

Korzybski, whose book, “...Manhood of Humanity, The Science and Art of Human Engineering,” has aroused the scientific world to a new concept of Mankind, proved to be in his lecture as dynamic a speaker as he is a writer and thinker. Under the fire of his enthusiasm and by the expressions of his dramatically mobile features the audience experienced no handicap from his diction or his continentalized expressions, nor were they conscious of the injuries he had received as a soldier for the armies of Russia...

Alfred started the lecture with the conclusions he had been forming about the importance of language and symbolism in relation to time-binding. By this time, he had definitely rejected positivistic ‘empiricism’ as a valid philosophy for understanding how we gain knowledge. No ‘naked’ facts exist. Any understanding we can have of so-called facts is filtered through the ‘mind’ of one or more human observers. These observers will perceive ‘facts’ in terms of some theoretical framework with accompanying language/symbolism:

“It is obvious,” he said, “that we are a speaking and thinking class of life. No human problem can be solved without some speaking and some thinking. It is therefore, of primary importance if we are speaking or thinking correctly.”  

One needn’t conclude that reliable knowledge was impossible, however. The latest findings of mathematics and mathematical physics demonstrated methods/language by means of which reliable knowledge could be achieved/expressed:

Only a mathematical philosophy, a mathematical logic, he declared, were valid since whatever else was proved relative by Einstein, numbers in their relations to each other always remained the same, absolute and fixed. And his theory, worked out before he had heard of Einstein and therefore entirely independent of him, he said, was the complement of it, and completely in accord with that theory.

Such methods, he argued, already applied by engineers in the limited realms of technology and construction, could be extended to human affairs:

If a visitor from Mars should come, Korzybski showed, and on a tour of inspection should see our bridges, our skyscrapers, our subways, and other engineering feats, and were to ask, “How often does one of these collapse?” man here would say that if the engineering of these projects were correct in all respects, the material used in their construction carefully inspected, and the work well done, they would never collapse. 

Taken to our libraries the visitor from Mars, he declared, shown the histories of the world, would be appalled that the same men who could engineer non-collapsible bridges and skyscrapers could build a civilization which was collapsing at some point every year. And the reason, he pointed out, for the difference, lay in the fundamental beginnings of the logic that had built each.

The ‘logic’ at the basis of the non-collapsible structures was based on the power of ‘simple’ numbers which more exactly fit the changing relations and differentiating character of the world:

… Man, even the first savage, with an inherent ability to create things, that were “brand new,” fixes symbols for differentiation of the things found in nature, of distinguishing one object from another of the same kind, and thus gave birth, on natural and logical basis, to mathematics. From this basis of tangible fact he had evolved the logic which enabled him to build non-collapsible bridges.

Somehow this ‘logic’—he didn’t (and couldn’t yet) spell out how—could and should be applied to the collapsing structures of the rest of human life. (For the rest of his life, Korzybski would continue to refine this discussion on the origin and significance of numbers in the realm of human evaluation.) The remainder of the lecture returned to Korzybski’s definition of Man:

… “The materialist has built the universe and left man out of it. The spiritualist has built a soul and left out the whole universe.” Man must be treated as a whole, he emphasized, not as a bifurcated animal. A soul cannot be put in him as a flower is put in a flower pot; the soul, or reasoning faculty, or intellect, or whatever it is, cannot be detached from man and treated separately. Korzybski said he did not quarrel with either faction, those who spoke of man in terms of matter, space and time, the materialists, or those who spoke of him as energy, so long as each was consistent.

Alfred had clearly captured the interest of a wide array of San Diego residents:

Following Korzybski’s masterful talk, the privilege of questioning him was granted and a number of interesting sidelights of the theory were brought out, the crowd seeming reluctant to leave the intellectual feast he provided. Informally he and Countess Korzybski met each of the audience and exchanged brief greetings and bits of comment before the gathering broke up at a late hour. He is to hold a public lecture at the Wednesday club Thursday evening, February 16. (19)

Newspaper Notice for Korzybski Lecture,
 Wednesday Club, San Diego, California - Feb. 16, 1922

Manhood was also still capturing the interest of people throughout the United States and elsewhere. It had just gone into its third printing. Reviews and notices continued coming in. What the clipping service didn’t clip, his friends usually managed to find for him. Besides the San Diego newspaper articles, January had seen a complimentary review of Manhood in Chemical and Metallurgical Engineering. The January 1922 Yale Review had a friendly review from Alfred’s friend Alexander Petrunkavich, a Yale University biologist who a year earlier had read proofs of the book. There was a book notice and comment in the January 1922 issue of The Social Service Bulletin of The Methodist Federation for Social Service. Then in February, System:The Magazine of Business featured complimentary comments on Manhood within a feature entitled “What Business Men Read Last Month”. (This interest in time-binding by ‘capitalist’ businessmen amused the socialist Polakov.)

Despite an occasional negative review like the one in the February 8 issue of The New Republic, responses to the book so far generally seemed positive. Although Alfred considered The New Republic review malicious, he did accept negative criticism when he found something useful in it. And he found something very useful in the criticisms of psychiatrist Frankwood E. Williams, M.D. in the January issue of Mental Hygiene published by The National Committee for Mental Hygiene. In his review Williams wondered if Korzybski might be belaboring the obvious in his efforts at definition. He also criticized Korzybski for ignoring the contributions of psychiatry to the study of humans, although he did acknowledge,

…The expression “time-binder” is the best contribution the author makes. While there would seem to be nothing new in the conception of “time-binding”, the expression itself is a happy one, so rich in imagination that one is surprised to find it in a book on “engineering”...In addition to the contribution of the term “time-binder,” Count Korzybski’s book will probably be useful in another way. If the book arouses interest in the science and art of human engineering..., it will be the most useful book on the subject yet printed. And if, their interest stimulated,…business men, engineers, and mathematicians wish to continue their studies, they might begin with—a number of books come to mind, but, for example, White’s Foundations of Psychiatry. (20)

Korzybski became aware of the review later that summer and wrote to the journal for a copy. He later met Williams and considered him “a very fine man”. He found the review, despite its ‘scolding’, “quite friendly and nice.”(21) He took Williams’ recommendation of White’s book as a personal suggestion, obtaining and reading it as soon as he could. This was the beginning of Korzybski’s serious and extensive study of psychiatry. It would lead to a unique alchemy of notions as Korzybski, ‘the visitor from Mars’, began to juxtapose his physiological view of mathematics with psychiatry as he delved into how time-binding works.

Notes 

You may download a pdf of all of the book's reference notes (including a note on primary source material and abbreviations used) from the link labeled Notes on the Contents page. The pdf of the Bibliography, linked on the Contents page contains full information on referenced books and articles. 

14. AK to C. J. Keyser, 1/14/1922. AKDA 8.647-8. 

15. AK to Dr. J. R. Brinkley, 8/12/1923. AKDA 13.302; AK to Ray P. Martin (Brinkley Jones Hospital), 8/21/1923. AKDA 13.275; Dr. J. R. Brinkley to AK, 10/29/1923. AKDA 13.182. See Brock for more on the career of J. R. Brinkley. 

16. “Count Korzybski, Native of Warsaw, Now San Diego Visitor...”. The San Diego Union, 1/17/1922. AKDA 3.71. 

17. “Polish Scientist To Lecture On Nature Of Man”. The San Diego Union, 1/25/1922. AKDA 3.71. 

18. Fred Gronberg to AK, 1/10/1922. AKDA 8.640. 

19. “Holds His Audience Spellbound For Two Hours”. The Sun Dial, 2/11/1922. AKDA 3.87. 

20. Manhood of Humanity review by Frankwood Williams, M.D. in Mental Hygiene, Vol. VI, No. 1, Jan. 1922. AKDA 3.122-123. 

21. Korzybski 1947, p. 233.

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Chapter 24 - A Visitor From Mars: Part 3 - The Social Role of the Man of Knowledge

Korzybski: A Biography (Free Online Edition)

Copyright © 2014 (2011) by Bruce I. Kodish 

All rights reserved. Copyright material may be quoted verbatim without need for permission from or payment to the copyright holder, provided that attribution is clearly given and that the material quoted is reasonably brief in extent.

The contacts, correspondence, and mutual recognition between Korzybski and the people he was meeting in the winter of 1921-22 gives a reasonable picture of the kinds of relations he had with scientists and other brain-workers throughout his career. From the beginnings of his efforts, he saw what he was attempting to do—to found a new field, human engineering (as he was calling his efforts then)—as a scientific enterprise. Despite attempts later on by people like journalist Martin Gardner to depict him otherwise, Korzybski didn’t isolate himself from, nor was he isolated by, the scientific community. He sought and received advice, approval, and criticism from many of the leading scientists and mathematicians of his day. Nonetheless, it was apparent even in La Jolla that what he was doing was outside the realm of conventional scientific categories.

Since Korzybski was trained as an engineer, he had no credentials in the academic fields his work seemed to touch upon the most. He had called it “mathematical sociology” to start with, which didn’t help much. But his coinage of “human engineering” didn’t fit into many people’s conceptual boxes of engineering either. Figuring out what he was up to was a problem for a number of the people with whom he came in contact. It was a problem for Alfred as well. The scope of Korzybski’s concerns—so general yet so practical—attracted some people but puzzled, or even repelled, others.

Korzybski’s fellow Pole, sociologist Florian Znaniecki, discussed the various kinds of scientific workers in his 1940 book, The Social Role of the Man of Knowledge. In Znaniecki’s terms, the role Korzybski had taken followed the path of the scientific “explorer”, a “creator of new knowledge”. “All new developments in the history of knowledge”, Znaniecki wrote, “have been due to those scientists who did more in their social roles than their circles wanted and expected them to do.”(12) According to Znaniecki, two broad and overlapping areas were open for scientific explorers: the discovery of new facts and the discovery of new problems. Although Korzybski had studied the facts of history—including that of scientific and technological developments—and made use of accepted facts from the scientific studies of others, he had not discovered new facts. Instead, with his theory of time-binding, he had discovered a new way of looking at what was already known. His theory led to a new set of problems.

If humans by definition ‘bind time’, then every area of human life—including people’s personal lives—is affected by the growth or stagnation of knowledge and its applications. In studying the mechanism of time-binding, Korzybski had begun focusing on people’s methods for gaining knowledge: understanding facts, formulating theories, and approaching problems. So he was interested not only in the content of what mathematicians, scientists, and other scholars had discovered but also in the pathways and pitfalls of their acts of discovery.

In addition, although he was focusing on mathematics and science, especially the exact sciences, he realized that the areas of knowledge relevant to the study of time-binding spanned the humanities and sciences. Indeed, he believed the study of time-binding and its mechanism would help achieve the Leibnizian dream of unifying the various fields of knowledge. At the start of 1922, Alfred wrote the following to H. D. Brasefield, an Oakland, California high school principal interested in his work:

…My aim is to unify science, and give a base for the brainworkers to unite around some constructive scientific as is possible doctrine. As a matter of fact we all speak about the “brotherhood of man” but such thing is impossible as long as we will not have a “brotherhood of doctrines”. Our mental processes are so scattered between the thousands of doctrines which each one is leading somewhere else…The old system is breaking down, what next? No new doctrine is workable for the time being…What [is] the way out? To provide a new method of analysis which would show clearly the valuations and thus help all to unite toward the same end. My book makes obvious that what we need today is more the RE-EDUCATION of THE EDUCATED than the education of the masses…(13) 

In an era of growing specialization, his problem was to find an audience that would consider his unifying vision on its own terms without trying to stuff it into the container of one or another different, and more limited, standard discipline. He had special hopes of gaining the interest of mathematicians, scientists, and engineers. But there was no getting around one fact—as a scientific explorer and theoretical synthesizer, it didn’t seem likely the formulator of time-binding would find an adequate home in any particular academic field.

Notes 

You may download a pdf of all of the book's reference notes (including a note on primary source material and abbreviations used) from the link labeled Notes on the Contents page. The pdf of the Bibliography, linked on the Contents page contains full information on referenced books and articles. 

12. Znaniecki, p. 164. 

13. AK to H. L. Brasefield, 1/5/1922. AKDA 8.691.

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Chapter 24 - A Visitor From Mars: Part 2 - Among the Scientists

Korzybski: A Biography (Free Online Edition)

Copyright © 2014 (2011) by Bruce I. Kodish 

All rights reserved. Copyright material may be quoted verbatim without need for permission from or payment to the copyright holder, provided that attribution is clearly given and that the material quoted is reasonably brief in extent.

Before Alfred had come to Scripps Institute he had had contact with individual scientists and scientific workers like Keyser, Loeb, Polakov, Steinmetz, and Wolf, among others. In San Francisco and Berkeley, the circle had expanded. At La Jolla, he extended his contacts even further throughout the U.S. scientific community. 

Partly, he was reaping the fruits of previous efforts: book publicity, word of mouth from readers of Manhood of Humanity and from people who had attended his lectures (and those of Polakov and Keyser), book reviews, and the large number of contacts and correspondents he had begun to accumulate. Partly, it was also due to his being at La Jolla, a prestigious research center, where he could meet and mingle with the resident and visiting scientists, as a fellow scientific worker. Partly, it was due to the efforts of Ritter himself.

Since the summer, Ritter had been writing enthusiastically about Korzybski to others, including E. W. Scripps who, with his sister, had become one of the great benefactors of early 20th century American science. Although Scripps had hoped to meet Alfred, he had already left the San Diego area for the winter and was yachting off the Florida coast when Alfred arrived. The curmudgeonly Scripps—who referred to himself as a “damned old crank”(5)—had had a long-time interest in “what kind of thing this damned human animal is, anyway.”(6) He read Manhood of Humanity with interest and liked parts of it. In letters to Ritter, he acknowledged the kind of exponential process in human history Korzybski had depicted. But Scripps didn’t allow himself to express too much enthusiasm. Korzybski must be wrong about human beings’ abilities to think rationally since, after all, people could believe in irrational things. As a self-declared pessimist about the human race, he rejected Korzybski’s vision of human potential. (7)

Although Scripps was away, Alfred did meet Scripps’ sister, Ellen. The elderly Miss Scripps seemed charmed enough by Alfred to invite him to speak at the La Jolla Community House in early December. Two months later, Alfred wrote to Keyser, “Miss Scripps had a very bad accident and broke her hip, she is about 80 so the thing is serious, and her brother has come from Florida, we probably will meet him…”(8) However, I have found nothing in Korzybski’s records indicating the two men ever met face to face.

Ritter and E. W. Scripps had been instrumental in founding the Science Service in 1920 in association with the National Academy of Sciences and the American Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS). Scripps provided an endowment and Ritter provided leadership as its President. With headquarters in Washington, D.C., the Science Service initially published a bulletin providing science stories to subscribing newspapers. When Korzybski arrived in La Jolla, they were getting ready to start the Science Service News-Letter, a science journal for general readers, finally launched in March 1922 and still in print as Science News.(9) 

Perhaps not surprisingly, the new director of the Science Service, polymathic chemist and writer Edwin E. Slossen, soon became interested in Korzybski’s work. Slossen worked for a literary journal The Independent and The Weekly Review and in an article, published in the February 25, 1922 edition of that magazine, he wrote a respectful review of Manhood, “Is There a Law of Human Progress?: Speculations on the Acceleration of Scientific Knowledge.”(10) 

E. E. Slossen and wife May Slossen, 1927

As a result of such writings as well as Ritter’s and others’ communications about him, Alfred’s name was becoming more widely known among scientists. For example, L. O. Howard, an entomologist at the U.S. Department of Agriculture and the President of the AAAS, mentioned Korzybski’s work at the Association’s conference in his end-of-year presidential address which was published in the December 30 issue of Science. Korzybski felt most grateful for Howard’s complementary words and began corresponding with him.

Alfred was also making connections locally around La Jolla. He was meeting and talking with the resident scientists at Scripps soon after his arrival. He also gave a lecture there within the first few weeks. Some no doubt were puzzled by his presence. Others found him a positive stimulus. Alfred became especially friendly with George McEwen, a physicist and applied mathematician, who had been recruited by Ritter a number of years before and who at the time was researching ocean currents. He had a long subsequent career at Scripps Institute and the University of California as a professor of physical oceanography. Something in Korzybski’s (and Keyser’s) approach to mathematics resonated with him and after Keyser’s book came out in 1922, McEwen collaborated with Alfred in an effort to write a joint review of it for Science.

With its growing reputation, Scripps Institute had an influx of scientific visitors during Alfred’s time there. One of these was University of Chicago developmental biologist Charles M. Childs. After meeting Childs at La Jolla, Alfred studied his books and corresponded with him for a number of years, later acknowledging the great influence Childs’ work had on him. To Alfred, Childs expressed a sensibility in his language— as did Loeb, Einstein, and others—with a consciousness of relations (avoiding elementalistic splits), characteristic of the time-binding attitude Alfred was trying to understand and make more explicit.

Along this line, his exposure to Childs’ work enhanced his awareness of the biological aspects of time-binding: we ‘think’ with the whole of our beings as organisms. In his letters, Alfred was beginning to refer to his own approach towards mathematics as physiological. Dealing explicitly with mathematics, and other forms of time-binding, as physiological, i.e., the behavior of organisms with nervous systems, may have struck some people as weird. But Korzybski would only increase his insistence on the importance of realizing that ‘thinking’ does not occur in a timeless, fleshless void. If relativity had abolished infinite speeds in physics, then the speed of ‘thought’ was not infinite either. The physiological gradients in primitive organisms that Childs described as time-related processes, appeared as the precursors of more elaborate nervous systems. To Alfred it made perfect sense to try to understand how organisms (including symbol-manipulating humans) gained knowledge of their environments in terms of natural processes. He had already touched on this, especially in the biology appendix of Manhood, and would elaborate it further in his subsequent work.

The time-dependent character of ‘thought’ became clear to Alfred at a gathering he attended at Scripps. Someone there had an I.Q. test that people took as a kind of party-game. Those whom Alfred regarded as the most gifted did the worst on the test. They spent the most time considering the ambiguities of the questions and attempting to understand the possible situations behind the words, and so could not respond as quickly as others with the ‘correct’ answers. ‘Thought’, taken as broadly as possible, clearly was a process. Alfred found it interesting that standard forms of logic and commonplace, even scientific, language seemed to obscure the factor of time as a consideration in thinking about thinking or thinking about anything else for that matter. In his copy of George Boole’s The Laws of Thought, he had underlined some telling phrases from the following passage:

It may indeed be said, that in ordinary reasoning we are often quite unconscious of this notion of time involved in the very language we are using. But the remark, however just, only serves to show that we commonly reason by the aid of words and the forms of a well-constructed language, without attending to the ulterior grounds upon which those very forms have been established...(11)  

While resident at the Scripps Institute, Alfred was also meeting people and giving talks in nearby San Diego. During the summer he had exchanged letters with Dr. Edward L. Hardy. Hardy, a scholar of English Literature, teacher, and educational administrator, had become President of the San Diego Normal School in 1910. In 1921, the school was reconfigured as San Diego State Teachers College (it is now known as San Diego State University). Hardy, who remained President there until 1935, became enthusiastic about time-binding after reading Manhood of Humanity. At the end of November, Alfred spoke at a gathering of teachers at Hardy’s home in San Diego. The two men maintained a friendly relationship and correspondence for years afterwards, with Hardy helping Alfred to edit Science and Sanity.

By the end of November, Alfred and Mira had not seen each other for several weeks. In the beginning of December, Alfred went to Los Angeles for a few days to spend some time with her. Mira had been staying at the Ambassador Hotel, but was hoping to make contacts and perhaps find some people whose portraits she could paint in Pasadena. The two attended a dinner with some people from California Institute of Technology (Caltech), including physicist Robert Millikan, Chairman of the Caltech Executive Council (effectively President of the school), and astronomer George Hale. Alfred provided an after-dinner speech and had meetings with both men, who seemed genuinely interested in his work.

Back in San Diego, Alfred delivered two lectures in early December. One was at the monthly meeting of the San Diego Chapter of the American Association of Engineers. A few days later, with Ritter introducing him, he gave the presentation Miss Scripps had invited him to give at the La Jolla Community House. Alfred recognized his audiences liked what he had to say. But neither his lectures nor Mira’s painting commissions were progressing as they wanted. There was a great deal of interest but not much, if any, money. They decided to extend their stay in Southern California a little longer. Mira would try her luck in Pasadena. She relocated to the Vista del Arroyo Hotel there. In January she would come down to stay with Alfred and perhaps find some portrait work among San Diego socialites.

Notes 

You may download a pdf of all of the book's reference notes (including a note on primary source material and abbreviations used) from the link labeled Notes on the Contents page. The pdf of the Bibliography, linked on the Contents page contains full information on referenced books and articles. 

5. Scripps qtd. in Pauly 2000, pp. 204. 

6. Ibid., p. 206. 

7. “…I am bound to believe that man is mythological (perhaps mystical) and at the same time brutally beast. Thus with a sad heart I am prevented from receiving to myself an offering of hope. Perhaps Korzybski is but another of those dreamers of which his race [the Slavs] has been so prolific.” E. W. Scripps to W. E. Ritter, 8/29/1921. AKDA 6.206. Ritter shared this correspondence with Korzybski. Alfred appeared amused by Scripps’ concern with the question “What is a dollar?” and by Scripps’ efforts to convince Ritter that he (Scripps) had already come up with many of the ideas in Manhood.

8. AK to C.J. Keyser, 2/2/1922. AKDA 8.570. 

9. Pauly 2000, pp. 210-211. See also “Smithsonian Institution Archives, Finding Aids to Personal Papers and Special Collections: Record Unit 7091, Science Service, Records, 1902-1965, Historical Note” at http://siarchives.si.edu/findingaids/FARU7091.htm#FARU7091h (accessed 1/17/2011); now (2014) at http://siarchives.si.edu/collections/siris_arc_217249

10. Edwin E. Slossen, “Is There a Law of Human Progress?: Speculations on the Acceleration of Scientific Knowledge”. The Independent and Weekly Review, 2/25/1922. AKDA 3.80. [Alfred and Mira later became friends with Slossen, meeting him in person. They corresponded with him until Slossen's death in 1929.]

11. George Boole, p. 173.

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Chapter 24 - A Visitor From Mars: Part 1 - Introduction

Korzybski: A Biography (Free Online Edition)

Copyright © 2014 (2011) by Bruce I. Kodish 

All rights reserved. Copyright material may be quoted verbatim without need for permission from or payment to the copyright holder, provided that attribution is clearly given and that the material quoted is reasonably brief in extent.

Korzybski had come to the Scripps Institution for Biological Research to confer with its founder and director, veteran biologist William Emerson Ritter. Ritter who had helped start the zoology department at Berkeley had become know for his detailed studies of marine life.(1) Nonetheless, he held a very broad view of biology which emphasized the unity of organisms and their relations to their environments. In the early 1900s he had begun trying to establish a marine biological laboratory somewhere along the California coast. After several attempts to do so, he built a lab in the boathouse of San Diego’s Hotel Del Coronado with help from members of the city’s chamber of commerce. He soon ‘struck gold’: two of San Diego’s wealthiest residents, newspaper magnate E. W. Scripps and his older sister Ellen Scripps, provided funds for Ritter to realize his dream to create a multi-disciplinary marine biology station. In 1907, they purchased property in La Jolla, just north of San Diego, and in 1912 the Scripps Institution (in association with the University of California) was born. 

William Emerson Ritter

Ritter and Korzybski had been corresponding since their first meeting that summer in Berkeley. They were both eager for some face-to-face discussions. Ritter had become fascinated with Korzybski’s new approach to the study of Man, especially since he had been working on a book under the tentative title of “The Natural History of Intelligence.” (The book finally was published in 1927 with the title The Natural History of Our Conduct.) Ritter had a philosophical bent and a well-developed consciousness of the role of language in scientific formulating. An article of his in the Journal of Philosophy had been entitled “The Need of a New English Word to Express Relation.” In his book, The Unity of the Organism, he had stressed the need for biologists to go beyond what he called “elementalism,” the study of isolated parts. He believed, “The organism in its totality is as essential to an explanation of its elements as its elements are to an explanation of the organism.”(2)  He called this approach “organismalism.”

Discussions with Korzybski at La Jolla helped Ritter gain more understanding of the relativity revolution in physics and see its broader implications for his holistic approach to biology. In a February 1922 letter to zoologist H. S. Jennings, Ritter noted his gratitude to Korzybski for helping him realize, “...For living nature...the space-time concept will prove finally to be the death of all elementalism, including atomism as this has come down to us from Greek speculation.”(3) Early on in their discussions, Ritter also realized that Korzybski’s insistence on saying “man is not an animal” was not a denial of Darwin but a logical point about a more useful classification of humankind within the biological world. Ritter considered their discussions about time-binding and evolution important enough to encourage Alfred to write an article for Science on the matter, which Alfred began to work on. As an upshot of their talks, Alfred also got Ritter to agree not to call ‘man’ an animal anymore. (Ritter slipped in subsequent writings, however.)

Alfred was also learning from Ritter. One of the main things was the new term “elementalism”—which became central to his subsequent formulating. Elementalistic terms/formulations treated as isolated and separate what might better be considered as related parts of larger wholes. But Alfred did not like “organismalism” as a term to describe terms/formulations which dealt with wholes and made explicit the relations of elements—the converse of elementalism. The term “organismalism” seemed too tied to biology. (Alfred would later come up with the term “non-elementalism,” which seemed more general.) If—as Keyser would later write—“to be is to be related,”(4) then there existed a great need for developing a way of speaking that made dealing with relations and wholes more explicit. That was becoming more clear in Alfred’s studies in the foundations of mathematics. As Korzybski put it at this time, the elementalism Ritter talked about seemed associated with the old, Aristotelian, syllogistic logic. Seeing things in terms of mutually exclusive classes formalized the subject-predicate structure of everyday language and could distort an accurate, functional view of how things worked. In regards to understanding Man, the old definition of Man as Animal plus Spirit (M = A + S) seemed to him an example of this. Whatever actual qualities the elementalistic designations of ‘animal’ and ‘spirit’ may have stood for, this “plus,” elementalistic logic surely distorted the unified functioning of a human being. On the other hand, understanding Man as a time-binder, seemed to provide a much more fitting way of talking about Man, which did not break humans into elementalistic parts.

Notes 

You may download a pdf of all of the book's reference notes (including a note on primary source material and abbreviations used) from the link labeled Notes on the Contents page. The pdf of the Bibliography, linked on the Contents page contains full information on referenced books and articles. 
1. Ritter’s 1893 doctoral dissertation was entitled “On the Eyes, the Integumentary Sense Papillae, and the Integument of the San Diego Blind Fish”. Pauly 2000, p. 291. 

2. W. E. Ritter, The Unity of the Organism, Vol. I, p. 24. 

3. “Now, and particularly in the last year, has come some real, even though slight, understanding of relativity as interpreted by Einstein and its bearings on the problems of living nature. For what I have been able to get from this…I am much indebted to Count Alfred Korzybski, who, as you know, is spending some months with us here.” W.E. Ritter to H.S. Jennings, 2/23/1922. AKDA 6.160. 

4. Keyser 1927, p. 94. 

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