Chapter 47 - One Weary Man: Part 4 - One Weary Man

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.

By August 2, Alfred wrote to Walter Polakov, “Most probably an institute for General Semantics will be financed in Chicago. In the meantime, ‘I don’t know, let’s see.’”(21) He had been invited to give a seminar to the GS class at Marlboro State Hospital from November 18 to December 12. By that time, the plans for an institute had become more definite. After the Marlboro seminar, he planned to return to Cambridge and begin packing at once for the move to Chicago.

Without question Mira’s absence continued to affect Alfred. Every so often they would end up writing to each other about the issues that had led to her leaving. These continued as sore spots for both of them. Alfred didn’t seem able to acknowledge how his own attitudes and behavior may have contributed to the troubles in their relationship. And Mira, while admitting her mistakes, no longer felt willing to take all of the responsibility for their vicious circle. Her attempts to correct what she saw as his misevaluations of her behavior and motives met with fierce resistance from him. She had an intense interest in general semantics and demonstrated her life-use of it in her letters. She had suggestions for making his work easier and for promoting it. But as far as he was concerned, she didn’t know a thing about it. He treated her thoughts about GS as so much ‘blah, blah, trah, trah’; if she would only just pipe down, listen to him, and do what he told her, everything would be all right. Although none of their fundamental differences had gotten resolved, her time away had left her feeling stronger in dealing with him. Still, she would try her best to accommodate his wishes. She recognized his burdens and didn’t want to add to them. She missed him and she wanted to come home.

He missed her too and, as he wrote to her at the end of the year, desperately missed having the personal life away from his work that he knew he could only have with her. But he felt that at this point, it would be better for both of them if she remained in Argentina, letting him pack and move to Chicago by himself. And he wanted her to stay away until he had established the Institute and set up a home for them. She reluctantly agreed.

Although his work seemed to be progressing quite well and was apparently going to get funded, a sad, lonely, even pessimistic tone came forth in his letters from this time. On December 10, he wrote to Helen L. Evans:

Am after the hospital seminars a sadder and older man. It’s pathetic how similar seminar-reaction[s] are in hospitals of confined “insane” and colleges of non-confined un-sane. As long as the seminars lasted, everything went well, but the results will be except a few cases just as effective as on the majority of the Olivet group,... Please realize that the main value of G.S. is preventive, not trying to “cure” “incurable” cases. (22) 

A week later he wrote to her again,

“Lonely”, well if anyone knows the meaning of this word it is me. I am always lonely even in crowds and with students as they usually are so far off the mark. (23)

While working with him during the Olivet seminar earlier in the year, Helen had already observed those qualities in him. In a letter to him near the end of the seminar, she wrote:

June 9, 1937

Count Korzybski — 

I am aware you do not want either gratitude nor compliments, but from my studies and your conferences so much has been gained it would be strange if I had remained entirely unaware of the ‘mind’ and personality responsible for such a work.  

Your courage in facing before-hand the obstacles that General Semantics has to meet, and in meeting your own personal problems is clear in the lines of suffering in your face. The fact that you understood and experienced so much probably accounts for the confidence you are able to inspire in others.  

The enclosed is a feeble attempt to paint your portrait in outline as it has appeared to me. Please accept it without sentiment. 

The next page contained the following poem. After the date and the title, the script suddenly slanted to the left (unlike the letter) in a way that appeared to have been written by someone writing left-handed:

Portrait in Outline
One can but guess the depth or breadth of mind
Whose sad, ironic certainty predicts our woe
Before we speak, so keen to find
Some common thing to ease the flow
Of thought — awaken thus an unresponsive world; 

One weary man who sits alone, with tender hand
Upon the pulse of sodden lives we meet...
Eager to give, content to feel, like a strand
Of Polish music in some sunlit street
Against our smug, complacent faces hurled. (24)

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. 

21. AK to Walter Polakov, 8/2/1937. IGS Archives. 

22. AK to Helen Evans, 12/10/1937. IGS Archives. 

23. AK to Helen Evans, 12/17/1937. IGS Archives. 

24. Helen Evans to AK, 6/9/1937. IGS Archives.

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Chapter 47 - One Weary Man: Part 3 - Olivet

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.

In April, Korzybski traveled to Olivet, Michigan. His friend Joseph Brewer, President of Olivet College, had asked him to return there to give an extended seminar, a series of fourteen, two-hour evening lectures from April 22 to June 18. As Brewer later noted, almost the entire school community of faculty and students had attended Korzybski’s previous two introductory lectures in 1935. “The reactions varied from anger through confusion to enthusiasm but there was no indifference. This acted as a sort of ferment in the institution...”(9) Brewer, who was developing a reputation as one of the most innovative small-college leaders in the United States, now wanted to add more korzybskian yeast. 

On April 19, about the time of Alfred’s arrival at Olivet, his friend William Morton Wheeler collapsed and died of a heart attack on a Cambridge subway platform. The 72- year-old entomologist and professor emeritus of zoology at Harvard, had felt enthusiastic about Korzybski’s work from the first time the two men met in 1923. Subsequently, Wheeler provided major help to Alfred in editing Science and Sanity. Although retired from teaching, just prior to his death he had continued to work at Harvard’s Biological Laboratories and Museum of Comparative Zoology. He had also continued to write and had gained broad respect as an exceptionally well-read and wide-ranging scientist-humanist. Alfred would miss his friendship and steadfast support. 

At Olivet, President Brewer had gotten funds from an anonymous donor to sponsor Alfred. Arrangements were made to transcribe the lectures and have them published. The lectures were open to all 35 of the faculty and all 265 students—although the students were limited to a first come, first serve basis. Between 75 and 100 people, mostly students, attended. Since he considered the effects of his lectures cumulative, Korzybski discouraged causal drop-ins and had attendance taken. Towards the middle of the seminar, he began offering interviews (as usual, on a voluntary basis) for interested group members who wanted to clear up confusions and get help making personal applications. The Olivet College Echo, the campus newspaper carried reports of the lectures for the general college community.

The transcript, under the title General Semantics, was edited by Korzybski and made available in a limited First Edition by the Olivet College Book Store, soon after the seminar in 1937.(10) Later plans to republish it were delayed during Korzybski’s lifetime. A Second Edition, published by the Institute of General Semantics, came out in 1964 under the title General Semantics Seminar 1937: Olivet College Lectures, with a Third Edition in 2002.

The Olivet College Lectures provides the closest impression so-far-in-print of how Korzybski talked while teaching. In his “Foreword to the Second Edition” Joseph Brewer noted,

Re-reading the Olivet Seminar now [1963], it is extraordinary to find how the rhythm, tone and flavor of Korzybski come through. To those who knew him, it is easy in going through this text to visualize his gestures and especially his mobile features, the quizzical expression succeeded by a warm, broad smile, his eyes shifting quickly from an amused twinkle to a penetrating intensity. (11) 

At this point in his teaching career, Korzybski had been giving seminars for two years. He had developed a facility for conveying his work in simple terms. As Homer J. Moore Jr., editor of the 2002 Third Edition, pointed out, “In this early presentation, [Korzybski] gives a complete outline of his system with the training methods needed to apply it.”(12) Brewer wrote that, 

Those who have attended later seminars [as Brewer did] will recognize the basic pattern that was set here. Korzybski sought constantly to refine and improve and enrich the presentation to make it more effective, and to adapt it to the particular group present, but the fundamental method and content are here.(13) 

Nonetheless, the presentation in the Olivet Lectures—like earlier seminars (notes and transcripts of which I have seen)—seems more linear than that of seminars Korzybski gave in subsequent years.The twenty-eight total hours, which his fourteen two-hour lecture periods gave him, afforded less time than he would have liked to elaborate stories, relate his own personal experiences, give examples from current events, make digressive ‘footnotes’, or do much in the way of demonstrations—although he did his best to include these aspects. He also couldn’t assume that many students had much familiarity with his work, which he could expect of later seminar students who had various popularizations or some of his own articles to read, if not Science and Sanity.

In the first lecture he noted the background of his work in mathematics and psychiatry, the importance of predictability, and the centrality of evaluation and values—the latter two forming the core subject matter of general semantics. GS was for use in solving life problems. He compared it to algebra. Reading a book on algebra was not enough to learn how to solve algebra problems; a technique had to be learned, and then applied. Similarly, with GS: “...it is just like another kind of algebra; it exists and its only value is to help the solution of life’s problems. But, we have to have a technique. You must master the technique before you can apply it and solve the problems.” Nonetheless, Korzybski emphasized that he was not there to solve his students problems for them: “It is my business to give you a method to solve your own problems.”(14) 

Part of this orientation involved an attitude of minimum expectations, learning not to expect too much. (This did not mean not having goals or not working toward them.) In Science and Sanity, he had briefly noted the “semantic shocks” resulting from unjustified expectations (p. 472). Since then he had been elaborating an “extensional theory of happiness” or “happiness formula” that he presented at Olivet. From then on, this would become a permanent part of his seminar content.

He draw a small circle E1 on the blackboard to represent minimum (extensional) expectations. A middle-size circle labeled ‘F’ stood for facts—whatever happened irrespective of expectations. On the opposite side, an even larger circle E2 represented maximum (intensional) expectations.

Extensional Theory of Happiness

He advised his class to get in the habit of starting out with minimum (extensional) expectations E1, since maximum (intensional) expectations E2, when disappointed, led easily to cynicism, bitterness, and frustration, labeled E3:

...If you expect, say ‘nothing’, in the actual living, bumping against facts, impact with the environment, you will find the facts better than you expected. You will be encouraged. You will not be cynical; you will not be bitter; etc. Life then will be happier for you as living protoplasm reacting to the impact of the environment. Expect the minimum. That is [expectation1 (E1).] That is the new extensional infiinite-valued expectations based on maximum probability. (15) 

At Olivet, he also began to pull away from his previous informal usage of the term “semantics”—by itself—to refer to his work, declaring in the lectures, “the old semantics is now dead”(16) and more consistently referring to his work as general semantics (or simply as “G. S.”), a “general theory of values and evaluation”. In presentations over the next two years, he would move towards completely abandoning the shortcut use of ‘semantics’ to label his work. General Semantics—despite the suggestion of its name to many—wasn’t any kind of ‘semantics’ at all, as people usually interpreted the latter term.

Many Olivet students and faculty felt inspired and changed as a result of Korzybski’s lectures and interviews. For example, one of the main points he emphasized in his lectures (as he would continue to do) was the importance of people considering themselves in neurological terms in order to become more extensional about themselves. This might lead to a number of practical consequences such as the following: if right or left-handedness depended on some ‘innate’ structuring of an individual’s brain, naturally left-handed people should not continue trying to force themselves to write, etc., with their right hand just because they had been told to do so as children. Continuing to do so could create many difficulties in functioning. In personal conferences, Korzybski had advised a few such probable ‘lefties’ to try switching their handedness. They noticed remarkable changes in making the switch.

One young man reported on the vastly improved legibility of his writing, his greater ease in expressing himself, and a significant reduction in a stammering problem. These changes occurred within a few weeks of making the change. He did have an initial period of difficulty during the transition when he felt unable to exert much pressure while writing with his left hand. During this time, he noticed a great deal of tension in his right hand, which seemed to be reproducing the left hand’s writing motions. He also experienced strange sensations in his head, which passed after a few days.(17) Korzybski considered his ‘simple’ advice about laterality as part of his general-semantics instruction. (This wouldn’t make much sense to someone who viewed his work as mainly about words.)

Olivet College’s assistant librarian, Helen L. Evans, was also one of the ‘left-handers’ helped as a result of switching to her left hand (she eliminated a speech block). She got to know Korzybski fairly well during the time of the seminar, attending all of his lectures and helping him by serving as a chaperone during his interviews with the women students. She came to see him as a valued friend and corresponded with him afterwards.(18) 

A few days after the seminar ended in mid-June, Joseph Brewer sent a letter of appreciation on behalf of the Olivet Board of Trustees to Korzybski, who was staying in Chicago. Brewer soon followed this with a detailed personal letter reporting on the beneficial effects of the seminar on the college community as a whole and on various individual students and faculty participants. Both letters were published as addenda for the 1964 Second Edition of the Olivet Lectures.

Despite Korzybski’s general success at Olivet, there were grousers. Prior to the seminar, Olivet’s Registrar and Dean of Men—although he attested to having no personal complaints about Korzybski or his work—had objected to Brewer about Korzybski’s visit. The Dean, who had had to deal with various epidemics of campus rumors in the past, considered it “extraordinarily dangerous to harbour a person of the Count’s spectacular and compelling personality” which he felt might engender more rumors.(19) Brewer didn’t consider this a legitimate reason for not inviting Korzybski. What small community like the Olivet College campus wasn’t subject to a certain amount of gossip-mongering?

Indeed, hearsay about Korzybski may have been promoted by a faculty couple, a philosophy/psychology instructor and his wife, a drama teacher. The two harbored resentments against both Brewer and a number of their fellow faculty members. When Brewer terminated their contracts the following year, they filed a complaint with the American Association of University Professors. Their charges against Brewer and a number of Olivet teachers also included a number of accusations against Korzybski: his lectures were “virtually compulsory” (he took attendance) and were characterized by “gutter” language (he talked frankly about sex) and the violation of “all known forms of logic and clear discourse” (he discussed the limitations of the aristotelian orientation). The philosophy teacher attended only the first lecture while his wife wrote, “I had better use for my time than to listen to the lewd stories of a half-intoxicated man.” The two recounted stories that they said some students had told them about Korzybski’s inappropriate behavior. Brewer compiled a folder full of responses to these claims from a number of students, faculty, and administrators. They unanimously disputed every one of the couple’s allegations about Brewer, Korzybski, and others. Korzybski also responded with a 15-page letter, which must have taken him several days to write, refuting point-by-point the claims made against him. Neither the Olivet College Board of Trustees nor the American Association of University Professors found any basis for further investigation. The couple’s complaints were dismissed. Despite these problems, there is no indication Brewer ever regretted his decision to sponsor Korzybski. Indeed, Korzybski was welcomed back to Olivet. After giving another seminar at the Chicago Campus of Northwestern University from July 7 to August 20, he returned to the Olivet campus to use the library there and gave two lectures between September 20 and October 5. (20)

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. 

9. Brewer, “Forward to the Second Edition”, General Semantics Seminar 1937: The Olivet College Lectures, p. viii. 

10. Rough editing by Korzybski of the Olivet Lectures transcript consisted of about 200 hours of work, which still didn’t seem good enough for him [AK to Cornelius Crane, 7/11/1939. IGS Archives]. 

11. Korzybski 2002 (1937), p. viii. 

12. Homer J. Moore, Jr. in Korzybski 2002 (1937), p. iv. 13. Brewer in Korzybski 2002 (1937), p. viii.

14. Korzybski 2002 (1937), p. 5. 

15. Korzybski 2002 (1937), p. 89–93. In the original diagram, published in the First Edition of the Olivet Lectures, Korzybski used “E1” to label the smaller, minimum expectation circle, and “E2” to label the larger, maximum expectation one. This original labeling, which I’ve used in the diagram above, got reversed in later presentations of the diagram, and in subsequent editions of the book after his death. 

16. Korzybski 2002 (1937), p. 6. 

17. Ronald Leipholz “Report of the Change from Right-handedness to Left-handedness”, May 30, 1937. IGS Archives. See also “Addendum for 1964 Edition”, in Korzybski 2002 (1937) for Brewer’s report on the seminar’s effects on various Olivet students and faculty. 

18. Helen L. Evans to Joseph Brewer, 4/25/1938. IGS Archives. 

19. Olivet Dean of Men to Joseph Brewer, 1937. IGS Archives. 

20. Olivet College “Flory” Folder. IGS Archives.

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Chapter 47 - One Weary Man: Part 2 - Man The Unknown

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.

By mid-February, Mira had reached Argentina. Although she and Alfred had just experienced the biggest blowup they had ever had in their relationship, they kept in frequent contact throughout her time away. Mira wrote more often than Alfred, who at times didn’t feel he had much new to tell her other than the fact that he was working very hard and worried about her health. He needn’t have worried. Even in this early part of her time away, she had begun to feel better. She was gaining weight as well as perspective, was beginning to meet people, and working out plans for getting painting commissions among the social elite of Mar del Plata and Buenos Aires. 

Mira felt just as concerned about Alfred’s health, given his tendency to push himself. His report that he was drinking very little, repeated often in his correspondence throughout the year, must have reassured her. He also wrote to her in February that he was trying a pill Lynn had suggested to him—benzedrine sulfate, a form of amphetamine just starting to get widely prescribed as an ‘energy booster’. Rather promiscuous prescription of the drug continued through the 1960s, when its addictiveness and damaging side effects became more widely understood. Korzybski confirmed the energizing effect of the drug on himself in his letter to Mira. It’s intriguing to wonder how long he continued to take it and what effect it might have had on his behavior. I’ve found no direct evidence of long-term amphetamine use by him. His astounding capacity for work in later years could have been explained by amphetamine use. On the other hand, his exceptional endurance had been noted by others, long before he had the opportunity to take the drug.

On March 7, as his Harvard seminar was going on, Alfred’s friend and mentor William Alanson White died. White had been Alfred’s first and main teacher in psychiatry through his writings, the hours of personal discussion, and through the opportunity he had given Alfred to study at St. Elizabeths. White had grasped the importance of bridging psychiatry with the physico-mathematical sciences. Despite the press of his own affairs he had consistently attended to Alfred’s peculiar efforts along that line. Alfred would always remain grateful to White for his encouragement. And White had also learned from Alfred. Traces of Korzybski’s influence appeared in the last book White had published, his 1936 Twentieth Century Psychiatry.

In 1937, the wave of psychiatric interest in Korzybski’s work that White had helped start was continuing to gather momentum. The January 1937 issue of the American Journal of Psychiatry had carried Douglas Campbell’s article “General Semantics: Implications of Linguistic Revision for Theoretical and Clinical Neuro-Psychiatry”. The May issue of that journal included Alfred’s review of Man, The Unknown, the 1935 best-seller by Nobel Prize-winning medical researcher Alexis Carrel.

TIME Magazine Cover: Dr. Alexis Carrel -- Sep. 16, 1935

Alfred and Mira had read Carrel’s book soon after it came out and Alfred had begun recommending it to his seminar students. In his two St. Louis papers he had referred to Carrel’s discussion of the role of language in science and medicine. Carrel had criticized the regrettable tendency of scientific/medical “schemata” to emphasize ‘abstract’ “universals” over the ‘concrete’ individual and thus to objectify verbal fictions.

Korzybski’s laudatory 1937 review, written a year previously, emphasized Carrel’s mid-decade survey of the various specialties providing knowledge about humans. Carrel saw a pressing need for a future synthesizing effort to develop “the science of man” which would—according to Carrel—reduce the dangers of over-specialization by emphasizing “the human being in his entirety.”(3)  

...[m]odern civilization absolutely needs specialists. Without them, science could not progress. But, before the results of their researches are applied to man, the scattered data of their analyses must be integrated in an intelligible synthesis. 

Such a synthesis cannot be obtained by a simple round-table conference of the specialists. It requires the efforts of one man, not merely those of a group. A work of art has never been produced by a committee of artists, nor a great discovery made by a committee of scholars. The syntheses needed for the progress of our knowledge of man should be elaborated in a single brain. (4)    

Such a synthesis would constitute the basis of an over-arching “superscience”:

This superscience will be utilizable only if, instead of being buried in libraries, it animates our intelligence. But is it possible for a single brain to assimilate such a gigantic amount of knowledge?...It seems that such an accomplishment is not impossible. In about twenty-five years of uninterrupted study one could learn these sciences. At the age of fifty, those who have submitted themselves to this discipline could effectively direct the construction of the human being and of a civilization based on his true nature. (5)  

Korzybski pointed out that the world didn’t have to wait for another 25 years. He had already produced at least the foundation of the kind of synthesis Carrel had envisioned. Carrel’s dream of a science of man—expressed in the old language—seemed unworkable if Carrel and others continued to neglect the foundational issues that Korzybski had already brought to the fore (evaluation, extensionalization, neuro-linguistic and neuro-semantic environments, etc.). Despite this criticism, Korzybski appreciated Carrel’s 1935 diagnosis of the degenerating condition of modern civilization. But in subsequent years, Korzybski would have to qualify his enthusiasm.

After retiring from Rockefeller University in 1938, Carrel would return to France. In 1941 he became an official in the Nazi collaborationist Vichy government. His French Foundation for the Study of Human Problems would oversee demographic and eugenics research in Vichy France. Although Carrel himself was never directly implicated in any crimes against humanity, his Vichy association and his espousal in Man The Unknown of eugenics and the use of “poison gas” in dealing with criminals and the criminally insane, would taint him as a proto-Nazi.(6) By 1941 his reputation had already begun to slip. Korzybski, in a footnote in that year’s “Introduction to the Second Edition” of Science and Sanity, made a brief, apparently critical reference to Carrel and his book while discussing “führers” in different fields “fancying that they represent ‘all’ of the human world!”(7)

Carrel would remain a ‘mixed bag’ for Korzybski. In subsequent seminars until the end of his life, while openly stating his qualms about Carrel’s political sympathies and mystical Catholicism, Alfred acknowledged the man’s contributions as a great physician-scientist. He would still refer to some of Carrel’s findings and would use a statement from Man The Unknown—not included in his review—as one of the quotes on self-reflexiveness with which he typically ended his lectures: “To progress again, man must remake himself. And he cannot remake himself without suffering. For he is both the marble and the sculptor.”(8)

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. 

3. Carrel 1935, p. 47. 

4. Carrel 1935, p. 47. qtd. by Korzybski 1937, in Alfred Korzybski Collected Writings, p. 250. 

5. Carrel 1935, p. 285. Qtd. by Korzybski 1937, in Alfred Korzybski Collected Writings, p. 251. Carrel had received a copy of Korzybski’s first Time-Binding paper in 1925, and wrote to Korzybski: “I shall take your reprint on “Time-Binding” with me to France, so that I may have an opportunity of reading it with the care it deserves.” [A. Carrel to AK, 5/25/1925. AKDA 17.135.] Given his discussion in Man The Unknown of the “science of man”, etc., it appears likely that he did just that. 

6. Carrel 1935, pp. 318–319. 7. Korzybski 1994 (1933), “Introduction to the Second Edition” of Science and Sanity, p. xliii–xliv. 8. Carrel 1935, p. 274.

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Chapter 47 - One Weary Man: 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.

The troubles with Mira and with Lynn had not only disturbed Alfred’s personal life. They also seemed to him to have reduced his prospects for establishing his work around Boston—and perhaps elsewhere too. He wondered whether the whole unfortunate business had harmed Campbell’s and Congdon’s opinions of him. Campbell visited him in Boston and reassured him otherwise. In a March 3, 1937 letter to Kendig, Campbell wrote,

I saw Alfred in Boston and was delighted to find him very much better in every way—healthy, hard at work and self-controlled. Lynn [at this time apparently still working at McLean], Congdon and myself are continuing to have unexpectedly good results with G.S., and while we cannot share some of Alfred’s propagandizing and proselytizing tendencies there is no doubt we are more and more enthusiastic. I believe that I shall soon be able to announce some form of permanent subsidy for him, perhaps making it possible for him to locate in Chicago. (1)

Until whatever Campbell was planning came through, Alfred would indeed be hard at work. (Then again, when was he not hard at work?) From February 17 until March 20, he gave a seminar for a group largely composed of Boston-area academics at the Baker Library of Harvard Business School which had become a center of human relations studies under the direction of Professors Elton Mayo and F. J. Roethlisberger. The two men had pioneered the study of motivating factors in workers’ behavior in their famous “Hawthorne Experiments”, at the Western Electric Hawthorne Works in Illinois. 

Elton Mayo (left) and Fritz. J. Roethlisberger,
Harvard Business School, ca. 1940

Roethlisberger, who attended the seminar along with Mayo, had previously read Science and Sanity:

[Korzybski’s book] although difficult to read, seemed to me to be saying something important. What I think attracted my interest was the way he put epistemology to work, so to speak. Boiled down, his approach seemed to me to be applied epistemology.  

At this time there was considerable interest in comparing the way a child thinks (Piaget) with the way a primitive thinks (Levy-Bruhl) and with the way a neurotic thinks (Freud). Only a genius or a nut would have tried to compare the way a mathematician thinks (Russell and Whitehead) and the way a neurotic thinks (psychiatry). Korzybski was such a man.  

Because he took such an extreme position, which at that time did not fit well into any discipline, Korzybski never gained any academic post or much recognition. His field was neither strictly philosophy, mathematics, linguistics, semantics, psychiatry, nor mental health. It was a brilliant one-man synthesis of all these things which he called general semantics to differentiate it from ordinary semantics (e.g., Ogden and Richards, The Meaning of Meaning). (2)

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. D. G. Campbell to M. Kendig, 3/3/1937. IGS Archives. 

2. Roethlisberger 1977, pp. 71–72.

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