Chapter 56 - Time To Try New Things: Part 6 - Autumn News

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, who followed the news closely, must have been aware of the debacle occuring in Poland, even as the war seemed to be coming to an end. D-Day, the successful invasion of Normandy in June, had marked another turning point. Germany was getting squeezed from all sides between British and American forces from the west and the Soviets from the east—small comfort for the Poles. In August as the Soviet army reached the eastern suburbs of Warsaw, it stopped. Stalin had decided to let the Germans level Warsaw. The Germans focused their remaining forces and weaponry on defeating the Polish Home Army, which had begun an uprising in Warsaw. A quarter of a million citizens in the Polish capital were killed before the uprising was over in October. Before the Germans withdrew from the city, they destroyed as much of it as they could and exiled a large portion of its population. Whatever agony Korzybski may have felt (and I guess that he felt a great deal), he kept it inside. There was nothing he could do about the situation in Warsaw. And the situation at home, as always, required his attention.

The Institute had gotten even more short of help in June when Pearl Johnecheck came down with a serious infection, either measles or scarlet fever. As 1944 advanced into autumn, she developed some kind of rheumatic heart condition. She could no longer continue her studies or her work at the Institute. She would do what she could do to help and would remain in close contact with Mira (with whom she had grown close), Alfred, and the other people at the Institute. But by the next year, she would be hospitalized before beginning a slow recovery in the last half of 1945. Charlotte Schuchardt, still hoping to develop a career in dance, had been working as Korzybski’s editorial assistant and as the main instructor of the seminar-workshop ‘neuro-semantic relaxation’ sessions—besides myriad other office and organizational duties. Now she took over Pearl’s job as Korzybski’s confidential secretary and Institute office manager.

The shortage of money also remained a pressing concern. A report at the end of 1944 would indicate that they were $10,000 short of their $20,000 short-term fundraising goal. They would need $10,000 more in pledges soon just to allow them to continue operating until the end of 1945 at what had become their normal, bare-to-the-bone level—with little extra for new programs, additional staff, etc.

Before the summer seminar-workshop, Kendig had applied for a grant from the Field Foundation to fund the IGS project in leadership training, which she and Korzybski had been hoping to develop for a number of years. She had an interview in New York with the foundation’s executive director, Maxwell Hahn. The foundation, a charitable trust started by Chicago Sun publisher Marshall Field III, had a special interest in programs related to fighting racial prejudice. Kendig had tried to focus her conversation with Hahn on Korzybski’s work in relation to prejudice and social tensions. Kendig had arranged and annotated for Hahn a selection of reviews, articles, and reprints. She also had Elwood Murray send materials about the many general-semantics related programs at the University of Denver and elsewhere, including a course on “Minority Problems in Denver”. Even with this impressive array of materials and courses, the Field Foundation turned down Kendig’s grant application in October. She would continue to try to get grant money from them, to no avail.

Despite the Institute’s struggle to survive, 1944 saw a surprising amount of public interest in Korzybski’s work. Life magazine commissioned Fred Rodell, a law professor at Yale who had done some popular writing, to write an article on GS and politics with Korzybski’s collaboration (Korzybski and Rodell would be listed as co-authors). Rodell, as well as a Life photographer, came to see Korzybski before the summer seminar. Eventually, Life decided not to carry the article, entitled “A Word to the Wise”. and sold it to Liberty magazine, which published it in its November 4 edition. To Korzybski the article seemed like a mishmosh due to faulty editing, but without question it brought publicity.

Korzybski’s books were selling like never before. Manhood of Humanity had completely sold out. With continuing demand for it, the Institute put out a call for used copies. It was listed as “temporarily out of print” on the Institute booklist. It would remain ‘temporarily out of print’ for the next six years. E.P. Dutton no longer had an interest in continuing with it. Mira, who had long reminded Alfred of the importance of time-binding for his ongoing work, urged him to begin writing an introduction to a new edition. The International Non-Aristotelian Library Publishing Company would publish it. He worked on it in fits and starts until the end of his life, but with other projects, various interruptions, and the exceptionally demanding standards for publication that he had come to impose on his own writing, he never completed it. (The second edition, with additional material by him and others, came out in 1950, a few months after his death.)

The demand for Science and Sanity in 1944 seems even more remarkable. The Institute sold four times as many copies as were sold in any previous year since the original publication of the book, just a little over 10 years before. They had already had to do some reprintings of the Second Edition. Later, in the spring of 1945, the book became unavailable for a number of months due to labor problems and paper shortages.

Even with the reduced demand for his seminars, Korzybski and the people at the Institute remained extremely busy. In August, Korzybski had gone with Kendig to Denver where they both lectured as part of the University of Denver’s summer workshop in improved communication, based on general semantics. While there, Korzybski spoke to the psychiatrists’ group at Fitzsimmons Hospital. Meanwhile at the Institute, Francis Chisholm began giving a six-session evening course, “Introduction to General Semantics”, over three weeks in August. Chisholm had left his position at Syracuse University and was going to begin teaching at Stephens College in Columbia, Missouri in the fall. About 40 people attended his course, which was transcribed and published by the Institute that winter as Introductory Lectures in General Semantics. Chisholm had been working at the Institute over the summer and seemed to Korzybski and Kendig like the kind of leader they wanted to encourage and develop. Kendig, whose professional background included curriculum development and educational research had long seen the need for a “so-called standard course which [could] be used in ‘controlled experiments.’ ” Chisholm had begun researching and designing such a course or at least an outline/syllabus that could serve to standardize courses in this way. (29) 

Much of these Institute doings were reported in an Autumn 1944, General Semantics Newsletter written by Kendig and sent out near the end of the year along with another fundraising notice. The newsletter noted an additional bit of promotional news for the Society for General Semantics. The Society had consolidated its business office with the editorial office of ETC. at the Illinois Institute of Technology (formerly the Armour Institute), where Hayakawa worked. The item noted that Karl Hauch, the Society’s Secretary-Treasurer, would be glad to receive membership applications and renewals. Given the difficult wartime circumstances, the Society for General Semantics, at the end of its first membership year, seemed to be doing rather well, which promised to add to the Institute coffers too. The Institute had managed to survive for another year.

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. 

29. General Semantics Newsletter, Autumn 1944, AKDA Scrapbook 4.79.

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Chapter 56 - Time To Try New Things: Part 5 - 'A Deaf Ear'

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.

Hayakawa had gotten some pieces of general semantics but had insufficiently grasped the system that connected them. You could get to some useful places by climbing his ladder. He had skillfully translated Korzybski’s new vision into the old elementalistic language that people could use without getting too discomforted. But at a certain point, you would have to kick away the ladder after you had climbed it, in order to understand and make use of Korzybski’s more comprehensive and radical approach.

Korzybski was becoming more concerned about Hayakawa’s lapses, especially since Hayakawa had come to appear to more and more people as a major spokesman for his work. At this point, he had written to Hayakawa about some of these issues in a friendly way. Despite these differences there seemed little rancor between the two men in the summer of 1944. They still seemed like friends. But trouble had been brewing.

As early as 1940, Kendig had written a memo to Alfred discussing some of these issues. It had bothered them that Hayakawa had never had a personal interview with Korzybski, nor attended a complete seminar (and as noted before, typically fell asleep when he sat in on Alfred’s lectures). He later explained he got bored hearing Korzybski repeating the ‘same’ things he already ‘knew’.(12) So much for ‘Lecture1 is not Lecture2, Lecture2 is not Lecture3, etc.’—the form of which Hayakawa had enthusiastically praised as “the most simple, most general, and most efficient of the rules for extensionalization.”(13) But Hayakawa didn’t follow his own rules, as he admitted in a 1990 interview with Roy E. Fox:

SIH: I’m not conscious of approaching some things with a non-Aristotelian point of view. 

RF: So to carry general semantics around with you all the time is not something you would advocate? 

SIH: That’s right. To carry it around with you all the time, you’d have to be more obsessed than I have ever been. (14) 

Up until 1944, Korzybski had mainly decided to overlook such things in consideration of the young professor’s merits. On December 2, 1943, he had written a two-page report recommending Hayakawa for a Guggenheim Fellowship.(15) There’s no evidence that Korzybski’s appreciation of Hayakawa’s talents as a teacher, writer, and editor was anything other than entirely genuine. He had agreed to having Hayakawa put the Institute as the nominal publisher of the 1940 second lithographed edition of Language in Action—despite the abstraction ladder. Korzybski had helped Hayakawa get a commercial deal with the Book-of-the-Month Club through his contact with David Fairchild. Despite its flaws, he had spoken well of the book, and of Hayakawa, in public and in private letters. The Institute had promoted the book and reprints of Hayakawa’s articles on its publication list, had promoted his work in seminars, and had honored him by making him an Institute Fellow. Korzybski had expressed delight with his appointment as Editor of ETC. He seemed to think the problems with Hayakawa could be resolved with suggestions and corrections. But it didn’t all depend on Korzybski.

Hayakawa had developed some disparaging notions about Korzybski and some grandiose ones about his own relation to Korzybski’s work. Whatever the reasons, his attitudes toward Korzybski seemed to make Hayakawa impervious to any of Korzybski’s efforts to get through to him. These attitudes are revealed in detail in two remarkable documents—one, an interview-memoir of the Hayakawas conducted in 1989—and later—by Julie Gordon Shearer (publically available on the internet from the University of California, Berkeley); and the 1990 Fox interview, published in ETC. in 1991.

Margedant Peters Hayakawa noted in the Shearer interview that she had felt an instant aversion to Korzybski when she first met him.(16) Despite a number of friendly gestures and invitations to come to seminars and have an interview with him, she assiduously avoided such contacts. Both she and her husband soon came to look at Korzybski in terms of her initial snap judgment: he ‘was’ in their view a dogmatic and demanding dictator who encouraged unquestioning, cultish followers.(17) By the end of their lives, the Hayakawas did not hesitate to cast aspersions about Korzybski’s ‘nuttiness’, his supposed failure to develop his work after writing Science and Sanity, his discouragement of student’s contributions to the development of general semantics, etc. I’m not sure they exactly qualify as lies because the Hayakawas apparently accepted them as innocent truths. The notion that Hayakawa and his wife might be projecting their own issues onto Korzybski and identifying him with their projections never seemed to occur to either one of them. Hayakawa seemed to see every action of Korzybski—every comment and suggestion—as an unreasonable demand for obedience. (18) Perceiving Korzybski thusly and given his own significant drive for power (he later became a controversial university president and then a U.S. Senator) he seemed determined to put himself in the role of “disobedient and disloyal son.”(19) I can imagine a likely reply from Alfred: “I am not your father!”

The Hayakawas still maintained a veneer of pleasantness with Korzybski in 1944. However, Hayakawa’s resentments would become overt, at least behind Korzybski’s back, within the next few years. Much of what he said and did influenced other people’s attitudes toward Korzybski. Much of this eventually got back to Korzybski and his colleagues at the Institute. Hayakawa’s misunderstandings and hostility became not only a significant source of personal pain for Korzybski but a major source of the problems that would occur between the Institute and the Society for General Semantics. And Hayakawa’s influence would help perpetuate misunderstandings about general semantics that continued long after Korzybski’s death.

Hayakawa’s behavior in relation to Korzybski from 1944 on seemed consistent with attitudes he expressed much later: he believed that he—and to a lesser extent Johnson and Lee—had made Korzybski famous and that Korzybski felt jealous of him because of that. In the ETC. interview with Fox, he remarked:

S.I.H.: When my Language in Action became a Book-of the-Month Club selection, that made him furious!....

R.F. [Interviewer Roy Fox]: “So Korzybski thought your book was incomplete? or inaccurate?”

S.I.H. : [Laughing] Just unfair competition! He wanted people to buy his book and not mine! (20) 

At bottom, probably even by 1944, Hayakawa had very mixed feelings about Korzybski, his work, his colleagues, and the Institute. He gave little value to the Institute courses, which he considered ‘religious indoctrination’.(21) Korzybski’s more dedicated students seemed suspect too: “I’m sure there were people who made a kind of cult out of it, and I’m sure Korzybski encouraged it.”(22) In short, the Institute didn’t seem academically respectable to him.(23) To believe this in 1944, he would have had to ignore the fact of Korzybski’s many students from academia who were making use of his work in university courses around the country. However, Hayakawa’s discomfort with Korzybski’s work may eventually have had some self-fulfilling effects on the attitudes of academics with whom Hayakawa interacted and influenced.

As he indicated in the Shearer interview, the Society for General Semantics, not the Institute, represented the future of general semantics for him. Hayakawa believed he had done more than anyone else to make Korzybski and general semantics famous. ETC., which he later claimed to have founded and took credit for naming, constituted for him the main reason for the existence of the Society.(24)  And, as far as he was concerned, ETC. existed as his ballywick. He didn’t intend to have Korzybski interfere with the editing of the journal.(25) He seemed determined to become the major figure in ‘semantics’. He—not Korzybski—would use ETC. to define the field and determine the direction of the discipline. (26) 

At the beginning of the year, the problems with Hayakawa that had remained quiescent for so long began to blossom—quietly at first. In January, Kendig had suggested Francis P. Chisholm as a new Institute Fellow. Hayakawa rejected him. According to the rules they had set up, the appointment of a new Institute Fellow needed unanimous approval of the existing Fellows, so there was nothing else Kendig or Korzybski felt they could do. This surely must have bothered them. They both considered Chisholm to have a solid grasp of the non-aristotelian system-discipline and a gift for communicating it. It surely must have grated on them to have Hayakawa, about whom they already felt some qualms, turn down such a capable individual.

There were also inklings of problems with the editing of ETC. Korzybski and Kendig were listed as “Consulting Editors”. Korzybski certainly saw his role as more than symbolic but Hayakawa seemed lax in consulting with either him or Kendig. Korzybski was contributing pieces to the journal—mostly forewords and commentaries on articles, as well as letters and reviews. He had wanted to see the Tables of Contents of upcoming issues. He had comments and suggestions for Hayakawa, who was not communicating with him about these things as he wished. Hayakawa had also begun publishing some material that Korzybski found questionable.(27) 

Now Hayakawa was planning to publish “Newtonian Physics and Aviation Cadets”, in the Spring 1944 issue of ETC. Korzybski had seen the article by Anatol Rapoport, a mathematician then in the Army Air Corp stationed in Alaska, and liked it a lot: it seemed to provide an exceptional example of the power of hidden assumptions and the usefulness of uncovering them. Korzybski had written a foreword to another article by Jerome Alexander and wanted to do something similar with the Rapoport piece, but didn’t know what was going on with the new issue due to come out soon. He wrote to Hayakawa on March 6, in part to get some information and to make some suggestions about the journal.:

Where in hell did you get the article of Rapoport? It is an extremely fine article, just the kind of stuff we want to publish in ETC. Please let me know the history of this article, how you got it...This article is most important for our work and in many ways a justification for it. 

...I am not happy, and neither is Kendig, that you do not let us know about your plans for every next issue of ETC. We have so much fretting to do and guessing what you might do as an editor. For instance, do you plan to publish in the same number the article of Alexander as a leading article in the next issue ( I didn’t see the proofs yet)?...please don’t torture me in guessing what you will or may do as an editor. I have plenty of guessing to do altogether; I want to know what is going on. And believe me, if I am prevented from advising you about ETC. it will not be for the good of ETC. and yourself. (28)

But Hayakawa seemed to have already turned a deaf ear to Korzybski and his concerns.

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. Fox, p. 247, Shearer, pp. 79, 126-127. 

13. Language in Action (1940), p. 103-104. 

14. Fox, p. 245. 

15. AK to H. A. Moe, 12/2/1943. Ralph Hamilton Papers. 

16. Shearer, p. 132. 

17. Shearer, pp. 133, 134. It appears that Margedant Hayakawa also avoided Korzybski because both she and her husband believed ‘he was a lech’. S. I. later “recalled”: “...he [Korzybski] offered private and rather intimate “semantic massages” to some women he found especially attractive.” [Haslam,. In Thought and Action: The Enigmatic Life of S. I. Hayakawa, p. 109.] Disturbing: that S. I. Hayakawa could so blithely accept and repeat as ‘fact’ what most likely existed as hearsay or as his and his wife’s projection; there is no evidence of any inappropriate incidents that he or she directly observed or reliably knew about. Doubly disturbing: Hayakawa’s biographer, Gerald Haslam, seems to accept as ‘fact’, this unflattering gossip about Korzybski that Hayakawa ‘recalled’. (Myths and misinformation about Korzybski and his work abound. Haslam—who studied with Hayakawa—uncritically repeats in his book [and thus may help perpetuate] other unfavorable canards, projections, and unsubstantiated opinions about Korzybski and his work, from Hayakawa and others; I think a key to the enigma of Hayakawa lies therein.) If I had found any reliable evidence of inappropriate sexual conduct on Korzybski’s part (or of other such egregious activity), I would have openly dealt with it in this biography. I didn’t find any. 

18. Shearer, p. 81–82. 

19. Shearer, p. 78. 

20. Fox, p. 247-248. 

21. Fox, p. 248-249. 

22. Fox, p. 248. 

23. Shearer, p. 130. 

24. Shearer, p. 121, 123. 

25. Shearer, p. 126. 

26. Shearer, p. 123-124. 

27. Korzybski had already written a friendly note to Hayakawa about one such questionable piece. [AK to S.I. Hayakawa, 1/18/1944, Ralph Hamilton Papers.] 

28. AK to S.I. Hayakawa, 3/6/1944, Ralph Hamilton Papers.

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Chapter 56 - Time To Try New Things: Part 4 - The Process of Abstracting

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 July seminar-workshop was notable for more than its new structure. Korzybski also produced a mimeographed handout for an important new visualization, to use with the structural differential, for conveying the process of abstracting. As a partly iconic, visual (and kinesthetic) representation of Korzybski’s system, nothing had seemed to match the differential as a training device—once students understood the distinctions and relationships represented. There was the rub. Some basic and persistent misunderstandings of the differential by students had vexed him for several years. The origin of Korzybski’s new diagrammatic formulation of abstracting came from his attempt to deal with some of these issues, particularly brought to the fore by Hayakawa’s work.

He described part of the problem in a May 24 letter to Robert Lee Durham, President of the Southern Seminary and Junior College in Buena Vista, Virginia, who had sent a letter asking about some fundamental issues related to identity and identification:

You know from Science and Sanity the structural differential. On top there is the event, then comes the ‘object’, and then follow higher and higher order abstractions. On a printed page the ‘higher’ go ‘down’. A great many students are somehow confused because higher and higher abstractions in a diagram go physically lower and lower on a printed page. In the lithographed edition [1939] of Hayakawa’s Language in Action the differential was given the way it was in Science and Sanity, from the top of the page down, which was correct. He was pestered by his students on this subject. Somehow he did not know the answer, so in the printed text edition of his book on page 96 he turned around the differential and put in print: ‘Start reading from bottom UP’. Why in the dickens then do it, when normally you read from up down? The answer is the unconscious assumption trained in us in a pre-scientific orientation; namely, the earth is flat and so ‘up’ and ‘down’ have absolute value, while on a spherical earth they have only relative value. (9) 

In the later editions of his book, Hayakawa had further compounded the problem of reversing the Structural Differential by renaming it “The Abstraction Ladder”, a metaphor that reified the unconscious assumption of absolute ‘up’ and ‘down’ and obscured the process aspect of abstracting. Hayakawa’s ladder metaphor effectively eliminated the circularity of human knowledge, the important connection between the highest and lowest levels in the process. In subsequent editions of the book, Hayakawa even used a picture of a ladder with a little man seemingly stranded at the top.

The structure of a representation could radically change what got expressed. Korzybski had long warned his students about the dangers of translating the non-aristotelian system into the old elementalistic distinctions and terminology. To a significant extent, Hayakawa had so far—and would continue—to do exactly that. Korzybski had advised speaking in terms of “evaluation”. But in Language in Action, Hayakawa continued to talk about ‘meaning’ without quotes (easier to forget about a ‘meaning-maker’). Korzybski had built his terminology distinguishing different orientations (extensional versus intensional), from the prior distinction between extensional and intensional definitions. He had rejected the distinction of ‘denotation’ and ‘connotation’ as elementalistic and confusing, since it depended on what he considered a faulty distinction between ‘objective’ and ‘subjective’ factors. But Hayakawa built his discussion in terms of ‘extensional meaning’ or ‘denotation’ and ‘intensional meaning’ or ‘connotation’. Hayakawa wrote:

The extensional meaning of a word or expression is that which it points to (denotes) in the extensional [physical] world...[it] cannot be expressed in words, because it is that which the words stand for...The intensional meaning of a word or expression, on the other hand, is that which is suggested (connoted) in the mind. (10) 

If one accepted Korzybski’s contention that any definition (extensional or intensional) evaluated—by someone—had a neurological context, one could not continue to distinguish ‘denotation’ from ‘connotation’ in the way Hayakawa had done. Using Hayakawa’s elementalistic terms in quotes, any ‘meanings’ had to exist ‘in the mind’, i.e., ‘inside someone’s head’. Talking about ‘denotation’ and ‘connotation’ in the way Hayakawa did, implied a sharp distinction between ‘objective’ and ‘subjective’ factors that didn’t exist, even if most people felt familiar and comfortable with those terms.

Hayakawa’s presentation of ‘general semantics’ had other related problems, including: his under-emphasis of non-verbal levels of abstracting; his emphasis on individual words rather than statements to illustrate different levels of verbal abstraction (potentially very misleading since determining the level of abstraction of one word compared to another required a larger context); his under-emphasis on the constructive as well as the ‘leaving out’ aspects of abstracting; his failure to connect mapping to the process of abstracting; his relative neglect of self-reflexiveness and complete neglect of multiordinality; his neglect of the elementalism/non-elementalism distinction and his persistent use of elementalistic formulations (e.g., talking about ‘affective’, ‘informational’, ‘directive’ and ‘pre-symbolic’ dimensions of language as if these could exist as entirely separate forms); his persistence in formulating elementalistically in terms of ‘meaning’ (he could have remedied this somewhat by using quotes but in the book he had neither discussed nor used single quotes or hyphens as safety devices); his interchangeable use of ‘semantics’ with ‘general semantics’ long after Korzybski had warned him and others about the confusion it caused; et cetera.

According to Kendig, as early as 1943 “as he said at the time, [Korzybski] was ‘struggling how to put his finger on’—how to convey to a writer—the hidden confusions in a manuscript about poetry and science.”(11) She nigh surely was referring to Hayakawa as the writer and to his article “Poetry and Science” published in 1942 in the English Institute Annual, which he reprinted in the Summer 1944 volume of ETC. After grappling with these issues for about a year, Korzybski presented his new diagram to the first summer seminar-workshop class. With a revision of it in 1946 (to bring in feedback interactions and interplay among the levels) and further explanatory text then and in 1950, the diagram became a centerpiece of his teaching in seminars and in his writing until the end of his life. Using it as an adjunct to the Structural Differential, he wanted to make as clear as possible the notion of abstracting as a neurological process.

The Process of Abstracting, 
by Alfred Korzybski (1946,1950)

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. AK to Robert Lee Durham, 5/24/1944. IGS Archives. 

10. Language in Action (1940), p. 27 

11. Kendig, Foreword to Korzybski’s “An Extensional Analysis..., in Alfred Korzybski Collected Writings, p. 565.

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Chapter 56 - Time To Try New Things: Part 3 - Some Students

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.

Three first-time students at the seminar-workshop illustrate a variety of responses to Korzybski’s work. David Harold Fink, a psychiatrist then living in Detroit, had published a book, Release From Nervous Tension in 1943. One chapter, “Words Are Triggers To Action” made generous use of general semantics although he made no mention of it or Korzybski. In writing his book, Fink seems to have been mainly influenced by Chase and Hayakawa, whose books he did mention. (He would also mention Wendell Johnson in later editions.) What he got out of the seminar-workshop seems hard to say since little changed in subsequent editions of his book and I’ve found no correspondence between him and Korzybski. (Mira did read Fink’s book and made notes about the chapter for Alfred.) Pooh-poohed by some academic psychiatric reviewers, Fink’s book would become a self-help bestseller, going through numerous editions over the next several decades and selling hundreds of thousands of copies. Fink wrote about the importance of becoming aware of words as directive maps, which entailed emotional reactions of all kinds. Human progress, social and individual, involved the process of making better, more scientific word maps. Undoubtedly, works like Fink’s, derived in part from Korzybski’s work (without directly referring to it), did much to bring a few of Korzybski’s basic notions into more common usage.

A second student, Alabama native Annie Goulding Dix, taught English and Journalism at the Richmond Professional Institute of the College of William and Mary. A fellow teacher had given her a copy of ETC., something about it grabbed her, and she immediately signed up for the 1944 summer seminar-workshop. A kindly intelligent woman with little pretense, she was willing to do the simple-sounding stuff Korzybski suggested and found it more than eye-opening. As she recounted years later in a memoir, she “found [general semantics] of more value to her students than any other subject she had taught.” It became a central part of her teaching repertoire for the remainder of her career—although she would have to learn how to deal with the reactions of some of her colleagues:

“What is new in all of this?” say some of my learned friends. “It’s all old stuff; everybody knows it. It’s too obvious.” So they will not waste their time with it. I am reminded of the story in the Bible of Naaman, the Syrian captain, who came to the prophet Elisha to be cured of his leprosy. Elisha said, “Go and bathe seven times in the River Jordan.” Naaman was insulted by such trivial treatment, and went away in a rage. His servants said to him, “If he had told you to do some big thing, you would have done it. Why not try what he says?” So he put his pride in his pocket and went back to do the thing that was so trivial that it was insulting. And, lo and behold, he was cured!

Ann felt willing to experiment with what she was learning at the seminar-workshop:

I remember the first time I consciously tested the efficacy of language usage as suggested by General Semantics. It was during my summer with Korzybski in Chicago in 1944. I was in the Loop in Chicago. It was dinner time and I was hungry. I looked at menus in the windows of restaurants. One was appealing, except that it had carrots, food that I had hated since I was a child. Korzybski had recently discussed the obvious fact that all things change. The ancient Greek philosopher, Heraclitus, put it this way: “No one can step into the same river twice.” You come nearer to communicating what you mean if you mentally date your comments. For example: myself 1944 is not myself 1914. So I consciously brought my distaste for carrots out into the open. “As a child, I didn’t like carrots. I still don’t like them.” Now to test the General Semantics suggestion, I said to myself: “Annie Goulding (as my mother called me in 1914) didn’t like carrots. Now, I am Ann (as my friends call me in 1944.) Those two persons are not the same.” So putting my distaste in my pocket (as Naaman had put his pride), I went into the restaurant and ordered the dinner with the carrots.

And, lo and behold, they were delicious.

Thus I discovered that, to speak truth in any judgment or evaluation, the tense of the verb is very important. In this case, only the past tense: “I hated” carrots or “used to hate carrots,” was true. By testing for current facts, I saw that my use of the present tense: I “hate carrots” was false. Many changes had occurred in those past thirty years. I had no current opinion. I had only been quoting the opinion of that little girl of long ago. (4)

In 1947, she would become a professor at the New Jersey State Teachers College (now Montclair State University), where she worked until her retirement in 1962. Afterwards, she continued teaching adult classes in GS. She wrote only a few articles for ETC. and the General Semantics Bulletin. But one of them, “Avoiding The Dangers Of Semantic Adolescence”, presented in 1951 as a paper at the First Conference on General Semantics at the University of Chicago, provides one of the clearest accounts of some of the dangers and challenges involved in internalizing a non-aristotelian orientation.

Beware of merely talking about general semantics without applying its principles in practice. The highly verbal individual who finds in general semantics a new and exciting philosophy is in danger of keeping it forever on the verbal level, thus increasing the very futility that its discipline hopes to correct. ...general semantics has not served its purpose until it enters into the language and evaluative habits of the individual. It is this that concerns me as a teacher,...Our beginners—be they young or old—need to be constantly reminded of what Korzybski said: that extensional orientation is a lifetime process. The exhilaration that comes with the beginning of awareness is not the end but only the beginning, and the growing or adolescent stage will not always be easy. But the maturity we seek is worth the effort. (5) 

A few years after her seminar with Korzybski, Ann would move to New York City and marry another student of Korzybski, Adlerian psychiatrist Joseph Immanuel Meiers—a Jewish refugee from Latvia. Both Ann and Joseph Meiers exemplified the quiet maturity and good humor of Korzybski’s best students. They didn’t become famous, but as relatively uncelebrated leaders they positively affected many people’s lives. (The couple became life-long friends of Charlotte Schuchardt Read and Allen Walker Read, living a few blocks from them on the upper Westside of Manhattan near Columbia University.)

A third notable student at this first IGS seminar-workshop was a twenty-three year old ‘firecracker’ from Miami, Florida named Ken Keyes, Jr. He had joined the Navy in the summer of 1941. As he had hoped by enlisting early, he was able to live at home while ‘sailing a desk’ in a Naval Intelligence censorship unit in Miami. By 1944, he was serving as chief petty officer in a Naval Intelligence photo lab on the ‘U.S.S. DuPont’, his name for the building in downtown Miami where he had his office. Ken and his wife, Roberta Rymer Keyes, already the parents of two, had become very enthusiastic about general semantics and its possibilities for reforming childhood education.

They (mainly Ken) began corresponding with the Institute in 1943 on the stationary of an organization they had just founded, “The Society for Educational Research—a non-profit group devoted to the formulation and dissemination of objectives and methods for 20th Century education”. With considerable financial resources (both Ken and Roberta had wealthy parents) they had already in 1944 bought 45 acres of property south of Miami for a non-aristotelian educational experiment they planned. Using general semantics as the core they were “hoping to set up and run a demonstration project in which five orphans from each race of humankind could grow up in loving harmony together.”(6) Life eventually prevented the project from happening.

Although Korzybski and Kendig provided encouragement, there seems more than a whiff of utopianism in Keyes’ letters. His ‘semantic adolescence’ seems clear from a note he wrote to Korzybski at the seminar: he had not prepared a personal history for his interview because “there are no personal problems of personality maladjustment, relations with people, etc., that I am aware of at the present time.”(7) (Years later, Keyes would write extensively about his own personality problems after he did become aware of them.) In his interview, he wanted to talk with Korzybski about the work he and his wife were planning. It seems likely that Korzybski indulged him. Without question Keyes could get things done. He had already demonstrated talents as a businessman, inventor, and photographer, among other things. He had access, probably through his work, to people with graphic design and printing skills. Although he wasn’t able to stay until the end of the workshop, he had agreed to prepare for seminar participants a professional-looking print handout of Korzybski’s blackboard diagrams—which he did. Korzybski and Kendig greatly appreciated his work.

The young man seemed very serious about changing the world with general semantics. Soon after the seminar-workshop in September 1944 he changed the name of his organization to “The Institute for Non-Aristotelian Research and Education”. Over the next year and a half, he continued to correspond with Korzybski and Kendig about the organization’s projects. He formed a study group in Miami, gave seminars; and sent professional-looking graphic mockups to Korzybski with cartoons and illustrations for a handbook he was producing, as well as for a journal for an association of GS teachers he wanted to establish.

In June 1945, Korzybski wrote to him, bluntly advising him to ‘put on the brakes’:

Your experience in teaching GS is not long enough or good enough...I am not trying to discourage you. Your ambitions are praiseworthy, but certainly for success you have to slow down and give yourself more time to digest the whole thing in your organism more. (8) 

After leaving the Navy, Keyes with Roberta and their two children, would put aside his institute and its long-term educational projects for the more immediate business of making a living. Then in 1946, their institute got permanently shelved after he contracted polio. But, despite becoming significantly disabled, he—and Roberta—would help Korzybski afterwards in a most important way.

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. 

4. Annie Dix Meirs 1995, pp. 61-62. 

5. Ann Dix Meiers 1952, p. 277. 

6. Keyes 1989, p. 16. 

7. Ken Keyes, Jr. to AK, nd. I.G.S Archives.

8. AK to Ken Keyes, 6/21/1945 qtd. in letter of Ken Keyes, Jr. to AK, 7/5/1945. IGS Archives.

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Chapter 56 - Time To Try New Things: Part 2 - The IGS Seminar-Workshop

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.

One way to develop new leaders would be to open up Korzybski’s seminars. For one thing, Kendig had long noticed that,

...The people who came to [Korzybski’s] seminars got a great deal out of them, and they were moved, and something happened inside of them, inside of their skins. But they got some very peculiar notions that they took away in their notebooks—I used to look in their notebooks sometime. So I thought, well, I asked him if I could just have a few sessions afterwards, after the seminars, and find out what was inside their heads,...I thought it might be nice if we could straighten out at least some of their verbalisms, as well as their semantic reactions. (2) 

For a number of years, Korzybski had provided time slots during his seminars for guest lecturers such as Dr. William Peterson, a University of Chicago physician and an Institute Honorary Trustee who had authored a multi-volume work on the influence of weather on health and behavior. Johnson, Hayakawa, Lee, and others had also lectured on non-aristotelian applications in their work. Why not bring in these kinds of presentations—and what Kendig wanted to do—after Korzybski had introduced the system? These extensions to Korzybski’s seminar would emphasize participant practice and the variety of applications of the system—a workshop. After all, application remained the main thrust.

By February, the first IGS “seminar-workshop” (Kendig’s term for the new format) was being planned for that summer. As Kendig wrote in a promotional letter she sent out a few months later, “At this time it seems to us that increasing competence of ‘old students’ is of equal or greater importance than enlarging the number of IGS students. The seminar-workshop program was organized to suit this situation.”(3) After this first one in 1944, the IGS would continue the Seminar-Workshop—with ongoing transformations—as a yearly offering usually given for three weeks every summer. (Elements of the workshop were integrated into Korzybski’s shorter intensive seminars as well.)

This first one was supposed to go from July 6 to 28, but having to rearrange the schedule to accommodate the guest speakers allowed them to finish two days early. Korzybski first gave the seminar, his 36 hours of lecture-demonstrations on the basic formulations. Then while he saw individuals for interviews, the other students participated in the workshop sessions (another 50 hours), which included group discussions with Kendig on applying GS, as well as lecture sessions and other activities in areas of special interest led by various advanced students such as Congdon, Hayakawa, Johnson, and Bontrager. Raymond W. McNealy, M.D., Institute trustee, surgeon and medical school professor discussed “General Semantics and Medical Education”. Wilbur E. Moore, head of the Speech Department at Central Michigan College of Education, gave presentations on “New Patterns for Debate”, and “Non-verbal Electrical Tests of Extensionalization”. (He had been doing research on the effects of extensional training on galvanic skin resistance using ‘lie-detection’ instruments). Korzybski also had some sessions with those who had attended previous seminars to deal with theoretical and practical questions related to people’s attempts to make applications. Francis Chisholm, who gave several workshop presentations, assisted Kendig in organizing and running the entire seminar-workshop.

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. 

2. M. Kendig, “Talk in Los Angeles, 1/18/1961, Unpublished. IGS Archives. 

3. Kendig promotional letter, 5/19/1944. AKDA, IGS Scrapbook 4.13.

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Chapter 56 - Time To Try New Things: 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.

If the fund-raising letter motivated people to help, the Institute’s financial problems would have better chances of resolution. Korzybski maintained that the Institute, if it survived, had a useful function to serve in “breaking the hold of aristotelianism”. He penciled in those words below the last paragraph of a later mimeographed version of an April, 1944 memorandum that he wrote to Kendig “about his future-work program.” The paragraph read,

Please remember that my age and war injuries are getting to be a handicap and I have only a few years left for constructive work. And yet I feel that I still have something to contribute for the future of mankind. These few years should be spent in the most constructive way for the future, by preserving the Institute as a center for the training of future leaders, so that there will be some capable people able to carry on. Knowing the difficulties, I do not believe that without a special center such training of leaders can be accomplished, and I believe this should be the main immediate aim of the Institute. (1) 

They would do what they could. But 1944 was going to be a tough year. With registrations for seminars at their lowest point, Korzybski would only give two Institute seminars this year—plus lectures at the end of February at the Menninger Psychiatric Clinic in Topeka, Kansas and lectures at a University of Denver Workshop in August. Given the hobbling state of Institute finances and Korzybski’s goal to develop leaders, it seemed like a time to try new things.

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. “Memorandum From Alfred Korzybski to M. Kendig About His Future-Work Program”, April,1944. (Mimeographed IV/1945). IGS Archives.

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