Exponential Humanity: Overcoming Challenges to Sanity and Survival in the 21st Century

Originally presented in a talk at the Department of Humanities and the Social Sciences, Indian Institute of Technology, Bombay – Jan. 31, 2013

Abstract

Because of the socio-culturally accumulative nature of human knowledge in all its forms, we humans qualify as what Alfred Korzybski called a “time-binding” class of life—exponential by our very nature. As time-binders, we can communicate experience from one individual, group, or generation to another. By this means we have the potential to start where others have left off. This article explores the time-binding roots of the exponential change that has become notable as a major feature of our present so-called 'civilized' life around the globe, with its accelerating accelerations and resulting bottlenecks and breakdowns. I suggest a korzybskian approach to conscious time-binding, sanity, and survival during this dynamic and challenging period of human history. 

Exponential Humanity Overcoming Challenges to Sanity and Survival in the 21st Century

The Orphans and the Inheritance: Using the Gifts of the Past

Korzybski provided us with a most precious legacy: a framework of knowledge about human knowledge, a pathway and discipline for becoming more conscious of our consciousness in useful ways for our individual development and social advancement.

However, we must provide the proper receptacle for that inheritance, as we must provide for any gift of knowledge. This gets to an important aspect of time-binding, the potential we have as humans, the capacity we have—which may or may not operate—to benefit from and apply to the present what others have learned in the past. 

Some insight into this comes from an analysis of a saying in the Jewish Pirkei Avot: "Apply yourself to the study of the Torah, for it is not your inheritance." This appears problematic and has required explanation as it seems to contradict this passage in the Hebrew Bible: "Torah is the inheritance of the congregation of Jacob." (Deut. 33:4)

A contradiction? 

In Talmudic discourse, " [Rabbi] Beis Yisrael offers a different explanation. Torah knowledge itself is an inheritance of the Jewish nation. However, one must apply himself to study the Torah, for it, [the necessary preparation one needs to acquire that precious heritage] is not yours by inheritance—one must exert himself in the preparation. This is analogous to a group of orphans who were to receive a large inheritance from their father, consisting of money and precious gems. The executor of the estate instructed them to bring luggage to carry away their shares. "What!", they exclaimed, "Such a magnificent estate and we must bring suitcases? Aren't there any among the items left to us by our father?" "No", answered the executor, "your father bequeathed you a fantastic fortune, but he didn't leave you even one basket or piece of luggage. That you must provide yourself." (Artscroll Pirkei Avot, p. 114)

This, as I hope you can see, does not just apply to Jewish Torah teachings, but to any important learning from others both living and dead. Korzybski, and others pursuing his work, have provided us with a most precious legacy. However, we must provide the proper receptacle. Without study and application—work—we cannot benefit from that inheritance. 

The Symbolic Form of Life: Korzybski and Cassirer

In Science and Sanity, Alfred Korzybski memorably wrote: 

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Notes

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

Stoicism – General-Semantics' Family Tree

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


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


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


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

The Secret of Korzybski's Work

"If I would have investigated language, 'thinking', I would
have written a perfectly rotten book on 'psychology'. ...The
secret of my work is that I did not investigate 'thinking' or
'speaking'. I investigated time-binding."
—Alfred Korzybski, 1947 letter to Karl Poehlmann

Quote of the Day–'Money Is Information'

" "Jesus and Ludwig Christ!" Clem Cotex cried. He jumped up and turned off the tapes, totally At One with the doctrine of Religiosophy. "Money is information," he muttered, beginning to pace the room, stoned out of his gourd. "Holy snakes and ladders. 'Humanity is the symbol-using class of life, and those who control symbols control us.' I read that in Korzybski aeons ago. Information!" "
—Robert Anton Wilson, Schrodinger's Cat

From the Stray Thought Bin - 'The Heroic Task of Every Generation'

The heroic task of every generation of time-binders (that's us humans): appropriating our inheritance from those who came before us. Every generation does the task to some degree poorly or well. What makes the task heroic?: The stakes are always high and for every new generation, including our own, its particular inheritance is never the same as—indeed is necessarily different than—any that came before. 

Quote of the Day: 'Language and Evolution'

"The formation of different languages and of distinct species, and the proofs that both have been developed through a gradual process, are curiously parallel...."
—Charles Darwin, The Descent of Man 1871

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

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


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


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

---

[1] Korzybski: A Biography, p. 8

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


Here's the audio link of Gendo Podcast 689


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

Korzybski's Trouble-Shooting Life

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Personal Time-Binding

An aspect of time-binding involves each of us learning from ourselves, learning how to make the most of our individual experiences. My wife has referred to this as "personal time-binding." Becoming conscious of yourself as a personal time-binder, you can recognize that you communicate with yourself as well as with others.

We talk to ourselves a lot. We can use this internal chatter for worse and better. When we label ourselves “stupid” or with similar negative higher-order abstractions, we create a negative environment for ourselves. When we make perfectionistic demands on ourselves, unconditionally and absolutistically telling ourselves what we “must” do, we diminish our chances of fully realizing our potentialities. Instead, as Albert Ellis has emphasized throughout his writings, we can extensionalize our internal chatter, just as we extensionalize our talk with others. Ellis’ books provide valuable material for learning how to talk to yourself in this way.

For example, I can change absolutistic demands, such as “I must have good relationships” into probabilistic preferences, such as “I prefer to have good relationships but I don’t absolutely have to have them.” Rather than absolutistically ‘shoulding on myself,’ I can use conditional or non-absolutistic shoulds instead. So I can tell myself that “If I want good relationships, I probably should accept other people and take responsibility for how I act. However, it is not absolutely guaranteed that people will accept me just because I accept them and act responsibly. Moreover, I am not a total ‘shit’ if I fail to do this perfectly all of the time even if it might seem more preferable.”

In learning how to talk to yourself this way, you not only take greater responsibility for your behavior, but take responsibility for treating yourself well. Thus, you can learn how to use your capacities most effectively by cooperating with yourself — enhancing your realistic self-acceptance.

Your personal time-binding includes both the environment you create for yourself and others as well as the personal legacy you leave for future generations. As you act in such a way as to bring your legacy to fruition, you contribute to your own and others’ daily well-being. Time-Binders — go for it!

[Adapted from the article Living Extensionally, published in ETC.: A Review of General Semantics, July 2004]

What Did Alfred Want?

Perhaps sometime soon I'll be able to link to a video of the presentation I gave at the November 2008 Alfred Korzybski Memorial Lecture Weekend Colloquium (boy, is that a mouthful!). In the meantime, here is a transcript of my talk. What worked as a relatively short, dynamic, and highly-entertaining oral presentation (if I do say so myself), may look a might lengthy in this blog format. I understand. I don't like reading long blogposts either. But there is a lot of material below about Korzybski and his work that you won't find anywhere else. So, dedicated Korzybski File fans, I believe it's worth your reading time:

What Did Alfred Want?:

A Biographer’s Notes on Korzybski’s Life and Work

By Bruce Kodish

Presented at the Institute of General Semantics Symposium 

“Creating The Future: Conscious Time-Binding For A Better Tomorrow,” 

at Fordham University, Saturday November 15, 2008

Overture
School was done. Vacation time had come. Fourteen-year-old Alfred Korzybski took the train from Warsaw. Young Alfred was traveling from his family’s home there to spend the summer at Rudnik, their country estate located in the gubernia (government district) of Piotrkow about 100 miles to the southwest. Although this was school vacation, Alfred didn’t expect to idle at Rudnik. He would have time, no doubt, for recreation but he also had plenty of work to look forward to and also, no doubt, what he ruefully referred to as “troubles.” As he later described himself, “I was a trouble shooter since [the age of] five. At home, servants, peasants, whenever we had troubles: [I heard] ‘Alfred, do it.’ And Alfred had to do the dirty work.” (1) When he arrived home that day, fourteen year old Alfred indeed had some “dirty work” to do:

I came to the station and a man was with horses and cart…to take me home. The moment I arrived home here burst [in] a peasant, ‘Master, master, save my wife’. What happened? She just had a child. And she had a hemorrhage. She’s bleeding white. I just came, a boy of fourteen—‘save her’. I knew nothing about that part of it, so I asked my mother, ‘What in hell can I do?’ To mama I didn’t say hell. I meant it probably, but I didn’t say it. ‘What shall I do?’ And my mother gave me orders, put pillows under her fanny, and put cotton in her. ...And I remember my doing that, putting her fanny up, and filling her with cotton. Of course, not knowing what I am doing. I did the best I could— successfully. It stopped the hemorrhage somehow. Helping nature, but all the time, remember, what happens, they ran to the boss and my mother didn’t want to be with them that way, so I had to do it.” (2)

Korzybski remained a practical troubleshooter all his life—although the scope of the troubles he would deal with came to embrace larger issues and more people than those on his family’s farm. Orson Welles once said, “There are never many—never enough of them—but there are men born into the world with a gaze fixed on the widest possible horizon, men who can see without strain beyond the most distant horizon into that unconquered country we call the future.” (3) Alfred Korzybski belonged in this company—which includes, of course, women as well as men.

I’ve entitled this talk, “What Did Alfred Want?” Having spent the last four years in the nearly singular pursuit of writing Korzybski’s biography, it seems to me that the questions “What did he want? and What did he fix his gaze on?, qualify as just about the most important questions that a biographer can ask about his subject. Indeed, “What does he or she want?” seems to me the primary question in understanding anyone’s life, including one’s own. The psychologist William McDougall, whom Korzybski met and briefly corresponded with, put it this way:

The most fundamental fact about human life is that from moment to moment each one of us is constantly engaged in striving to bring about, to realize, to make actual, that which he conceives is possible and desires to achieve, whether it is only the securing of his next meal, the control of his temper, or the realization of a great ideal. Man is fundamentally a purposive, striving creature. He…longs for what is not.” (4)

Korzybski also indicated the importance of this question. For instance, he taught that one of the keys to understanding an author was to get behind his words and to find out what he was trying to get across, what he wanted to accomplish in saying whatever he said.

This morning I’d like to share with you some of what I’ve discovered as I’ve tried to answer the question, “What Did Alfred Want?” In Korzybski’s case, he had his gaze fixed on something wide and far.

Time-Binding
By the time he wrote his first book, Korzybski had fixed his gaze upon perhaps the ultimate human horizon—the potential of the human race—summarized in the term “time-binding.” Time-binding, for him, stood for the capacity which characterized the human class of life. As he presented it in his first book Manhood of Humanity (published in 1921), this capacity consists of the uniquely human ability to begin where another individual or generation left off and thus be able to build on previous efforts in order to make ‘progress’.

Formulated as a capacity or potential, time-binding is not ethically neutral. Rather, time-binding, as Korzybski formulated it, implies a normative judgment of behavior. It depicts humans not only in strictly ‘descriptive’ terms, i.e., as beings with highly developed, symbol-using nervous systems who communicate with others. The definition also implies an ‘ought’— a criterion of values—as well, and thus has strong ethical implications. (5) This value-laden aspect of the term may open up a formulational ‘can of worms’. (6)

But despite whatever problems the formulation may pose, all (legitimately all) of Korzybski’s subsequent work—which came to be called “general semantics”—involved his efforts to investigate and explain the mechanisms of time-binding. How did it work or not work? How could it be made to work better? It was his attempt to provide a foundation for a science of humanity, “a science and art of human engineering…of directing the energies and capacities of human beings to the advancement of human weal.” (7) He wanted to reduce the amount of preventable stupidity in science and life. He wanted to help as many people as possible to live up to their potential as time-binders. For Korzybski, science and mathematics provided some of the best examples he knew of time-binding behavior. We could also learn by contrasting this best in behavior with the worst, exemplified by people with the most serious psychiatric disturbances. For this reason, he spent two years studying abnormal behavior in the mid-1920s, at St. Elisabeths Hospital, the Federal Asylum for the Insane in Washington, D.C. He felt he could make a definite contribution by developing a teachable system that summarized the methodological wisdom he had gleaned from his studies in mathematics, the physico-mathematical sciences, psychiatry, and other fields. He once said that just as you can bring a horse to water but cannot make it drink, you can bring a boy to college but you cannot make him ‘think’. To increase the chance of doing that, you needed at least a method, a set of time-binding standards for human evaluation that could be taught—even to a child. This is what he offered with his work.

Korzybski was already 40 years old when he wrote the first draft of Manhood of Humanity. It seems clear that the notion of time-binding and the scientific-ethical project that—over the next 30 years—resulted from it, constituted the crystallization of deeply held values that Korzybski had already developed over his lifetime. In particular, Korzybski felt a strong sense of gratitude for what he had received from others. Even the peasants and servants on his parent’s farm had—through their labor— provided him with the gift of time that allowed him to pursue his early studies. Having received much, he showed an early tendency to give to others in return.

For example, as a young man returning to Poland at the turn of the Twentieth Century after a long sojourn in Italy, Alfred had the sudden sobering realization that his boyhood peasant playmate still could not read as an adult. Alfred soon started a school for the peasants on his family’s property, a short-lived project, that got him into trouble with the Tsarist government. (One of his father’s last gifts to him before dying was to keep him from getting sent to Siberia for this ‘crime’.) Korzybski demonstrated this kind of behavior his whole life. Seeming to go out of his way to help others was actually very much his way.

This attitude of appreciation for the time-binding gifts of others and the attendant desire to be of service to others characterized his life and seems to me essential for understanding why he did what he did. In addition, it provides the necessary ‘fuel’ for those of us who wish to become more conscious time-binders ourselves. We must study the past and develop a sense of gratitude, an ability to ongoingly acknowledge the time-binding gifts we have received from others—the quick and the dead. And we must ongoingly be aware that what we do, even from moment to moment, will be part of what the future inherits—our children and the children of others, their children and their children’s children, et cetera. Will what we do now provide them with a blessing or a curse?

Researching The Korzybski Biography
Working to answer the question, “What did Alfred Want?” for the Korzybski biography, I have had a great deal of time-binding assistance myself and feel most grateful for it. Korzybski left not only his published writings, but also a rich collection of archives and correspondence. An estimated 20,000 letters, scrapbook pages, and other documents from the years 1920-1938 were microfilmed under the direction of Charlotte Schuchardt Read. With the originals and one copy of the microfilms eventually given to Columbia University, the Institute of General Semantics kept another microfilm copy. These were eventually digitized by the former Executive Director of the Institute, Steve Stockdale and presented to me at the beginning of 2005—with the approval of the Institute Board of Trustees—for the purposes of my research.

Talk about the benefits of time-binding—I have probably read every one of those 20,000 or more pieces and have collated and annotated a large portion of the digital files they are contained on, all given to me on 2 DVDs that I could read on my laptop in my office at home. Before this digitization process, done only a few years ago, I would have had to camp out at Columbia University’s Rare Book and Manuscript Library or at the Institute archives looking at microfilms for several years straight. “Having a life” while writing this book has been difficult enough. There are also the Institute’s open files now at Read House in Ft. Worth, Texas, which go from around 1938 (the year of the founding of the Institute) to the time of Korzybski’s death in 1950—and beyond. These materials, plus Korzybski’s personal library (which includes books that he marked as he read them), plus the tapes and transcripts of many of Korzybski’s seminars, plus his 499-page unpublished memoir, among other things—provide a great deal of material for answering the question “What did Alfred want?” Korzybski often commented quite directly about what he did indeed want.

“I Am Selfish!”
I’d like to end with a story that Korzybski often told to his seminar students. This version, which he gave at his 1948-1949 Winter Intensive Seminar, explains in part why he did what he did:

…some friends gave a dinner for my wife and me, and they invited also an Oxford graduate,…very wealthy, educated, Oxford and so on. He was extremely British in what is definitely known—it is seldom believed in America but they believe in it—that’s the British theory of selfishness. And he was nagging me all through the dinner—I had of course to tell them some development in [my work]; naturally they all expected me to say something. Well, I did. He was nagging, interrupting, and I was trying to explain to him time-binding, how we are not like animals, every one for himself and all of that, but we are interdependent. We build upon the work of the dead, and we depend on the work of every one else in our civilization and so on. And I was telling how I worked to get my formulations, to deal with human messes all around.

Then he began to pick at me: ‘why was I so ‘altruistic’, doing all this work for my fellow men?’—I don’t know what not. ‘Oh, this ‘altruism’ would not work, there is no sense in it, a selfish outlook is the only workable one’, and so on and so on, picking at me with his theories about ‘selfishness’. And ultimately I got annoyed with that petty criticism, that picking at me. I just shut him up—successfully. I said, ‘You want me to be selfish? I am selfish! I work the way I work because I don’t want to live in a world made by men like you!’ That shut him up alright.

In a way—this is serious—remember there is no sense talking whether I am selfish or not, because that argument remains valid that I am say ‘altruistic’ because I eventually want a better world for me to live in. But you see the argument: ‘selfish’-‘unselfish’ is actually useless. It is a good place for quarreling. … (8)

Coda

To paraphrase a line from Josef Conrad’s Heart of Darkness, “Mr. Korzybski, he dead.” There are more important questions than “What did Alfred want?” Those questions for each of us include: “What do I want?” “What do we want?” In my book, I have strived to show what Korzybski wanted and what he achieved through his lifelong efforts. I am bold enough to believe that the story of his life and work might help us to answer our own present questions, to widen and deepen the horizon of our own gazes, so that what we want is truly worthy of our selves as time-binders. I bid you adieu.


Notes
(1) Korzybski 1947, p. 385.

(2) Ibid., pp. 386–387.

(3) Welles in Kodar and Silovic.

(4) William McDougall, qtd. in Runkel, p. 32.

(5) “On this inherently human level of interdependence time-binding leads inevitably to feelings of responsibility, duty toward others and the future, and therefore to some type of ethics, morals, and similar social and/or socio-cultural reactions.” Korzybski in “What I Believe” (1949), Alfred Korzybski Collected Writings, pp. 646–647.

(6) How do we determine whether the results of particular human efforts constitute ‘progress’ or not? Criminals in gangs seem to use their time-binding potential to cooperate and communicate with each other and learn from the experiences of other criminals and criminal gangs—sometimes for substantial benefits to themselves and fellow gang members while making things worse for the rest of us. For further exploration of this issue see French.

(7) Korzybski 1921, p. 1.

(8) This quote comes from the CD audio record of Korzybski’s 1948-1949 Winter Intensive Seminar (available for purchase from the Institute of General Semantics) combined with material (missing in the recording) from the unpublished transcript of the seminar.

Bibliography
French, Jim. 2004. “Editor’s Essay 2004 – The Extensional Definition of Time-Binding,” in General Semantics Bulletin 71: 8–9.

Kodar, Oja and Vassili Silovic. 1995. Orson Welles: The One Man Band, on Disc 2 of F for Fake: Criterion Collection, special edition DVD. New York: Criterion, 2005.

Korzybski, Alfred. 1949. “What I Believe” in Alfred Korzybski Collected Writings: 1920–1950. Collected and arranged by M. Kendig. Final Editing and preparation by Charlotte Schuchardt Read with the assistance of Robert P. Pula. Brooklyn, NY: Institute of General Semantics, 1990.

———. 1947. Alfred Korzybski Biographical Material. Recorded by Kenneth Keyes (July 1947). Transcribed by Roberta Rymer Keyes. Indexed by Robert P. Pula. Unpublished.

———. 1921. Manhood of Humanity: The Science and Art of Human Engineering. New York: E.P. Dutton & Company.

Runkel, Philip J. 2003. People As Living Things: The Psychology of Perceptual Control. Hayward, CA: Living Control Systems Publishing.

Time-Binding - So What? Part V

J. seems to have gotten more interested in time-binding, although he still has some formulational problems with it. (Read the comment on the previous post). So I feel that I've done some good with this "So What?" series of blogposts. For now, I'll let his continuing theoretical concerns 'simmer' and move on to practical applications. If you consider yourself a time-binder, so what? In that last post, I ended with some questions to ponder, to get a living feel for the implications of time-binding to you. I want to add here another question that can make it more 'real' for you.

My wife Susan Presby Kodish came up with a time-binding question that we use in personal coaching work and classes: What do you want your legacy to be?

You won't live forever. Usually we think of a legacy as an amount of money or property left for an inheritance. Here I mean something different, although it could include these kinds of things. Rather by legacy I mean something related to how you would like to be remembered after you're gone. This doesn't have to be by way of some great masterpiece you leave that everyone recognizes or a monument erected in your memory. Rather by legacy, I mean more precisely: what difference you would like your presence to have made on others, on the world (whether or not recognized). Don't think that because your name may be forgotten in a few hundred years—likely sooner—that your existence in the world now doesn't make a difference.

Professor J.T. Shotwell wrote about two kinds of immortality:

...the immortality of monuments,—of things to look at and recall; and the immortality of use,—of things which surrender their identity but continue to live, things forgotten but treasured, and incorporated in the vital forces of society. Thought can achieve both kinds. It embodies itself in forms—like epics, cathedrals and even engines—where endurance depends upon the nature of the stuff used, the perfection of the workmanship and the fortune of time. But it also embodies itself in use; that is, it can continue its work, enter into other thought and continue to emit its energy even when its original mold is broken up. (1)

As a time-binder, you will leave a legacy, willy-nilly, whether you do it purposefully or not. What do you want yours to be?

(1). Qtd. in Ashley Montagu 1955, Immortality. New York: Grove Press, p. 66. From James T. Shotwell 1942, "Mechanism and Culture." In Science and Man, Ed. By R. N. Anshen. New York: Harcourt Brace & Co.

Time-Binding - So What? Part IV

J., a reader of this blog, indicated that he wasn't very interested in the notion of "time-binding." I've used the previous posts with the above title to address his implied question "So what?" Why should time-binding concern him?

I hope I've given him (and others) some things to chew on. Time-binding, for one thing, got Korzybski started. Trying to figure it out led him to develop his subsequent work.

Aside from its relevance to understand what Korzybski was doing, what (as J. asked) "authorizes this particular description over all the other potential descriptions of 'what dominantly characterizes humans'?"

Korzybski felt (and I agree) that this capacity to build upon what others have done—based upon our uniquely symbolic brains—does most characterize humans. If that at least seems plausible then we can proceed to see what develops from it. Fruitfulness 'is all'. What develops from starting to think of yourself as a time-binder? Let's extensionalize this, bring it down to earth.

As an exercise, I suggest contemplating one or more of these time-binding questions:

* Can you find anything that you have made, arranged, organized, composed, written, etc., that didn't in some way depend upon the contributions of others?
* Take an object from your pocket, desktop, or around your house or office. How did it get here? How was it manufactured? Trace things back a bit. How many people were involved in making it and getting it to the store or place where you bought it or got it from? Who invented it? What other inventions were required to produce it? Et cetera.
* How did you come to be reading this weblog?

These questions can help you get a feel for yourself as a time-binder. What kind of difference could becoming more consciously aware of yourself as a time-binder make in your life?

Some Strate Talk About Time-Binding

My friend Lance Strate, Executive Director of the Institute of General Semantics has begun to blog about time-binding.
I consider his meditations definitely worth reading and especially like what he wrote at the end of his second piece "Thoughts About Time-Binding 2"

So, even if you don't care for Korzybski and general semantics, or don't agree with the conclusions arrived at, there is much to be gained from going back to the original questions that Korzybski posed, seeing how he answered them, and answering them again for ourselves, in the context of our own time. This is a worthwhile exercise as well for those who are completely in agreement with Korzybski. To make an analogy with mathematics, it is not enough to get the right answers, you have to go through the process by which they were attained, understand that process, and make it your own.

Lance practices what he preaches. If you do what he beautifully demonstrates, i.e., go back to the original material—Korzybski's own writing—(not what Bruce or Lance says about it ) and contend with the questions he raises, you will reap rewards that you wouldn't otherwise get.

Check out "Thoughts About Time-Binding 2" and also Lance's first post"Thoughts About Time-Binding 1"

Time-Binding - So What? Part III

The very astute J. has pointed to something notable about Korzybski's formulation of time-binding. Time-binding, as Korzybski formulated it, is not simply descriptive or ethically neutral. As J. wrote:

Time binding seems like a description transformed into prescription (?); e.g. "Dog's often bark, therefore, dogs should bark 'better'. Where's the logic in this?

Korzybski's formulation definitely was not simply limited to a description of the unique human ability to communicate via symbolism. He very clearly defined time-binding in terms of a capacity, a potential that the human ability to communicate makes possible: the capacity to begin where another individual or generation left off and thus be able to build on previous efforts in order to make ‘progress’. Stated in terms of human potential, his formulation of time-binding implies an 'ought', a value-laden criterion, as well as an 'is', a description of what people do. Korzybski wanted people to become better time-binders.

Of course, this value-laden aspect of time-binding seems to open up a formulational 'can of worms'. Judging the relative time-binding merits of different human acts and products doesn't seem necessarily clearcut. How do we operationalize time-binding and 'progress' so we can observe and measure them? I've dealt with this question at more length in my book Dare to Inquire Despite whatever problems the formulation may pose, all (legitimately all) of Korzybski’s subsequent work, which came to be called “general semantics,” involved his efforts to investigate and explain the mechanisms of time-binding. If you are interested in understanding Korzybski's work and how it developed, that alone justifies giving attention to time-binding.

As for J's subsidiary question

Why is this transformation relevant, and what authorizes this particular description over all the other potential descriptions of 'what dominantly characterizes humans'?

I'll leave that for another post.

Time-Binding - So What? Part II

My reader J has said "I'm not very interested in time-binding..." He must have a lot of patience since I have given over a great deal of this blog space so far to discussing time-binding. I'm asking J and others who may feel similarly to have even a bit more patience with me.

Having now spent more than four years working on a biography of Korzybski (getting near completion now), I have felt obligated to deal with time-binding in some depth and detail, since (in his own eyes) it played such an important role in the development of his work. He devoted his first book, Manhood of Humanity, to the notion. And, as he said on numerous occasions, all of his subsequent work—which he subsequently called "general semantics" developed out of his efforts to clarify and elaborate the mechanism of time-binding, i.e., how time-binding worked.

He didn't talk or write much explicitly about time-binding after the 1933 publication of Science and Sanity, until the last few years of his life when he returned to the subject with renewed vigor. He had been working for some time on a new introduction to the Second Edition of Manhood but was unable to complete it before his death in March 1950.

Korzybski was very interested in time-binding. I have come to agree with Korzybski as to its importance. Because of this, I have felt compelled to spend a fair amount of time dealing with time-binding in my book and, as a result, in this blog.

But this only begins to touch on the question "So what?"

Time-Binding - So What? Part I

A reader of this weblog (I'll call him J) wrote

I'm not very interested in time-binding...Time binding seems like a description transformed into prescription (?); e.g. "Dog's often bark, therefore, dogs should bark 'better'. Where's the logic in this? [i.e. Why is this transformation relevant, and what authorizes this particular description over all the other potential descriptions of 'what dominantly characterizes humans'

He also said that he was interested in "applications to 'our' everyday life." He seemed to have some difficulty seeing how time-binding and perhaps other formulations/principles of general semantics could be used "for assessing our personal goals, dreams, and/or purposes in life."

Since I like to make my blogposts shorter rather than longer, I'm going to take more than one blogpost to unpack this. Here goes.

Let me start with a rough and ready set of statements about time-binding from the glossary of Drive Yourself Sane.

Time-Binding: the characteristic human ability, using language and other symbols, to transmit information across time; the potential for individuals to learn from their own and other people's experiences; the potential for each generation to start where the last generation left off, the potential to become aware of this ability; this allows for the formation of cultures and the ability to study cultures, etc.

Starting from this, I'll try to address J's puzzlement.

Echoes of Time-Binding - I

Since Korzybski first formulated it in 1921 as the defining characteristic of humaness, others have used the notion of time-binding in their own formulating or have pointed to some aspect of the phenomena, with or without using the term.

For example, Richard Feynman referred to "time-binding" in answering the question "What is Science" Although time-binding had an important role in his answer to that question he apparently didn't consider it important enough to find out who coined the term. To me that seems like teaching the classical laws of motion and not bothering to mention Galileo or Newton. A physics teacher would not be doing his proper job, in my opinion, if he taught that way. But I get the distinct sense from reading other works by Feynman that he was not well-read or very knowlegable in areas outside of his own work and indeed didn't seem to consider any knowledge outside of physics as very worthwhile or even as science. But he had somehow heard about "time-binding." Curious.

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

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

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

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

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