Marcus Aurelius Among the Non-Elementalists

"And in the case of superior things like stars, we discover a kind of unity in separation. The higher we rise on the scale of being, the easier it is to discern a connection even among things separated by vast distances." 
——Marcus Aurelius, Meditations*

*quoted from Nature's Hidden Force by George Land and Beth Jarman, p. 81

GS & Stoicism: A Personal View

GS has stoicism in its family tree, as I noted in this article here a short while ago. Guillaume Andrieu, the Editor of the New Stoa Newsletter has just published an interview with me where I discuss in more detail my own history with stoicism and discuss its relationship with Korzybski's work.  Here it is: New Stoa Spotlight on Bruce Kodish

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. 

A Crack In The Stoics Armor?

In his The Enchiridion, the 1st century C.E. Stoic philosopher Epictetus wrote that,

"Men are disturbed not by things, but by the views which they take of them." [qtd. in Albert Ellis's Reason and Emotion in Psychotherapy, 1962 (1977), p. 54]

Since I consider the Stoics, important and still relevant predecessors of Korzybski's work, the following opinion piece on Stoicism in this New York Times blog caught my interest. A Crack In The Stoic Armor. I find it a thoughtful piece although I don't believe that the writer, Nancy Sherman characterizes Stoicism accurately. I greatly admire Admiral James Stockdale and have gotten a great deal from his writings and I don't think that his philosophy of life gets adequately summarized by the motto "Suck it up." See some of the subsequent comments on the blog page for other people's reactions to this. Worth reading and pondering.