The Explorer – A Poem by Ted P. Daly

The Explorer *

I cannot dance in simple bliss

To the tinkling symbols of the age; 

Or join with full abandon

The parade of waving flags; 

Or step with unmixed joy 

To the strains of another's  song; 

Or choose between ploughshares and the sword

As those who chant for peace or war. 

I press beyond the soothing myth, 

Beyond the parables of truth

To a land of tingling consciousness, 

Of pure, if thinner air. 

Oh, many have been lost here, 

The landmarks are very few, 

But whatever I may find, 

I shall report to you. 

* from March Through Russia and Other Poems (1969) by Ted P. Daly. Philadelphia, Pa.: Dorrance & Company

KORZYBSKI: A BIOGRAPHY - UNSOLICITED, UNPAID ENDORSEMENT I JUST FOUND ON FACEBOOK DWAYNE POLOWAY

From the Stray Thought Bin - Becoming/Developing/Consciousness

Do you really want to develop 'more consciousness'?

"More consciousness", what do you mean?

Do you actually know what it will cost you? 

What it will cost you to more clearly see? 

Those strange dots of high weirdness growing? 

Strange outbreaks of madness you say "Glory Be!" 

Do you even take any much notice? 

You notice and quick look away? 

Do you really want to know?

Who or what are you trying to be? 

To be.

To be. 

TO BE YOU.

Do you? 

Do you? 

Do you think?

Much more important can you feel as you see? 

From The Stray Thought Bin - "Skeptics and Skeptics"

The best skeptics not only doubt, but doubt their doubt and often doubt that too. 

Aristotle's Non-Aristotelianism

"Essentialism", an emphasis on 'essences' expressed in definitions and a rigid insistence on 'laws of thought' characterize what Korzybski called the aristotelian orientation. But despite the essentialism which Aristotle got from his teacher Plato, Aristotle himself went beyond it in several ways that show he was not himself a strict 'aristotelian'. 

For example, although Aristotle systematized the search for essences in his logical works, the focus of this search for him seems somewhat different from that of Plato. 

Plato had clearly emphasized the secondary importance of the visible world compared to the more important world of ideal forms or essences that he postulated. Aristotle, on the other hand, emphasized the importance of the world we live in, with the forms or essences existing within the objects around us that we see and touch.

Despite the essentialistic drift of his logic, this 'realistic' bent of Aristotle makes his philosophy in some ways more congenial with Korzybski's "non-aristotelian" perspective than some people might expect.  There are  places in his writings related to logic and methodology where Aristotle indicates some quite non-aristotelian sounding (in the korzybskian sense) leeway in what are still referred to as the aristotelian "laws of thought".

For example, in Metaphysics, he wrote: "...however much all things may be 'so and so', still there is a more and a less in the nature of things." (Book IV: Ch. 4, p. 743) In De Interpretatione, he noted that certain statements may have an "undecided" or indeterminate value, neither "true" nor "false". For example, take the statements "A sea-fight will take place tomorrow." 

"One may indeed be more likely to be true than the other, but it cannot be either actually true or actually false. It is therefore plain that it is not necessary that of an affirmation and a denial one should be true and the other false." (Ch. 9, p. 48)

Aristotle also moved beyond the two-valued approach of his logic in his work on ethics and politics. In Nichomachean Ethics, he emphasized the doctrine of the "golden mean", which involves each individual finding the best intermediate third value between two extremes. So courage provides a mean between excessive fear and over-confidence, and temperance lies between the extremes of self-indulgence and 'insensibilty'. (Book II: Ch.7, pp. 959-960)

In his Politics, he emphasized that the individual and society did not have to exist in opposition to each other: "Man is a political animal" who develops his excellence in the company of others, while the State can function to aid the individual in his self-development. 

Despite these exceptions, Aristotle and followers put into place a system that, when carried into the orientation of everyday evaluating and science, became rigidified. This "aristotelian" orientation has outlived its usefulness as an overarching approach.

Korzybski emphasized his admiration for Aristotle even as he criticized and sought to go beyond aristotelianism:

"To avoid misunderstanding I wish to acknowledge explicitly my profound admiration for the extraordinary genius of Aristotle, particularly in consideration of the period in which he lived. Nevertheless, the twisting of his system and the imposed immobility of this twisted system, as enforced for nearly two thousand years by the controlling groups, often under threats of torture and death, have led and can only lead to more disasters. From what we know about Aristotle, there is little doubt that, if alive, he would not tolerate such twistings and artificial immobility of the system usually ascribed to him." (Science and Sanity, Fifth Edition, p. xciv)

To conclude, Korzybski was certainly NOT anti-Aristotle nor anti-aristotelian logic. Instead, he objected to aristotelianism as an orientation or system involving the basic structural assumptions about the world ('metaphysics') and human knowledge ('epistemology') that he saw underlying Aristotle's systematic views (epitomized in the view of aristotelian logic as 'the' logic). Korzybski felt the need to challenge and revise these structural assumptions in the light of later scientific investigations, since overemphasizing aristotelian logic as 'the' logic encouraged an essentialist, what he called an "intensional" orientation in science and life, involving "identification" or "confusion of orders of abstraction". For Korzybski, aristotelian logic still had a place in useful formulating but could no longer be given an exclusive or dominating position. The main emphasis of Korzybski's work in "general semantics" (GS) was not on 'logic' as such, but on what might be called "psycho-logic", i.e., understanding and enhancing the entire scope of human evaluating including thinking-feeling-perceiving-doing, etc.; our evaluational reactions. 

References

McKeon, Richard. 1941. The Basic Works of Aristotle. New York: Random House. 

The Institute of General Semantics - 75 Years and Still Standing

     For several days in March, 1938, Alfred Korzybski lectured the medical staff at Peoria State Hospital, Peoria, Illinois. His presentation there marked the end of his career as an independent, itinerant teacher (which had ramped up ever since the publication five years earlier of Science and Sanity). By the time of his Peoria lectures, Korzybski and a few of his closest students had already begun the process of setting up the Institute of General Semantics (IGS) in Chicago, which the state of Illinois incorporated in May 1938 as a non-profit institution for "Linguistic Epistemologic Scientific Research and Education". Remarkably today, seventy-five years later, the Institute still exists. It has never been easy. 

Until his death on March 1, 1950—Korzybski would carry on his work at the Institute (which moved to Lakeville, Connecticut in 1946). Korzybski: A Biography provides a detailed account of IGS history during those first 12 turbulent  years. Accounts of the Institute's subsequent years can be found in various now-somewhat-hard-to-find articles by Charlotte Schuchardt Read and others. I've provided some recent updates of the last somewhat tumultuous decade (See my 2011 presentation at the IGS Annual Conference in New York City and my January 2013 blogpost The State of Organized GS-2013: A Blunt Assessment, which both focus on recent organizational difficulties.) However, as Korzybski: A Biography clearly documents, from its beginnings the IGS  struggled with difficulties of various kinds, some of which threatened its survival—even with Korzybski at the helm. Difficulties, sometimes severe, continued after Korzybski's death. (In my years, starting in 1979, of serious involvement in IGS educational, management, and publication activities I was one of a number of people who had to deal with many of these problems). But somehow the Institute survived it all. And despite recent problems and organizational downsizing, it still does. 

Will the Institute of General Semantics survive as a viable organization carrying on Korzybski's legacy for another 75 years? I don't know. I do feel confident that if it is to do so, those people who run the organization now, its Board of Trustees, will need to do a lot more than they already have done to renew their understanding of Korzybski's work and of the aims and history of the organization they are responsible for. And they will need to renew their commitment to carrying on the legacy that Korzybski and others left us. Not just words but actions are needed. Complacency and indifference have a way of sneaking up on even the best of us. And the creeping organizational amnesia (which I've alluded to elsewhere and which may have started long before any of its present members sat on the Board of Trustees) will have to be reversed. Without a deep and thorough knowledge of the discipline of GS, including the history and traditions of the Institute,—which I presently see lacking in the organization—it will be impossible to adequately build upon what's been done already. That's what conscious time-binding requires. In order to learn, it's necessary to realize that you don't already know something. Those who don't know can then get help if they seek it, because there are still a few people around who know quite a bit—hint, hint.

In the meantime, I send the Institute of General Semantics my best wishes—Happy 75th Anniversary and Many More!

Book Review of The Posturality of the Person: A Guide to Postural Education and Therapy by Ron Dennis

Posture, as Ron Dennis defines it, “comprises the flow through space and time of all activity of bodily support and movement in the course of living.” A study of posture in this dynamic sense leads not only to a descriptive understanding of the state of any person’s posture, but also to prescriptive guidelines for assessing the “posturality of the person”, the term Dennis has coined for the quality of postural use and the title of this important book. Dennis, a veteran teacher—and teacher of teachers—of the Alexander Technique of postural education, received the 2012 Certificate of Merit from the American Society for the Alexander Technique. His incisive yet brief book (112 pages) is worth multiple readings—but not just for students and teachers of the Alexander Technique. Although the influence from his study and teaching of the Alexander Technique is certainly not negligible, this book is not specifically about that well-known approach to 'posture' and 'movement'. Rather in the notion of posturality, Dennis connects and extends the core concerns of Alexander Technique teachers to those of physical therapists, physicians, chiropractors, personal trainers, psychotherapists, as well as contemporary movement scientists and other students of human physiology and behavior, including students of Korzybski's general semantics (GS)—but more on that connection shortly.

After his opening "Introduction" which outlines the aim and content of the book, Dennis' Chapter 2—"Conceptual Foundations"—provides a list of "22 foundational statements" on "the physiological and developmental issues relevant to the approach of posturality being advocated." The remainder of the book does not thoroughly cover all of these premises, which would require a much larger book or even multiple encyclopedic volumes. Instead, Dennis focuses his remaining chapters on statements 19 through 22, which deal with the notion of "lengthening", the process of arriving at an "optimal structural dimension" of the skeleton, especially the spine, for the least amount of unnecessary strain in movement and support. Subsequent chapters on lengthening include: "Length and Lengthening"; "Why Lengthen?"; "Good Grief, How Do I Lengthen?"; "Dynamic Posturality ~ Moving with Length"; "Breath as Postural Process"' and "Where Do We Go from Here", which surveys various manipulative, exercise, and awareness-based approaches to musculoskeletal health, seen through the lens of posturality. The final chapter 9, "Bibliographic Essay", provides valuable recommendations for further reading, including Science and Sanity and my wife's and my book Drive Yourself Sane: Using the Uncommon Sense of General Semantics. Three appendices follow including a case report by Julie Orta, who describes how—through her work with Dennis—she resolved her personal problems with chronic debilitating neck and shoulder pain; and two articles written by Dennis: "Poise and the Art of Lengthening", and "Muscles and Mentals: How We Get Tense".

The relevance of Dennis' notion of posturality to Korzybski's GS seems clear in Dennis' sharp denial of dualism. Korzybski formulated the problem of dualism in terms of what he called "elementalism", unconsciously dividing up what we don't find divided in the non-verbal, process world. In performing this unconscious isolation of related elements, we are likely to thereby neglect important relationships, contexts, and connections. Our language use can express such elementalistic evaluating by suggesting false-to-fact, static, isolated structures. Dennis, who has studied Korzybski's work, demonstrates throughout the book his consciousness of this problem and resolutely and explicitly emphasizes the relatedness of 'support' and 'movement', as well as the non-separability of 'mechanical'/'physiological' factors from our 'emotional'/'intellectual' life. Dennis' "non-elementalism" is also apparent in his emphasis, following scientist-epistemologist Michael Polanyi, on the importance of personal, phenomenological experience in the study and correction of posturality. In so doing, Dennis suggests the need to resolve the radical split between 'objectivity' and 'subjectivity', which has long remained at the center of Western assumptions about human knowledge. Korzybski, who had F. M. Alexander's books in his personal library, definitely considered the relevance of 'posture' to his own work: clearly expressed in his development of the technique of "neuro-semantic relaxation" (See Korzybski: A Biography, pp. 344, 414-415, 646).

In conclusion, The Posturality of the Person will reward those with professional and theoretical interests in musculoskeletal health as well as general readers looking for a sound, clear and practical basis for dramatically improving their own postural use. As psychologist Kurt Lewin suggested, there is nothing so practical as a good theory. Dennis shows that the split between the 'theoretical' and 'practical' can and must be bridged. Although short and simple, this is not “Posture for Dummies”. Wise up and get The Posturality of the Person. 

Poland's Fight and the Essence of Judaism - Korzybski's Response to the 1943 Warsaw Ghetto Uprising (An excerpt from Korzybski: A Biography)

In honor of the fighters of the Warsaw Ghetto Uprising, which began 70 years ago in April 1943, I'm publishing the first few pages of Chapter 55 of Korzybski: A Biography. This section deals with Korzybski's 1943 response to the fate of Poles and Polish Jewry under the iron heel of the Nazi tyranny:  Poland's_Fight_and_the_Essence_of_Judaism

Ayn Nation Under God - A Review

The full title of Hart William’s book of connected essays, Ayn Nation Under God: A Rational Examination As To Why Ayn Rand Is Full Of It, indicates Williams' intent and point of view quite well. The essays (most of which appeared in slightly different form on Williams' blog from 2005 to 2012)  do not pretend to any faux ‘objectivity’. But despite his generally negative opinion of Ayn Rand’s work, her fans and followers will make a mistake if they dismiss Williams’ ebook, available in Amazon Kindle format, as not worthy of their reading time and effort. For them, and for the non-fans of Rand—in and out of academia—many of whom have dismissed her work as unimportant, Williams provides a most valuable service by treating Rand with the respect she deserves as one of the most influential figures of mid-20^th Century to early 21^st Century American thought. 

A veteran print journalist, blogger, screenwriter, novelist and all-around scribe (see His Vorpal Sword) Williams adduces a great deal of evidence to show that Rand—founder of a philosophical school she called "Objectivism"—has become a revered figure and a major inspiration for the Republican Right (especially its more secular wing representing finance and banking) and the allied Libertarian movement, both of which cherish and feel bolstered by Rand’s uber-individualist, anti-government, but pro-corporate outlook. Williams has carefully studied Rand’s work and his “rational examination” focuses on her basic premises: her view of ‘reason’, which he finds inadequate, and her basic understanding of human nature, which he finds lacking, indeed monstrously so. His criticism seems to me—a student and advocate of Alfred Korzybski’s non-aristotelian viewpoint—devastatingly apt.

Although Williams has not studied Korzybski’s work, he has clearly been influenced by some of the ongoing non-aristotelian currents that Korzybski saw developing in the  scientific, intellectual culture of his time, which he sought to systematize and enhance by means of the teachable system that he called “general semantics”. Non-aristotelian I should emphasize was not for Korzybski anti-Aristotle, not even anti aristotelian logic. Aristotle’s logic, for example, may still remain useful—where it applies. But Korzybski did reject the essentialist structural assumptions or metaphysics which Aristotle’s logic in particular embodies when interpreted, as Ayn Rand did, as the overarching basis for human ‘rationality’ and ‘reason’ rather than as a limited set of guidelines for some forms of discourse.

 In his first and perhaps best chapter (written especially for the book), Williams, who as a college philosophy major studied mathematical logic, gives his take on Rand’s trumpeting of the aristotelian ‘laws of thought’ and ‘pure logic’ as the basis for ‘reason’ (in Atlas Shrugged, she titled the three sections of the book “Non-Contradiction”, “Either-Or”, and “A is A”). Williams writes that when he first saw her “A is A” years ago, he said “When?”: “A is A sometimes, but other times it’s not exactly A. In fact, when you say A, you are just specifying THIS A at THAT exact moment in time, which that A will never be again. But it’s close enough for government work, or, in this case, anti-government work.” Williams further discussion of aristotelian logic seems quite in keeping with Korzybski’s take: overdependence on it by using it as a general orientation, as Rand and her followers do, leads to evaluational rigidity and inflexibility.

William’s critique of Rand’s view of human nature also appears quite devastating. Rand cut her heroes from a cartoonish mold where, just as with the fabled politician, they built with their own two hands the log cabin they were born in. She elevates to sacred doctrine an extreme individualism that takes little to no account of the social matrix upon which any individual human accomplishment is based. Perhaps Williams doesn’t know much about Korzybski’s characterization of humanity as the time-binding class of life, but throughout the book he demonstrates his implicit understanding of the time-binding character of humanity and its incompatibility with Rand’s extreme version of individuality, embodied in the title of one of her books The Virtue of Selfishness. Rand erroneously embraces “[a]n almost universal human trait…the ability to discount the endless contributions of others to our thinking process, while magnifying our own ‘original’ thinking beyond all measure. This is the basis of the American mythos of the ‘Self-made man…”

Rand’s extreme elevation of the virtue of selfishness has no place for altruism at all, at all.  According to Rand, Williams notes, “[o]nly when this awful, ridiculous moral notion of self-sacrifice and altruism is rejected will the thinkers/creators/Atlases be free to create. Until then, Galt [one of Rand’s heros in Atlas Shrugged] says, they’re out.” 

On the contrary, “Man is a SOCIAL animal,” Williams writes, “but Ayn Rand and her adherents insanely reject this fundamental truth. As a result, while a few have enriched themselves, our society is falling apart, and our infrastructure is rotting.” Thus Rand’s work provides the perfect theoretical basis for the current extreme view of individualism supported by ‘tea-party’ advocates, ‘libertarian’ think tanks, and the right-wing Republicans, among others. An example of the latter is former Republican Vice-Presidential candidate, Paul Ryan, a staunch right-wing Catholic, who during the campaign attempted to distance himself from the staunch atheist, Rand, he once admired and touted. But despite his new found love for St. Thomas Aquinas, Ryan still seems to be pushing the virtue of selfishness. Not very christian according to some christian’s measures, but then again, as Williams points out, “nobody ever went broke providing millionaires with a rationalization for the morality of greed.” At the moment, Congressman Ryan seems to be doing quite well. 

The book's title, Ayn Nation Under God, might have been better titled Ayn Nation Under Galt, but then again maybe Hart Williams’ title is appropriate if we accept Albert Ellis's affirmative answer to the question that was also the title of his book critiquing Rand, "Is Objectivism A Religion?" At any rate, Hart Williams' book provides a remarkably non-aristotelian look at what is unfortunately becoming (at least to me) Ayn Nation Under Rand. If you want to understand a great deal more about the present, polarized, aristotelian orientation that dominates the political climate in the U.S. you can't do better than read Hart William's book. My summary and quotes don’t do justice to his writing. He tenders his conclusions with a large portion of supporting detail served with verve and wit in an extremely inexpensive book. All the more reason to get: Ayn Nation Under God