Chapter 59 - A Matter Of Character: Part 4 - Beyond Lip Service

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.

As Korzybski had put it in “A Veteran’s Re-Adjustment,” “Learning must be in deed and not mere lip service, and this is the main difficulty.”(11) David Levine was finding out for himself about philosophising lip service in relation to GS. Born in Boston in 1929, the precocious 16 year old from Norfolk, Virginia, had completed one year of high school before passing a test to enter the University of Chicago as a sophomore in 1945. To make extra money, he got odd jobs waiting tables and washing dishes before starting to work at the Institute as an errand boy for Charlotte. Soon afterwards, Kendig invited him to take Francis Chisholm’s 1945 summer introductory course. He found it an eye-opening experience, particularly the schema of “logical fate” which he applied in his math and philosophy courses with “favorable results.” (He later recalled that the premises-conclusions diagram helped him to get an “A” in his philosophy class—and the philosophy professor found it useful too.) Around this time, he met Korzybski and heard him speak, although the two did not get to know each other until two years later. When David talked to Kendig about further studies, she got him a second-hand copy of Science and Sanity. David took two weeks off from his classes to read the book. He felt “stunned” by the time he finished it and immediately began the first of what would become many re-readings.(12) 

David worked at the Institute in Chicago for only about a year. He wouldn’t have an opportunity to take a seminar with Korzybski until 1948. However, he definitely seemed ‘besotted’ with GS, a condition he described in an article published in 1953:

The organization of a University of Chicago chapter of the Society for General Semantics gave me an opportunity during 1946 and 1947 to verbalize in large quantities about general semantics. Such intense over-verbalization about GS seems to be the ‘standard’ reaction to an introduction to GS. While such verbalization may be ‘standard,’ later I found it empirically to be an extremely unprofitable expenditure of time and energy. My only time-binding comment here is, that if you must run off at the mouth about GS to any chronic degree, then for pity sake relax, preferably with a drink in one hand, and make up your mind you’re not going to accomplish a hell of a lot. I emphasize relax, because if you get too ‘deadly serious’ in your verbal escapades, I find through personal experience you may actually injure yourself as well as others. 

On the campus of U of C a great deal of ‘neurotic’ over-verbalization about GS probably wouldn’t distinguish you from the rest of the denizens, but if a fellow in the ‘outside world’ who has a reasonably responsible position to fill engages in intense verbalization, ‘crusading,’ ‘lecturing,’ etc., it may cost him his job, his family’s peace of mind, etc., and in general could get him the unsavory reputation of ‘crack-pot.’ (13)  

Such crusading might repel potential students, preventing them from taking Korzybski and his work seriously. If they did get interested, over-verbalization would divert them from the necessary personal work involved in the discipline. Admittedly, this very aspect of Korzybski’s teaching, his focus on “the personal adjustment of his students” might bother others. As Allen Walker Read noted years later:

...More and more [Korzybski’s] purpose came to be to have an impact on the society of his time. To accomplish this, the whole person must be involved, with the reactions of the nervous system restructured. For the academic intellectual, this intrusion into his personal life arouses antagonism. Most of us have resistances to assaults on our ways of evaluating. Some people cannot stand it and have left seminars in the middle of them. (14) 

Korzybski had carefully studied the issue. “In every seminar I learn something about the difficulties which my students confront when they try to apply GS to life, which helps me in formulating new approaches, and in fact the discovering of new mechanisms which are perhaps crucial.”(15) A major part of the problem was that mastering extensional methodology required more than reading a book or attending a lecture. Internalization required practice. Many if not most people could benefit from the personal guidance of a teacher—the more individualized the better. This was the main reason he insisted on continuing his work with students in personal interviews.

At this point, looking to the future when he would no longer be around, Korzybski felt more than ever the need to develop a core of qualified people to carry on his work. Such people definitely would need to have an adequate verbal understanding of the non-aristotelian formulations. More importantly, they would need to have adequately internalized the extensional methods of GS. Such individuals would be in a position to apply and teach the work in the way he intended. Over the first part of 1946, he and Kendig developed a new program to do this (as part of the larger IGS development program they had long hoped for). They announced it in the first item on page one of the Summer 1946, IGS Student Newsletter:

DEMAND GROWS FOR APPROVED WORKERS IN GS as indicated by many items in this letter. To designate those whose qualifications and training in General Semantics in their own line of work have been approved by Korzybski, the Trustees are creating the title Associate of the Institute of General Semantics. Teachers, physicians, lecturers and all other workers in any field who wish his approval and official recognition of their competence are invited to qualify for appointment as an ‘Associate.’ In general, they will be expected to take some refresher training in the Non-A discipline and have a conference with Korzybski. Other qualifying procedures will not be subject to standard routine but will vary with Korzybski’s evaluations of the individual’s status in personal mastery of the discipline...(16) 

(Because of continuing limitations of money and personnel over the next few years, this plan never took off.) 

Whether they became Associates or not, additional educational material could provide guideposts for students wishing to develop in the direction of the new man and woman that Korzybski had envisioned. People would find stories of personal experience valuable. He had acquired a large file of autobiographical statements and correspondence from the students who had seen him for interviews. He also had materials from students of his students, like the veteran who had taken Elwood Murray’s class in Denver, upon whom the “Veteran’s Re-adjustment” paper had been based. As an educator and not a psychiatrist nor psychotherapist, he didn’t feel he would get taken seriously by writing standard clinical-sounding case studies. Instead, Alfred would provide some commentary as he had done in the “Veteran’s” paper, but the material would basically consist of students’ self-reports on the struggles, successes, and failures of their ongoing self-reeducation.

Many of the letters he got from students—briefly recounting positive and/or negative results—wouldn’t do. Without knowing more details about the students’ lives, a reader would have trouble understanding what they were talking about. In February, Korzybski had received, about a week apart, two letters from one person; they exactly suited his purpose. A reader wouldn’t need much else than these letters to get a good sense of the process of struggle and internalization that this student—whom he renamed Smith₁—depicted.

Korzybski got permission from Smith₁ to publish the letters along with Korzybski’s reply to him, wrote a brief commentary to introduce them, and had the document mimeographed. He began to distribute the Smith₁ document “Letters on Non-Aristotelian Retraining” to select people as an example of how serious students could benefit from working to apply this ‘new type of thinking’ to themselves. (The Smith₁ letters were published in the General Semantics Bulletin in 1951 and republished in Korzybski’s Collected Writings.) Korzybski prepared a second set of letters from another student, renamed Smith₂ , later in the year and made plans to prepare a series of such pieces from his personal correspondence with students. But various disruptions and projects that became more pressing made it impossible for Korzybski to devote the necessary time before he died to carry out what he called “The Smith_n Series of GS Life-Histories.”(17) 

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. 

11. Korzybski, “A Veteran’s Re-Adjustment and Extensional Methods” in Alfred Korzybski Collected Writings, p. 547.

12. Personal Interview–David Linwood [Levine] with Bruce Kodish, conducted on May 11, 2005. 

13. Levine, David A. “A Student’s Progress Report on Some Applications of Korzybskian Methodology”. General Semantics Bulletin, 10 & 11, Autumn-Winter 1952-1953, p. 63. 

14. Allen Walker Read 1984, p. 17. 

15. AK to C. B. Congdon, 2/6/1946. IGS Archives. 

16. IGS Student Newsletter, Summer, 1946. AKDA, Scrapbook 4.246.

17. Notes on “The Smith_n Series of GS Life-Histories”. IGS Archives.

< Part 3

Return to Table of Contents 

Chapter 59 - A Matter Of Character: Part 3 - A Matter of Character

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.

Before anything else, the methodology had to be applied by people to themselves. Korzybski’s concern for people found particular expression in his extensive and painstaking individual work with his students to help them do just that.

Each student presented a different set of difficulties for him to troubleshoot. He was not always the stern taskmaster that he may have seemed with Richard McClaughry. Each student (including the ‘same’ student at different times) required a different approach in order to help them extensionalize, i.e., face facts and find options, in a way he felt they could handle. He found the work absorbing. But although he worked at minimizing his expectations about what he could accomplish, his individual work with students took a toll on his organism-as-a-whole. Especially after the block of interviews he would do after a seminar, he typically felt exhausted. Nonetheless, he had to teach in his personal way if he was going to continue working, and to get others to carry on with his work, in the way he intended. It was a matter of character.

Indeed, the rhetorical question to McClaughry—“What good is ability without character?”—had great significance for Korzybski. Not just incidentally, the question sounds ‘aristotelian’. Years before, Korzybski had read Aristotle’s Nicomachean Ethics and had noted connections with his own aims and work. The Greek term ethikos translates roughly as ‘character’. Aristotle’s work, supposedly written for his son Nichomachus, consisted of a treatise on personal character development in terms of virtue or human excellence—a notion that he had carried forth from an earlier stream of ‘thought’ in classical Greek culture. Aristotle’s book in turn had a profound effect on later formulators, perhaps in a round-about way on Korzybski too. However non-aristotelian his applied epistemology, Korzybski could definitely be called ‘aristotelian’ in this sense—his deep concern with developing human excellence, both personal and group, in terms of what seemed to him most characteristic of human life, time-binding. *
*Conversely, Aristotle's notion of human nature ('man is a rational animal', etc.), though not equivalent to Korzybski's, still showed prefigurings of time-binding, as Korzybski noted in the margins of his copy of Nichomachean Ethics—along with instances of Aristotle's elementalism, etc.

Early in February 1946, Korzybski described the aim of his work to Irving J. Lee, talking very much in terms of the by-now-ancient sense of character, virtue, and human excellence. Lee’s private seminar—a refresher with Korzybski—took place over a period of more than a week, soon after Lee’s return from military service. Altogether, the two men spent nine sessions together (two to three hours each time), so that Lee could catch up with developments in Korzybski’s work that he had missed while he was away, e.g., the newest ‘baby-like’ extensional device, chain-indexes. Lee later spoke about how Korzybski related the core of his work to character development:

...At one of these sessions, I said, “Now, Alfred, you have been thinking about this stuff for a very long time. Can you tell me, in a nutshell, what are you trying to do? What is the objective of all this reading and studying and talking and sweating that you go through day after day, year after year? What are you after?” 

...I never could call on him in those sessions without being forced to take notes. If I came without a pencil and paper, he invariably found a pad and pencil, and “take some notes” was the continuous refrain. Well, I have gone over those notes many times and in answer to that question, this is almost a verbatim account of what he said when I asked him, “Alfred, what are you trying to do, in a nutshell?” 

...He said, “Irving, we are trying to produce a new sort of man...A man who will have no new virtues, but we will know how to describe him and, maybe, we will know how to create him...”. (Korzybski told Lee that he had already basically described the 'new sort of man' in Science and Sanity). (8)

More than 2000 years had passed since Aristotle. Perhaps Korzybski’s new man would have no new virtues, but based on the understanding of humans as time-binders and more recent knowledge of how we know what we say we know, the old virtues would need re-formulating in order to be described in terms of a broader—and epistemologically non-aristotelian—approach.

Korzybski himself never made a formal analysis of Nichomachean Ethics, but a non-essentialist, non-elementalistic approach seemed to require ‘fuzzifying’— even dissolving—the apparently distinct boundaries among the virtues delineated as ideals in Aristotle’s book: the boundaries between the intellectual virtues corresponding to various theoretical realms (‘intuition’, ‘philosophy’, science and mathematics); the rigid boundaries between the various forms of theoretical knowledge (no longer ‘unchanging truths’) and contingent practical knowledge; and the boundaries between various forms of practical knowledge. Theoretical knowledge could be seen as a development of everyday ‘common sense’. And simple (but not necessarily easy) lessons of practical wisdom could be extracted—as Korzybski did—from a study of physico-mathematical methods. The walls between the other intellectual virtues and productive—i.e., engineering/technical—knowledge would also have to be bridged or fall away. Reviewed from such a ‘non-aristotelian’, non-elementalistic perspective, Aristotle’s intellectual virtues represented not entirely separate realms, but rather different aspects or stages in a unified process of abstracting (in the korzybskian sense of that term).

Furthermore, since the process of abstracting necessarily involved evaluating, no human abstracting process could be said to exist entirely separately from factors of value, emotions, personal character, etc. In this way, the so-called moral virtues had as much relevance to science and other intellectual endeavors as to the rest of human life. Conversely, one would need various kinds of intellectual excellence, good sense—i.e. sound evaluation—to do ‘good’. So the elementalistic walls between Aristotle’s types of intellectual virtue and his types of moral virtue would have to come down too. From a korzybskian point of view you could still read Nichomachean Ethics with profit, but you would have to put in a lot of quotes, hyphens, etc.

For Korzybski, as much as for Aristotle, the personal character development he sought to spark in his students had to involve a student’s conscious cultivation of new habits in the desired direction. This required persistent effort. Korzybski knew this not only from his experience with students, but also from his experience of working on himself. “I am the same kind of moron as the rest of you,” Alfred told Charlotte Schuchardt, who by this time was managing the Institute office and had become his confidential secretary, editorial advisor and—beside Kendig—his more or less indispensable right-hand woman. “[I]t’s the method that does the work, for me as well as for you.”(9) But the method wouldn’t work without the student supplying the sweat.

The sweating might start with preliminary reading: Science and Sanity, or at least Francis Chisholm’s Introductory Lectures on General Semantics or Lee’s Language Habits in Human Affairs. Then, attending 30 to 40 hours of Korzybski’s lectures—along with additional workshop experiences or presentations from others—provided an experience far richer than anything a student could hope to get through reading the books alone. For those who chose to put themselves on ‘the firing line’, the two to four hours of personal interview with Korzybski could give them an extra boost of motivation and a useful new tack on how to apply the general extensional methods to their own particular problems. Some students might be in for rough times and unpleasant surprises. As a student continued working, barriers awaited to emerge. But, as Korzybski indicated to Richard McClaughry, he considered his job that of helping students to face facts and learn how to continue facing facts about their lives. And as he told McClaughry, his students were not paying him to make them like it. (He realized that if he was doing his job adequately, some of his students would probably not like him, either).

Both Aristotle and Korzybski would agree about this: intellectual interest and assent were not enough to cultivate the virtues they espoused. Aristotle, long before, had noted:

We are right then in saying, that these virtues are formed in a man by his doing the actions; but no one, if he should leave them undone, would be even in the way to become a good man. Yet people in general do not perform these actions, but taking refuge in talk they flatter themselves they are philosophising, and that they will so be good men: acting in truth very like those sick people who listen to the doctor with great attention but do nothing that he tells them: just as these then cannot be well bodily under such a course of treatment, so neither can those be mentally by philosophising. (10)

Practical wisdom had to be applied—not just talked about.

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. 

8. See “The Semantic Man: An address delivered by Irving J. Lee at the first conference on General Semantics, Chicago, Ill.”, 6/22/1951. Unpublished. (Thanks to Sanford I. Berman for providing me with a copy of this paper.) See Sanford I. Berman, “Irving J. Lee: ‘The Semantic Man’ ”, in General Semantics Bulletin 18 & 19, 1955, pp. 22-25. Also see Steve Stockdale “Snooping Around the Time-Binding Attic, Part 2, in ETC. A Review of General Semantics, Fall 2002, pp. 338-339. 

9. C.S. Read. “Alfred Habdank Skarbek Korzybski: A Biographical Sketch. p. 9. 

10. Nichomachean Ethics, D.P. Chase, translation. Book II, Section IV, p. 32.

< Part 2      Part 4 >

Return to Table of Contents 

Chapter 59 - A Matter Of Character: Part 2 - A 'New Type of Thinking'

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.

At the start of 1946, people still struggled to make sense of a world made topsy-turvy by the atomic bomb (that term first mentioned in a 1914 H.G. Wells story). Some parents had initially turned to their children—at least those who read science fiction—to learn about the effects of radiation, etc.(1) Korzybski felt that his work provided definite means to help people deal constructively with this new world situation; he was not going to shy away from offering it. 

Atomic Bomb Mushroom Cloud Over Hiroshima, 1945

In early December 1945, he wrote to Jekuthiel Ginsburg, who had invited him to lecture again for Scripta Mathematica in New York City:

When we were discussing the last time the titles for the two lectures somehow you were not too enthusiastic about the word ‘non-aristotelian’. I did not object, but this was before the release of atomic energy. Today we do not need to be shy about this term, as it is crucial for the future of all of us, science, mathematics, education and even sanity. It is simple to speak about the application of physico-mathematicial method, but one has to extract out of it the essential non-aristotelian epistemology which so far no one has done except in General Semantics. All success we have with the non-aristotelian re-orientation is due to this extremely simplified and natural physico-mathematical method and epistemology. I enclose a report of a disturbed veteran and how in ten hours of class training he was helped. And so it goes. (2)

A number of prominent public figures had also expressed their post-war urgencies about the role of education in human life in ‘the atomic age’. Brock Chisholm, a Canadian veteran of World War I and a psychiatrist who had served as the Director General of the Canadian Army Medical Corps during World War II, had given the William Alanson White Memorial Lecture in Washington, D.C. in the latter part of 1945. The lecture, “The Psychiatry of Enduring Peace and Social Progress” presented a case for psychiatry to take up a broader social and preventive role in “overhauling the educational system.” Chisholm, who would go on to head the newly-born World Health Organization, had already become a controversial figure in his battle against “poisonous certainties” by scolding Canadian parents for telling their children that ‘there is a Santa Claus.’ His White lecture was published in the February issue of the journal Psychiatry, then edited by Harry Stack Sullivan. Sullivan wrote a heartfelt editorial pointing out the need for psychiatry as a profession to “proceed responsibly with a cultural revolution” as Chisholm had envisioned. Although Korzybski felt concerned about Chisholm’s brashness, he welcomed both men’s pieces. In May he wrote a congratulatory letter to Sullivan, later mimeographed and distributed by the Institute of General Semantics, making clear that his own work provided specifics lacking in Chisholm’s and Sullivan’s more general statements.(3) 

Einstein was also speaking out. At the end of May, Elwood Murray received a telegram from the physicist that he passed on to Korzybski. Reading it must have both buoyed and annoyed Alfred:

Our world faces crisis as yet unperceived by those possessing power to make great decisions for good or evil. The unleashed power of the atom has changed everything save our modes of thinking and we thus drift toward unparalleled catastrophe...We need two hundred thousand dollars at once for nationwide campaign to let the people know that new type of thinking essential if mankind is to survive and move toward higher levels. This appeal sent you only after long consideration of immense crisis we face...(4) 

On June 23, the Sunday New York Times Magazine published an article by Einstein about the unprecedented dangers of the atomic bomb. “Science has brought forth this danger,” he wrote, “but the real problem is in the minds and hearts of men. We will not change the hearts of other men by mechanisms, but by changing our hearts and speaking bravely.”(5) 

Einstein certainly seemed on the right track in proposing the necessity for a new way of ‘thinking’, a change in people’s ‘hearts’ and ‘minds’. But without exploring and making use of the mechanisms by which it operated, Korzybski didn’t know how that change could happen. Korzybski must have appreciated the tweaking that Elwood Murray gave the physicist in a reply to his telegram:

Here is a slight token of support for your telegraphed appeal...I am especially interested in the methods of this new type of thinking you would teach. I would be glad to have any materials you might refer me to on this. In these respects, have you ever investigated the work of Alfred Korzybski, and the general scientific methods he has formulated which are applicable to the immense problems of inter-personal relations.(6) 

Einstein had no methodology or materials for teaching the ‘new type of thinking’ he called for. Korzybski, and colleagues like Murray, did. Korzybski didn’t think socially responsible scientists should ignore that. He would take whatever opportunity he could find to apprise people of his work. Some people would find that bothersome. But Korzybski’s sense of urgency matched Chisholm’s and Einstein’s.

In his article, Chisholm had written: “We must at whatever cost prevent our children and their children from being as we have been, but freedom from the tyranny of these faiths and fears is not to be gained in one generation. ...” On the contrary, as Korzybski wrote in a commentary on Chisholm’s article,

This freedom might be achieved provided psychiatrists and mathematicians, and the respectively inter-connected scientists, could and would snap out from their professional ‘shell of isolationism’, improve their methods, and clarify their nomenclature and formulations as suggested by General [William] Menninger to psychiatrists. This would be an epoch-making step. ....Co-operation of different specialists in various fields is indispensable if anything is to be accomplished. The solution of the problem is to unify methodology. If there is a ‘mortal sin’ in this world, destructive to us all, it is the mutual ignorance of learned specialists of the work of other specialists, and their mutual apathy and self-centered indifference to the unification of methodology.

...Einstein, speaking as a layman, says: ‘The real problem is in the hearts of men’. In general semantics we formulate it workably and so differently: ‘The real problem depends on human evaluations, and any evaluation depends on different conscious or unconscious assumptions, premises, postulates, creeds, dogmas, prejudices, guesses, and what not, which, when acted upon, by necessity result in some methodology.’ (7)

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. See Martha A. Bartter’s The way to ground zero: The atomic bomb in American science fiction and Alexei and Cory Panshin’s The world beyond the hill: Science fiction and the quest for transcendence. 

2. AK to Jekuthiel Ginsburg, Dec. 1, 1945. IGS Archives. 

3. “Copy of a letter to Harry Stack Sullivan, M.D., May 1946”, Alfred Korzybski Collected Writings, pp. 899-903. 

4. Einstein Telegram as Chairman, Emergency Committee of Atomic Scientists. AKDA, Scrapbook 41.449. 

5. Albert Einstein, in an interview with Michael Amrine. “The Real Problem Is In The Hearts of Men”. New York Times, 6/23/1946. 

6. Elwood Murray to Albert Einstein, 6/12/1946. AKDA, Scrapbook 5.241. 

7. Comments by Alfred Korzybski to “Excerpts From the William Alanson White Memorial Lectures, Second Series by Harry Stack Sullivan and Major-General G. B Chisholm”. AKDA, Scrapbook 5.8-14.

< Part 1     Part 3 >

Return to Table of Contents 

Chapter 59 - A Matter Of Character: 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.

On the Eastern Front in 1914 and 1915, Korzybski had more than once escaped death. Since then, although he had taken a rather matter-of-fact view of his own mortality, he had seized the gift of life that fortune had given him and had worked to make the most of it. By the beginning of 1946, he knew that the largest part of his life was over. He had little if anything to regret. He had produced his work. He believed that he had done what he set out to do. He had helped many people. He had gotten a measure of recognition from many of those whose opinions he cared about. He had taught others who would carry on his work as best they could. Mira had a roof over her head. Still, if he was ready to die at any time, he was not ready to quit. The last four years (and two months) of his life were not years of retirement. The accumulated fatigue of his endless work had combined with his war injuries to slow him down from his former, seemingly endless vigor. Yet he still felt reasonably healthy and creative. He was not walking into the sunset quietly even if he did need more support from his cane. 

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. 

Part 2 >

Return to Table of Contents 

Chapter 58 - "Shoot Yourself!: Part 2 - "Shoot Yourself!"

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.

Another attendee at this 1945-46 Winter Holiday Seminar, Richard T. McClaughry, never became well known, but he left a record of his interview with Korzybski notable for its personal honesty, likely detail, and rarity. Although Korzybski’s individual work with his students constituted a major part of his efforts, few independent records exist of what happened in these interviews. The autobiographical statements of students and Korzybski’s follow-up correspondence with them were, as he had requested, returned to them or destroyed upon his death to protect their privacy. Only a few students’ letters—with their permission—remained in the archives, with their names cut out. McClaughry wrote an account of his interview with Korzybski in an article written for the Reader’s Digest—never published, but discovered by his son among his papers many years after his 1973 death. With his son’s permission, I present his story here. (4)

At the age of thirty, McClaughry had a successful marriage and a promising career when tragedy struck. Soon after his wife gave birth to their first child, a healthy boy, he received a fateful phone call at work. His wife had just died from a blood clot. With that call, his world began to fall apart. He became depressed. Though not very religious to start with, he became a militant atheist. Within a year, he was seeing a psychiatrist who advised him to get married in order “to face the future and provide a home for my infant son.” The marriage broke up six months later. He sent his son to live with relatives, fired his psychiatrist, quit his job as an advertising account executive, and had a heart attack (considered “psychosomatic”) in short order. While recovering, he read an article about Korzybski and his seminars and decided that he might learn something helpful. 

Then living in Detroit, he attended the September intensive seminar in 1941. In his own words, here are his first impressions: 

I’m not sure yet why I actually went. Largely, I think, because my physician had forbidden me even to think of work during the period, and time hung heavy on my hands. I didn’t expect much—in that length of time and for that price [$50]. (I had already spent thousands on psychiatry.) I was nine-tenths convinced in advance that Korzybski had to be an imposter and a fake. Perhaps, like most cynics, I had developed a morbid pleasure in exposing the “stupidities” of others, and went to Chicago to match my intellect against anyone who dared to believe in anything. 

At any rate, I went. My first sight of the man I proposed to challenge somewhat jarred my preconceptions. I had expected either a “long-haired intellectual” or a suave and urbane Hollywood “faith healer” type. Instead I saw a man of sixty [sic] who looked more like a Polish wrestler than anything else. Head like a billiard ball—either completely bald or completely shaved, I never knew which. A round, flat, Slavic face. A short, squat, powerful body, with tremendous shoulders. A baffling accent, at times incomprehensible to my Mid-Western American ears. A tremendous grasp of a staggering range of academic subjects, including mathematics, the physical sciences, languages, history, philosophy, psychology and psychiatry. He was capable of Falstaffian humor and Jovian wrath. Though Bertrand Russell, who should know, once referred to his erudition as “extraordinary”, I have never, before or since, heard any lecturer or teacher answer so many questions with a simple and unequivocal “I don’t know”.  

I am happy to say now that any ideas I may have had of pitting my “intellect” against Korzybski’s disappeared quickly. I attempted just one confrontation, only to feel ten seconds later as if I had been picked up by a giant and shaken like a child. From then on, I kept my mouth shut, and listened. 

This ‘confrontation’ may have been the encounter that his son described to me in a letter:

I lived with my father during high school, 1950-1954. The only artifact I have from him is his cherished copy of S&S, carefully underlined by me when I read it 40 years ago. 

Here’s the one anecdote [my father] told me back then about attending AK’s seminar... 

At an early lecture AK mentioned “zat famuz Greek general who conquered z’vurld”.  

My father, long used to being the brightest boy in the class, piped up “Alexander the Great.”  

AK paused, looked quizzically at my father, and feigning deafness said “Vot?” [Korzybski was probably not feigning as he definitely had a hearing deficit – BIK]My father said, “ALEXANDER THE GREAT.”  

AK, looking even more puzzled, said “VOT?” 

My father, now getting very embarrassed, shouted “ALEXANDER THE GREAT!” 

AK pondered this a moment, then said, “It duss not matter.” 

That was the only time my father sought to supply AK with missing information. (5) 

McClaughry found the seminar exhilarating and valuable. He convinced his estranged second wife to come to the upcoming 1941-42 Holiday Seminar with him. Perhaps they could find some means there to restore their marriage. But, as he wrote, “her reactions were different than mine, and the project failed.” 

By this time, America was at war, so shortly after my divorce decree became final, I enlisted in the Army. Three and one-half years of military service, including two and one-half overseas, wiped out what progress I had made toward personal re-orientation. After demobilization, I decided to attend one more seminar at the Institute as a last resort, not so much because I thought a third series of lectures would reach me with anything new, as because I hoped contact with Korzybski might give me back the will to try again. 

This was the 1945-46 Holiday Intensive—the last one he would ever attend. He came to believe that his interview there with Korzybski saved his life.

The seminar was as expected. But at the end of each seminar, it was Korzybski’s practice to grant a two-hour private interview to each student, based on a written, confidential autobiography submitted in advance. I had submitted autobiographies twice in the past, but I now realized that they had been less than candid. This time I determined, cost what it might, to be brutally honest about myself in my paper, in order to get from Korzybski the help I desperately needed.  

I got more than I bargained for.  

Korzybski’s face was like stone when I entered his office for my scheduled interview. The room was in darkness, except for a pool of light in the far corner of the room, where the man I had come to see sat at his desk, waiting. He motioned me to a chair, without greeting. As I sat down, he picked up and glanced briefly at the document I had mailed him, sentences in which, I could see from across the desk, had been heavily underlined.

Alfred Korzybski in his Chicago office, 1944 (6)

“Well”, he said finally, after what seemed an interminable silence, “you’re paying me to tell you what’s wrong with you. You are not paying me to make you like it.” 

“You are an alcoholic.”  

I winced. Though I knew I had frequently drunk to excess, I worked in fields in which heavy drinking was laughed at. Neither my psychiatrist nor I had seen this as a basic problem. Furthermore, those were the days when the term “alcoholic” was still an insult, not a diagnosis. I reacted accordingly. 

“That isn’t what my psychiatrist said,” I retorted belligerently. “He said. ...” 

“I don’t care what your psychiatrist said”, Korzybski interrupted. “If anyone  can read this revolting mess”—here he picked up and waved the document I had sent him through the mails—“and not see alcoholism in every line, I’d like to know how. You’re not a misunderstood genius. You’re not a pathetic victim of Fate. You’re an alcoholic, and the sooner you realize it, the better.”  

I tried to protest again, but he talked right through me. 

“How long do you think you’re going to last, the way you’re going?” he asked, again waving my paper.  

I answered with what I thought was cynical bravado. “I don’t know”, I shrugged, “six months, maybe.”  

He shook his head sadly. “No, not six months; thirty years, with each year more miserable than the one before. Most alcoholics don’t die young, though everyone wishes they would. They just keep on stumbling along, a nuisance to everyone else and a misery to themselves.”  

“Now, I’m going to tell you what you can do about it”, he continued, “and you’re not going to like that, either.” 

“From where you sit right now, you have only three choices. First, you can go on as you are; that’s probably what you will do. You think you’ve had a hard life so far. Let me tell you what you can expect, if you continue in your present direction.”  

Korzybski prided himself on his ability to speak to the senses and the emotions as well as to the intellect. During the next thirty or forty minutes, he more than proved his point. It was not a temperance lecture. It was a detailed, statistically-based description of a typical case of alcoholic disintegration. 

I didn’t just hear what he said. As he talked, I felt the things he talked about actually happening—and to me. As if in a motion picture, I saw myself fighting a hopeless battle against alcoholic odds...the progressively more severe and more prolonged drinking episodes and their aftermaths...the humiliation and degradation...the friends lost...the jobs thrown away...the lies and excuses used over and over again until finally worn out...and only finally the jail, the mental hospital and the dishonored grave. At times, in considering these possibilities in the past, I had managed to see myself in an heroic role: Man against Fate. There was nothing heroic in Korzybski’s picture. Instead of Prometheus defying the lightnings, I saw only an increasingly revolting parody of a human being condemned by his own stupidity to a revolting end. I felt this just couldn’t be a true picture of me and my future; yet, when I looked at myself through Korzybski’s eyes, that’s what I saw.  

“Now”, he said at last, “that’s one choice you can make. Fortunately, a much better choice is available.” 

“Shoot yourself.”  

I gasped. It was no time for jokes.  

He wasn’t joking.  

“That’s right,”he repeated. “Shoot yourself. I’m not sentimental about suicide. There are a  lot of people moving around on the face of the earth who would be better off dead, and you’re one of them. Why drag out the misery and disgrace I’ve just told you about for thirty years, when you can get it all over in thirty seconds? Get a revolver...load it...put it to your temple...pull the trigger. In two or three days, you’ll be buried and forgotten, and the whole human race, including you, will be better off.”  

He paused a moment, and then resumed in a more reflective tone. “There would be a third choice—for some people—but, on second thought, I don’t believe it’s worth mentioning to you. You have no religion. That’s out. You’ve tried psychiatry long enough to prove yourself untreatable. You’ve attended my seminars three times and are worse off now than when you started. Obviously, I can’t help you. Frankly, I don’t know anyone who can—or anything.” 

He paused again. Then he said: “There is something called ‘Alcoholics Anonymous’. They seem to get results, in some cases. I don’t know how. I wish I did. Their number is in the phone book.” He thought again. “But, no—even they have to have something left to work with, and you’re too far gone. You can call them, if you want to, but I can tell you right now that if you do you’ll just be wasting their time and yours.”  

I made one last attempt at self-defense. “But I have shown some ability in some things”,  I protested.  

He looked at me with heavy scorn. Then he said something which I have tried to remember, ever since.  

“Oh, I admit you have ability,” he snorted. “But, will you kindly tell me: WHAT GOOD IS ABILITY WITHOUT CHARACTER?” 

He left that thought trailing in the air. Then he suddenly looked at his watch and stood up. 

“Well, old man, that’s it. I said in the beginning that you have three choices, but actually you have only two: continue on your present course or shoot yourself. Even you ought to be able to see which is better.”  

...The man across the desk spoke with the cold, impersonal tones of a judge pronouncing sentence. 

“I’m sorry, but that’s it”, he said. “The only thing you can do that makes any sense at all is: SHOOT YOURSELF”. 

I tried to interrupt, but he continued remorselessly, with chilling pauses between each sentence.  

“Now—your time is up.”  

“There’s the door.” 

“Walk out of it.” 

“Don’t come back.” 

“And don’t bother to let me know how you come out—because I don’t care.”...  

...That...ended the interview. 

Obviously, I didn’t shoot myself. I left Korzybski’s office feeling like a whipped cur, but in a few minutes my mood changed to towering rage. Whom was he calling an alcoholic? Maybe I had drunk too much, at times, in the past—but always for good reason. Now I would drink only with control, like a gentleman, and ultimately throw my detractor’s likes back in his teeth! Less than two months later, I awoke on the floor of a Chicago North Clark Street rooming house, completely unable to remember where I had been or what I had done for the past ten days!  

My first thought was: “My God! Everything he said was true. The only thing I can do that makes any sense is shoot myself!”  

Alcoholics with schizoid tendencies desperately avoid committing themselves to courses from which there is no withdrawal, as Korzybski well knew—and death is so final. On the heels of my first thought came a second. Even if Korzybski had said that AA wouldn’t work for me, I could always try that first, and then shoot myself afterwards, if AA didn’t work. At least it would postpone my awful decision.  

So I phoned the local AA office for help, in what I thought was defiance of Korzybski’s advice. I couldn’t have called under better auspices. Much of the alcoholic’s characteristic arrogance and conceit had already been beaten out of me. I was intensely aware of the gravity of my situation. And it was my own idea, upon which hung my last chance to salvage some shred of self-respect as well as my life. It was my last chance to prove that, in this respect at least, I could be right and Korzybski wrong. If I was being manipulated by a superior mind—and I was—I didn’t realize it at the time.  

Twenty-one years have passed since then. It would be nice to be able to report that an “instant miracle” occurred when I joined AA, and that my life since February, 1946, has been one of mounting triumph. It hasn’t. There has been progress, mixed with set-backs and reverses. After six years of uninterrupted sobriety in AA, I took a “refresher course” in drinking, after which it took me seven desperate years to get solidly back on the AA program. (I thought “just one drink” wouldn’t hurt!) Now an additional eight years of abstinence have ensued. I have not, during those twenty-three years, pitched a no-hit game nor become a Hollywood celebrity nor even a business tycoon. I have kept from becoming a public charge, I have stayed out of jails, mental hospitals, and gutters, I have helped raise my own son and two step-[children] and I have developed a quiet faith in “something” that gives [hope].  

In retrospect, I cannot find adequate words with which to express my gratitude to Alcoholics Anonymous and its members for the help I have received from them. Yet, in my heart, my greatest gratitude goes to general semantics and Alfred Korzybski. Without the good fortune of exposure to general semantics and Korzybski before I attempted AA, I do not believe I could have accepted the religious over-tones and basic common sense of the AA program—though others have. In my personal approach to AA—and AA insists that each member must build his own “individual” program—I found a surprising correlation between the principles of general semantics and the practices of AA. For me, general semantics provided the theory, Korzybski the goad, and AA the way of life. I needed all three to stay alive. 

I never saw Korzybski again after that day in 1946. I did write to him, after I thought I had become well-established in AA, telling him how things were going. From his prompt and encouraging reply, I learned that I had done and was doing exactly what he hoped I would do. I corresponded with him thereafter until he died.  

I shall never forget my last two hours with him, painful as they were at the time. I particularly try to remember, not always successfully, his reference to the valuelessness of ability without character. My feelings about Korzybski, who had his faults as well as his virtues, is still: “There was a man. When comes such another, into my life, at least.” And I still believe that the man who told me to shoot myself saved my life. 

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. Excerpts from R.T. McClaughry’s 1969 unpublished article, ‘“SHOOT YOURSELF,” He Said—and Saved My Life!’ Used with permission of John McClaughry.

5. John McClaughry to B. I. Kodish, Feb. 4, 2009. 

6. The sign on the lower left corner of Korzybski’s blackboard had a Walter Winchell quote from the November 1942 issue of Reader’s Digest which read as follows:

When a private at Randolph Field comes to a noncom with a complaint, he is handed a mourning-bordered card which says: “Your trials and tribulations have broken my heart. They are unique. I have never heard of anything like them before. As proof of my sympathy, I give you this card which entitles you to one hour of condolence.”

< Part 1 

Return to Table of Contents 

"Observing Without The Mediation of Symbols"

"For tens of thousands of years, the human brain has lived in terms of symbols – words, images, concepts, etc. That’s why it’s so hard for us to see that the word is not the thing and the map is not the territory."

http://www.costaricantimes.com/observing-without-the-mediation-of-symbols/37481

Chapter 58 - "Shoot Yourself!": 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.

Korzybski’s Holiday Intensive Seminar ran from December 27, 1945 to January 9, 1946. He had a full class of thirty-five students. Notable among them was a French Canadian psychologist from Montreal, Joseph Samuel Anselme Bois (pronounced “Bwa”), already becoming well-known in Canadian psychology and management consulting circles.

Born in 1892, Bois graduated from Laval University in Quebec and became a priest in the Catholic Church, where he served for twenty years before his dismissal “for preaching that with love, all will be good.” As Bois put it, “This translated as ‘love, and do what you want.’ They thought I meant free love, not God-love.”(1) 

J. Samuel Bois

Afterwards, he studied psychology at McGill University in Montreal, getting his PhD in 1936 at the age of 44. In 1939, he came across Science and Sanity. It changed his life—challenging to the roots the thomistic-aristotelian philosophy he had studied to enter the priesthood. Eventually he embraced the non-aristotelian revision Korzybski offered. He spent the war years as the head of Research and Information for the Canadian Army, where his work involved morale building, organizational research, and publishing the Canadian Army weekly magazine, Khaki, in English and French. Having recently left the service at the time of the Holiday seminar, he worked as head of psychological services for a Canadian management consulting firm. At the Holiday seminar, as Bois later wrote:

For two hours, from midnight until 2 A.M., [Korzybski] spoke to me in his office, after his closing lecture. I didn’t have time to remain for the workshop, and he consented at this late hour to comment on the biography I had submitted to him. (2)

Despite not spending much personal time with Korzybski, Bois became one of Korzybski’s most important continuators. Starting in 1947, he began lecturing at Institute seminar-workshops with Korzybski’s full approval. Bois would come to view Korzybski as one of that group of men called in French “les grand couers”—great hearts.(3) Teaching and developing the non-aristotelian system and discipline became the main focus of Bois’ long life of writing and teaching.

Bois teaching at 1950 IGS Summer 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. 

1. Qtd. in Gary David, “About the Author” in Bois 1996, p. xxiv. 

2. Bois, 1950. “The Alfred Korzybski I Knew”, p. 20, in General Semantics Bulletin 3 (1950), pp. 20-21. 

3. Ibid., pg. 21. 

Part 2 >

Return to Table of Contents