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Alfred Korzybski published Manhood of Humanity in 1921 and introduced his theory of time-binding. He classified humans as "time-binders", primarily differentiated from lower forms of life by their unique capability to use language - and other symbol systems - to accumulate knowledge from generation to generation, such that the child can pick up where the parent left off.
Twelve years later, he provided a methodology for applying the consequences of time-binding in his book, Science and Sanity: An Introduction to Non-Aristotelian Systems and General Semantics. He and M. Kendig established The Institute of General Semantics as a non-profit organization in Chicago in 1938. The Institute moved to Lakeville, Connecticut in 1946, and is now based in Brooklyn, New York. [More on the Institute.] While it would be a mistake to equate Korzybski (the man) with general semantics (the system of formulations), there is no denying the fact that Korzybski as formulator did do the formulating. Clearly, others since have made significant contributions to the field. What we view today as "general semantics" has a greater breadth - and perhaps, depth - than that which Korzybski left us in 1950.
I offer this comparison, for whatever it's worth. I suggest that Korzybski was to general semantics as Michaelangelo was to the Cistine Chapel. Without him, there would still be a structure - albeit, one with four beige walls and a plaster ceiling. Ultimately, he will be remembered - as will most of us, I suppose - by what he wrote and said, and what others wrote and said about him.
- Steve Stockdale
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ALFRED KORZYBSKI
A Biographical Sketch
The Girl and the Match
Alfred Korzybski and Some Notable Names associated with Korzybski and GS
A Brief History of the IGS
God may forgive your sins. But your nervous system won't.
Who rules the symbols, rules us. A person does what he does because he sees the world as he sees it. We see what we see because we miss all the finer details. Alfred Korzybski |
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(some of) What Others Said About Him
"He deepened my awareness of the human relevance of all studies. He has too vividly shown that what men say and do is inevitably linked with what they see and with what they assume. Accom-panying that insight is a new kind of respect for human potentiality."
"... he turns your attention to something less tangible, something that you cannot compute additively, that you cannot demonstrate to others with a brilliant display of 'whys' and 'therefores'. He makes you conscious of structure, relations and order. He helps you feel that you as a living-thinking-feeling-acting individual are a conscious node of interrelatedness in a universe that you eventually feel throbbing with you, through you, around you ..."
"He existed as a process and produced in his lifetime a number of ink marks presenting to some degree his basic formulations of the function of mankind. In this capacity, he was never surpassed. His time-binding theory and his subsequent development of General Semantics as a method for the achievement of its maximal function severed across old lines of thought as does a clean cleaver through moldy cheese. This cleavage has yielded a resultant new approach, which is only beginning to be felt in multiple scientific disciplines."
"...[his] was not the sentimental approach, nor the metaphysical, which have had such a long vogue. Rather it was an engineering approach. He began with an 'obvious' fact, but one so large that it had mostly been taken for granted and never adequately explored before; namely, that humans represent a symbol-producing, symbol-using class of life. In other words, the arrangements by which we regulate our lives and the relationships among us are established through the functioning of our symbol systems. Man has created for himself an environment of symbols, and for better or for worse he has to live with them."
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