Korzybski's Quest

I think it's helpful to consider Korzybski's work from 1920 to 1950 in the context of three broad concerns that shaped the arc of his personal "quest" (my term, not his).

What makes the human species human? In other words, what are the similarities among humans that differentiate us from other species, that distinguish the organism named Smith from his canine best friend named Fido?
What accounts for the vast differences in behaviors that are exhibited among humans such that, within one generation, we can produce Gandhi, Hitler, Einstein, and Stalin?
Is it possible to characterize these vast differences such that we can more rapidly increase behaviors that advance and progress humanity, while minimizing the atavistic behaviors that retard or regress humanity?

The task of engineering science is not only to know but to know how (Korzybski, 1993, p. 11).

1. What makes humans human? Time-binding

Alfred Korzybski's education focused on the sciences, especially chemistry and engineering. He had a deep curiosity about how things worked. Therefore in considering this first question, Korzybski sought an operational definition of humans — not merely a verbal definition. What did humans do that was different from non-human forms of life?

Plants as Chemistry-binders

First Korzybski considered plants. What do plants do? Plants absorb, or bind, specific chemicals in their immediate environment — nutrients from the soil and water — and together with the effects of sunlight (for above-ground plants), reproduce cells and produce growth. Plant growth and reproduction are influenced by other environmental factors such as climate, gravity, and (of course) plant-eating animals and pollinating insects, just to name a few.

Korzybski therefore distinguished plants by their ability to bind together the elements of their environment within and to their own organisms in order to produce and sustain life. He referred to them as chemistry-binders.

Animals as Space-binders

Turning to the animal kingdom (including birds and fish), Korzybski determined that, operationally, what animals do includes everything that plants do with one crucial difference. Animals possess (to varying degrees) the ability to move about in their environment. If the source of its food or water depletes, an animal can move to another place. The ability to move about in space also provides animals with defensive, and offensive, capabilities in their relations with other animals.

Based on this defining characteristic of being able to move about throughout their spacial environment, Korzybski referred to animals as space-binders in that they 'binded' the spaces within their living territory.

Humans as Time-binders

In assessing what humans do, over and above the capabilities of animals, Korzybski determined that the most critical difference is the ability to create, manipulate, record, and transform symbols. For him, however, the consequence of this uniquely-human capability was much more than just being able to think and communicate with symbols, words, signs, icons, etc.

Korzybski did not regard the human language capability itself as the defining characteristic of humans, but as the tool that enabled the capability that most differentiated humans from animals — the ability to transfer knowledge from human to human, within and across generations. Languages and other symbol systems, powered by the brain's neo-cortex (Korzybski, 1993, p. 149) provide humans with the means to document experiences, observations, tips, descriptions, etc., which means that a child can pick up from where the parent leaves off. Knowledge among the human species can therefore accumulate and advance as a body, not simply as random lessons taught and learned by copying, mimicing, or experience.

As a plant binds its chemical environment to reproduce and grow, and as an animal binds space to survive, humans are able to bind time such that a school girl in 2014 can learn physics from Isaac Newton, dance to an 18th-century waltz, become entranced by the words of a sacred ancient text, and try to keep with Facebook's ever-changing privacy settings. Like the plants that 'bind' chemicals directly into the living cells of their own organisms, and the animals that 'bind' their movements within their environments, humans bind time by the activities and changes of their individual brains.

Korzybski coined the term time-binding to denote this defining capability of human time-binders, first described in his 1921 book, Manhood of Humanity. He wrote:

We know that time-binding capacity — the capacity for accumulating racial [of the human race] experience, enlarging it, and transmitting it for future expansion — is the peculiar power, the characteristic energy, the definitive nature, the defining mark, of man; ... to make improvement — to do greater things by help of things already done — are of the very nature of the time-binding capacity which makes humans human (Korzybski, 1993, pp. 174-175).

All human achievements are cumulative; no one of us can claim any achievement exclusively as his own; we all must use consciously or unconsciously the achievements of others, some of them living but most of them dead (Korzybski, 1990a, p. 13).

2. What accounts for the differences in human behavior? Evaluating

While Korzybski defined time-binding as a characteristic human capacity (or capability), he knew from first-hand experience in World War I that human behavior did not always result in "improvement" or "greater things." Therefore he contemplated how it was that some humans sought to advance and progress "human weal" (Korzybski, 1993, p. 1) while others sought to murder, steal, and subjugate other humans for their own selfish weal.

As we will emphasize throughout the course, Korzybski drew a sharp distinction between what we experience in our lives, and our reactions to those experiences. What our nervous system can sense and experience is but an abstraction of the total possible experience, and our reactions to what happens are yet another abstraction.

Because people can expect to experience the 'same' event or situation differently, their reactions to the experience will inevitably be different. Influenced by his understanding of the tropism effect from biology (plant growth results from the effects of external stimulation from light, moisture, gravity, etc.), Korzybski initially coined the term semantic reaction to refer to the total response of a human to a meaningful event or experience. However, in his later work he came to use the more general evaluational reaction or simply evaluation to denote human behavioral reactions as the collective or cumulative impact of one's abstractions. Evaluations would therefore include activities we label as judgments, conclusions, opinions, beliefs, ideologies, etc. Here is a table of terms that could be considered under the umbrella term of evaluating.

So in assessing the differences in human behaviors, Korzybski theorized that these differences were matters of evaluation, due to the different meanings that individuals attached to events and experiences, based on their own individual values.

In Week 5, we'll address the "big picture" implications of his theories about the complex inter-relationships among evaluations, meanings, and values. Here are some examples that may give you a feel for what Korzybski was getting at:

The European Union is divided over the ongoing financial crises in Greece and other countries. Generalizing and simplifying ... the citizens in Greece evaluate the crisis differently than German citizens because the austerity that is being forced on Greece means something very different to the Greek than it means to the German. The Greek and the German evaluate the situation differently because the situation means something different because they hold different values.
The Tea Party in the United States evaluates the significance of U.S. debt and government spending levels differently from other political groups because of the meaning that Tea Partiers give to government debt based on their values.
People around the world hold different evaluations about global warming/climate change based what the phenomenon means to them and what values they hold. To the citizen of the Maldives, the threat of rising oceans bears meaningful consequences because they value their way of life (not to mention their actual lives), so they evaluate the evidence and forecasts about global warming one way. The owner/operator/customers of a coal-burning electricity plant in the remote southwest U.S., they evalute the issue differently because their economic and political values are affected in different meaningful ways.
The ongoing tensions between India and Pakistan can be considered in terms of different evaluations based on conflicting values and meanings.

3. How to characterize a method or system that can be taught, learned, and applied?

Korzybski published his time-binding theory in Manhood of Humanity in 1921. Throughout the 1920s, he worked through the implications of his theory, including his detailed analysis and description of the abstracting process that produced individual evaluations.

For two years he observed patients at St. Elizabeth's mental hospital in Washinton, D.C. He carefully noted the language of the mentally ill, specifically how in many instances their language (maps) did not match the 'real' world (territory), which reflected pathological cases of misevaluation.

In contrast to the extremes of such inappropriate language behavior resulting from misevaluations, Korzybski studied the effective and productive language behaviors of scientists, mathematicians, engineers, artists, writers, etc. He worked diligently to analyze and understand the language behaviors at both ends of these two extremes. He specifically sought a way to articulate and communicate how a misevaluation differed operationally from an appropriate evaluation.

The result of Korzybski's investigations and contemplations were published in 1933 in the source book for General Semantics, Science and Sanity: An Introduction to Non-Aristotelian Systems and General Semantics. In it, Korzybski:

describes the biological and neurological basis for his work,
offers a detailed diagnosis of the many varieties of mistakes, errors, and misevaluations that humans consistently manifest,
proffers prescriptions for recognizing, minimizing, and avoiding the causes of these misevaluations, and
explains methods of teaching and learning these prescriptions.

For more on the life of Alfred Korzybski, check out Bruce Kodish's thorough and worthwhile Korzybski: A Biography Links to an external site. (link to Amazon.com listing).

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