Alfred Korzybski

Alfred Korzybski

Alfred Habdank Skarbek Korzybski (born July 3, 1879 as Alfred Władysław Augustyn Korzybski in Warsaw , Poland ; † March 1, 1950 in Lakeville , Connecticut , USA ) was a Polish-American engineer and author. In the first half of the 20th century he developed "general semantics".

Life

Korzybski comes from a noble Polish family and grew up near Warsaw. He spoke four languages ​​fluently: he learned Polish and Russian at school, and learned German and French from his two governesses . He later learned other languages, which had a very strong impact on his philosophical work.

Korzybski studied engineering at the University of Warsaw . During the First World War he was called to serve in the Russian army . After he was wounded three times in the war, the Russian army sent him to Canada and the United States in December 1916 to coordinate the shipment of artillery to Russia. In November 1918 he met the American artist Mira Edgerly, whom he married on January 17, 1919 in Washington, DC . Korzybski's original plan was to return to Poland after the war ended to help rebuild the country. However, due to the uncertain economic situation in his native country and the unclear future of the Polish nobility, he decided to stay in the United States.

In 1920 he wrote his first book Manhood of Humanity . In 1933 he completed his second book Science and Sanity - An Introduction to Non-Aristotelian Systems and General Semantics . In 1938 he founded the Institute for General Semantics (IGS) in Lakeville, Connecticut, which is now in Fort Worth , Texas . He lectured at Harvard . William S. Burroughs , who had heard of Korzybski while at Harvard, attended a week-long seminar at the IGS in the summer of 1939, organized by Korzybski.

General semantics

Korzybski was mainly concerned with the conception of what he called General Semantics , which is not linguistic semantics with which, according to Korzybski's own statement, it has little to do with. Its main principles are outlined in Science and Sanity (published 1933).

Alfred Korzybski was an officer in the First World War . At that time already impressed by the discrepancy between technical possibilities and psychological development, it was his goal to simplify psychotherapy in such a way that human development can keep pace with technical development. He emigrated to the USA in good time before the Second World War , where he founded the "Institute for General Semantics" in 1938. Until his death in 1950 he taught its therapeutic and philosophical principles.

Perhaps the best-known quote from his main work Science and Sanity reads: "The map is not the landscape, but if the map is similar to the structure of the landscape, it is useful". It aims for man to live in two worlds: in the world of language and symbols and in the real world of experience. Korzybski argued that the world of language is an abstraction of the world of experience and therefore the abstraction (the map) can never be identical with the experience (the landscape). And he pointed out the following: If the linguistic world does not adequately depict the world of experience, man is led astray, guided by a wrong map. Maps based on the “is” of the predication of a conceptually or linguistically explainable phenomenon or the “is” of the identity of something are fundamentally wrong because they assert an identity between a phenomenon and its linguistic designation. A phenomenon is never identical with the linguistic category with which it is described. Language is, as it were, a map of reality. In his book Korzybski shows that the human brain is able to react to the map alone and to completely forget the depicted terrain (in extreme cases). This means that the human brain is able to hold something to be true, or to believe something that doesn't exist, and then stops checking whether it really exists. This can lead to serious wrong decisions, which Korzybski supposedly wanted to warn against.

On the basis of an extensive criticism of the Aristotelian system, he presented a method how the individual can develop in such a way that he does not confuse the map with the area and so through words and the conditioned "semantic reaction" to words in personal suffering drifting. The core of this method is the experience that nothing “is” (what is meant is: completely so) as the “is” of the predication or the “is” of the identity describe it. This experience was supposed to be conveyed by an instrument which Korzybski called the “Structural Differential”. The work with the "structural differential" is still used by students of General Semantics in coaching and therapy.

Korzybski's books have not found widespread circulation, but he has stimulated many scientists to study the phenomena described in more detail. Alfred Korzybski has also influenced many forms of therapy currently practiced. For example, he taught Eric Berne , who developed transactional analysis, and Gregory Bateson , who in turn influenced Paul Watzlawick and with him all forms of systemic therapy and family therapy. The RET (Rational-Emotive Therapy) according to Albert Ellis , but also some basic ideas of the NLP ( Neuro-Linguistic Programming ) go back directly to the General Semantics . All of the leading NLP developers, Richard Bandler , John Grinder and Robert Dilts , knew Korzybski's works and made use of his findings. A newer variant is the mace method.

The secondary literature on Alfred Korzybski is extensive. Among others, the following became known: The Tyranny of Words by Stuart Chase, S. I. Hayakawa's Semantics - Language in Thought and Action, and Anatol Rapoport's book Operational Philosophy .

The general semantics were also addressed by science fiction authors in their stories. AE van Vogt implemented it as the main topic in his zero A books and Samuel R. Delany described a language without personal pronouns in his science fiction novel Babel-17 .

effect

Korzybski's work influenced pedagogy , gestalt therapy , rational emotional therapy , NLP ( neuro-linguistic programming ) and several authors and scientists. Isaac Asimov incorporated some of Korzybski's central theses into his writings and Robert A. Heinlein said of Korzybski: “You cannot like him personally, but he is at least as important a man as Einstein, at least because his field is broader. The same kind of work as Einstein's, the same kind of work, with the same methods; but in a much broader field, much closer to human relationships. ”Korzybski also influenced L. Ron Hubbard's Scientology . Alfred Korzybski explicitly rejected any religion. He expressed this particularly in Science and Sanity . Korzybski was interested in the emotional liberation of people and personally lived very simply and modestly.

Works

• Manhood of Humanity . Alfred Korzybski, foreword by Edward Kasner, notes by M. Kendig. Institute of General Semantics, 1950, ISBN 0-937298-00-X . Full version available in Project Gutenberg .
• Science and Sanity: An Introduction to Non-Aristotelian Systems and General Semantics . Alfred Korzybski, preface by Robert P. Pula. Institute of General Semantics, 1994, original published 1933, current ISBN 0-937298-01-8 . Full version available on the website of the European Society for General Semantics.
• Alfred Korzybski: Collected Writings 1920–1950 . Institute of General Semantics, 1990, ISBN 0-685-40616-4 . Partial version available on Google Books .

Secondary literature

• SI Hayakawa: semantics. Language in thinking u. Act . Verlag Darmstädter Blätter, Darmstadt 1987, ISBN 3-87139-027-5 .
• SI Hayakawa (Ed.): Word and Reality. Contributions to general semantics . Verlag Darmstädter Blätter, Darmstadt 1987.
• Falconar, Ted: Creative Intelligence & Self-Liberation, Crown House Publishing Ltd, 2000, 2007.
• Presby Kodish, Susan, Ph.D .: Drive yourself Sane: Using the Uncommon Sense of General Semantics, Extensional Publishing, 2001.
• Johnson, Kenneth G .: Thinking Creatically, Institute of General Semantics, 1991.
• Johnson, Wendell: People in Quandaries, Harper & Brothers, 1946.
• Weinberg, Harry L .: Levels of Knowing And Existence, Studies in General Semantics, Harper & Row, 1959.
• Helmut Rehbock: General Semantics. In: Helmut Glück , Michael Rödel (Hrsg.): Metzler Lexikon Sprache. Metzler Verlag, Stuttgart 2016, ISBN 978-3-476-02641-5 , p. 28

Individual evidence

1. ^ Ross Evans Paulson: Language, Science, and Action: Korzybski's General Semantics: a Study in Comparative Intellectual History . Greenwood Press, Westport / Conn. 1983, ISBN 978-0-313-23732-4 , p. 12.
2. ↑ Stanley S. Sokol et al. a. (Ed.): Korzybski, Alfred . In: The Polish Biographical Dictionary: Profiles of Nearly 900 Poles who Have Made Lasting Contributions to World Civilization . Bolchazy-Carducci Publishers, Wauconda 1992, ISBN 978-0-86516-245-7 , p. 200.
3. ↑ M. Kendig and Charlotte Schuchardt Read (eds.): Alfred Korzybski: Collected Writings, 1920–1950 . Institute of General Semantics, Englewood 1990, ISBN 978-0-910780-08-7 , p. 21.
4. ↑ Gerald W. Haslam and Janice E. Haslam: In Thought and Action: The Enigmatic Life of SI Hayakawa . University of Nebraska Press, Lincoln 2011, ISBN 978-0-8032-3976-0 , p. 105.
5. ^ Ross Evans Paulson: Language, Science, and Action: Korzybski's General Semantics: a Study in Comparative Intellectual History . Greenwood Press, Westport / Conn. 1983, ISBN 978-0-313-23732-4 , p. 26 f.
6. ↑ Barry Miles: William S. Burroughs: A Life . Weidenfeld & Nicolson, London 2014, ISBN 978-0-297-86725-8 , p. 83.
7. ^ Alfred Korzybski ,: Science and Sanity: An Introduction to Non-Aristotelian Systems and General Semantics . 5th edition. New York 1994, ISBN 0-937298-01-8 , pp. 58 . Original English quote from Korzybski: " A map is not the territory it represents, but, if correct, it has a similar structure to the territory, which accounts for its usefulness. " GOOGLE Books.
8. ↑ Alexei Panshin: The World Beyond the Hill: Science Fiction and the Quest for Transcendence . JP Tarcher, Los Angeles 1989, ISBN 978-0-87477-436-8 , p. 605.
9. ↑ Notable individuals . From: Generalsemantics.org , accessed April 27, 2014.

Web links

• Institute of General Semantics