Alfred Korzybski

Alfred Korzybski was born in 1879. He was a voracious reader, and he came to idolize not only Albert Einstein, but mathematicians Cassius J. Keyser and Henri Poincaré, psychologists William Alanson White, Ivan Pavlov, and Sigmund Freud, and philosophers Bertrand Russell, Alfred North Whitehead, Ludwig Wittgenstein, Josiah Royce, and indeed Aristotle, however much he styled his approach and system as “non-Aristotelian.” Korzybski published his first book, Manhood of Humanity: The Science and Art of Human Engineering, in 1921 (in 1950, shortly after his death a second edition of Manhood of Humanity was published, in which the subtitle was eliminated). He then published his magnum opus, Science and Sanity: An Introduction to Non-Aristotelian Systems and General Semantics in 1933 (and subsequently in four more editions, the last two posthumously, the most recent in 1993). In this work, he noted that what set humans a class apart and made time-binding possible, were language and symbolic communication, which he categorized as forms of abstracting. Korzybski stressed the importance of non-identity, arguing that no two phenomena in the universe are entirely identical, and that all phenomena are unique events in space-time. He especially warned of the danger of mistaking words for things, and symbols for reality. He famously reminds us that, “the map is not the territory,” and “whatever you say a thing is, it isn’t.”

An inkling of Korzybski’s early teaching method can be gleaned from the transcript of his lectures on general semantics given at Olivet College in Michigan, which was published under the title of General Semantics Seminar 1937 in that same year (with two posthumous editions following, the most recent in 2002). In 1942, a group of his students founded the International Society for General Semantics (which merged with the IGS in 2004), and began publishing the journal, ETC: A Review of General Semantics the following year. In 1948, he published an abridged version of his main work under the title of Selections from Science and Sanity (posthumously modified over eight printings, transfered to CD-ROM, and now in a second edition published in 2010). Korzybski passed away on March 1, 1950, as the IGS was just readying for publication the first issue of its own journal, the General Semantics Bulletin, and, in 1952, the Institute established an annual Alfred Korzybski Memorial Lecture.