Background

Alfred Korzybski full named Alfred Habdank Skarbek Korzybski was born on July 3, 1879, in Warsaw, Poland (then the part of the Russian Empire) to an aristocratic Polish family many members of which were accomplished mathematicians, scientists, and engineers. He was a son of Ladislas Habdank K. Korzybski and Countess Helena Korzybski (maiden name Rzewuska).

Education

While at schools, Alfred Korzybski learned the Russian language, and at home, he was taught Polish. Due to a governess who spoke French and German, by his teenage years, Korzybski became fluent in four languages.

Before studying chemical engineering at the Warsaw University of Technology, he managed the farm of his father.

Later, Alfred Korzybski also did his studies in Germany, Italy, and the United States.

Career

The start of Alfred Korzybski’s professional career can be counted from the military service at the Second Russian Army during World War I as an intelligence officer. First, he served on the eastern front in Poland. After being severely wounded, he was attached to the Russian General Staff and in 1915 he was sent to Canada as an artillery expert to take part in arranging a purchase of armaments. It was there where he began studying English.

Following the 1917 revolutions in Russia that deposed the Czar and established the Soviet Union, Korzybski remained in the United States as part of the Polish-French military commission. Soon, he was assigned by the United States Government to lecture about the conflict across the country and promote the sale of Liberty bonds. He also briefly served as a member of the Polish Commission at the League of Nations in 1920.

The following year, Korzybski published his first book, ‘Manhood of Humanity: The Science and Art of Human Engineering’ at E. P. Dutton. In this work, the author proposed that the future welfare of humanity depends on the establishment of a scientific study of human nature, which would form the essential basis for a valid system of ethics. The book was well received by scholars in a broad range of disciplines, including the sciences, mathematics, and philosophy.

The subsequent years, Korzybski pursued his researches and concentrated on the mechanisms of time-binding. He also touched psychiatry in his investigations. At the end of the 1920s, the scientist worked on the book firstly entitled ‘Time-Binding: The General Theory’. In 1933, it appeared under the title ‘Science and Sanity: An Introduction to Non-Aristotelian Systems and General Semantics’ and soon became the basis for a distinct school of semantics (the study meaning in language) known as the general semantics movement. It became his most known volume.

Although the book was criticized for the author’s dense and repetitious writing style and the presence of new many ideas that had already been put forward by earlier thinkers, its principles were enthusiastically embraced by many scholars leading the author to tour across the United States lecturing on his theory of proper human evaluation, or General Semantics, at schools and colleges. Five years after the publication, Korzybski found the Institute of General Semantics in Chicago as the training center and to encourage research in the new theory. ‘Science and Sanity’ was reprinted three times during its author’s lifetime.

Among Korzybski’s, most prominent admirers were the economist and social scientist Stuart Chase and professor of English (later as the United States Senator from California) S. I. Hayakawa. Differences with Hayakawa and A housing shortage, however, led Korzybski to move the Institute of General Semantics from Chicago to Lakeville, Connecticut, in 1946.

Although having a poor hearing and limited mobility caused by the wounds he had received during World War II, Alfred Korzybski lectured and organized seminars until his death.

He died on March 1, 1950, editing papers on language and perceptual processes he planned to read at a Texas symposium the next month.

Achievements

• Alfred Korzybski’s ideas, which brought together aspects of linguistics, philosophy, psychology, neurology, and sociology, inspired reactions from the scholarly community that ranged from extravagant praise to vehement rejection. Korzybski’s work, according to scholars, has served as an important stimulus for advances in linguistics, philosophy, psychiatry, and sociology.
  
  In his book ‘Power of Words’, published in 1953, Stuart Chase provided a brief overview of Korzybski’s contributions to the study of communication. According to Chas, Korzybski had fallen short of his glared objective of establishing general semantics as the scientific discipline. Nonetheless, Chase declared that its ideas had inspired a generation of scholars who were well on their way to securing a leading role for general semantics among the social sciences.

Works

More photos

• book

  • Science and Sanity: An Introduction to Non-Aristotelian Systems and General Semantics

    (Selections from Science and Sanity represents Alfred Korz...)

    1933
  • General Semantics Seminar, 1937

    (Transcripts of Alfred Korzybski "caught live" lecturing a...)

    1937
  • Manhood of Humanity: The Science and Art of Human Engineering 1921
  • Time-Binding, The General Theory: Two Papers, 1924-1926 1926

Views

Quotations: "Man's achievements rest upon the use of symbols.... we must consider ourselves as a symbolic, semantic class of life, and those who rule the symbols, rule us."

"The abuse of symbolism is like the abuse of food or drink: it makes people ill, and so their reactions become deranged."

"The word is not the thing."

"The map is not the territory."

"There are two ways to slide easily through life; to believe everything or doubt everything. Both ways save us from thinking."

"The objective level is not words, and cannot be reached by words alone. We must point our finger and be silent, or we will never reach this level."

"Humans can be literally poisoned by false ideas and false teachings. Many people have a just horror at the thought of putting poison into tea or coffee, but seem unable to realize that, when they teach false ideas and false doctrines, they are poisoning the time-binding capacity of their fellow men and women. One has to stop and think!"

"To regard human beings as tools — as instruments — for the use of other human beings is not only unscientific but it is repugnant, stupid and short sighted. Tools are made by man but have not the autonomy of their maker — they have not man's time-binding capacity for initiation, for self-direction, and self-improvement."

"How many a genius has perished inarticulate because unable to stand the strain of social conditions where animal standards prevail and "survival of the fittest" means, not survival of the "fittest in time-binding capacity," but survival of the strongest in ruthlessness and guile – in space-binding competition!"

"The only link between the verbal and objective world is exclusively structural, necessitating the conclusion that the only content of all "knowledge" is structural. Now structure can be considered as a complex of relations, and ultimately as multi-dimensional order. From this point of view, all language can be considered as names for unspeakable entities on the objective level, be it things or feelings, or as names of relations."

"Any organism must be treated as-a-whole; in other words, that an organism is not an algebraic sum, a linear function of its elements, but always more than that. It is seemingly little realized, at present, that this simple and innocent-looking statement involves a full structural revision of our language..."

Membership

Alfred Korzybski was a member of the American Mathematical Society, Chicago Society for Personality Study, the Association for Symbolic Logic, the New York Academy Sciences, the Society for Applied Anthropology, as well as a fellow of the American Association for the Advancement of Science.

Personality

Quotes from others about the person

• "General semantics can aid in teaching children, and in bringing ‘backward’ scholars up to the mark. It has led to a healthy re-examination of verbal proof and exerted some influence on the law. It promotes techniques of agreement, and encourages a new appraisal of philosophies formulated before Einstein. Perhaps best of all. General Semantics helps the student know what he does not know." - Stuart Chase, economist, social theorist, and writer
  
  "[Korzybsk was important] for the furor created by his personality. He lit fires, started controversies, caused people to look to their terms, and so gave a much-needed impetus to the whole subject of communication." - Stuart Chase, economist, social theorist, and writer

Connections

Alfred Korzybski met his future wife, Mira Edgerly, a portraitist on ivory, soon after the end of the First World War in 1918. Alfred and Mira married on January a year later. They lived together till Korzybski’s death.

Father:

Ladislas Habdank K. Korzybski

Mother:

Countess Helena Korzybski

Spouse:

Mira Edgerly

colleague:

Stuart Chase

colleague:

S. I. Hayakawa

References

• Korzybski: A Biography
  2011