Korzybski: A Biography

Citation

Campbell, C. (2013), "Korzybski: A Biography", Kybernetes, Vol. 42 No. 2, pp. 336-340. https://doi.org/10.1108/03684921311310648

About “intellectual biography” as a form of writing, we might say that its value rests in the degree to which the life of the subject is related in a meaningful and structural way to their “intellectual” work. By drawing together the subject's ideas with the times through which they lived, we come to understand with far more precision and depth the structure of those ideas, which we might first have viewed in different contexts than those in which the ideas were actually formed. The intellectual work, in other words, needs to find its roots in experience and beyond the words which, to echo Lewis Carroll, constitute its “bread‐and‐butterflies.” According to this standard, Bruce Kodish's ambitious intellectual biography of Alfred Korzybski, a Polish Engineer, Intelligence Officer and War‐Veteran who moved to the USA in the 1920s and remained there as a writer and teacher for the rest of his life, can be measured a success.

In Korzybski: A Biography, we see how Korzybski's thought and writing – which would eventually help engender the mid‐twentieth‐century General Semantics teaching and learning movement – emerged naturally out of his lived circumstances. Korzybski's unique “in‐between” position in the Polish‐Russian‐British armed forces in the Second World War led logically to his later reflections on the meaning of language, as well as mathematical and scientific reasoning. His war service required producing – and surviving – effective intelligence and communications operations as well as effective artillery barrages[1]. But by the end of the war, assuming the voice of “a Polish soldier” in his public address “Let the Dead be Heard”, Korzybski was no longer so angry at his German enemy, “the direct slayer, but against those indirect slayers who created conditions leading to those wholesale crimes” (p. 109). His interest in the relation between problems of language and more general troubles led him quite naturally after the war to consider not only how words can help win wars, but also how patterns of words and meaning help create the conditions the give rise to wars in the first place. Kodish quotes at length from “Let the Dead be Heard” to indicate the extent to which Korzybski's later ideas were already contained in a nutshell in his war experience: “Sentimentalism in questions concerning war is a crime, because it encourages war, which is nothing but a crime” (p. 109).

Kodish relates how Korzybski's published thoughts – and evidently a good deal of his unpublished ones – were motivated by the very real experiences of suffering caused by the Great War, but also by the larger structural social conditions that amounted for him to an animalistic war of each against all, which continued apace even when the open war of guns and swords was officially over. Drawing throughout the book from an immense wealth of unpublished personal and professional correspondence, Kodish quotes in particular from a letter written by Korzybski to a practicing psychiatrist:

Well General Semantics [the name Korzybski eventually gave to his way of thinking] was born through pain and in pain. It is an illegitimate child of Mars and the World War, and like Oedipus it fulfills an ancient prophecy and kills the father […] (p. 99).

Korzybski knew well that in order to achieve the abolition of war, radical pacifism on the individual level would not be enough: it would be necessary also, or even primarily, to abolish the intellectual and spiritual supports of war, including destructive commercial competition and sentimental ideologies of greatness and value based essentially on the desire to acquire without any rational limit – what we more colloquially call “greed.”

What emerges in Kodish's description is that Korzybski's life's effort was inspired by the visceral experience of just what it takes to maintain our civilization as it stands – the immense toll of suffering it demands. Korzybki's intellectual work did not consist in an attempt to describe his life‐circumstances, after having lived them. He did not lament or regret his involvement in world‐historical tragedies. Rather, he was at every moment motivated by the awareness that our ways of thinking about our life circumstances continuously help produce and re‐produce those circumstances – ones that many already realize are in sore need of changing. Intellectual life and the day‐to‐day are not separate compartments in the division of labour. Rather, the thought of any culture is part of the everyday life of all its people, and our thoughts and actions are continually mutually influencing each other in a reciprocal fashion Korzybski (borrowing from the American mathematical philosopher Cassius Keyser) called “logical fate.”

To the extent that Kodish uncovers the organic relation between meaningful “self‐help” in our lived experience and “philosophical” ideas, he arguably does a great service to the intellectual history of North America, carrying forward the service done by Korzybski himself. For it turns out that a significant proportion of the “leading concepts” of contemporary academic debates are foreshadowed in General Semantics, and in forms that were not yet under the sentence of academic isolation that seems to overshadow these debates today[2]. Korzybski's voracious study of mathematics and science, his unusual methods for reading and integrating numerous books and articles, and his appreciation for exciting new developments among the scientists of his new home found an echo in the appreciation and interest his own unusual ideas generated among those scientists.

Foremost among these groundbreaking ideas is Korzybski's concept of “time‐binding,” drawn out of Keyser's concept of logical fate and first presented in Korzybski's text Manhood of Humanity. Kodish's writing is “typically Korzybkian” in his faithfulness to the spirit of Korzybski's time‐binding, which is, broadly speaking, the human capacity to build and learn on the findings of others, to pass on learning, to build on the achievements of the past, rather than remaining locked in a repeating cycle of cultural creation and destruction. Kodish's account of Korzybski's “networking” efforts in the 1920s and 1930s reads like a who's who of American scientific endeavour at the time. If nothing else, Korzybski is a vivid document of a profoundly exciting (and it seems, more and more forgotten) time in the physical and human sciences not only in Europe but practically on‐the‐ground and indigenously among North American doctors, teachers, engineers and technicians. Kodish highlights what Korzybski found among all these scientists and writers: what the Anglo‐American philosophical scientist Gregory Bateson would likely have referred to as “the pattern that connects.” Korzybski and General Semantics resonated with discoveries made in a densely interdisciplinary network of inquiry and practical intellectual concern in the 1920s and 1930s. The map Kodish draws of Korzybski's network of intellectual friends and associates, who included mathematician Cassius Keyser, biologist Charles M. Childs, Physiologist Jacques Loeb, Calvin Bridges, Bronislaw Malinowski and so many others[3] is engaging and informative enough that the question of viability of General Semantics itself as a school of thought‐action might be taken as a secondary question – that is, if it were not so important to seeing the links between what now might appear to be disparate kinds of inquiry.

Of course, there is more than one standard for success in the evaluation of writing, including intellectual biography. Count Alfred Korzybski, after all, is not only a figure of American intellectual history. He founded a movement which at its height gained tens of thousands of followers, and which suffered painful divisions in the wake of the Vietnam War, then ensuing political polarization, and finally its re‐articulation through interpreters like Samuel Hayakawa and its diffusion amidst the efflorescence of “countercultural” movements like Neuro‐Linguistic Programming. Where the memory of General Semantics lives on, it may be as likely to repel, rather than attract, readers and students – especially in the academic world, which is surely the natural home of intellectual biography. The challenge Kodish's book faces, in market terms, is to avoid falling into the abyss between the broad industrial expanse of best‐selling “self‐help” writing and the narrow – as well as unstable – platforms of academic respectability. Korzybski might at first glance come across as “too historical” or “too conceptual” to many self‐help readers, and as “too new‐age‐y” to many academic readers. We might imagine Kodish paraphrasing Cassius Keyser: “the gabble of a ‘new‐ager’ tends to make me an intellectual, and the gabble of an ‘intellectual’ tends to make me a new‐ager”[4].

But then again, perhaps we, the intellectuals at least, might value Kodish's audacity, leaping in without hesitation into what might be described as a great wound in the intellectual life of North America. A “great wound” in intellectual life: what honest working intellectual is not aware of the wounded quality of intellectual life in North America? The problems described at mid‐twentieth century by immigrant writers like T.W. Adorno and Herbert Marcuse, including a general contempt among the population for people who “think but don't do”, matched by an uncritical praise given to anyone who appears to “just do it,” are surely as bad or worse than ever. The immense split between “thinking” on the one hand and “doing” on the other is one characteristic of European history in general, but it has been exacerbated in North America to the point where we might often wonder is anything more than memory left in our so‐called “intellectual life”!

The cardinal teaching of General Semantics is that if “intellectual” matters are split off from the most banal practicalities of living, then intellectual and practical life suffers in equal measure. The market successes of the self‐help movement are a testament, one might suggest, to an immense intellectual and spiritual hunger among everyday, normally‐educated people. Kodish draws out the uniqueness of Korzybski's work: the extent to which he realized that people's everyday problems were to an important extent a result of problems in their way of thinking, and of how they talk about thinking. “Philosophy”, to the extent that it presumes a split between its own activity and the everyday activity of the most average individual, is cast aside by Korzybski as an obstacle. What was needed for Korzybski (and is needed for Kodish) is to use a “philosophical”, or more precisely “mathematico‐logical” approach to understanding our relationships, our work, our successes and failures, ourselves.

The great virtue of Kodish's presentation, much like that of Korzybski's work itself, is that the political, social and personal are shown to be intertwined with each other, without being identified with each other. General Semantics is not primarily or only a movement for “moral reform”, because it sees that a good number of social factors operate at a higher structural level than the one where we find individual moral conduct. We must not imagine that our society could be “fixed” or suddenly set right by the moral conversion of “bad people.” The problems are not caused by a “few bad apples” any more than most of our personal problems are caused by one simple, isolated cause. Killing off “bad rebels” or “bad rulers” and attempting to install “good” people in their place will only exacerbate the problems of warfare and greed, to the extent that place itself has not also changed.

Kodish shows ably how Korzybski quickly abandoned an early flirtation with what were prevalent anti‐Semitic ideas of socialism and “social credit” that proposed the elimination of “parasites” in favour of the “producers”[5]. His perplexity at problems of scarcity in a world of industrial production quickly evolved from a scapegoating mentality (perfectly expressed in Henry Ford's anti‐Semitism) to a diagnosis of a whole cultural malaise. He understood that progress to humanity's “manhood” (in 2012 we should say “adulthood”) would require transcending “Maginot‐line mentalities of all kinds,” and that a broad technical and political coalition for enlightened reform would be needed to push the world beyond its current preoccupations of continuous commercial and military expansion.

If there is a limit to Kodish's account (and Korzybski would remind us that there is no account of anything without limits), it may lie in Kodish's abbreviated and summary treatment of these “higher” practical levels of human experience – that is, the broadly social and political. The working map Kodish provides of Korzybski's political attitude – that he resigned himself to the capitalist system with government intervention as necessary – very much runs against the grain of Korzybski's sense that what was needed was a revolution in human self‐understanding and social organization. Kodish's account seems at times to suggest, or could be interpreted as meaning, that all Korzybski really wanted after all was the moral‐spiritual‐intellectual reform of individuals, and that the larger structures of the free market and the interlocking complex of warring states would simply follow suit, changing as a result of the new individuals working inside them. Korzybski's social and political negativity surely lay in his refusal of naive optimism and willingness to face the darkest and most hopeless aspects of Western civilization. How else can we explain that for Korzybski the world “didn't seem bad through and through, only ‘hopeless’” (p. 101)?

But ultimately this is a minor issue, and Kodish might, after all, be excused for not attempting to sail directly into the stormy waters of the reform‐or‐revolt question and the attendant questions of political violence and nonviolence. Korzybski is, after all, already saddled with the task not only of mapping Korzybski's life, but also (given the apparently uncertain fate of the Korzybski archives) with the more elementary challenge of preserving the traces of his life and achievements. Kodish's intense focus on the individual level – and his evident passion and commitment to furthering the work of General Semantics as a way of helping people with troubles at a variety of levels – really goes to a level deeper than the political, to the spirit of hope that arguably sustains all meaningful radical and reformist activity today.

Notes

Historians of war might indeed find in Korzybski's war service an anticipation in microcosm of the role communications and intelligence play in contemporary military strategy.

Ideas such Derrida's phallogocentrism, Butler and Foucault's discursive performativity, and a wider “post‐humanist” critique of Cartesian dualism are quite arguably contained in nuce in Korzybski's doctrine‐concepts of “Aristotelian metaphysics,” “logical fate,” and “organism‐as‐a‐whole.”

Among them we might even mention a young William Seward Burroughs, who would go on to influence an entire generation of poets and artists with a particularly schizophrenic poetic version of general semantics – of which Korzybski himself may not have approved.

Kodish reports that Keyser himself said, “The gabble of a ‘radical’ tends to make me conservative and the gabble of a ‘conservative’ tends to make me radical” (p. 150).

One important contribution Kodish makes here is to help us remember precisely how prevalent and socially acceptable anti‐Semitism had become in American life the 1920s.