Alfred Korzybski

ETC.: A Review of General Semantics, Winter, 2003 by Neil Postman

The 1940s and 1950s were the decades of Korzybski's greatest impact, in large measure because of the considerable interpretive gifts of one of his students, S. I. Hayakawa(1941). Hayakawa's popularizing book, Language in Thought and Action, and his twenty-five-year editorship of the general semantics journal ETC, directed hundreds of thousands of people to the study of Korzybski's ideas. In addition, eminent scholars, scientists, and teachers from a variety of disciplines found Korzybski's formulations to be both sound and important, although certainly not beyond criticism. Among them were Wendell Johnson, Irving Lee, J. Samuel Bois, Elwood Murray, Margaret Mead, Ashley Montagu, Aldous Huxley, F.S.C. Northrop, Russell Meyers, Clyde Kluckhohn, and Stuart Chase. During this period, many schools and universities offered courses in general semantics; at one time in the late 1950s, more than one hundred colleges did so, including New York University. I have been unable to verify the exact date but there is suggestive evidence that in the late 1940s, NYU's School of Continuing Education sponsored a seminar given by Korzybski himself. And in stuart Chase's popular The Power of Words, Chase asserts that an NYU School of Education course called "Language and Behavior" was among the first general semantics courses ever given at a major university. That course survives to this day under the title "Language and Human Behavior."

As I noted at the outset, Korzybski's work, at least in its systematic formulation, is largely ignored today by academic linguists, semanticists, psychologists, and anthropologists. The reasons are complex but certainly include the fact that in taking all knowledge as within his competence, Korzybski's reach exceeded his grasp. Science and Sanity is filled with unsupportable assertions and not a few errors, some of them extraordinarily naive. This has turned away many specialists to whom precision and caution are more impressive than grandeur of vision. Then, too, Korzybski was much less clear than he thought he was about the kind of enterprise general semantics ought to be. Is it a new science? An educational program? A therapeutic strategy? Like psychoanalysis, general semantics lends itself, too easily, to the predilections and idiosyncrasies of its practitioners, and there has been no firm consensus about the path it should follow. Moreover, general semantics is not easy to fit into conventional academic territories. It is simply too broad in its scope to be contained within a single discipline, for it is part philosophy, part epistemology, part psychology, part linguistics, and several other "parts," all of which when taken together comprise the university curriculum. In a world of specialists, general semantics appears too diffuse, too divergent, too holistic to suit the modern style of academic thought. In a word, to study and teach it is not likely to further one's chances for tenure.

And yet, although Korzybski's name is relatively obscure at the moment, his impact has been felt. Some of his terminology and many of his insights have found their way into semiotics, psycholinguistics, educational psychology, media studies, and, of course, semantics. Many people in the non-academic world--in business, government, social work, psychotherapy--employ Korzybski's methods with great effectiveness and freely acknowledge their debt to him. But beyond all this, it is indisputable that together with such figures as C.S. Pierce, William James, Ludwig Wittgenstein, and I.A. Richards, Alfred Korzybski helped to heighten our awareness of the role of language in making us what we are and in preventing us from becoming what we ought to be but are not yet.