For Web Anekaant NO. 6 9-4-18

Special Issue
Time-Binding
Modes of Synthesis, Subversion and Innovation
Edited by
Bini B. S.
No. 6, 2017-18 (Autumn)

Published By
Balvant Parekh Centre for General Semantics &
Other Human Sciences
Baroda
Anekaant: A Journal of Polysemic Thought is published twice a year (Autumn and Spring) by Balvant
Parekh Centre for General Semantics and Other Human Sciences, Baroda, India. Its objective is to
engage with ideas emanating from the discipline of General Semantics, and from other disciplines
under the broad rubric of the human sciences. As the human sciences include several areas of
thought and their application, the range of the Journal’s coverage is both open-ended and inclusive.
It provides a forum for a dialogue among both scholars and non-scholars on topics of contemporary
relevance that have some bearing on our everyday reality. Articles submitted for possible publication
in the Journal must be written in a style devoid of academic jargon so that they are easily intelligible
to general readers. It will also have a book-review section, where books related to the areas of the
Journal’s concerns will be discussed.
Editors : Bini B.S.
Managing Editor : Udayprakash Sharma
Submission Guidelines
We accept manuscripts for the general issues throughout the year. For special issues, the theme and
the deadline for sending the articles will be published in the Journal and on Balvant Parekh Centre’s
website. Manuscripts should be of 4500-7000 words. For research papers, please use the latest
MLA style. Author’s name should appear on the cover page only. Please email your submissions in
MS Word Format and address your queries to the editor (binisajil@gmail.com). Please attach an
abstract (300 words), keywords and a brief bionote of the author (100 words) with the submission.
All submissions to the journal will be evaluated by a team of referees. Those articles which receive
favorable comments will be published.
Subscription Rates (for two issues)
Institution $25 Overseas; ` 500/- India

Individual $15 Overseas; ` 300/- India
Balvant Parekh Centre for General Semantics and Other Human Sciences
C-302, Siddhi Vinayak Complex, Faramji Road, Behind the Railway Station
Baroda-390007, Gujarat, India
Ph:+ 91 265-2320870
www.balvantparekhcentre.org.in
Dedicated to the loving memory
of
Shri Balvant K. Parekh
A time-binder par excellence
(12 March 1924 - 25 January 2013)

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS
Shri Balvant K. Parekh, an exemplary time-binder continues to inspire me and I don’t know
how to communicate my gratitude to him.
I thank the members of the Parekh family for supporting Balvant Parekh Centre for General
Semantics and Other Human Sciences, its programs and publications in a true time-binding
spirit, following the footsteps of Shri Balvant K. Parekh.
The members of the Board of Trust of the Centre are time-binders with vision and integrity.
I am grateful to each one of them. The Trustees of the Forum on Contemporary Theory have
extended their intellectual support to Balvant Parekh Centre and I express my gratitude to
them.
Words cannot sufficiently explain my indebtedness to Professor Prafulla C. Kar – strict and
patient mentor; untiring time-binder; enthusiastic space-binder.
Shri Devkumar Trivedi’s passion for and knowledge of General Semantics is remarkable.
As someone who believes in a comprehensive approach to knowledge, he constantly
encourages me to explore diverse territories: science-poetry-technology-music, etc. I
cannot thank him enough for this unique insight and unconditional support.
My colleagues at Balvant Parekh Centre are with me in this time-binding expedition.
Time-binding efforts through Balvant Parekh Centre have given me the precious camaraderie
of many fellow time-binders. I thank them all.
Finally, I express my gratitude to the contributors for helping me put together this volume,
reaffirming my faith in time-binding as a collective and continuous endeavour.
Bini B. S.
Editor
ANEKAANT: A JOURNAL OF POLYSEMIC THOUGHT
No. 6, 2017-18 (Autumn)
Special Issue
TIME-BINDING:
MODES OF SYNTHESIS, SUBVERSION AND INNOVATION
Contents
FOREWORD 7
Prafulla C. Kar
INTRODUCTION 9
Bini B. S.
DEFINING HUMANHOOD 13
Bruce I. Kodish
ON THE BINDING BIASES OF TIME: AN ESSAY ON GENERAL SEMANTICS, MEDIA

ECOLOGY, AND THE PAST, PRESENT, AND FUTURE OF THE HUMAN SPECIES 29
Lance Strate
FROM TIME-BINDING TO TIMES-BINDING TO CONSCIOUS TIMES-BINDING 49

Milton Dawes
ON TIME-BINDING 57
Corey Anton
RADICAL GENERAL SEMANTICS: WHAT STRANGE NEW PHENOMENON IS THIS? 59

Gad Horowitz
ON KORZYBSKI’S NOTION OF ‘TIME-BINDING’ AS THE FUNDAMENTAL

MARK OF HUMANITY 65
P.G. Jung
BUCKY THE TIME-BINDING BEAVER 73
Martin H. Levinson
THE “MYTH” OF GENERAL SEMANTICS 75

Colin Campbell
LITERATURE IN AND AS TIME-BINDING: EXPLORING THE

AESTHETIC-POLITICAL-PEDAGOGICAL IMPLICATIONS 95
Bini B.S.
AN ARISTOTELIAN APPROACH TO THE TIME-BINDING NOTION IN

ALFRED KORZYBSKI 113
Laura Trujillo Liñán
TIME-BINDING AND SUSTAINABLE DEVELOPMENT: A COMPARATIVE PRAXIS 117

Aniruddh Shastree
SAND 127
Lance Strate
NOTES ON CONTRIBUTORS 140

Anekaant: A Journal of Polysemic Thought, No. 6, 2017-18 (Autumn)
Special Issue – Time-Binding: Modes of Synthesis, Subversion and Innovation
FOREWORD
Prafulla C. Kar
I congratulate Bini for choosing the topic of “Time-Binding” for this special number of Anekaant:
A Journal of Polysemic Thought, published by Balvant Parekh Centre for General Semantics and
Other Human Sciences, Baroda. The topic is timely, both for its philosophical implications and
its practical value. Although it is not a new concept, it acquired a fresh currency when Korzybski
used it to define his project of general semantics. In order to clarify what that project was, he used
this expression as a defining marker. In other words, general semantics, broadly speaking, is about
the application of “time binding” in life. It is an attribute that is uniquely human; if practiced in
daily life it might yield beneficial results in bringing about a sane society. Korzybski’s experience
in World War I made him speculate on a possible making of a better world based upon proper
understanding of human relations. Although history has not followed this trajectory as yet, there is
still hope today, when the planet is being ravaged by climate change and varieties of environmental
disaster, that the world we have inherited may, if there is a collective will, become a better place to
live in. For that change to happen we may not need any grand and spectacular plans; what we need
is a little change of heart and a new thinking about our responsibility to ourselves. Cultivation of the
capacity of time-binding is such a small step, which should bring about a big change in our lives.
Korzybski thinks that only human beings are endowed with the faculty of time-binding; if activated
by a constant practice this latent faculty will produce rich dividends in the long run. Such is the
magic of time-binding. If we are a little careful and conscious in our social and linguistic behavior,
we are exercising our time-binding capacity in implicit ways, which could be more far-reaching
in their effect than grand programs carried out with self-conscious zeal. An admirer of Leibnitz,
Korzybski values the efficacy “of the obvious,” which is his epiphanic discovery of “time-binding.”
As philosophy, “time-binding” underscores the human capacity for analeptic and proleptic
visions; a human being through his remembrance of things past may receive some valuable
intimations from his experience as a guidance for his future orientation in turning his sense of loss
or guilt to a new beginning of positive living, as Nathaniel Hawthorne did in turning his sense of
“ancestral guilt” to aesthetic innovation and fulfillment. This capacity requires not only the need to
remember but also the need to forget; these two human attributes, remembrance and forgetting, are
time-binding qualities. Cultivating the art of forgetting is more difficult than cultivating the art of
remembrance; but it should be practiced constantly as a way of cleansing your mind of the impurities
collected in it over the years. That is why forgetting is intrinsically associated with the capacity for
forgiveness. All great time-binders in history like Lincoln, Gandhi, Martin Luther King and Nelson
Mandela, cultivated this efficacious practice of forgiving through deliberate acts of stepping aside
the unsavory past as a condition for building a new world.
8 Anekaant Special Issue – Time-Binding: Modes of Synthesis, Subversion and Innovation
Therefore, Korzybski’s catchphrase “time-binding” seems to have now acquired a rhetorical

force of persuasion, like his other catchphrase, “structural differential.” “Structural Differential”
is a practical elucidation of how “time-binding” operates invisibly at the neurological level of
experience, when an object perceived through senses is translated into an idea or concept through
a linguistic medium. The transition, Korzybski maintains, from perception to labeling is a “time-
binding” process involving an awareness of “delay” already ingrained in the abstracting process
itself. If we are in a hurry to name an “object” we pay no attention to this necessary “delay” and
therefore are liable to make an error in our judgment; therefore Korzybski emphasizes the need for
meditation at the silent, unspoken level of perception before naming the object linguistically. This
is how we will be able to maintain sanity in society through a careful cultivation of our linguistic
capacity for communication. And that capacity is an aspect of time-binding.
We are happy that through this special number of the Journal we will be able to awaken our
dormant faculty of “time-binding” for a useful intervention in social praxis.
INTRODUCTION
TIME-BINDING: MODES OF SYNTHESIS, SUBVERSION
AND INNOVATION
Bini B.S.
This volume emerges from reflecting on why and how time-binding, as a concept and practice,
is pivotal to Korzybski’s work. Practicing conscious time-binding is becoming more and more
necessary and important. Korzybski’s idea of time-binding is not limited to piling up knowledge,
skills and information from the past for the welfare of the present and future generations. While the
process of time-binding suggests such a synthesis, it also emphasizes innovation which is an outcome
of critical and creative workings of mind and constant search for knowledge. Disruption of ossified
prejudices, outdated ideas and eroded ideals by courageously questioning and subverting them is
part of the time-binding practice. The daring to break away from the shackles of old orientations and
embrace change that contributes to human weal reinforces time-binding. Time-binding, if used as an
epistemic-revolution can turn into a strategy against unjust domination and indoctrination.
Korzybski argued that if civilizations are creations, the creating force is the collective time-
binding efforts of human beings. As the ability to transmit information, skills and knowledge from one
generation to the next at an exponential rate, time-binding involves the processes of ‘summarizing,
digesting and appropriating’. Korzybski’s approach was experimental and he used history and
quotidian human life-worlds around him as his laboratories. He ruminated on the content, manner
and outcome of human epistemological processes; Korzybski went deep into the tangled web of
associations binding together knowledge, language and symbols, communication and activities of
human beings. The human-being as a time-binder is a complex ever-evolving organism-as a whole-
in an ever-changing environment. A person’s interactions with the natural-social environments
influence and are in turn influenced by her/his time-binding processes. It is by virtue of the vitality
of human time-binding capability that human ideas and human knowledge are imbued with death-
defying potentials.
Human beings can make time-binding an essential part of their life-worlds as a mindful practice;
Korzybski would insist that we ought to be conscious, cautious and conscientious time-binders.
Paradoxically Korzybski’s thoughts on time-binding emerged from a moment of despair and
pessimism. Manhood of Humanity, in which the idea of time-binding was discussed in detail, was
published during a crucial historical juncture, in the year 1921, immediately after the First World
War had ended. The western world was devastated; all those prevalent illusions about the invincible,
stable and flourishing European civilization were challenged. Korzybski was part of the war as a
soldier, artillery officer, an expert in making bombs (he was a chemical engineer by profession)
and as a spy. During his somewhat prolonged hospitalization and convalescence following a war
injury, Korzybski started thinking about the pathetic condition of humanity. The First World War for
Korzybski was an instance of epistemological decay and futility; an occasion wherein knowledge,
skills and ideas were rendered useless or proven to be dangerous. The First World War was a phase
of infantilism; like children who would not hesitate to use a priceless chronometer for cracking nuts,
human beings used their scientific advancements for killing each other.
Time-binding is an ethically informed and creatively carried out process that suggests improving
upon and inventing. Positive time-binding is a process aiming at human welfare demanding
‘intellectual honesty’ and ‘linguistic conscience’; it facilitates human engineering by which
Korzybski meant channelizing individual and collective human efforts for the benefit of humanity.
It is unjust to accuse Korzybski of being a blind follower of scientism. He did not suggest that
science could be a panacea. On the contrary, he was wary of the misplaced faith in the capabilities
of science. Korzybski was critical about ‘science for the sake of science’ as he believed that “science
represents a public time-binding activity and concern, not the private pleasure or benefit of some
one person” and so a scientist “must become a socialized individual and cannot keep aloof from
general human interests” (Science and Sanity 526). In the First World War, Korzybski witnessed
how science that could do so much for human welfare was used for designing potent weapons that
resulted in terminating millions of human lives. He could see ancient and massive structures erected
by human beings collapse, turning the toil of centuries into dust in a moment. Such obliteration of
human life and property shocked Korzybski into thinking about the dangers embedded in human
knowledge and civilization.
Korzybski was profoundly disturbed by the fact that scientific inquiries are not guided by
ethical concerns. He warned us to be wary of the kind of ‘negative’ time-binding, exemplified by
the mindless and irrational violence of war, in which human knowledge and human skills were
channelized for human annihilation. In Manhood of Humanity, he makes this observation on being
dejected by the plight of the post-WWI world: “There is every reason why the standards in our
civilization are so low, because we have ‘poisoned’, in a literal sense of the word, our minds with the
physico-chemical effects of wrong ideas” (251). But instead of drowning in a mire of a pessimistic
view, Korzybski came up with the idea of time-binding and the method of General Semantics.
Korzybski’s formulation of human beings as a time-binding class of life implies that each
generation can possibly add to the wealth of knowledge and skills of previous generations in a
way that is beneficial to humanity. He also exposes the possibility that there are knowledge-action
processes, which are detrimental to human welfare. Inventions that threaten the very existence of
humanity like biological, nuclear or chemical weapons could be cited as examples. Dehumanizing
prejudices and misevaluations flourish and circulate in and across generations, bringing endless
misery to many. Hence Korzybski in his later theorizations suggests that there could be constructively
positive and destructively negative time-binding; in some cases, the same idea and invention may
comprise the features of both constructive and destructive time-binding. An example could be atomic
energy. Atomic energy can be used for generating electricity, which can have constructive benefits;
but there are environmental hazards involved. Atomic principles can lead to creation of weapons
of mass destruction that can wipe out the human habitat – this green planet– completely from the
cosmos. This is to say that the processes of time-binding cannot be reduced to an absolute either-or
value system such as this: positive or negative; good or bad; constructive and destructive. Only time
will tell what the outcome of our time-bindings might be. It is unproductive to have a binary view
about time-binding. In other words, the effect of time-binding is a grey zone that does not permit a
simplistic black and white vision.
According to Korzybski, a time-binder takes off from where the previous generations have left
off and newness or erasure in thought-practices that s/he brings in is not only relevant to the person’s
own life time, but also remain relevant for generations to come. Korzybski suggests that human
beings as time-binders should learn from their mistakes and try not to repeat the same mistakes.
Despite the brutal lessons taught by the First World War, the Second World War happened, once again
Introduction 11
making Korzybski wonder why humans fail to exercise their time-binding capacities effectively.
Our attitudes towards the past, in Korzybski’s opinion, should be ‘scientific’ – based on the spirit
of continuous inquiry and the habit of holding one’s views tentatively. In science, when an error or
anomaly is detected, scientists are willing to revise their hypothesis and continue their research. On
the contrary, in life, we hold on to our rigid dogmatic and categorical thinking without ever showing
any inclination to review and revise them in the light of newer experiences. That is the reason why
we commit the same mistakes again and again. In his analysis of human indiscretions towards the
past, Korzybski identifies three levels of foolishness:
Such are the children of folly: (1) Drifting fools—ignorers of the past—disregarders of race
experience—thoughtless floaters on the shifting currents of human affairs; (2) Static fools—
idealizers of the past—complacent lovers of the present—enemies of change—fearful of the
future; (3) Dynamic fools—scorners of the past—haters of the present—destroyers of the
works of the dead—most modest of fools, each of them saying: “What ought to be begins
with Me; I will make the world a paradise; but my genius must be free; now it is hampered by
the existing ‘order’—the bungling work of the past; I will destroy it; I will start with chaos; we
need light—the Sun casts shadows—I will begin by blotting out the Sun; then the world will be
full of glory—the light of my genius.” (Manhood of Humanity 169)
We cannot dwell in the past forever; we should not ignore or dismiss the past. We could engage
with the past through the inseparable processes of constructive criticism, open-minded inquiry,
discernment and innovativeness. Korzybski had dedicated Manhood of Humanity; ‘To the quick and
the dead’. Time-binding is not an unbreakable flow of wisdom from the past to the present for the
future; it is also about questioning and doubting our notions and assumptions, besides discovering
and creating. It is ethical practicality in action. Knowledge is seldom an isolated pursuit. It is a
collective endeavor that knows not the boundaries of space-time.
Knowledge and power are curiously interlinked in the process of time-binding. Brute power
is something that is detrimental to positive time-binding and human history is full of instances
in which power intervenes in the production and distribution of ideas and processes of knowing-
doing. Suppression of certain ideas and imposing of certain ideas inevitably happen as part of the
time-binding process. Time-binding may also refer to salvaging subjugated knowledge. Korzybski’s
warning about the unjust control over knowledge by the powerful is ominously relevant to our times:
“Our rulers, who rule our symbols, and so rule a symbolic class of life, impose their own infantilism
on our institutions, educational methods, and doctrines. This leads to maladjustment of the incoming
generations…. In turn, they produce leaders afflicted with the old animalistic limitations” (Science
and Sanity 41). Korzybski’s horror at the animal logic operating behind the formation and circulation
of ideas and institutions is evident from this observation:
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! (Manhood of Humanity 136)
Korzybski himself was a synthesizer as well as a subversive thinker. His re-visions and new
formulations are backed by untiring creatical evaluation of ideas and methods of thought as evident
from developing a non-Aristotelian method. There are many thinkers who have similarly engaged
critically and constructively with established thought and methods. They questioned stagnant ideas;
they deconstructed and built upon existing knowledge. The founder of the Centre, Shri Balvant
Parekh was a time-binder par excellence, whose ‘enlightened use of capital’, paired with his tireless
pursuit of knowledge and ideas, paved the way to the establishment of Pidilite Industries and Balvant
Parekh Centre. He was a man of remarkable insight, hindsight and foresight. Anekaant: A Journal
of Polysemic Thought is one of the many ways in which we try to fulfill Mr. Parekh’s time-binding
vision.
Across disciplines and professions, many have come up with path-breaking concepts and methods,
hence ushering fresh perspectives into our ways of seeing-knowing-doing. The papers in this issue
look at various aspects of time binding. I was amazed to see the variety of paths through which
time-binding is approached by the contributors. Bruce Kodish observes time-binding from multiple
perspectives. His exploration begins with the life and times of Alfred Korzybski; Kodish goes on
to map the vast and variegated terrain of time-binding as an idea and method tracing Korzybski’s
footprints. Kodish illustrates how a time-binder can benefit from studying Korzybski with open-
mindedness and without blinding admiration. Lance Strate takes us with him on an intense and
lengthy voyage, venturing into the overlapping domains of time, language, communication, culture
and media ecology. Strate’s paper is an adventure of ideas. Milton Dawes reminds that ‘time’ in
time-binding is never singular and disconnected; hence times-binding, which as a process should
be insightful and conscious. Corey Anton’s succinct paper covers a huge realm of biological and
cultural factors and ends on a note that as we are responsible for creating the conditions through
which we become ourselves, as ‘sane’ time-binders, we should strive to live up to the task. After
these studies, which branch out into multi-directional quests, Gad Horowitz takes us to the root
of General Semantics. Returning to and revisiting the roots is an important step in time-binding,
as it would enrich the growth of a more nuanced and dense understanding of Korzybski’s ideas
and their practical possibilities. P.G. Jung does not hesitate to voice his anxieties about the air of
normativity surrounding Korzybski’s idea of time-binding. Jung’s concerns regarding such notions
as ethics, progress vs. change, absence of the ‘other’, etc. in the schema of time-binding merit
attention and rethinking. Through a delightful fable/parable about Bucky the time-binding beaver,
Martin Levinson explains energy-binding, space-binding and time-binding in a lucid and enjoyable
way. Colin Campbell’s study is a poly-dimensional approach to myth, general semantics and
the myth of general semantics, with a keen awareness of the epistemological rituals followed by
disciplines. Campbell goes deep into the indeterminacy of myth’s ‘pastness’ and the enigma of
its contemporariness in this study. In my paper, I examine the ways in which literature thrives on
and influences time-binding with its aesthetic-pedagogical-political functions. In the course of a
time-binding journey, which takes her forward and backwards through the history of ideas, Laura
Trujillo Liñán discovers certain similarities between Alfred Korzybski and Aristotle. She argues that
Korzybski, who described himself as a non-Aristotelian, shared certain concerns with Aristotle and
is definitely not an anti-Aristotelian. It is through the lens of sustainable development that Aniruddh
Shastree studies time-binding and its uses as a theory and praxis. Shastree illustrates how time-
binding can shed light on many unexplored trails leading to effective sustainable development,
optimizing benefits and minimizing harm.
The volume ends with a poem by Lance Strate, symbolically bringing together footprints and
traces of voyages on the sands of time; capturing on its deep-surface, time’s ever spiraling patterns
of movement. Sand is timeless, stretching beyond the limits of history and human existence, taking
everything in: …only the sands remain/ particles forming waves/ ever ever eternal in motion/ let us
flow as they do/ around curved spaces/ wandering all around/ not in straight lines but loops/ going
forth/ only to return again/ the circular motion is everlasting.
REFERENCES
Korzybski, Alfred. Manhood of Humanity (1921). New York: Institute of General Semantics, 2001. (Second
Edition, Fifth Print). Print.
––. Science and Sanity: An Introduction to Non- Aristotelian Systems and General Semantics (1933). Texas:
Institute of General Semantics, 2005. (Fifth Edition, Third Printing). Print.
DEFINING HUMANHOOD
Bruce I. Kodish
“We have indeed known that the character and status of the so-called human or social sciences
depend upon what man is; but we have not reflected upon the fact that they depend also, in
equal or greater measure, upon what humans think man is.”
~ Cassius J. Keyser [“The Nature of Man” (1927)]
Alfred Korzybski and His World

Alfred Korzybski’s work was motivated by deep curiosity and deep concern for his fellow
humans. His wife, Mira Edgerly Korzybska, remarked that, “I had never met anyone with such a
capacity to care for humanity-as-a-whole, as few men are capable of caring for one woman.”1
He was born on July 3, 1879 in Warsaw, Poland, then governed by a Russian Tsarist dictatorship.
Both sides of his upper-class family came from the Polish landed nobility. Although some people
later insisted on calling Korzybski “Count,” Allen Walker Read pointed out that, “Korzybski did not
seek out the title in spite of the standing of his family in the Polish aristocracy, but its use was
fostered by his wife, a talented American portrait painter, who believed it was useful to her to be
called ‘Countess Korzybska’.”2
Korzybski’s parents owned property in the city and had a farm where Alfred spent much of
his youth. He came from a long line of lawyers, mathematicians, engineers and scientists who
were nourished by the long tradition of Polish humanist culture. Alfred and his older sister were
raised by French and German governesses. They thus learned French and German in addition to
Polish and Russian. Korzybski considered this multi-lingual environment significant for his later
work since it prevented him from believing in word magic and attaching some special importance to
one way of labeling things.3 He later advocated that children learn at least one foreign language to
encourage evaluational flexibility.4
The poor clay soil of the Korzybski estate required innovative methods of plowing, irrigation,
etc., to be productive. Korzybski’s father applied his engineering talents to turn the estate into a
model farm. This example of using engineering methods to deal with practical problems likely
provided young Alfred with a powerful example of possibilities that he would later apply to general
psycho-social betterment.
When Korzybski was five years old, his father also provided him more directly with a ‘feel’ for
science by introducing him to the differential calculus and physical-mathematical methods. This feel
and the importance of conveying it to others would stay with him for the rest of his life.
14 Anekaant Special Issue - Time Binding: Modes of Synthesis, Subversion and Innovation
Korzybski’s family was not especially religious and he received no religious training despite the
generally Catholic environment in Poland.5 He remembered with fondness his closest brush with
religious study, a class with a Jesuit priest who taught comparative religion in a nominally Catholic
religious class. Based on this experience, he recommended the study of comparative religions to
provide inoculation against narrow, sectarian dogmas.6
From the beginning of his life, Korzybski functioned as a ‘trouble shooter’. Peasant and itinerant
workers required supervision in the farm work. Medical problems (since there was no physician
nearby), domestic and labor disputes among the workers, etc., became challenges with which the
young Korzybski had to deal. These required resourcefulness, and an ability to observe and to look
at things from other people’s points of view.
The family raised horses and Korzybski developed exceptional skill as a rider and horse trainer.
He greatly respected the intelligence of horses and claimed that they taught him a great deal of
‘horse-sense’. “I discovered something which everybody knows by now that you can fool a human
being, but you cannot fool a horse. I learned that. It’s really true.” 7
Korzybski performed somewhat indifferently in school. He found that by attending closely in
class and getting a broad picture of the subject matter he was able to pass his exams without much
studying.8 He constantly read on his own, however. He had ambitions to become a physicist, a
mathematician or a lawyer, but found that the course of study that his parents had put him through,
with no Latin or Greek, was geared toward engineering school and so prevented him from getting
into a university. This disappointed him greatly. Instead he attended the Polytechnic Institute in
Warsaw where he studied chemical engineering.
After engineering school, Korzybski traveled throughout Europe, including Italy, where he lived
for a couple of years in Rome. When he returned from Rome to the family estate shortly after
the turn of the 20th Century, Alfred had the sudden sobering realization that his boyhood peasant
playmate still could not read as an adult. Alfred soon started a school for the peasants on his family’s
property, a short-lived project that got him into trouble with the Tsarist government. (One of his
father’s last gifts to him before dying was to keep him from getting sent to Siberia for this ‘crime’.)
Korzybski demonstrated this kind of behavior his whole life. To go out of his way to help others was
actually very much his way.
In the years before World War I, Alfred became a teacher at a girls’ school and managed his
family’s estate and Warsaw apartment building. In 1914, at the start of the war, Korzybski, 35
years old, joined the Second Russian Army, working in the intelligence service. The war proved
momentous for him. Assigned to get information on German battle plans, he traveled throughout
the Eastern front at great personal risk, sustained injuries (some permanent) and felt deeply unsettled
by the suffering he saw.
After a year at the front, he was sent as an artillery expert to Canada (the main thing he knew
about artillery, he said, was from having been at the receiving end of it). There he oversaw munitions
testing at the Petawawa Proving Ground. When this assignment ended Korzybski came to the United
States, where he involved himself with various war-related tasks. With the Russian Revolution in
1917 and the breakdown of the Russian Army, Korzybski became a recruiter for the French-Polish
Military Commission and lectured for the United States Government, selling Liberty Bonds. When
the war ended in 1918, he decided to stay in the United States — by the mid-1920s, permanently.
Throughout the period of the war and its aftermath Alfred wondered at the destruction and
social collapse he observed. How could it happen? What could prevent it from recurring? He was
struck as well by the achievements of human civilization, which included the technology used so
destructively during the war.
When engineers build buildings, they expect them to remain standing. If ever the buildings
collapse, their scientifically-based calculations and design principles usually can reveal what went
Defining Humanhood 15
wrong. Yet in our human interactions and social institutions, ‘collapse’ seems a ‘normal’ expectable
outcome. Periodic wars, revolutions and other disasters seem neither preventable nor correctable.9
These concerns reflected deeper questions he had wondered about since childhood: “What makes
humans human?” In other words, “How do human beings differ from animals?” These became
burning questions for him, based on his concern for humanity and its future.
Manhood of Humanity
In New York City, Alfred Korzybski stood atop the Woolworth Building, then (around 1920)
the tallest building in the world. Below he saw the city streets:
... I was looking over New York. That enormous city, steaming, boiling with life... And I asked
myself the question, how it happens, the physical side of it looking at the street, at Broadway.
You saw vermin crawling, and the vermin were humans. They were so small because the height
was so great, and a streetcar was a caterpillar… Looking at that, I was much intrigued. I was
fully aware that everyone of those little bits of humans there, everyone was full of joy, sorrows,
and what not. And who did that tremendous thing called New York? That vermin did it. I didn’t
get my answer there, but I was asking how humans, little things like that with such a wealth
of personal life, how in the dickens can they do such a thing as New York, London, Paris,
wars, revolutions, and what not. That question popped at me, on the top of that building.10
Korzybski’s answer to the question “how in the dickens can they do such a thing?” became the
focus of his life work. He presented it in Manhood of Humanity, published in 1921. This book, using
the accepted terminology of the time, addressed all “humankind–men, women and children.”11What
did he propose? In the book, Korzybski noted that engineers use scientific-mathematical knowledge
and methods to build relatively non-collapsible structures. Likewise, he contended that we might
be able to apply scientific-mathematical methods to ourselves and our societies to create ‘non-
collapsing’ social institutions. In this, he was reviving an old dream of Bacon, Leibnitz, and others.
By imaginatively applying scientific methods to human problems, we could create a new discipline,
which he labeled “human engineering,” a science of human welfare. The first step in doing this
involved answering the question, “What makes humans human?”
The Time-Binding Class of Life

This question asked for a definition of humanhood. Korzybski had a great concern to avoid
the armchair metaphysics with its detached verbalism that had characterized many previous
philosophical attempts to define ‘Man’. Rather, Korzybski wanted to understand humans functionally,
in terms of what they do. He found it necessary to build such a functional definition on the basis
of the naturalistic view of human evolution.
Korzybski accepted that life evolved out of non-life. Life involves specific physico-chemical
configurations that emerged out of organic chemical phenomena. What characterizes life? Recognizing
the unsatisfactory state of the knowledge of the time (1921), he accepted that life somehow involves
“autonomous activities” 12 in which, quoting biologist Jacques Loeb, “the living cell synthesizes
its own complicated specific material from indifferent or nonspecific simple compounds of the
surrounding medium…”13 Korzybski built on this to create a functional classification of life forms.
For his purposes he chose to differentiate plants, animals and humans as three major groups. He
characterized plants by their ability to chemically “bind” or organize the energy of the sun, storing
it and using it to grow. Thus he defined plants as “chemistry-binders.” Animals use plant energy
as food, either directly or indirectly by consuming other animals. Thus they include chemistry-
binding in their make-up. Animals transform this acquired energy in order to move through the
dimension of space so as to acquire more energy, etc. Their lives involve marking, defending and
otherwise organizing their space or territory. Thus, Korzybski defined animals as “space-binders.”
Finally, we consider humans. Human beings have their own metabolisms and use plant energy. So in
various ways they incorporate chemistry-binding. Humans also incorporate space-binding features.
We move through space. We look like animals and share many functional characteristics with them.
We domesticate animals and make use of animal products. But we humans differ from any other
creature. We have the ability to symbolize our experiences. We can organize or “bind” this symbolic
information so as to receive it, and transmit it from one time to another, creatively building upon it
at a potentially accelerating rate. Korzybski therefore called humans “time-binders.”
Time-Binding, Culture and Biology

The human dimension of time-binding more or less corresponds to the anthropologist’s
notion of culture — described by Raymond Firth as “the component of accumulated resources,
immaterial as well as material, which the people inherit, employ, transmute, add to, and transmit...
it includes the residual effects of social action. It is necessarily also an incentive to action.” 14 I
nearly agree with Ashley Montagu when he wrote that “Korzybski’s conception of time-binding
and the anthropological conception of culture are virtually identical in character.”15 However, as he
developed his work, Korzybski very carefully eschewed characterizing any aspect of human culture —
as some anthropologists did and do—as ‘immaterial’. (Another crucial difference between
time-binding and the culture formulation is the notion of acceleration—potential and actual
“accelerating accelerations.”)
Korzybski insisted in a very exacting way that, “All phenomena in nature are natural and
should be approached as such.”16 He thus forthrightly maintained (in 1921) the importance of
speaking and writing in such a fashion so as to keep clear that ‘society’ and ‘culture’ do not
function in a realm entirely separate from ‘biology’. Korzybski considered culture (i.e., ‘thoughts’,
‘languages’, ‘symbols’, ‘images’, etc.) as the natural product of the “physico-chemical base...of
the human time-binding energy”17 of individual nervous systems in association with one another.
A ‘thought’ gets embodied in a language or some other symbolism. It represents a residual
effect or product of time-binding. This effect provides a new incentive for action by modifying
the physico-chemical base of the individual who created it or anyone else who interprets it. The
physico-chemical base so changed can produce a new ‘thought’ which may provide yet again some
new incentive for action.
This natural process, which Korzybski called his “spiral theory” of time-binding, depends
explicitly on a nonlinear, circular notion of causality which preceded by some years the notion
of “feedback” in control theory and cybernetics. This circular or spiral process of causality has
serious implications for all aspects of human culture. These implications have remained unrecognized
by many experts on language and human behavior up to the present.
Korzybski affirmed with Jacques Loeb, “that all life phenomena can be unequivocally
explained in physico-chemical terms.”18 Yet many people, including scientists, seem surprised
by the implications of this which Korzybski clearly noted: “...if we teach humans false ideas,
we affect their time-binding capacities and energies very seriously, by affecting in a wrong way the
physico-chemical base.”19 As he later noted in Science and Sanity, “Neural products are stored up
or preserved in extra-neural form [various observable aspects of language, symbolism, culture, etc.,
e.g., books], and they can be put back in the nervous system as active neural processes”—for better
and worse.20 In his later work, Korzybski elaborated on this spiral theory of time-binding in terms
of the “self-reflexiveness” of human symbolic processes and the “circularity of human knowledge.”
In an interesting way, this spiral effect brings out the importance of how we humans define and
understand ourselves both as individuals and as members of the human race.
The Symbolic Class of Life

Our time-binding energies very much entail human symbolic abilities. As Alfred later wrote in
Science and Sanity: “The affairs of man are conducted by our own, man-made rules and according
to man-made theories. Man’s achievements rest upon the use of symbols. For this reason, we must
consider ourselves as a symbolic, semantic class of life, and those who rule the symbols, rule us.”21
Independently of Korzybski, philosopher Ernst Cassirer also saw the defining importance
of symbolism in understanding human life. Cassirer published the three volumes of his work,
Philosophy of Symbolic Forms, in 1923-1929, a few years after Korzybski’s Manhood of Humanity.
In a later work, An Essay on Man, Cassirer wrote the following, apparently unaware of Korzybski’s
work:
Man has, as it were, discovered a new method of adapting himself to his environment. Between
the receptor system and the effector system, which are to be found in all animal species, we
find in man a third link which we may describe as the symbolic system. This new acquisition
transforms the whole of human life. As compared with the other animals man lives not merely
in a broader reality; he lives so to speak, in a new dimension of reality.…Reason is a very
inadequate term with which to comprehend the forms of man’s cultural life in all their richness
and variety. But all these forms are symbolic forms. Hence, instead of defining man as an animal
rationale, we should define him as an animal symbolicum. By so doing we can designate his
specific difference, and we can understand the new way open to man––the way to civilization.22
Korzybski, who had read Cassirer’s work, dedicated his 1933 Science and Sanity to the works
of Cassirer, among others which “greatly influenced my enquiry.” Such scholarly acknowledgement
was typical of Korzybski. Also typically of Korzybski (trained as an engineer): he formulated the
symbolic mechanism in terms of time-binding, which provides a practical way to apply Cassirer’s
and others’ insights about human culture.
Time-Binding and Progress

Korzybski’s formulation of time-binding does not aim simply at neutral description. Rather,
the time-binding process involves our potentially constructive building upon the past—in a word
‘progress’—using the accumulated inheritance of symbolically-generated culture in imaginative,
wise and well-informed ways. This implies at least a limited kind of progress measured by the growth
of knowledge. To progress in this way, we must apply our creative imaginations to what we inherit
in order to build upon it. Such progress also depends upon how we reason and how well. Earlier
writers on progress presented views on the evolution of reasoning that find echoes in Korzybski’s
work. For example, Auguste Comte distinguished three phases in the development of human
knowledge: the theological, metaphysical and scientific stages. In the theological phase explanations
for things are sought in ‘God(s)’ and ‘spirits’. The metaphysical phase tends toward theoretical
explanations detached from experience and experiment. In the scientific stage, according to Comte,
theory is subordinated to observation and experiment in order to gain knowledge. In Manhood of
Humanity, Korzybski referred to the childhood of humanity and its adulthood. In his later work
he distinguished among primitive (one-valued), pre-modern (two-or few-valued, aristotelian)
and modern scientific (infinite-valued, non-aristotelian) worldviews. (The first two belong to the
childhood and the last to the adulthood of humanity.) These divisions roughly correspond to Auguste
Comte’s threefold division.
Comte’s work had a flavor of optimism and a sense of the inevitability of human progress: “In
a dynamical view, the progress of the race must be considered susceptible of modification only
with regard to its speed, and without any reversal in the order of development, or any interval
of any importance being overleaped.”23 Korzybski’s work in Manhood of Humanity seems
generally consistent with Comte’s notion, particularly in relation to the progress in human knowledge
that time-binding entails. Korzybski’s work on time-binding, then, has connections with previous

writers on ‘progress’. What does his work contribute to their discussion? Korzybski’s attempt to
quantify ‘progress’ provides a key.
The Exponential Growth of Knowledge

In Manhood, Korzybski formulated a ‘scientific’ law of progress where “…time-binding power
is an exponential power or function of time”24 expressed by the formula PRT (P = progress; R = ratio
of progress; T = number of past generations). This formula yields ever-increasing acceleration over
time. 25 As Robert Anton Wilson noted, “... Korzybski…was groping toward the truth: acceleration is
real, and it is intimately connected with time-binding, the passing of signals between generations.” 26
(Note: since R can conceivably equal 0, meaning no progress, or can even equal a negative number,
meaning a reversal or loss; progress—at least in a specific area—no longer has the complete
inevitability that Comte envisioned.) John Allen Paulos has explained exponential growth:
"… a sequence grows exponentially (or geometrically) if its rate of growth is proportional to the
amount of the quantity present––i.e., if each number in the sequence comes from multiplying
its predecessor by the same factor.” In contrast, a “sequence grows linearly (or arithmetically)
if its rate of growth is constant––i.e., if each number in the sequence comes from adding the
same factor to its predecessor." 27
Korzybski theorized that the growth of knowledge in so-called physical science and technology
constitutes exemplary time-binding. The relatively high rate here readily demonstrates its
geometrical, exponential character, he contended, showing a rapidly-rising curve that can grow
steeper with each generation of scientists as more and more knowledge accumulates. However, our
social/behavioral knowledge, he contended, does not represent successful time-binding. It seems
to grow (if not strictly arithmetically) at a slow rate which, in comparison with the more rapidly
rising growth curve of physical science, approaches a straight line. Within the social/behavioral area
we can include law, politics, economics, morals, human relationships, etc. These areas of knowledge
relate to our personal and social lives. The differential growth rate between our knowledge of the
‘physical’ world and our knowledge of ourselves and our social relationships continues to lead to
disastrous consequences as noted before: collapsing social structures (including bombed buildings
and people).
Do we have the possibility of moving closer to the adulthood of humanity by bridging the
divide between science/technology and the rest of human affairs? Korzybski contended that a major
step in this direction can occur when we abandon outdated religious and zoological definitions of
ourselves. We cannot understand ourselves adequately if we insist on defining ourselves as some
combination of supernatural (‘soul’, ‘spirit’, etc.) and ‘animal’. We cannot understand ourselves
adequately if we insist on viewing ourselves simply as ‘animals’ destined to play out brutal
competitive games of survival of the fittest for goods and territory. (It’s becoming clear today that
we can’t adequately understand animals that way either.) We can understand ourselves and advance
human welfare by studying ourselves in detail as a time-binding class of life.
Evolution of Time-Binding
The boundary separating animals from humans has become more indistinct as biological study has
advanced. Consciousness, language use (still controversial), technology, altruism, reverence, etc.,
appear to exist—at least to some degree—in other species such as primates, birds, etc.
Do some animals time-bind? Some non-humans indeed seem to start where their previous
generations have left off. For example, chimpanzees establish life-long relationships within groups
and their young learn all manner of things by imitation, including how to find food and use simple
tools and medicinal plants. The exact procedure for using a twig to pull out ‘morsels’ of protein from
a termite nest is not in any chimp’s genes. Presumably, some past chimp ‘geniuses’ had to figure out
that termites come out of underground nests, that they taste good, don’t make you sick (unless you
eat too many), and can be extricated with the appropriate tools and techniques. All of this knowledge
had to be learned and carried on to the present by other chimps.
Still, as far as I know, as of 2017 nobody has found any chimpanzee libraries, laboratories or
universities. (Although chimp tool ‘workshops’ have now been discovered.) Korzybski preferred
not to talk about humans as animals. He acknowledged the difference between humans and animals
as a difference of degrees. He considered this “a difference that makes a difference” to such a
degree that it seemed justified to designate humans as a separate, non-animal, time-binding class of
life. (Perhaps Korzybski was also influenced by his experiences in Poland, where the rights of serfs
—which he defended—were devalued by calling the people “beasts.”)
My friend and teacher, the late Stuart A. Mayper—scientist, philosopher, korzybskian scholar and
former editor of the now defunct General Semantics Bulletin—agreed with Korzybski “that the
differences between humans and non-human animals are great enough to justify setting up a third
‘Kingdom’ of Time-Binders—evolved from animals, we should insist.”28 Biological taxonomists,
who specialize in classifying species according to evolutionary principles, have not taken up
Korzybski’s or Mayper’s suggestions.
The extent of human, symbolically-based, time-binding efforts does seem to far exceed that of
other organisms. Nonetheless, might it still have some usefulness to view humans as ‘animals’ of a
sort—although preeminently time-binding ones? Could it help us to ‘bear in mind’ our continuity
with other forms of life: bacteria, buttercups, bamboos and bonobos? Remembering our connections
with the ecological web to which all organisms belong does seem vital.
Within a few centuries, human time-binding activities have altered human environments, the
habitats of other organisms and the larger, ecological network to an awesome degree. Our time-
binding activities now affect the immediate and the long-term lives of all creatures great and small.
We humans are not immune to the regularities that have been observed to operate within and among
other creatures. Our quality of life and survival depends upon humanity-as-a-whole finding some
harmony with its larger environment-as-a-whole.
Time-Binding and Cooperation

Because it emphasizes a larger, cooperative context for human actions, viewing humans as time-
binders can lead to a greater sense of responsibility toward other humans, other organisms, and the
larger environment within which we live.
The notion of time-binding challenges the “Social Darwinist” notion of animalistic “survival of
the fittest” as a justification for short-sighted human greed, selfishness, and unqualified competition.
Rather, as Korzybski proposed: “...survival of the fittest” for human beings as such––that is, for
time-binders––is survival in time, which means intellectual or spiritual competition, struggle for
excellence, for making the best survive. The-fittest-in-time––those who make the best survive––are
those who do the most in producing values for all mankind including posterity.”29
Consider these time-binding questions:
*Can you find anything that you have made, arranged, organized, composed, written, etc., that
did not in some way depend on the contributions of others?
*Take an object from your pocket, desktop, or around your house or office. How did it get here?
Where did you get it from? Trace things back a bit. How was it manufactured? How many
people were involved in making it and getting it to the store or place where you bought it or got
it from? Did some time exist before that kind of object existed? Who invented it? What other
inventions were required to produce it?
*How did you come to be reading this essay?
Although each of us can imaginatively innovate, none of our creations are made entirely on our
own. None of us, completely from scratch, invented the language that we speak and write or the
tools with which we make things. Recognizing ourselves as time-binders implies acknowledging
our debts and feeling grateful to those who came before us. Considering those who will come after
us rounds out the cooperative view of time-binding. Nurturing a child, communicating our ideas
in writing, teaching, etc., or transmitting them through our personal example or in inventions,
artifacts, etc., we establish ourselves as the present link in a chain that connects the past with the
future. This does not contradict this essential point made by Ayn Rand:
Individualism regards man—every man—as an independent, sovereign entity who possesses an
inalienable right to his own life, a right derived from his nature as a rational being. Individualism
holds that a civilized society, or any form of association, cooperation or peaceful coexistence
among men, can be achieved only on the basis of the recognition of individual rights—and that
a group, as such, has no rights other than the individual rights of its members. (The Virtue of
Selfishness 129)
As a time-binder, you will leave a legacy, willy-nilly, whether you do it purposefully or not.
What do you want your legacy to be?––a time-binding question formulated by my wife and
co-worker, Susan Kodish, in her personal counseling and coaching practice. You won’t live forever.
Usually we think of a legacy as an amount of money or property left for an inheritance. Here we
mean something different, although it could include these kinds of things. Rather, by legacy we
mean something related to how you would like to be remembered after you’ve gone. This doesn’t
have to be by way of some great masterpiece you’ve left that everyone recognizes or a monument
erected in your memory. Rather, by legacy we mean more precisely: what difference you would like
your presence to have made on others, on the world (whether or not recognized). Don’t think that
because your name will probably be forgotten in a few hundred years—likely sooner—that your
existence in the world now doesn’t make a difference. Professor J. T. Shotwell wrote about two
kinds of immortality:
… the immortality of monuments,—of things to look at and recall; and the immortality of use,—
of things which surrender their identity but continue to live, things forgotten but treasured, and
incorporated in the vital forces of society. Thought can achieve both kinds. It embodies itself
in forms—like epics, cathedrals and even engines—where the endurance depends upon the
nature of the stuff used, the perfection of the workmanship and the fortune of time. But it also
embodies itself in use; that is, it can continue to work, enter into other thought and continue to
emit its energy even when its original mold is broken up.30
Time-Binding and Economics

As already indicated, Korzybski was not the first to note the cooperative process of time-binding.
This process was touched upon by others–– in the long-standing tradition of discussion on “the idea
of progress”––without getting labeled as such. In particular, nineteenth-century political economist
Henry George, in his work Progress and Poverty, showed that he understood the phenomenon of
time-binding quite well:
The narrow span of human life allows the individual to go but a short distance, but though each
generation may do but little, yet generations, succeeding to the gain of their predecessors, may
gradually elevate the status of mankind, as coral polyps, building one generation upon the work
of the other, gradually elevate themselves from the bottom of the sea. 31
What, then, distinguishes Korzybski’s work? Korzybski closed in upon the process that Henry
George and others had noted and discussed. He labeled it and made it the starting point of a science
of humanity. We should not disparage the power of a new term. We can use a new label or term to
represent an entire theory. Once we have reached adequate agreement about what we mean by a
term (this may sometimes require long, drawn out discussion and study), we can use the single term
rather than repeating each time the long, drawn out discussion. A new term can thus allow us—more
easily than before we had the term—to bring out and isolate new, salient and useful aspects of
experience; summarize relations; make new distinctions and draw forth implications. The explicit
and general theory represented by the term “time-binding,” has implications that can be drawn forth
for a variety of areas including economics and politics.
What are some of the economic-political implications of the cooperative view of time-binding?
Korzybski defined wealth as: “...those things––whether they be material commodities or forms of
knowledge and understanding––that have been produced by the time-binding energies of humanity,
and according to which nearly all the wealth of the world at any given time is the accumulated fruit
of the toil of past generations––the living work of the dead.”32 Economically, money represents but
doesn’t constitute wealth. Korzybski warned “against confusing the ‘making’ of money by hook or
crook, by trick or trade, with the creating of wealth, by the product of labor.”33
From this time-binding view of wealth, Korzybski criticized both capitalists and socialists. He
suggested that “‘capitalistic’ lust to keep for SELF and ‘proletarian’ lust to get for SELF are both
of them space-binding lust—animal lust—beneath the level of time-binding life.”34 “There are
capitalists and capitalists; there are socialists and socialists. Among the capitalists there are
those who want wealth––mainly the fruit of dead men’s toil––for themselves. Among the
socialists there are those––the orthodox socialists––who seek to disperse it. The former do
not perceive that the product of the labor of the dead is itself dead if not quickened by the
energies of living men. The orthodox socialists do not perceive the tremendous benefits that
accrue to mankind from the accumulation of wealth, if rightly used.”35
Korzybski proposed that an alternative political-economic approach must result from a time-
binding perspective. He did not elaborate its details, but at its base it would involve a political-
economic order, neither ‘socialist’ nor ‘capitalist’ as many people understand those terms, but
focused on cooperation which would benefit all humans. Henry George’s social libertarian approach
to free market capitalism comes close. It was George who enunciated “the law of human progress”
in Progress and Poverty:
To compare society to a boat. Her progress through the water will not depend upon the exertion
of her crew, but upon the exertion devoted to propelling her. This will be lessened by any
expenditure of force required for bailing, or any expenditure of force in fighting among
themselves, or in pulling in different directions.
“Now, as in a separated state the whole powers of man are required to maintain existence,
and mental power is set free for higher uses only by the association of men in communities,
which permits the division of labor and all the economies which come with the co-operation of
increased numbers, association is the first essential of progress. Improvement becomes possible
as men come together in peaceful association, and the wider and closer the association, the
greater the possibilities of improvement. And as the wasteful expenditure of mental power in
conflict becomes greater or less as the moral law which accords to each an equality of rights is
ignored or is recognized, equality (or justice) is the second essential of progress.
Thus association in equality is the law of progress. Association frees mental power for
expenditure in improvement, and equality, or justice, or freedom — for the terms here signify
the same thing, the recognition of the moral law prevents the dissipation of this power in
fruitless struggles.
Here is the law of progress, which will explain all diversities, all advances, all halts, and
retrogressions. Men tend to progress just as they come closer together, and by cooperation
with each other increase the mental power that may be devoted to improvement, but just as
conflict is provoked, or association develops inequality of condition and power, this tendency
to progression is lessened, checked, and finally reversed. (508)
Time-Binding and Democracy

As indicated above the relation of time-binding to economics cannot be separated from so-called
politics. To promote time-binding progress, democracy—society functioning in the direction of
a more or less open society—Henry George’s association in equality appears utterly necessary.
Korzybski’s student and colleague, Guthrie Janssen, considered democratic values at the heart of a
time-binding view. In his article, “Time-Binding: Functional Basis of Democracy,” he wrote that in
a democracy:
A primary requirement would seem to be that it should tend to facilitate time-binding. It should
tend to foster an optimum flow of communication. It should tend to make communication occur
with ever-decreasing limitations, so that each individual may increasingly enjoy the benefits of
the functioning of the nervous systems of others, including those of generations past. And it
should tend to permit each individual to make optimum time-binding contributions himself. 36
Scientific activity, when it actually functions scientifically—not only in the name of ‘science’
as all-too-often happens—follows this pattern. The open-ended nature of genuinely democratic
communication leaves unobstructed the possibility of more information and revising opinions. By
contrast, in a dictatorship (government, corporation, family, etc.) functioning in the direction of a
more or less closed society:
…there is no need for the time-binding contributions of others because, since he [the dictator—
an individual or group] has the ‘final’ answers, what others contribute would either be the ‘same’,
or it would be ‘wrong’. So he blocks off others from making their time-binding contributions.…
[H]owever the blockage of people’s time-binding activities occurs, the situation that results has
the character of ‘dictatorship’ by our definition. There may be even a dictatorship by a majority
(e.g., a ‘dictatorship of the proletariat’), if it sets up a ‘closed system’ barring the time-binding
contributions of others. Moreover, dictatorships of varying degrees are found in economic,
social, religious, and other spheres besides politics.37
As Korzybski put it: ‟…from a time-binding point of view a dictatorship of whatever kind won’t
work, and eventually won’t last; it twists the time-binding of humans, and so humans themselves. And
a democracy, however imperfect, after all permits us humans to behave like humans in the time-
binding sense.”38
Time-Binding and Human Values

Korzybski’s work is founded on the value of knowledge and the values inherent in its
pursuit. In Manhood of Humanity, Korzybski had fixed his gaze upon perhaps the ultimate human
horizon—the potential of the human race—summarized in the term “time-binding.” As the uniquely
human potential to begin where another individual or generation left off and thus to be able to build
on previous efforts in order to make ‘progress’, time-binding is not ethically neutral.
Rather, time-binding, as Korzybski formulated it, implies a normative judgment on behavior.
It depicts humans not only in strictly ‘descriptive’ terms, i.e., as beings with highly developed,
symbol-using nervous systems who communicate with others. Time-binding, as Korzybski defined
it, also implies an ‘ought’— a criterion of values and basic standard of human progress—and thus
has strong ethical implications. (Remember, he called ‘general semantics’—explicitly built upon the
foundation of time-binding— ‟a theory of values.”
At a time when the notion of the neutrality of science (its supposed value-free nature) received great
support, Korzybski showed boldness in emphasizing the ‘value-full’ foundations and consequences
of a scientific approach: “If those who know why and how neglect to act, those who do not know will
act, and the world will continue to flounder. The whole history of mankind and especially the present
[1921] plight of the world show only too sadly how dangerous and expensive it is to have the world
governed by those who do not know.”39
In this second decade of the twenty-first century, many people have questioned the adequacy
of such a scientific, engineering ideal. Pessimism seems rampant and many have turned to weird
forms of absolutistic relativism or to equally absolutistic fundamentalist religions and ideologies —
including the dogmas of so-called ‘scientists’ (for more on this see Rupert Sheldrake’s Science Set
Free: 10 Paths To New Discovery, originally published in UK as The Science Delusion). Korzybski
addressed this sort of movement when he wrote:
…it may be proved that undue pessimism is as dangerous a ‘religion’ as any other blind creed…
as long as we presuppose the situation to be hopeless, the situation will indeed be hopeless.
The spirit of Human Engineering does not know the word “hopeless”; for engineers know
that wrong methods are alone responsible for disastrous results, and that every situation can be
successfully handled by the use of proper means. The task of engineering science is not only to
know but to know how.40
Some interesting questions are raised by Korzybski’s value-based approach focusing on human
time-binding potential—not the statistical normal. For example, how do we determine whether the
results of particular human efforts constitute time-binding ‘progress’ or not? Criminals in gangs
misuse their time-binding potential to cooperate and communicate with each other and learn from
the experiences of other criminals and criminal gangs—sometimes for substantial benefits to
themselves and fellow gang members while making things worse for the rest of us. The overarching
result does not seem anything like ‘progress’. My good friend, James D. French, Editor Emeritus of
the former Institute of General Semantics’ now defunct General Semantics Bulletin, referred to this
misappropriation of our time-binding potential as “crossbinding”:
Bear in mind that in time-binding there may be cross developments that work against the
general progressive momentum, just as in a river there may be crosscurrents that work against
the general flow of the water. I use the term crossbinds to characterize them. Identity theft, for
example, would be an example of a crossbind: of something that grew out of record keeping,
but that works against it and time-binding in general. Criminal activity of any type could be
considered as a crossbind, of course. Another example would be Adolf Hitler’s book, Mein
Kampf; and then there are certain dogmatic creeds, and so on. A given thing can also have
both time-binding and crossbinding elements in play. For example, an automobile can get you
across town faster; but the exhaust from cars in general may pollute your lungs. The interplay
between time-binding and crossbinding could be said to determine the general rate of progress
of the human race.41
One must see behind certain aspects of Korzybski’s style in Manhood of Humanity to recognize
that time-binding implies a qualified view of progress. Writing in his new language, Korzybski
had not yet developed the formulational carefulness that later characterized his writing. (Korzybski
received considerable stylistic help from his friend, mathematician Cassius J. Keyser, which may
have contributed to the florid, ornate prose of the book, very unlike Korzybski’s later style). From
his later work, it seems clear that he did recognize the tentative and piecemeal nature of progress.
A major contribution of his to the “great conversation” about progress was his recognition of its
possible pathology when unconscious time-binders act like space-binders. He clearly emphasized
that the extent to which we bring forth our time-binding potential is not the consequence of some
absolute cosmic inevitability. Rather it depends on us, subject to the choices we make. It depends on
our consciousness of our selves as time-binders.
Science and Sanity

It was the attitude of ‘mind’ conducive to time-binding rather than its political-economic
implications upon which Korzybski focused his main attention after Manhood. All (legitimately
all) of Korzybski’s subsequent work—which came to be called “general semantics”—involved his
efforts to investigate and explain the mechanisms of time-binding. How did it work or not work in
each of us? How could it be made to work better?
In answering these questions, he sought to provide a foundation for a science of humanity, “a
science and art of human engineering…of directing the energies and capacities of human beings
to the advancement of human weal.”42 He wanted to reduce the amount of preventable stupidity in
science and life. He wanted to help as many people as possible to live up to their potential as time-
binders.
For Korzybski, science and mathematics when genuinely practiced in a spirit of inquiry provided
some of the best examples he knew of time-binding behavior. He contrasted this best in behavior
with the worst, exemplified by people with the most serious psychiatric disturbances. For this
reason, he spent two years studying abnormal behavior in the mid-1920s, at St. Elisabeths Hospital,
the Federal Asylum for the Insane in Washington, D.C.
He felt he could make a definite contribution by developing a teachable system that
summarized the methodological wisdom he had gleaned from his studies in mathematics, the
physico-mathematical sciences, psychiatry, and other fields. He once said that just as you can bring
a horse to water but cannot make it drink, you can bring a boy to college but you cannot make him
‘think’. To increase the chance of doing that, you needed at least a method, a set of time-binding
standards for human evaluation that could be taught—even to a child. This is what he offered with
his work: his later writings, not least of which was Science and Sanity published in 1933; and—until
his death in 1950—his work with thousands of individual students helping them apply his methods
to their life-problems.
Korzybski was already 40 years old when he wrote the first draft of Manhood of Humanity. It
seems clear that the notion of time-binding and the scientific-ethical project that—over the next 30
years—resulted from it, constituted the crystallization of deeply held values that Korzybski had
already developed over his lifetime. Korzybski definitely felt a strong sense of gratitude for what
he had received from others. Even the peasants and servants on his parent’s farm had—through
their labor— provided him with the gift of time that allowed him to pursue his early studies. Having
received much, he showed an early tendency to give to others in return.
Korzybski’s attitude of appreciation for the time-binding gifts of others and the attendant desire
to be of service to others characterized his life and seems to me essential for understanding why he
did what he did. In addition, it provides the necessary ‘fuel’ for those of us who wish to become more
conscious time-binders ourselves. To do so, one must study the past and cultivate a sense of gratitude,
an ability to ongoingly acknowledge the time-binding gifts received from others—the quick and the
dead. One must cultivate a sense of the future as well; an awareness that what one does, even from
moment to moment, will be part of what the future inherits—you yourself, your friends and loved
ones, your children and the children of others, their children and their children’s children, et cetera.
Will what you do now provide them with a blessing or a curse? This will ultimately depend upon
your willingness to learn and—perhaps more importantly—to unlearn, to unleash your imagination,
and, as engineer-philosopher Billy Vaughn Koen has said, to seek like the engineer or Michelangelo
“to criticize by creation not by finding fault.”43
“I Am Selfish!”
I’d like to end with a story that Korzybski often told to his seminar students. This version, which
he gave at his 1948-1949 Winter Intensive Seminar, explains in part why he did what he did:
…some friends gave a dinner for my wife and me, and they invited also an Oxford graduate,…
very wealthy, educated, Oxford and so on. He was extremely British in what is definitely
known—it is seldom believed in America but they believe in it—that’s the British theory of
selfishness. And he was nagging me all through the dinner—I had of course to tell them some
development in [my work]; naturally they all expected me to say something. Well, I did. He
was nagging, interrupting, and I was trying to explain to him time-binding, how we are not like
animals, every one for himself and all of that, but we are interdependent. We build upon the
work of the dead, and we depend on the work of every one else in our civilization and so on.
And I was telling how I worked to get my formulations, to deal with human messes all around.
Then he began to pick at me: ‟why was I so ‘altruistic’, doing all this work for my fellow
men?” —I don’t know what not. ‟Oh, this ‘altruism’ would not work, there is no sense in it, a
selfish outlook is the only workable one,” and so on and so on, picking at me with his theories
about ‘selfishness’. And ultimately I got annoyed with that petty criticism, that picking at me. I
just shut him up—successfully. I said, ‘You want me to be selfish? I am selfish! I work the way
I work because I don’t want to live in a world made by men like you!’ That shut him up alright.
In Korzybski: A Biography, I strived to show Korzybski’s quest, the development of his w
and what heIn a way—this is serious—remember there is no sense talking whether I am selfish or not,
achieved through his lifelong efforts. I am bold enough to believe that the sto
because that argument remains valid that I am say ‘altruistic’ because I eventually want a better
his life and world
workformight help
me to live you
in. But youtoseeanswer your
the argument: own presentisconcerns,
‘selfish’-‘unselfish’ to Itwiden
actually useless. is and deepe
horizon of your own gaze, so that what you desire and achieve is truly worthy of your se
a good place for quarreling. … 44
45
a conscious time-binder.
In Korzybski: A Biography, I strived to show Korzybski’s quest, the development of his work,
and what he achieved through his lifelong efforts. I am bold enough to believe that the story of his
life and work might help you to answer your own present concerns, to widen and deepen the horizon
of your own gaze, so that what you desire and achieve is truly worthy of your self as a conscious
time-binder.45
ET CETERA ........... ,.
NOTES
ET CETERA ........... ,.
1. C. S. Read 1990, p. 742
2. A. W. Read 1984, p. 16
Notes
3. Korzybski 1947a, p. 18
1. C. S. Read 1990, p. 742.
2. A. W. Read 1984, p. 16
4. Korzybski 2002 (1937), pp. 227 - 229
5. Korzybski, 1947a, p.19
6. Korzybski, 1947a, pp. 447 - 448
7. Korzybski, 1947a, pp. 58 - 59
8. Korzybski, 1947a, p. 42
9. Korzybski 1990a, “Science, Sanity, and Humanism,” pp. 383-384
10. Korzybski 1947a, p. 213
11. Korzybski 1950 (1921), p. 2. See Barzun, pp. 82-85 for his views on the term “Man” as a neutral one for
“human being.” You can find differing views in Minnich and in Miller and Swift.
12. Korzybski 1950 (1921), p. 56
13. Korzybski 1950 (1921), p. 58
14. Qtd. in Montagu 1953, p. 11
15. Montagu 1953, p. 11.
16. Korzybski 1950 (1921), p. 227
17. Korzybski 1950 (1921), pp. 232 - 234
18. Korzybski 1950 (1921), p. 230
19. Korzybski 1950 (1921), p. 234
20. Korzybski 1994 (1933), p. 291
21. Korzybski 1994 (1933), p. 76
22. Cassirer, pp. 24-26
23. Qtd. in Van Doren 1967, p. 44
24. Korzybski 1950 (1921), p. 110
25. “The typical term of the progression is PRT where PR denotes the ending progress made in the generation
with which we agree to start our reckoning. R denotes the ratio of increase, and T denotes the number of
generations after the chosen ‘start.’ The quantity, PRT of progress made in the Tth generation contains T as
an exponent, and so the quantity, varying as time T passes, is called an exponential function of the time.”
(Manhood of Humanity, pp. 110-111)
26. Wilson 1983, p. 88
27. Paulos 1991, p. 70
28. Stuart Mayper, Personal Communication
29. Korzybski 1950 (1921), pp. 147 - 148
30. Qtd. in Montagu 1955, p. 66. From James T. Shotwell 1942, “Mechanismand Culture.” In Science and
Man, Ed. By R. N. Anshen. New York: Harcourt, Brace & Co.
31. George, p. 50
32. Korzybski 1950 (1921), p. 115
33. Korzybski 1950 (1921), p. 115
34. Korzybski 1950 (1921), p. 198
35. Korzybski 1950 (1921), pp. 132 - 133
36. Janssen, p. 27
37. Janssen, p. 28
38. Korzybski 1990c, p. 630
39. Korzybski 1950 (1921), p. 11
40. Ibid, pp. 10 - 11
41. French, p. 9
42. Korzybski 1950 (1921), p. 1
43. Koen, p. 33
44. Korzybski, Alfred 1948/1949. This extended quote comes from the audio recording of Korzybski’s 1948-
1949 Winter Intensive Seminar combined with material (missing in the recording) from the unpublished
transcript of the seminar.
45. Korzybski: A Biography provides the first and only comprehensive book-length account of Alfred
Korzybski’s life, with never-before-told details of what he sought and what he achieved in the course of
his extraordinary career. You can read the free, online edition at the book at my weblog, Korzybski Files,
[ korzybskifiles.blogspot.com ]. Although I’m providing this free online version of Korzybski: A Biography,
please support my work by ordering your own copy and asking your library(s) to order it too. The book, in
the Ingram catalog, is available from internet bookstores internationally. You can also order through your
local brick and mortar bookstore, if you prefer. It is available in softcover, perfect binding (ISBN 978-0-
9700664-0-4) and hardcover, case binding (ISBN 978-0-9700664-2-8).
REFERENCES
Barzun, Jacques. From Dawn to Decadence: 500 Years of Western Cultural Life 1500 to the Present. New York:
HarperCollins, 2000. Print.
Cassirer, Ernst. An Essay on Man. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1944. Print.
French, James D. “Editors Essay 2004: The Extensional Definition of Time-Binding,” in General Semantics
Bulletin 71: pp.8-9, 2004. Print.
Janssen, Guthrie E. “Time-Binding: Functional Basis of Democracy,” in General Semantics Bulletin 6 & 7: pp.
25-30, 1951. Print.
Kodish, Bruce I. Korzybski: A Biography. Pasadena, California: Extensional Publishing, 2011, Print.
Koen, Billy Vaughn. Discussion of the Method: Conducting the Engineer’s Approach to Problem Solving. New
York/Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2003. Print.
Korzybski, Alfred(1933). Science and Sanity: An Introduction to Non-Aristotelian Systems and General
Semantics. Fifth Edition. Preface by Robert P. Pula. Brooklyn, NY: Institute of General Semantics, 1994.
Print.
––. General Semantics Seminar 1937: Transcription of Notes from Lectures in General Semantics Given at
Olivet College. 3rd edition. Homer J. Moore, ed. Brooklyn, NY: Institute of General Semantics. 2002.
Print.
––. Collected Writings: 1920-1950. (Collected and arranged by M. Kendig. Final editing and preparation for
printing by Charlotte Schuchardt Read with the assistance of Robert P. Pula.) Brooklyn, NY: Institute of
General Semantics, 1990 a. Print.
––. “What I Believe,” in Collected Writings, pp. 645-663, 1990 b. Print.
––. “Time-binding and Human Potentialities: A Lecture by Alfred Korzybski,” in Collected Writings, pp. 625-
633, 1990 c. Print.
––. Manhood of Humanity, (1921). Second edition. Brooklyn, NY: Institute of General Semantics. 1950. Print.
––. Intensive Seminar. Audio tapes, unedited. 37 hours, recorded Dec. 27, 1948-Jan 2, 1949. Brooklyn, NY:
Institute of General Semantics, 1948/1949. Audio.
––. Biographical Material. Recorded by Kenneth Keyes, July 1947. Transcribed by Roberta Rymer Keyes.
Indexed by Robert P. Pula, 1947 a. Unpublished Audio.
Keyser, Cassius J. “The Nature of Man,” in Mole Philosophy and Other Essays. New York: E.P. Dutton & Co,
1927. Print.
Miller, Casey and Kate Swift. Words and Women: New Language in New Times. Garden City, New York:
Anchor Press/Doubleday, 1976. Print.
Minnich, Elizabeth Kamark. Transforming Knowledge. Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 1990. Print.
Montagu, Ashley. Immortality. New York: Grove Press, 1955. Print.
––. “On Time-binding and the Concept of Culture,” in General Semantics Bulletin 12 & 13: pp. 9-16, 1953.
Print.
Paulos, John Allen. Beyond Numeracy: Ruminations of a Numbers Man. New York: Vintage, 1991. Print.
Read, Allen Walker. “Changing Attitudes Toward Korzybski’s General Semantics,” in General Semantics
Bulletin 51: pp. 11-25, 1984. Print.
Read Charlotte Schuchardt. “Alfred Habdank Skarbek Korzybski: A Biographical Sketch,” in Korzybski
Collected Writings, pp. 739-748. 1990. Print.
Sheldrake, Rupert. Science Set Free: 10 Paths to New Discovery. New York: Deepak Chopra Books, 2012.
Print.
Wilson, Robert Anton. Prometheus Rising. Phoenix, AZ: Falcon Press, 1983. Print.
ON THE BINDING BIASES OF TIME:

AN ESSAY ON GENERAL SEMANTICS, MEDIA ECOLOGY,
AND THE PAST, PRESENT, AND FUTURE OF THE HUMAN
SPECIES*
Lance Strate
I have chosen to address the theme of time because it is a topic that I find fascinating, and I would
discuss it in great depth and detail if I could, but in the words of the Roman poet Virgil, tempus fugit.
Or as Groucho Marx put it, time flies like an arrow, fruit flies like a banana. That quip demonstrates
that syntax and meaning is subject to the principle of relativity, just as much as time and gravity.
What this means is that it is not just time that is relative, but that our ways of representing time,
talking about time, telling time as it were, are equally relative. So, for example, Stephen Hawking
writes in his bestselling book, A Brief History of Time, that the universe started off with a bang about
thirteen or fourteen billion years ago, and is continuing to expand today.1 Whether the expansion
will go on forever, or reach a limit, and reverse itself, contracting back down to a single point,
remains a matter of some debate. Either way, the fact remains that the Big Bang was an explosion
so massive that it is still going on, some thirteen or fourteen billion years later, with no end in sight.
The explosion is taking place on such a vast scale that we do not experience it as an explosion, but
we are all riding the Big Bang, clinging to a tiny bit of debris that we call Earth, as our galaxy moves
at a rate of 300 kilometers or 185 miles per second.
The Bible tells us, “To everything there is a season, and a time to every purpose under heaven,” to
which Pete Seger added the refrain, “turn, turn, turn.” We traditionally looked to the cycles of nature
for our sense of time, and tried to capture those cycles, in turn, in our calendars and clocks. But we
also have a sense of time as an irresistible forward motion. It was not until the nineteenth century
that physicists established the Second Law of Thermodynamics, which states that the universe has
a statistical tendency to move towards a greater amount of entropy over time, meaning that the
passage of time is irreversible; this is sometimes referred to as time’s arrow. But the notion of
history as an unfolding progression dates back to antiquity, and no doubt our prehistoric ancestors
understood the process of aging, and the passages from birth to childhood to maturity to death.
Having turned fifty-two not long before I began writing this essay, I note with some resentment that
in English I have to say that I am fifty-two years old, fifty-two years old! I much prefer the French
language in this instance, as then I would say, j’ai cinquante-deux ans, I have fifty-two years. Now,
* This essay is an expanded version of a keynote address presented at the 67th Annual Conference of the New York State
Communication Association, Ellenville, NY, October 23-25, 2009. Earlier versions of this essay were published in The
Electronic Journal of Communication, Vol. 20, Nos. 1-2, 2010, and the 2009 NYSCA Conference Proceedings.
Noam Chomsky would say that they mean the same thing in their deep structure, but fortunately we
are in the post-Chomsky era now, and can safely say that the two statements reflect quite different
views of time. In English, you become old, it is a change of state; being fifty-two, I am no longer
fifty-one or fifty; I have lost those ages in the process of metamorphosis. In French, you gain years,
it is an accumulation; having fifty-two years, I did not lose age fifty-one or fifty, or any other age —
I still have them! They represent the experience, the knowledge, and presumably the wisdom that I
have gained.
Marshall McLuhan talked about how we move into the future looking into the rearview mirror. 2
That is an automobile metaphor, and I found it instructive to learn that he never actually drove very
much. But even if his metaphor is a bit askew, his point is quite valid, that we tend to live in the past,
because that is all that we know. McLuhan pointed out that a prophet is not someone who foresees
the future, but rather someone who tells you what is happening right now. In military circles, it
is commonly said that there is a tendency to prepare to fight the last war you were in, instead of
preparing for the war you are actually about to fight. And it seems to me that part of the problem is
that we think of time in terms of space, imagining time as a line or a road that we are traveling on,
moving forward into the future. McLuhan reminds us that we can see nothing of the future that lies
before us, while the past is laid out clearly for our inspection. In this sense, then, we are walking
backwards into the future, a metaphor employed in some tribal cultures, notably the Maori.
I think it important to keep in mind that the road is only a metaphor for thinking about time; it is
not the phenomenon itself. We think of time as one-dimensional, a line, but why not two dimensions
of time, or three dimensions, like the length, breadth, and width of space? We could alternately
imagine time as a balloon being filled with air, continually expanding in size. Thinking of time as
visual space, whether linear or multidimensional, suggests the possibility of time travel, but being
only a metaphor, I suspect that notions of going back to the future and forward into the past will
remain confined to the realm of science fiction and fantasy. Instead of thinking of time visually, why
not imagine time as a purely sonic phenomenon, as a conversation or a piece of music. Indeed, our
sense of hearing is intimately linked to our sense of time, for as Walter Ong puts it, “sound exists
only when it is going out of existence.” 3 We can even think of time through the sense of smell, and in
fact McLuhan notes in Understanding Media that research on the brain indicates that smell is closely
associated with memory; he also notes that up until missionaries introduced the mechanical clock
to China and Japan in the seventeenth century, incense had been used for millennia in East Asia to
measure time’s passage, and distinguish special occasions.4
At this point, having neither world enough nor time, I must put an end to this meandering
introduction, and begin in earnest by quoting from James W. Carey’s highly respected book,
published in 1989, Communication as Culture, from an essay about Harold Innis:
Innis argued that changes in communication technology affected culture by altering the structure
of interests (the things thought about), by changing the character of symbols (the things thought
with), and by changing the nature of community (the arena in which thought developed). By
a space-binding culture he meant literally that: a culture whose predominant interest was in
space — land as real estate, voyage, discovery, movement, expansion, empire, control. In
the realm of symbols he meant the growth of symbols and conceptions that supported these
interests: the physics of space, the arts of navigation and civil engineering, the price system,
the mathematics of tax collectors and bureaucracies, the entire realm of physical science,
and the system of affectless, rational symbols that facilitated those interests. In the realm of
communities he meant communities of space: communities that were not in place but in space,
mobile, connected over vast distances by appropriate symbols, forms and interests.
To space-binding cultures he opposed time-binding cultures: cultures with interests in
time — history, continuity, permanence, contraction; whose symbols were fiduciary — oral,
mythopoetic, religious, ritualistic; and whose communities were rooted in place — intimate ties
An Essay on General Semantics, Media Ecology, and the Past, Present, and Future of the Human Species 31
and a shared historical culture. The genius of social policy, he thought, was to serve the demands
of both time and space; to use one to prevent the excesses of the other: to use historicism to
check the dreams of reason and to use reason to control the passions of memory. But these were
reciprocally related tendencies. As cultures became more time-binding they became less space-
binding and vice versa. The problem again was found in dominant media of communication.
Space-binding media were light and portable and permitted extension in space; time-binding
media were heavy and durable or, like the oral tradition, persistent and difficult to destroy. In
propositional form, then, structures of consciousness paralleled structures of communication.5
Those of you who are familiar with Carey’s scholarship know that he was a leading expert on
the work of the Harold Innis, and that Innis was a Canadian economist who, towards the end of his
career, turned his attention to the study of communication, and particularly the relationship between
forms of communication and social organization. Carey stood alongside Marshall McLuhan in
acknowledging the great debt that we owe Innis for his pioneering investigations into the study of
media, and Carey’s insights into Innis’s scholarship were second to none. But, those of you who are
familiar with Harold Innis’s classic work, The Bias of Communication, 6 may have noticed something
curious about Carey’s explication. As the title of his book indicates, Innis argued that different
modes of communication are characterized by different inherent biases, an idea that has come to
be foundational for the field of media ecology. And Innis specifically contrasted technological
and cultural biases towards space and towards time. But Carey, rather than using Innis’s terms,
space bias and time bias, speaks of space-binding and time-binding. It was a seemingly minor and
harmless substitution, to be sure, except for the fact that the phrases space-binding and time-binding
are established terms in the discipline of general semantics, having been coined by Alfred Korzybski
in his first book, Manhood of Humanity, 7 and included in his magnum opus, Science and Sanity.8
Not long after I was appointed Executive Director of the Institute of General Semantics, someone
on a general semantics online discussion group came across Carey’s quote and asked why these terms
were being used without any attribution to Korzybski. I explained that there probably was some
mistake; that Innis used the term bias, not binding, that time bias referenced concepts significantly
different from time-binding, and as far as I could tell, Innis did not draw upon Korzybski’s work at
all. On further reflection, though, I think it reasonable to assume that Innis was aware of Korzybski’s
work, as most North American intellectuals were in the mid-twentieth century, including Lewis
Mumford, one of Innis’s influences. Along similar lines, Carey does not make any reference to
Korzybski in his writings, as far as I know, but I am certain that a scholar of intellectual history of
Carey’s caliber was familiar with Korzybski’s work and terminology. So in the end, I cannot say
whether Carey meant to draw a connection between Innis and Korzybski, or substituted the terms
solely for stylistic reasons, or simply made a mistake. But that point of either conflation or confusion
gave me the idea to draw on both terms, and entitle this essay, “On the Binding Biases of Time.”
And my intent is to address the subject of time within it, at least as much as time, and space, permits.
As human beings, we are both blessed and cursed with a consciousness of time that is unique
among the myriad forms of life, at least as far as we can tell. Granted, all forms of life function
within time, seek to maintain their existence over time, and do so by responding to certain changes in
their environment, changing in some way to meet the demands of a dynamic environment that itself
changes over time, and also acting upon their environment in an attempt to alter it in ways conducive
to their own survival. One of the defining characteristics of life forms is that they attempt to produce
copies of themselves over time, to ensure the survival of their species, or as Richard Dawkins argues,
the gene itself is a replicator, replication is its only imperative, and this drives all other biological and
behavioral processes.9 Every characteristic that is typically used to define the somewhat nebulous
concept of life involves activity occurring over time, for example metabolism, homeostasis, response
to stimuli, growth, adaptation, and reproduction. We might therefore distinguish life from non-life
by the organism’s sense of time, which might be called an awareness or consciousness of time
depending on how you choose to define those terms. What makes an organism alive is its active
engagement with time, its use of time to relate, adjust, and modify its environment, and its use of
time to relate, adjust and modify its own self. This view gives new meaning to the term time-life.
As J. T. Fraser, the founder of the International Society for the Study of Time, puts it, “to say that
a living organism is an orchestra with trillions of instruments that are kept playing in a coordinated
fashion from instant to instant is, of course, a metaphor. But it is a useful and appropriate one,
because it reminds us of the organic solidarity that constitutes the life process.”10 Fraser goes on to
argue:
The literature of biological clocks regularly asserts that the reason they evolved was to help the
organism survive. This is as inadequate a view as if I claimed that the musicians of an orchestra
help the orchestra make music. Musicians do not help the orchestra, they are the orchestra.
Likewise, biological clocks do not help a living organism survive, they are the organism. 11
Further, the sense of time that distinguishes the organic from the inorganic extends beyond the
present. Once more, as Fraser explains:
Some 3.5 billion years ago, as perceived and measured by us clock watchers, self-organizing
systems characterized by a know-how for defining an organic present came into being.
Biogenesis created a new kind of time, one that was more advanced, more evolved, than the
time of the physical world: expectation and memory created new categories of time in terms of
the organisms’ self-interests. Nothing in the physical world ever remembers anything, not even
a memory circuit does. Nothing in the physical world ever expects anything, not even an alarm
system. Only for living organisms do future, past, and present constitute reality. 12
While life in general exists within an environment of memory, expectation, and perception,
species differ in the ways in which they organize and access their memories, and in their ability
to anticipate alternatives and plan for contingencies. And of all the myriad species that populate
the planet, none come close to the unique time consciousness of the human race. It is not just
that, as compared to other forms of life, we human beings have more powerful memories and, and
stronger cognitive abilities that enhance our ability to anticipate and plan. Rather, our sense of time
represents a quantum leap beyond any kind of time consciousness that has existed before us. The
qualitative difference extends so far as to make us the only species that can develop an awareness of
our mortality. Ernest Becker argues that this awareness is so devastating to our self-esteem that we
require extraordinary means for coping with that awful knowledge. According to Becker, the answer
to that problem comes through culture, which provides us with the means for living as heroes within
our own narrative, and by seeing ourselves as living heroically, provides us with the means for the
denial of death.13
The prospect of our own demise renders human time consciousness at times poignant, at
times courageous, at times absurd, arrogant, and grotesque. We may be consoled, however, by the
realization that others will carry on in our absence, that we will be remembered by others just as
we remember those who are no longer with us, that activities that we have begun can be taken up
and continued by others, that plans that we construct may be brought to fruition by others. We
call certain documents a will, a last will and testament, and a living will, because they are in fact
extensions of our consciousness reaching into a future where we are no longer present or mentally
active; they are attempts to project our intentions and determinations, our decisions and desires,
our will beyond the lifespan of our consciousness. Beyond memory and will, we may find some
consolation in the realization that something of what we have learned in life, some aspect of our
awareness, some element of our thought processes, some portion of our ways of knowing, some
subset of the knowledge that we have accumulated has been passed on to others, and will survive
our own individual demise.
I want to suggest to you, however, that this sort of acute time consciousness, while intensified
by our awareness and understanding of death, emerges as a consequence of what Korzybski referred
to as time-binding. The basic idea of time-binding is by no means a radical notion. It is the idea that
human beings make progress from one generation to the next by virtue of our ability to preserve
and transmit knowledge. Time-binding is an elaboration on the famous quote by Isaac Newton: “If
I have seen a little further it is by standing on the shoulders of giants.” The quote itself is a product
of time-binding, as earlier variants can be traced back to at least the twelfth century. Nowadays, we
have grown uncomfortable with the word progress, so we are more likely to talk about evolution,
for example, in reference to cultural evolution. If you really think about it, though, in this instance
evolution is being used to a large extent as a euphemism for progress. At one time, the talk was of
evolution to a higher state of being; more recently we speak of evolution towards greater complexity.
And while I understand the need to avoid the triumphalism associated with the concept of progress in
the early twentieth century, our language have grown poorer and less precise for having eliminated
that word from our working vocabularies.
While Korzybski introduced the term time-binding to signify a radical break between human
beings and forms of life, it is also possible to view time-binding as the product of an evolutionary
process. In other words, we might say that we are not the only species to engage in some form of
time-binding activity, instead observing that other animals are capable of imitation and learning,
thereby passing on useful behaviors from one generation to the next. Thus, time-binding has
slowly evolved from forms of life that are entirely dependent on the self-replication of DNA to
maintain their existence over time, to species that are capable of engaging in increasingly more
elaborate forms of social learning. For most animals, this limited form of time-binding allows for
adaptation of behaviors in response to a dynamic, changing environment. If you take the view of
some anthropologists that animals as well as humans can be said to have culture, this sort of cultural
evolution is directed towards homeostasis, rather than progress. Indeed, we might say that much of
human cultural evolution is directed towards homeostasis, especially in tribal societies. What this
means is that human beings have the potential of making progress through time-binding, but we do
not necessarily realize that potential. In fact, for most of our history, we have not.
Korzybski used the concept of time-binding as the basis of his definition of the human race as a
unique class of life, in contrast to animals, which he referred to as space-binding, and plants, which
he termed chemistry-binding. This three-fold schema, while presented as science, seems inadequate
even by the standards of early twentieth century biology. What then to make of it? One possibility is
to view it as a metaphor, a poetic or rhetorical device. Or it can be seen as a heuristic device, a way
to start thinking about humanity and what it might take to solve problems like war, violence, and
oppression. But Korzybski’s classifications can be better understood when we take into account the
fact that his background was in engineering. Engineers are concerned with pragmatic questions and
practical concerns, which is no doubt why this Polish nobleman found a following, and a home, in the
United States. As a form of applied science, engineering is concerned above all with getting specific
tasks accomplished, with work. From the point of view of physics, work requires the application of
force, and force is the product of energy.
Engineering, then, is all about energy, and it is worth noting that our contemporary understanding
of energy was relatively recent when Korzybski began his investigations. As Thomas Kuhn explains
in his paradigm-shifting work, The Structure of Scientific Revolutions, the pioneers of electrical
research viewed electricity as a substance. In particular, these electricians, as scientists such as
Benjamin Franklin referred to themselves, believed that electricity was a fluid, and to this day we
use terms such as flow and current.14 Along the same lines, light was once thought to be a form of
matter, be it particle, medium, or emanation, and from antiquity fire was thought to be one of the
elements. It was not until the nineteenth century that the idea of vis viva, of living force, was finally
replaced by that of energy, and the laws of thermodynamics were formalized. And at the beginning
of the twentieth century, Albert Einstein introduced his famous equation, E=MC2, which establishes
that energy and matter are essentially equivalent, the third element in that equation being the square
of the speed of light, which is a measure of time. What all this represents is a paradigm shift away
from the view that the universe can be best understood as matter, to a view that the universe is
essentially energy, and matter is simply a form of very slow and stable energy, or potential energy. It
is a shift away from viewing “things” as static and substantial, and towards viewing all phenomena
as dynamics processes. In the mid-nineteenth century, Karl Marx and Frederick Engels argued that
as a result of the growth of capitalism and industrialism, “all that is solid melts into the air,” but this
is an apt description of the scientific revolution that was going on at the time that they wrote their
Communist Manifesto, a paradigm shift that McLuhan noted was preceded and precipitated by the
development of electrical technology, notably the telegraph. 15
As an engineer working in the enthusiastic wake of a scientific revolution, Korzybski’s theory of
time-binding was all about energy; indeed, he was an ardent admirer of Einstein, and in fact called
his early work a general theory of time-binding, following the example of Einstein’s general theory
of relativity. And Korzybski’s theory begins with the sun as a source of energy for life on earth.
And more than any other form of life, plants have evolved a way to capture and store that energy,
which is why he called plants the chemistry-binding class of life. That stored energy is then used by
animals, who convert it into motion, that is, kinetic energy, moving freely about in their environment
in ways that plants are not capable of, and that is why he called animals the space-binding class of
life. Human beings are able to use that energy to move through space as well, but we have also found
a way to store it, not chemically, but in the form of knowledge, which makes us the time-binding
class of life. Korzybski also regards these categories in terms of dimensionality, chemistry-binding
being one dimensional, space-binding adding a second dimension, and time-binding give us humans
sole access to a third dimension of life. Here to we can see the influence of Einstein, who posited
time as a fourth spatial dimension, better understood as the unified phenomenon of spacetime. But
dimension, after all, is just a fancy way of saying measure, and Korzybski’s three dimensions of
binding are measures of energy. And energy, once again, is what is required to get work done. This
leads to a rather interesting economic commentary that can be found in Manhood of Humanity:
The potential use-values in wealth are created by human work operating in time upon raw
material given by nature. The use-values are produced by time-taking transformations of the
raw materials; these transformations are wrought by human brain labor and human muscular
labor directed by the human brain acting in time. The kinetic use-values of wealth are also
created by human toil — mainly by the intellectual labor of observation, experimentation,
imagination, deduction and invention, all consuming the precious time of short human lives.
It is obvious that in the creation of use-values whether potential or kinetic, the element of time
enters as an absolutely essential factor. The fundamental importance of time as a factor in the
production of wealth — the fact that wealth and the use-values of wealth are literally the natural
offspring of the spiritual union of time with toil—has been completely overlooked, not only
by the economics, but by the ethics, the jurisprudence and the other branches of speculative
reasoning, throughout the long period of humanity’s childhood. In the course of the ages
there has indeed been much “talk” about time, but there has been no recognition of the basic
significance of time as essential in the conception and in the very constitution of human values.
It is often said that “Time is Money”; the statement is often false; but the proposition that
Money is Time is always true. It is always true in the profound sense that Money is the measure
and symbol of Wealth — the product of Time and Toil — the crystallization of the time-binding
human capacity. IT IS THUS TRUE THAT MONEY IS A VERY PRECIOUS THING, THE
MEASURE AND SYMBOL OF WORK—IN PART THE WORK OF THE LIVING BUT, IN
THE MAIN, THE LIVING WORK OF THE DEAD.16
In Korzybski’s analysis, wealth is for the most part not something that people earn on their own,
a view that runs contrary to the American dream, our Horatio Alger tales of going from rags to
riches, and our glorification of the entrepreneur. Rather, Korzybski reminds us that most wealth is
inherited. Unlike Marx, Korzybski is not concerned with the fact that inherited wealth tends to stay
in the hands of a small population over time, generally within families and socioeconomic classes.
Instead, Korzybski focuses on wealth as a common human inheritance, which should in turn be
utilized for the common good, rather than private gain; it should be noted as well that his concept of
wealth consists of more than just money and material goods, but also and especially knowledge and
knowhow. In remarking on ‘the capitalist era’ he states:
It may seem strange but it is true that the time-binding exponential powers, called humans, do
not die — their bodies die but their achievements live forever — a permanent source of power.
All of our precious possessions—science, acquired by experience, accumulated wealth in all
fields of life—are kinetic and potential use-values created and left by by-gone generations;
they are humanity’s treasures produced mainly in the past, and conserved for our use, by that
peculiar function or power of man for the binding of time. 17
Essentially, then, every invention, every innovation, every human advancement is the product of
generations, indeed millennia of previous discoveries, tens of thousands of years of intellectual and
physical labor. Thus, Korzybski comments:
This fact, of supreme ethical importance, applies to all of us; none of us may speak or act as if
the material or spiritual wealth we have were produced by us; for, if we be not stupid, we must
see that what we call our wealth, our civilization, everything we use or enjoy, is in the main the
product of the labor of men now dead, some of them slaves, some of them “owners” of slaves.
The metal spoon or the knife which we use daily is a product of the work of many generations,
including those who discovered the metal and the use of it, and the utility of the spoon.
And here arises a most important question: Since the wealth of the world is in the main the free
gift of the past — the fruit of the labor of the dead — to whom does it of right belong? The
question cannot be evaded. Is the existing monopoly of the great inherited treasures produced
by dead men’s toil a normal and natural evolution?
Or is it an artificial status imposed by the few upon the many? Such is the crux of the modern
controversy. 18
Korzybski’s critique of capitalism and commercialism was not an affirmation of communism or
socialism, however, but rather the basis for arguing for government based on scientific principles,
a technocracy run by individuals involved in human engineering (as he put it), and a society
where everyone would employ a rational, scientific approach in every aspect of their lives. From a
contemporary perspective, this sounds at best naïve and idealistic, if not ominous and threatening;
but I think it important to recall how differently we viewed science, technology, engineering, and
progress in the early twentieth century. Korzybski’s optimism was paralleled by that expressed
by Thorstein Veblen in the The Engineers and the Price System, also published in 1921,19 and in
Lewis Mumford’s hopeful view of the transformative potential of electrification in his 1934 tome,
Technics and Human Civilization.20 Politics aside, what is of great significance is that Korzybski
differentiates between different types of time-binding. Just as earlier I suggested that animals are
capable of a form of time-binding that is largely homeostatic rather than progressive, Korzybski
argues that human time-binding progresses slowly for the most part, arithmetically at best, except
for the advancements that are made in science, technology, and engineering, where time-binding
becomes rapid, and progress geometric.
The disconnect between progress in science and technology on the one hand, and ethics and
human relations on the other, is a subject that many have commented on. Korzybski’s proposal was
to apply the scientific method, which has proven to be so extraordinarily successful in enabling us
to predict and manipulate various aspects of our environments, to all aspects of human life. Upon
further investigation, he came to understand that what set human time-binding apart from animal
behavior so very dramatically was the human capacity for language and symbolic communication.21
Language is a storage medium, and the language that we speak is not our own invention, but the
product of untold generations that have gone before us. Following the Sapir-Whorf Hypothesis,
the language that we are taught is a medium that transmits the stored perceptions and worldview
of the past.22 Expressed in terms of energy, language is a battery, it stores cognitive energy that we
use to get work done, and we recharge that battery by teaching our young how to speak. It follows
then that differences in the way that we use language can lead to differences in the process of time-
binding. Thus, Korzybski concluded that the ways in which scientists and engineers use language
in their professional activities are much more effective than the imprecise and ambiguous way that
language is used otherwise. Consequently, he developed general semantics as a means of extending
the scientific approach to all of communication, perception, and evaluation, and thereby improving
the efficiency of time-binding and increasing the rate of progress in all areas of human activity.
The process of time-binding, then, is subject to change, evolution, and progress; in short, time-
binding is subject to time-binding. There is an implied theory of history in Manhood of Humanity,
a history of human development that is, once again, broken up into three stages. First, there is the
pre-scientific stage, where time-binding exists, but progress is very slow. Korzybski has relatively
little to say about this stage, and perhaps he might have referred to this as the infancy of humanity
(which is not to say that I support such a characterization). Second is the scientific stage, where
the adoption of scientific method allows for rapid progress in specialized sectors such as applied
science, technology and engineering, and in our knowledge of pure science and mathematics, but not
in any other aspect of human affairs. This is what Korzybski means by the childhood of humanity.
The third stage would be when all human life is informed by and governed by a scientific approach.
I think we could refer to this period as post-scientific, not because science would be obsolete, but
simply because it would become ubiquitous and environmental; this follows the same logic in which
Fredric Jameson explains that the postmodern is considered the period following modernization,
in which the process of modernization has been completed and is no longer an issue.23 This period
would be the ‘manhood of humanity’, our mature phase, a stage he believed we were about to enter.
Korzybski was wounded as a Polish soldier in the Russian army during the First World War,
and went on to publish Manhood of Humanity in 1921, Science and Sanity in 1933, and found the
Institute of General Semantics in Chicago in 1938. Harold Innis was wounded as a Canadian solider
in the British army during the First World War, earned his PhD from the University of Chicago
in 1920, and went on to teach at the University of Toronto, where he became Canada’s leading
economist. The parallels are interesting, but as far as I can tell, they never met or communicated
with one another. Innis published several books on the subject of Canada’s political economy during
the twenties, thirties, and forties, and did not turn his attention to the study of communication until
after the Second World War. It was not until 1950, the year that Korzybski died, that Innis published
Empire and Communications, 24 followed the next year by The Bias of Communication, 25 and then
by Changing Concepts of Time, published in 1952, the year that Innis died.26 And it was in The
Bias of Communication in particular that Innis discussed the biases of time, and space. Whereas
Korzybski was concerned with the question of what distinguishes humanity from other forms of
life, Innis was concerned with the question of what distinguishes one type of human society from
another. And whereas Korzybski brought an engineer’s concern with work and energy to the study
of time, Innis brought an economist’s concern with raw materials and staples; if time is energy to
Korzybski, the media by which we communicate over time is akin to coal and oil to Innis.
Korzybski studied time, and that led him to the study of communication. Innis studied
communication, and that led him to the study of time. Communication, however, has typically
been talked about in terms of transportation, transmission, or pipeline metaphors. Generally,
communication is seen as being a process of moving messages from point A to point B, or from
point A to many different point Bs in the case of mass communication. As such, the focus is on
how far a message can travel, how fast it could traverse a given distance, and how widely it can be
disseminated. In other words, the preoccupation has been with communicating over space. It therefore
represents a significant breakthrough on Innis’s part to realize that communication can take place
over time as well as over space. Building on Innis, Carey came to stress the role of communication
in the formation and preservation of communities, including the imagined communities that we call
nations, and in the maintenance of social cohesion and cultural continuity. Carey called it the ritual
view of communication, which he contrasted with the transportation view, and which implies that
we ought to focus pay attention to the process of communing as well as commuting. 27
Innis, then, came to his own understanding of what Korzybski termed time-binding, but he
moved in a different direction, observing that in the process of binding time, we bind ourselves
together in social units, as families and tribes, communities and cities, nations and societies. And as
we bind ourselves together in this way, we ourselves become bound by time, time becomes the ties
that bind, and we become prisoners of our remembered past and imagined future. And as we bind
ourselves together in different ways, as the means by which we bind time changes, so too does the
character of human culture. This is central to Innis’s insight, and is part of a broader generalization
that differences in the way that we communicate with others and with ourselves, differences in the
way that we mediate between ourselves and our environment, are what Gregory Bateson would
refer to as differences that make a difference; they are systemic differences that have a powerful
influence on the way that we think, feel, and perceive the world; on our consciousness, identity, and
relationships; on our forms of social organization and our culture. 28
In The Bias of Communication, Innis states:
My bias is with the oral tradition, particularly as reflected in Greek civilization, and with the
necessity of recapturing something of its spirit. For that purpose we should try to understand
something of the importance of life or of the living tradition, which is peculiar to the oral as
against the mechanized tradition, and of the contributions of Greek civilization.29
Innis goes on to argue:
The oral dialectic is overwhelmingly significant where the subject-matter is human action and
feeling, and it is important in the discovery of new truth but of very little value in disseminating
it. The oral discussion inherently involves personal contact and a consideration for the feelings
of others, and it is in sharp contrast with the cruelty of mechanized communication and the
tendencies which we have come to note in the modern world. The quantitative pressure of
modern knowledge has been responsible for the decay of oral dialectic and conversation.30
Innis favored oral tradition for its flexibility, but also understood its limitations, as he also
notes, “an oral tradition implies freshness and elasticity but students of anthropology have pointed
to the binding character of custom in primitive cultures.” 31 This of course is another example of
the binding character of time-binding, but it is also important to acknowledge that at the time that
Innis was writing, he himself was bound or shall we say constrained by the fact that orality-literacy
studies were relatively new and undeveloped. Still, they were far from unknown, as Milman Parry’s
groundbreaking research establishing the basic characteristics of oral composition and oral culture
took place during the 1920s and 1930s, at the same time that Korzybski was writing Manhood of
Humanity and Science and Sanity.32 And Innis had the benefit of a brief but fruitful exposure to
the renowned classicist Eric Havelock, before Havelock left Toronto for Yale University.33 Indeed,
it might be said that two fundamental and parallel discoveries occurred during this period, one
concerning the understanding of time in contrast to space, and the other in regard to the understanding
of sound in contrast to vision. The two go hand in hand, sound being a dynamic phenomenon, only
existing as it goes out of existence, so that it cannot give the illusion of stopping or otherwise
stepping outside of time in the way that vision does. Pause a video and you get a freeze frame,
but pause an audio recording and all you get is silence. The relationship between time and sound
perhaps sheds new light on the significance of Einstein’s violin playing, and certainly represents a
cornerstone of the media ecology perspective.
Sound being ephemeral, time-binding in oral cultures is entirely dependent on human memory,
not individual memory alone but collective memory. Moreover, memory is not a thing, not a
substance, but a form of energy, the activity of remembering; but more than that, memory is a
performance, an active process of commemoration.34 To be kept in collective memory, knowledge
becomes attached to dramatic narrative, conveyed in the form of extraordinary agents performing
remarkable actions, and typically expressed in mnemonic forms such as poetry, songs, and sayings.
The singer of tales in an oral culture, having no written text to study, does not have the concept of
verbatim memorization that we literates do, so that no two oral performances are alike; in fact, the
singer is quite willing to vary the performance to accommodate the situation, mood of the audience,
and other factors. The multiformity of oral performance is the key to the flexibility of oral tradition,
as the tradition being fluid can easily adapt to meet changing circumstances. 35
To give an example, the twelve tribes of ancient history are represented in the Bible by the twelve
sons of Jacob, each of whom carries the name and is presented as the ancestor of one of the tribes,
and this is a common motif in oral cultures. When the Assyrians destroyed the northern kingdom of
Israel, ten of the twelve tribes disappeared, their people presumably killed, enslaved, or assimilated.
But because the story was part of a written tradition, the ten lost tribes were not forgotten, and
Jews and Christians alike searched the world for them; upon the discovery of the New World,
some thought that the native Americans might be the descendants of the ten lost tribes. By way of
contrast, Jack Goody and Ian Watt relate the story of a West African people that told the tale of seven
brothers, each the ancestor of a neighboring tribe. 36 British researchers recorded this myth early in
the twentieth century, and no subsequent studies were carried out until sixty years later. During that
time, two of the tribes had disappeared, and the myth had changed accordingly, so that they now
told the story with only five brothers instead of seven. Not only was there no acknowledgement that
any change had occurred on the part of these peoples, but they insisted that this was the story that
they had always told. Goody and Watt refer to this characteristic of oral cultures as homeostatic, and
Walter Ong comments on this, saying “oral societies live very much in a present which keeps itself
in equilibrium or homeostasis by sloughing off memories which no longer have present relevance.”37
Underlying Ong’s point is the fact that oral cultures, lacking any storage medium outside of human
memory, practice economy in their time-binding, and only pass on what is needed for survival,
only what is functional and useful. Historical and biographical details do not need to be preserved,
especially if they are no longer relevant to the present. Oral societies are not bound by the weight
of history in the way that literate societies are, and we might consider how well-balanced the world
would be if all of its peoples would forget their historical conflicts, prejudices, and grievances.
Some time ago, a colleague told me that he was reading a book of ancient myths, and when I
asked what myths they were, he said they were the myths of the Australian aborigines. I responded
by noting that those myths could not be considered ancient, as they were only recorded a century or
two ago. It is an easy enough mistake to make. I well remember watching documentaries when I was
young that purported to be about a people ‘untouched by time’, whose way of life was ‘unchanged
since the dawn of time’. But how can anyone know how much has changed if there are no historical
records? What we do know is that homeostasis is not stasis, it is a dynamic equilibrium, evolving
not in the progressive sense that we are accustomed to, not by accumulating increasingly greater
amounts of knowledge, nor by making significant technological advancements, but simply by

adapting only as much as is needed to maintain a balance in response to changing circumstances.
As Ong puts it, oral cultures are “conservative or traditionalist,”38 their main concern is to hold onto
the knowledge that they already have, to maintain their precarious hold on whatever knowhow has
been working for them, and they therefore tend to reject innovation and novelty, and venerate the
wisdom of their elders.
Members of oral societies, therefore, live in the present, but they continually look to the past,
and value the past. They typically talk about a mythic golden age that they long to return to, a time
when the world was created, society was founded, a time of perfect unity and knowledge, like the
Biblical story of the Garden of Eden. According to Mircea Eliade, they find it relatively easy to
move from the profane time and space of everyday life to a sacred time and space, one that connects
directly to that moment or era of creation and foundation.39 The shift is accomplished through ritual,
which is a dramatic reenactment of action that occurred during that golden age; oral performance
becomes a ritual drama, and mimesis a form of communion. In this sense, oral cultures are certainly
pre-scientific, and also pre-historical, and myth as the content of oral tradition is the functional
equivalent of science and history. And my intent is not to suggest that there is something desirable
about being pre-scientific and pre-historical, nor do I want to romanticize oral societies. But I do
think it important to acknowledge that they represent an ideal of balance that we find both valuable
and elusive, and that it is that characteristic of flexibility and homeostasis that Innis was hoping to
see restored, rather than a wholesale return to tribalism.
What was it then that pushed us out of balance? It was a complex set of factors that includes the
agricultural revolution, the creation of stable settlements culminating in the creation of cities, the
institution of complex social hierarchies leading to the establishment of a king and ruling class, the
introduction of some form of economic system that accounts for trade and taxation, the appearance
of some kind of organized religion that includes temples and priests, and more. But all of these
different, disparate elements are all bound up with and bound together by systems of communication,
specifically by systems of notation, and ultimately by the revolutionary innovation in communication
that we call writing. Writing gave us a means to store knowledge outside of human memory, and
Korzybski recognized that writing was a necessary prerequisite for a truly progressive form of time-
binding. But writing also froze language in a relatively permanent form, replacing the flexibility of
oral tradition with the rigidity of the fixed text. Homeostasis became harder to achieve after words
begun to be written in stone. And it was especially when writing was preserved by durable media
such as stone, clay tablets, and the parchment codex, that the past stopped serving the present, and
the present became the servant of the past. This unhealthy fixation with the past is what Innis meant
when he wrote about time-biased cultures.40
On this point, I differ with Carey and others who have ventured interpretations of Innis’s
dialectical approach, as I would argue that Innis did not intend to categorize homeostatic oral
cultures as time-biased. Time bias implies a society that is unbalanced, that exhibits an unhealthy
obsession with preserving the past and maintaining the status quo. And time bias implies a society
that is dominated by some form of organized religion. The word religion itself is worthy of some
attention, in that it is commonly said to have been derived from the Latin word for binding, implying
a binding of human beings to the gods or God, a binding covenant expressed through ritual and
dogma, a binding together of a congregation, and also, I think we can say, a binding of time. But no
one is entirely sure of the origin of this word, and Cicero argued for a different derivation, one in
which the root meaning of religion is to reread, to read again. 41 Following Cicero’s lead, I would
suggest that tribal cults turn into organized religions when their rituals are written down, when
the oral performance of ritual drama becomes a rereading of a written text, when the flexibility of
ritual rooted in oral tradition becomes fixed in writing. And myth become religion when a changing
repertoire of songs and stories featuring supernatural agents are written down and canonized as a
sacred text, formalized and frozen, and preserved with great care, often guarded and controlled by a
priestly class. Complex writing systems, such as cuneiform and hieroglyphics, and texts written in
archaic or dead languages, help to enforce priestly monopolies of knowledge, to use the economic
metaphor that Innis introduced.42 And control over texts in turn facilitates priestly control over
sacred time, ending easy access to spiritual communion for the rest of the population.
Goody explains that the introduction of a sacred text transforms religious experience from a loose
set of spiritual practices and beliefs, one that is fluid and flexible, to a set doctrine to which all must
adhere. 43 With the sacred text, a line is drawn between adherents who are members of the religious
grouping and all the rest who are unbelievers and infidels; religion becomes an either/or affair, as
in either you swear allegiance on and to the text and all that it contains, or you are an outsider, and
if you are a member of one religion, you cannot be a member of another at the same time. With a
sacred text, conversion becomes conceivable, and so do orthodoxy, fundamentalism, and heresy.
Concrete images of the supernatural, in which the sacred is immanent, permeating the environment
and surrounding us, give way to abstract conceptions in which the supernatural becomes distanced
and transcendent, moving from the earth and water to a mountain top, from a mountain top to the
sky, and from the sky to God knows where. As Innis notes, writing opens the door to monotheism,
but even the polytheism of the Greeks and Romans becomes increasingly more abstract with literacy.
With all this in mind, I would take the position that the term ‘religion’ is best reserved for systems
of belief and practice that are associated with writing, that the myths and rituals, and the cults and
spirituality of oral cultures do not constitute the specialized institutions and coherent belief systems,
bounded and binding, that we define as religion.
Given that the introduction of writing knocks cultures out of balance, innovations in writing
technology can be seen as an attempt to restore that balance. One example would be the introduction
of lightweight and transportable writing surfaces such as papyrus and paper, to offset the heavy
media of stone, clay tablets, wood, and parchment. Such light media allow for a reliable means of
sending messages back and forth over distances, and serve the administrative needs of the king and
government, while also being useful for trade and commerce. Even more significantly, all media that
facilitate communication over space are inherently military technologies, the contemporary phrase
used for such functions being command and control. In this way, such new forms of writing allow
for the growth of secular sectors of society, and make it possible for societies to expand beyond local
territories, into kingdoms and empires. This then results in a new kind of imbalance, as the pendulum
shifts to the other extreme, and we get the kind of culture that Innis referred to as space-biased.
Time remains an important consideration, however, but the need for preservation and durability
is replaced by an interest in speed and transportation. Control also requires coordination and
synchronization, which can best be achieved by systems of time-keeping and time-telling, such as the
calendar in the ancient world, and the mechanical clock in medieval Europe.44 These technologies,
which are based on writing and reading, break time down into homogenous units, years, days,
hours, and as a consequence our experience of time changes. Edward T. Hall notes that traditional
societies (e.g., oral cultures) are polychromic; members of such cultures see time as heterogeneous,
continuous and unstructured in character, and they consequently treat time in a way that is flexible
and open to what we call multitasking.45 Calendars and clocks move cultures in the direction of the
monochronic, in which time is experienced as homogenous, uniform, and repeatable, linear and
punctuated, so that punctuality is valued, and a focused, one-thing-at-a-time approach is common.
Monochronic cultures reduce the experience of sacred time down to infrequent special occasions,
holiday celebrations, while opening the door to the modern metaphor of time as money.46 This
ultimately leads to our contemporary notions of a 24/7, and 24/7/365 lifestyle.
Light and easy to use writing surfaces also facilitate copying, which not only undermines the
time-bias of heavy media, but also restores some of the flexibility of oral tradition, since copying
was rarely free from error, and scribes rarely concerned with exact duplication of documents.
Another set of innovations that served to counter time biases were the simplifications of complex
writing systems, such as the shift from cuneiform and hieroglyphics to phonetic writing systems,
including the alphabet. This in turn led to the mechanization of writing through the invention of
the printing press with moveable type, and the mass production and distribution of written works
gave a great boost to the nascent space bias of Renaissance Europe. Ironically, however fragile
and perishable each individual copy might be, the production and diffusion of multiple copies of
the same text was more effective at preserving knowledge over time than the creation of a single
copy in a highly durable medium, as Elizabeth Eisenstein makes clear.47 But the social impact was
to undermine the time bias associated with the medieval manuscript, and break the monopoly of
knowledge that the church held, which was based on its ownership and scribal copying of parchment
manuscripts; the printing of works in contemporary vernaculars, rather than Latin and other
learned languages, which printers did to increase their markets, further contributed to this process.
48
All of these developments served to democratize writing and reading, and thereby disrupt pre-
existing religious, political, and social hierarchies. This in turn led to the growth of scholarship,
the critical examination of existing traditions, and the growth of knowledge. Robert Logan in his
McLuhan-inspired work, The Alphabet Effect, has shown how alphabetic writing in particular was
intimately linked to the growth of science in western culture, through its particular ability to facilitate
logical thinking, analysis, and classification; these effects take hold especially after alphabetic
writing was amplified by typography.49
The technologies of written communication, then, underlie both the conquest of nature and
the conquest of peoples. Marxist critics have long noted the relationship between empiricism and
imperialism, but were unable to explain the connection adequately — there is something more at
work here than some conspiracy on the part of the bourgeoisie. We can understand the idea of
progress in science and technology best by understanding that it is a spatial metaphor, the root
meaning of progress being travel across territory. The very idea of progress over time originates
as a by-product of a space-biased culture, and this amounts to a shift in time consciousness. Oral
cultures look backwards to the past for legitimacy, for archetypes and models, and long to return to
the moment of creation, a golden age, or at least recover the lost knowledge of their ancestors. But
the introduction of writing, especially when coupled with a bias towards space gradually results
in turn away from the past and towards the future, as embodied in the idea of progress. The belief
is that things are getting better over time, the present is superior to the past, and the best is yet to
come.50 People look forward to the future, longing for what is yet to come, whether it is imagined as
a progression continuing on indefinitely, or as reaching an end state of utopia. The word old becomes
a term of derision, and in the print era, readers turn their attention to two new literary forms, the
novel, and the news. Perhaps the conceptual shift is best summed up the change in the meaning of
the word original, which once only meant the first and oldest, coming from the moment of origin in
the past, and has also come to mean the newest, most innovative, most cutting edge, or better yet,
bleeding edge.
The spatial imbalance associated with the Egyptian, Alexandrian and Roman empires in
the antiquity, later moved to the Mohammedan and Mongolian empires of the east, and then
manifested in the commercialism, colonialism, and industrialism of modern Europe and America.
Innis was profoundly concerned with the continued intensification of our space bias brought on
by the application of electricity to communications, in the form of the telegraph, telephone, and
broadcasting, which enabled us to engage in instantaneous communication over great distances. But
he also held out some hope that an acoustic medium like radio might restore some semblance of the
oral tradition, and thereby help to restore balance to western societies.51
James Carey insisted that we can only understand people in the context of their particular time
and place. And we can see in both Innis and Korzybski an attempt to respond to the terrible events
of the twentieth century, which included the First World War, the Great Depression, the Second
World War, the atom bomb, and the cold war, as well as the rise of propaganda and mass persuasion,
including advertising and public relations, and the dominance of mass communication and mass
culture. Can anyone blame them for hoping that it might be time, at last, for us to enter a new era of
sanity and balance?
Of course, it is easy enough for us to say, some sixty years later, that Korzybski and Innis were
wrong, that the kinds of changes that they envisioned never came to pass. But perhaps it would be
more accurate to say that the changes did come to pass, only not in the way that they had hoped
for. Korzybski’s dream of a scientific society is not a reality; but Einstein’s Theory of Relativity,
along with Heisenberg’s Uncertainty Principle are the cornerstones of what has been termed the
postmodern condition, with its cultural and moral relativism. And while we ourselves may not be
more rational today than we were a century ago, we live in a society guided by the rational principle
of efficiency, the cornerstone of what Neil Postman referred to as technopoly, the surrender of culture
to technology.52 And we turn increasingly greater portions of our affairs over to that supreme engine
of mathematical action, the computer. Where Korzybski wanted us to be better human beings, we
have instead been taking the human element out of the equation, and automating the process. Rather
than entering a mature phase, an adulthood of humanity, we seem to find ourselves in a new form
of infancy.
And despite Innis’s hopes, oral traditions seem more distant than ever before in the age of
television and the internet. We have experienced a continued growth in sonic technologies, however,
which Ong termed secondary orality to emphasize their distinction from the primary orality of oral
cultures.53 McLuhan, spoke about a retrieval of acoustic space, but that amounts to an embrace of
nonlinearity and subjectivity, rather than a retrieval of memory and dialogue. McLuhan also talked
about retribalization and the global village, but again this represents something quite different from
preliterate tribalism and village life, as it involves instantaneous global telecommunications.54 We
have found a new kind of interactivity made possible by computer-mediated communication, social
networking, and social media, and this does seem to provide us with a form of communication
that resembles orality in certain respects. But are a series of updates and comments on Facebook,
MySpace, and Twitter the equivalent of oral dialogue? Does blogging take the place of epic poetry
and public address? Can online groups and bulletin boards replace communities where individuals
must cooperate out of necessity, in response to the requirements of material reality? Does the
ephemeral nature of electronic communications, with websites and people’s profiles vanishing
overnight, provide us with the continuity that we so desperately need?
In one sense, electronic surveillance, and data collection and storage, present us with the
possibility of balancing the space bias of western societies with a new form of time-binding, one
so thorough and complete that it has been dubbed total recall. 55 Does this go so far as to threaten
us with a return to a time-biased way of life, one that would support and encourage the various
fundamentalist and theocratic movements in existence today? Digital data bases are easy enough
to alter, it is important to note, and such alterations can be difficult if not impossible to detect. In
this way, digitality does restore some of the flexibility of orality, and perhaps offer some promise
for restoring homeostasis. Would Innis be encouraged? I suspect not, because contemporary digital
alterations are not kept in check by a conservative or traditionalist worldview, and therefore are open
to relentless revisionism, a kind of temporal anarchy. If there is potential for homeostasis here, it is
a dystopian balance where again we find that the human element has been removed. The flexibility
of oral tradition is based on the medium of human memory, the basis of human knowledge, for as
Ong reminds us, “you know what you can recall,”56 and as Fraser argues, computers do not really
remember anything.
Where oral cultures naturally look to the past and literate cultures have the potential to turn
around and look towards the future, our electronic culture seems to be fixated on the present. The
instantaneity of telecommunications communicates to us in the present tense. Even when the content
is a recording or film, the broadcast signal creates the message in the present, and there is always the
possibility of someone interrupting the broadcast to bring us a special message.57 We are plugged
in, tuned in, our nervous systems “extended in a global embrace,” as McLuhan puts it. 58 We are
consequently impatient, intolerant of delays of even the slightest measure, as we live in what Jeremy
Rifkin refers to as a nanosecond culture. 59 With electronic updates transmitted online and onto
mobile devices, it is not surprising to hear students say: You mean you want me to pay to read on
paper what I can get for free on the internet, and you want me to pay for yesterday’s news? We thrive
on the live, the up-to-the-minute, the on-demand, the just-in-time. And our popular culture, popular
psychotherapies, and popular spiritualities constantly advise us to live in the moment. While there
is some utility to this advice, it is repeated over and over as if it is some kind of cosmic revelation,
rather than a widely shared common sense assumption that is never called into question anymore.
Carpe diem! Seize the day! Or so says Robin Williams in the 1989 film, The Dead Poets Society,
which is presented to us as a model of what schooling ought to be like, contradicting centuries of
our best time-binding efforts.
Our present-centeredness is more than a matter of the immediacy of electronic transmission and
being online all the time, however, as we have also sought to bring the past and the future under
the control of the present. Our sense of the past has previously been governed by narrative, whether
it was the episodic storytelling associated with oral myth, or the linear accounts of written history.
With digitality, the database substitutes for the narrative, 60 and we are left with a discontinuous set
of images, audio and video clips, nostalgic anecdotes, and fragmented historical documents, archival
materials, and museum pieces, all randomly accessible, but lacking in coherent order, context or
explanations, let alone detailed chronology. In giving us total recall, the digital database produces
information overload, and in giving us a highly flexible form of time-binding, the digital database
turns historical fact into a matter of personal opinion. We can individually construct the past as we
see fit, just as we can construct our own personal newsfeeds and readers and newspapers on the web,
and our own playlists for digital music, and just as we construct our own story out of the multitude
of possibilities in a hypertext and a computer game.
We have also blurred the once-clear distinction between a performance and its recording through
the use of computer programming. A program does not play back a performance, it is itself a performer,
producing an automated performance.61 Each performance is a new ‘live’ performance, but one that
was constructed in the past, and each performance is identical to very previous performance, and
every performance that will be repeated afterwards. The programmed performance brings the past
into the present not as a recorded artifact, but as an event newly recreated in each iteration. This not
only brings the past but also the future into the present. The program is an attempt to colonize the
future on the part of the present. 62 Programming the future should not be confused with planning for
the future, which is what we did when we were forward-looking. Planning involves contingencies
and uncertainties, hence Robert Burns famous lines from his poem, “To a Mouse,” that “the best laid
schemes o’ mice an’ men, Gang aft agley,” and hence the Yiddish proverb, “mentsch tracht, Gott
lacht,” which is typically translated as “man plans, and God laughs,” not to mention John Lennon’s
poignant lyrics from the album he released shortly before his assassination, “life is what happens
to you while you’re busy making other plans.” Without a doubt, our children know the difference
between making plans to play after school, and the kinds of programmed afternoon activities that
they often are involved in. Programming is not so much about progress as it is about controlling the
future, not so much about continuity as it is about uniformity and eliminating uncertainty. While
the Long Now Foundation’s goals are commendable, their choice of name is symptomatic of our
contemporary form of time-binding. We live in a long now that extends far into our past and that we
are trying to extend far into our future. But the problem with programming the future, as opposed to
planning for it, is that programming is an attempt to eliminate human judgment, to bring the future
into the present by means of hyperrationality, as we bring the past into the present by means of
hyperreality.
The very term postmodern reflects our inability to come to terms with the future as future, which
is entirely dependent on an understanding of the past as history, and as prologue, as the words that
have come before. Postmodern is not a word of explanation, it is an expression of the temporal
confusion brought on by our present-centeredness. This same temporal confusion is reflected in the
Terminator movies and television series, with its time-loop paradox that defies logical analysis. It
is reflected as well in movies such as Memento, and generally in all the narratives where memory,
identity, and reality are called into question, including the Matrix and its sequels, The Bourne Identity
and its sequels, Pleasantville, The Truman Show, A Beautiful Mind, Dark City, Blade Runner, and
of course, Total Recall. The list is quite extensive, including recent television series such as Life on
Mars, Journeyman, and FlashForward, and also includes movies where the future and the present
blur together like Minority Report, and Premonition. In one sense, we have created a new kind of
sacred time, a present in which all times past and future intersect. In another sense, we have created
a completely profane time, 24/7/365, and entirely uniform. The distinction between sacred and
profane time is dependent on maintaining some vestige of polychronic culture, however, and cannot
be sustained in our monochronic society of the long now. In losing our sacred time, we are losing
our much-needed Sabbaths, losing our opportunities for rest and reflection. And so we find that we
are losing the distinctions between night and day, between the seasons, and that we are losing our
past and our future. If time is a form of energy, then time itself is subject to time’s arrow, is subject
to entropy, the loss of quality, and this loss of quality time amounts to a loss of differentiation of
time, a descent into a maelstrom of temporal chaos; rather than the heat death of the universe, it is
the time death of humanity.
Having said all that, I do not believe that all is lost. Although Korzybski’s dream of training
people to think and act with enhanced rationality never quite materialized, I do think we have
seen great success in the effort to combat the irrationality of stereotyping and prejudice, an area
where Korzybski’s program of general semantics has made significant contributions. And while we
have yet to achieve the flexibility and balance that Innis valued, we have become more concerned
with homeostasis, more ecologically minded, in many ways, especially in regard to the natural
environment. There is no question that we still need to make much more progress in these areas, but
following the advice of Wendell Johnson, we also need to recognize and celebrate the progress that
we have achieved.63
Korzybski and Innis represent different concepts of time, different positions on how human beings
ought to relate to time, but they are in many ways quite complementary. Korzybski valued progress,
and I have argued that we need to retrieve and reclaim that word, and stop feeling embarrassed about
using it. We have made great progress, and not just in science and technology, and we ought to feel
good about how we have made things better, at least in certain ways. But we have to bring back the
idea of progress in the holistic sense that Korzybski asked for, not as applying to specialized sectors
of society relating to science and technology. We have to insist that it can only be called progress
if it includes social, political, and economic progress, and moral, ethical, and ecological progress.
At the same time that we need to move forward, we need to regain and then maintain our balance.
We need a balance between progress and continuity, between the individual and the community,
between the profane and the sacred, between science and religion, between technology and ecology,
between space and time. We need to put an end to the tyranny of the now, which means that we have
to actively counter the biases of our contemporary electronic media environment, following what
Postman argued was the thermostatic function that schools ought to be carrying out in order to help
us find a measure of homeostasis.64
That means that we need to teach history as a coherent narrative, or set of narratives, narratives
that help to contextualize the present, that show the progress and the backtracking, the discoveries
and the errors, the good and the evil, so that we can understand ourselves, as a species, in time;
and this includes the history of communication, and the arts, the religions, the philosophies, and
the sciences and technologies. And we need to teach the history of the future, and the future of the
future, futurism not as being about entrepreneurial efforts and the introduction of new products, but
about planning and conserving, about preserving and preparing for the generations to come, about
achieving and maintaining sustainability, about pondering the impact and effects of innovations, and
the fact that change is always unpredictable and needs to be approached with great care. The past and
the future need to be in balance with one another, with the present serving as an appropriate fulcrum
between the two. And we need to make our time balance on a human scale.
We exist only because we are riding on that Big Bang that happened some fourteen billion years
ago. We are alive because we are riding on a second big bang that occurred about four billion years
ago on this planet, the origin of life. And we are here to talk about it because we are riding on a third
big bang that occurred maybe forty thousand years ago or so, the origin of language. As a species,
we are binders of time, bound up by our biases of time; we are moved by our consciousness of time,
as we tell time, and as we tell ourselves that only time will tell; as we play for time, and as we pray,
as we pray for time.
NOTES AND REFERENCES

1. Stephen W. Hawking, A Brief History of Time (Revised Edition). (New York: Bantam Books, 1998).
2. Marshall McLuhan and Quentin Fiore, The Medium is the Massage: An Inventory of Effects. (Corte
Madera, CA: Gingko Press, 1967).
3. Walter J. Ong, Orality and Literacy: The Technologizing of the Word. (London: Routledge, 1982), p. 32.
4. Marshall McLuhan, Understanding Media: The Extensions of Man (Critical Edition, W. T. Gordon, Ed.).
(Corte Madera, CA: Gingko Press, 2003).
5. James W. Carey, Communication as Culture: Essays on Media and Society. (Boston: Unwin Hyman,
1989), pp. 160-161.
6. Harold A. Innis, The Bias of Communication. (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1951).
7. Alfred Korzybski, Manhood of Humanity (2nd Edition). (Lakeville, CT: The International Non-Aristotelian
Library/Institute of General Semantics, 1950).
8. Alfred Korzybski, Science and Sanity: An Introduction to Non-Aristotelian Systems and General Semantics
(5th ed.). (Englewood, NJ: The International Non-Aristotelian Library/Institute of General Semantics,
1993).
9. Richard Dawkins, The Selfish Gene. (London: Oxford University Press, 1989).
10. J. T. Fraser, Time, The Familiar Stranger. (Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 1987), p. 128.
11. Ibid, pp. 131-132
12. Ibid, p. 136
13. Ernest Becker, The Denial of Death. (New York: Free Press, 1973). See also The Birth and Death of
Meaning. (New York: Free Press, 1971).
14. Thomas S. Kuhn, The Structure of Scientific Revolutions (3rd Edition). (Chicago and London: University of
Chicago Press, 1996).
15. McLuhan, Understanding, op cit. See also Marshall McLuhan, The Gutenberg Galaxy: The Making of
Typographic Man. (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1962).
16. Korzybski, Manhood, op cit., pp. 116-117.
17. Ibid, p. 119
18. Ibid, p. 124
19. Thorstein Veblen, The Engineers and the Price System. (New York, B.W. Huebsch, 1921).
20. Lewis Mumford, Technics and Civilization. (New York: Harcourt Brace, 1934).
21. Korzybski, Science, op. cit.
22. See Edward Sapir, Language: An Introduction to the Study of Speech. (New York: Harcourt Brace
Jovanovich, 1921). See also Benjamin Lee Whorf, Language, Thought, and Reality. (Cambridge, MA:
MIT Press, 1956).
23. Fredric Jameson, Postmodernism, Or, the Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism. (Durham, NC: Duke
University Press, 1991).
24. Harold A. Innis, Empire and Communications (Revised Edition, M. Q. Innis, Ed.). (Toronto: University
of Toronto Press, 1972).
25. Innis, Bias, op. cit.
26. Harold A. Innis, Changing Concepts of Time. (Lanham, MD: Rowman & Littlefield, 1952).
27. Carey, op. cit.
28. Gregory Bateson, Steps to an Ecology of Mind: Collected Essays in Anthropology, Psychiatry, Evolution,
and Epistemology. (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1972).
29. Innis, Bias, op. cit., p. 190
30. Ibid, p., 191
31. Ibid, p, 4
32. See Milman Parry, The Making of Homeric Verse: The Collected Papers of Milman Parry (Adam Parry,
Ed.). (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1971).
33. See Eric A. Havelock, Preface to Plato. (Cambridge, MA: The Belknap Press of Harvard University Press,
1963).
34. Michael E. Hobart, and Zachary S. Schiffman, Information Ages: Literacy, Numeracy, and the Computer
Revolution. (Baltimore: John Hopkins University Press. 1998).
35. Albert B. Lord, The Singer of Tales. (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1960). See also Havelock,
op. cit., and Ong, op. cit.
36. Jack Goody and Ian Watt, “The Consequences of Literacy.” In Jack Goody (Ed.), Literacy in Traditional
Societies, pp. 27-68. (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1968).
37. Ong, op. cit., p. 46
38. Ibid, p. 41
39. Mircea Eliade, The Sacred and the Profane (Willard R. Trask, Trans.). (New York: Harvest/HBJ Books,
1959).
41. Marcus Tullius Cicero, The Nature of the Gods (Horace C. P. McGregor, Trans.). (Harmondsworth,
England: Penguin, 1972).
43. Jack Goody, The Logic of Writing and the Organization of Society. (Cambridge: Cambridge University
Press, 1986).
44. See Innis, Bias, op. cit., and Empire, op. cit., and Mumford, op. cit.
45. Edward T. Hall, The Dance of Life: The Other Dimension of Time. (Garden City: Anchor Press, 1983).
46. George Lakoff and Mark Johnson, Metaphors We Live By. (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1980).
47. Elizabeth L. Eisenstein. The Printing Press as an Agent of Change: Communications and Cultural
Transformations in Early Modern Europe, 2 vols. (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1979).
48. See Innis, Bias, op. cit., and Empire, op. cit.
49. Robert K. Logan, The Alphabet Effect: A Media Ecology Understanding of the Making of Western
Civilization (2nd Ed.). (Cresskill, NJ: Hampton Press, 2004).
50. Henry J. Perkinson, How Things Got Better: Speech, Writing, Printing, and Cultural Change. (Westport,
CT: Bergin & Garvey, 1995).
51. See Innis, Bias, op. cit. See also Innis, Changing, op. cit.
52. Neil Postman, Technopoly: The Surrender of Culture to Technology. (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1992).
53. Ong, op. cit.
54. McLuhan, Understanding, op. cit.
55. See Lance Strate, Cybertime. In Lance Strate, Ron Jacobson, & Stephanie G. Gibson (Eds.), Communication
and Cyberspace: Social Interaction in an Electronic Environment, (2nd Edition), pp. 361-387. (Cresskill,
NJ: Hampton Press, 2003).
56. Ong, op. cit., p. 33
57. Strate, op. cit.
58. McLuhan, Understanding, op. cit., p. 5
59. Jermey Rifkin, Time Wars: The Primary Conflict in Human History. (New York: H. Holt, 1987).
60. Lev Manovich, The Language of New Media. (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2001).
61. Steve Jones, Rock Formation: Music, Technology, and Mass Communication. (Newbury Park, CA: Sage,
1992).
62. Strate, op. cit.
63. Wendell Johnson, W. (1946). People in Quandaries: The Semantics of Personal Adjustment. (New York:
Harper & Row, 1946).
64. Neil Postman, Teaching as a Conserving Activity. (New York: Delacorte, 1979).
BALVANT PAREKH LECTURE SERIES
VI Balvant Parekh Memorial Lecture

Hans Ulrich Gumbrecht, Albert Guérard
Professor in Literature at Stanford University,
USA, spoke on “What Can Verse, Rhyme, Stanza
Do to a Text?” on 15 December 2017.
Balvant Parekh Distinguished Lectures
Raphael Cohen-Almagor, Chair in Politics at

the University of Hull, United Kingdom and
Director of the Middle East Study Group spoke on
“Multiculturalism in Liberal Democracies: The
Bounds of Intervention in Practices of Minority
Cultures” on 16 January 2018.
Bhikhu Parekh, Emeritus Professor at the

University of Hull and the University of
Westminster, UK delivered a lecture on “Is
Gandhi Still Relevant?” on 23 January 2018.
Craig Irvine, Academic Director the Narrative Medicine

Program at Columbia University, New York spoke on
“Merleau-Ponty and Medicine: Language, Creativity,
and the Body” on 16 March 2018.
FROM TIME-BINDING TO TIMES-BINDING TO CONSCIOUS

TIMES-BINDING
Milton Dawes
I
In becoming more awake to our natural ways of being; in being more awake to the kinds of
institutions, the ideas and policies we have inherited and ones we are creating in our times as
attitudinal and behavioral guides, we present ourselves with opportunities to critically evaluate
their potential benefits and dangers. In becoming more ‘conscious times-binders’, ‘we’ (present
generation) might more responsibly, critically evaluate and decide what is worth passing on. As
‘conscious times-binders’ with a heightened sense of responsibility to future generations, we might
become sensitive to the factor that what we pass on will be the foundations for the next generation
(in their turn) to responsibly critically evaluate, build on, and pass on to the next. In that manner we
might be contributing to a saner human world.
About Time-binding
“Among ‘humans’ the abstractions of high orders produced by others, as well as those produced
by oneself are stimuli to abstracting in still higher orders. Thus, in principle, each generation starts
where the former generation left off” (Science and Sanity 394). Without instructions or training we
build on (times-bind) and improve our abstractions — anything that ourselves and others (present
and long gone) have imagined, thought, spoken, and written about, explained, believed, built, did,
etc. We abstract (select-leave out-add to) from different frames of reference and create different
fields of explorations (high order abstractions): chemistry, physics, biology, mathematics, history,
anthropology, sociology, geology, geography, archaeology, philosophies, religions, works of art,
music, linguistics, general semantics, etc. Time-binding-abstracting is what we do — and cannot not
do. General Semantics is about making ourselves conscious of our usually non-conscious behaviors
and offers principles as tools we can use to help us do better. ‘Abstractions of high orders’ include
labels, names, definitions, generalizations, inferences, expectations, beliefs, feelings, insights,
habits, rules, policies, etc. – Abstractions of high orders constitute times-binding abstractions from
abstractions from abstractions…the earlier abstractions starting say at sensual experiences, objects,
etc., are ranked ‘lower order’ (lower, but not in terms of importance): Think of the seen, felt, smelled
object; the label orange; a particular type of orange; the label fruit, a health product, a particular
molecular configuration, and so on. Note that our higher order abstractions move us away from the
seen, felt, smelled thing.
We are natural times-binders but we are not naturally conscious of ourselves as times-binders.
Times-binding consciousness emerges, when we read about, hear about, and begin to notice for
ourselves our own times-binding behaviors; and develops when we habitually look for ways to
improve. Our identification with our language, culture, group, tribe (nation), professional and other
interests, and their related values, definitions, titles, and labels, etc., hinders us from discovering
ourselves as humans and times-binders. In being asleep to ourselves as times-binders we impede
our development as ‘habitual critical creative times-binding reflecting persons’ with higher levels
of times-binding intelligence enabling us to better understand broader and more complex situations.
With lots of conscious times-binding practice, we learn more about ourselves, and our times-binding
processes. We learn more and faster, and achieve some measure of ‘conscious times–binding
intelligence’. With persistence, we achieve a measure of ‘conscious times-binding excellence’—
an ongoing self-correcting mode of consciousness, learning, and living...not an easy journey…but
could be fun and rewarding for inquiring ‘minds’. Being natural times-binders, we generally do
quite well without any awareness of our times-binding behaviors; and can be quite successful in
our diverse projects, and our professional and other interests. But when personal, societal, national,
international and other relationships problems inevitably arise, we will find using general semantics
times-binding tools to be quite effective and very reliable: Especially so when with curious, creative,
inquiring minds, when we are concerned to develop ourselves and expand our horizons—and not
satisfied with easy, simple answers, we seek insights into the bigger picture and deeper issues: and
when we feel urges that Bernard Lonergan, S.J. calls ‘an unrestricted disinterested desire to know’—
an insatiable desire to know, to know more, and better — for no other reason than just to know.
Through natural times-binding we have accomplished a great deal in terms of benefits to
humanity through expansion of our knowledge and understanding…although we have gained much
more knowledge of the ‘outer’ world than of our ‘inner’ world. Through natural times-binding,
with no conscious times-binding ethical restraint, we have also created a great deal of harmful and
destructive anti-times-binding technologies (our use of ‘smart’ bombs, and other weapons of war). To
improve our human relationships (including relationships with ourselves); to at least attempt to keep
up with accelerated times-bindings changes due to increase and advance in technologies, we have
to strive (struggle in opposition) towards achieving higher levels of times-binding intelligence —
a way towards progress and sanity in our personal, societal, and international affairs. In striving for
conscious times-binding excellence, we start from a heuristic base: We do what we do to discover
what we are doing; to learn from what we are doing so we can do better what we are doing…We
treat failure as success in being awaken to what not to do next times. We wake ourselves up to
appreciate the many opportunities to apply general semantics principles towards realizing our times-
binding potentials and development. We accept and behaviorally value and appreciate ‘a conscious
times-binding human ethics’: An ethics based on ‘being’ ‘conscious of abstracting’ — using general
semantics times-binding principles-tools to modify our self-sabotaging, self-harassing attitudes and
ways of thinking and ‘behaving’; and to restrain and guide our often self-destructive behaviors. In
accepting conscious times–binding ethics, we value and appreciate how much we owe to earlier and
present times-binders; and recognize our responsibility to ‘present’ and ‘future’ times-binders. To
this I add Bernard Lonergan’s ‘good of order’: “It consists in an intelligible pattern of relationships
that condition the fulfillment of each man’s desires by his contribution to the fulfillment of the desires
of others and, similarly, protect each from the object of his fears in the measure he contributes to
warding off the objects feared by others” (Insight 213). A social order where “…both taking care
of oneself and contributing to the well-being of others have their legitimate place and necessary
function.…” (Insight 219)
We are Not Our Names or Titles

In Manhood of Humanity, Alfred Korzybski proposes that the way we are defined, the way
we define and label ourselves, influence our general attitudes, our thinking, feelings, values,
From Time-binding to Times-binding to Conscious Times-binding 51
and behaviors. And so, based on observable characteristics, he defines us humans as “a natural
time-binding class of life.” Times-binding is something we do: We have a natural ability to learn
from, build on and improve (not just copy) what we have learned from ourselves, others, and our
environments. We are times-binding when we imagine or think of other ways to understand, talk
about or do something; when we review, revise, and refine an explanation, a letter, an idea, an
opinion, a feeling; when we wake-up ourselves from seeing to observing, from hearing to listening,
from thinking to reflecting — to reflecting on our reflections, from knowing to understanding; from
believing to researching…In building on earlier ‘happenings’, our times-bindings implicitly involve
the general semantics principles of ‘non-allness’ and ‘non-identity’: Becoming aware that there are
other ways of thinking about, interpreting, reacting to, doing things, adjusting to change, and so on,
we eventually come to appreciate times-binding as a critical, creative, and generally an effective
way towards progress in any area. Times-binding from the musical “Annie Get Your Gun,” we could
adopt as a times-binding refrain: Anything I can do I can do better: I can do anything better than me.
General Semantics
General Semantics constitutes a times-binding system of interrelated principles — generalizations
of the method and approach of science and mathematics as models of human thinking at its best
(best in terms of predictability): We can use general semantics principles as semantic alarms to
wake ourselves up to the fact that we are not our thoughts, feelings, ideas, ideals, ideologies, titles,
self-image, attitudes, professions, beliefs, opinions, knowledge, etc.; and that our thoughts, feelings,
opinions, knowledge etc., are quite different from (not identical with, not the same as) what they
are about. Like other tools, just writing or talking about them, celebrating or criticizing them might
add to our philosophies, ideologies, and opinions. But to gain higher levels of understanding,
advancement or progress in our human affairs, these tools, have to be used in order to discover their
limits and potentials. And it’s our moral responsibility to evaluate their usefulness, effectiveness,
and value before exposing them to future generations.
From “Time-binding” to “Times-binding”

We can modify (‘times-bind’) Korzybski’s definition of humans from ‘a natural time-binding
class of life’ to ‘a natural times-binding class of life’ based on the following arguments: The time-
binding process is not instantaneous…it goes on over a set of clock times (from clock-time ‘x’
through clock times ‘x’+ to clock time ‘y’: The duration of a happening from which we abstract-
time-bind, and our reviewings, revisings, refinings, and building on such happening, occur over
different ‘intervals of duration’ (set of clock-times—however small.) Two clock-times based on
different ‘intervals of duration’, and involving different happenings, are not identical. We don’t call
two different friends ‘friend’, or two books, ‘book’. From these considerations ‘Times-binding’
seems to me more accurately descriptive than ‘time-binding’. With the notion ‘times’ we might
also avoid the usual controversies involving ‘What is time?’ The beginning and end of time: Time
flowing: Managing time: Slowing down of time: Time travel (which we do anyway whenever we
move), etc.
Our Human World: A Function of Our Times-Bindings

We times-bind naturally — but we are not naturally conscious of our times-binding. Present
world situations (political, economic, artistic, religious, scientific, international conflicts, terrorism,
creative and technological accomplishments, destructive activities, etc.) result from our natural
times-binding behaviors — unrestrained by ‘conscious times-binding ethics’: An ethics where we
value and appreciate how much we owe to earlier and present times-binders; and recognize and value
our responsibility to ‘present’ and ‘future’ times-binders. An ethics based on ‘being’ ‘conscious that
we abstract’ as a way to re-train and restrain our often ‘unsane’ and destructive behaviors; and a way
towards achieving higher levels of times-binding-intelligent behaviors. To help ourselves improve,
progress in our relationships, and do better (no matter what), we need to wake up ourselves, be more
attentive, and become more conscious times-binders. Becoming conscious of our natural times-
binding behaviors, we can time-bindingly improve on those natural, spontaneous, sometimes harmful
and destructive behaviors towards becoming more intelligent, wiser, and saner human beings.
Natural Abstracting-Times-Binding
Natural times-binding like abstracting, being natural, needs no training: But in being more
aware of what we are doing — and how, we can catch ourselves and develop ‘conscious-times-
binding habits’. Language and symbol use accelerate and extend — but are not necessary for natural
abstracting-times-binding. (Watch little toddlers playing and learning to do things by themselves:
Observe yourself revising an idea, working at doing something better: Learning, observing, and
revising are not words.) There could be times-binding lapse (as some claim) but in terms of ‘infinite
valued maximum probability’ this is hardly likely — not with billions of times-binding humans.
Considering ‘times-binding’ as ‘a special case of abstracting’: We are abstracting-times-binding
whenever we sense, imagine, think-feel, believe, understand, know, ‘say’, do, etc. And more so
when we realize that these abstracting-times-binding behaviors do not cover all, and are not the
things they are about (principles of ‘non-allness, non-identity, and non-elementalism’). We are
abstracting-times-binding when we are learning anything; reflecting on our beliefs; moving from
‘knowledge’ (awareness, acquaintance with ‘things’, objects, situations) to understanding (making
sense of, give meanings to, recognizing structural connections, etc.): abstracting-times-binding
when we discover we benefit in moving from seeing to looking, hearing to listening; seeing things,
objects, situations, etc., to seeing things in relationships; when we spot and correct a mistake, ask
a question or question an answer. We are abstracting-times-binding when we reflect on and seek to
improve our assumptions, opinions, judgments, decisions, and actions. We are abstracting-times-
binding when we realize that words by themselves do not have meanings—we give meanings.
(Some dictionaries remind us of this.) If words had meanings: Where in the word do we look for its
meanings? Could we look at any word in any language and know its meaning/s just by looking? We
are abstracting-times-binding when we remember to remove our fingers before we close the door;
remember not to hold hot coffee over our laps; when we recognize the green light as a ‘symbol’ —
not identify it as ‘a signal to go — without checking’; when we remember that we live in a world
of relationships: that there is no one cause with one effect; that behavior has consequences; that
actions will induce many reactions; that we are functions of each other, our environments, language,
culture, and of ‘the ‘past’…which has not all passed; when we become aware that “It is sometimes
easier to get into situations than get out.” We are abstracting-times-binding when we recognize
through science and our commonsense that there are goings on beyond what we sense (event
level —atoms, molecules, sub-atomic particles, attitudes, prejudices, biases, beliefs, values, etc.):
And probably most importantly: We are abstracting-times-binding when we think of ‘our’ ‘conscious
times-binding-abstracting behaviors’ as abstractions from the neural processes — which we call “the
unconscious.” Computers, smart phones, etc., by increasing the number and frequency of human
interactions, also increase the number and frequency of natural times-bindings: We can expect
more creative developments: But we need conscious times-binding ethics and consciousness of
abstracting as guides, to help us minimize a predictable related increase in the number, frequency,
and complexity of human problems resulting from natural times-binding. Many of the above
abstractions are from some of my own abstracting-conscious times-binding experiences. Catch
yourself and add some of your own.
II
Conscious Abstracting-Times-Binding: Highest Order of Abstracting?

We are consciously abstracting-times-binding when we consciously use general semantics
principles: date our opinions, theories, judgments, explanations, etc.; when we awaken ourselves
to consciously distinguish between what we sense, and our imagining, words, labels, descriptions,
definitions, assumptions, generalizations, theories, beliefs, opinions, etc.; about what we sensed. We
can catch ourselves being conscious of abstracting, using a general semantics principle, engaged
in ‘high order abstracting’, etc., and recognize these experiences as ‘instances of conscious times-
binding awareness’ before words or labels. The level of our ‘intelligences’ (however this is defined)
in any field, is a function of our time-binding activities. We can extend our intelligences through
increasing the frequency of our conscious times-binding activities. For myself, at this time, I think
of this as also a possible measure of one’s appropriation and integration of general semantics as a
system of interrelated principles: a system promoting conscious times-binding, and consciousness
of abstracting as antidotes to our natural, often ‘unsane’, harmful times-binding thinking, ideals,
‘idealogies’, institutions, policies, and behaviors; and a system that can be considered an improvement
and an advance beyond our usual ways of thinking and being human. Consciously applying general
semantics principles to modify our evaluations-attitudes-and-behaviors; non-elementalistically
recognizing ourselves as part of a fractal Universe, and that we tend to behave like our ‘relatives’,
could be among our “highest orders of abstracting.”
Conscious Times-Binding, Consciousness of Abstracting and ‘The Calculus’

“We see what we see because we miss all the finer details. Remembering this helps us not identify
what we ‘see’ as all there is to be seen” (Science and Sanity 376). “It (the calculus) is structurally
and semantically the ‘logic’ of sanity” (Science and Sanity 574). “The present work is also to a
large extent inspired by it…” “…teachers…should be at least acquainted with the rudiments of
the calculus” (Science and Sanity 575). “The ‘calculus’” as “a study of a continuous function
by following its development through indefinitely small steps” — generalized to finely tuned
awareness; and consciousness of abstracting — (also finely tuned awareness: remembering that
our abstracting does not include all (including ourselves)), can be closely related. ‘Consciousness
of abstracting’ a general semantics master principle refers to ‘a conscious times-binding mode of
consciousness’ where we recognize that in our imagining, sensing, thinking, feeling, experiencing,
deciding, explaining, understanding, knowing etc., we have selected, left out, and added our own
‘stuff’. I see both ‘the calculus’ and “consciousness of abstracting” as conscious times-binding
limits: We cannot evaluate or times-bind what we are not aware of — no matter how short lived.
‘The calculus’ involves variables, functions, differentiations and integrations — all aspects of our
sensing, feelings, judgments, expectations, evaluations, generalizations, etc. What we ‘see’, our
words, experiences, and even ourselves, can be seen and experienced from many points of viewing
(frames of reference, perspectives, etc.); can be given different meanings, significance, ‘values’,
etc. — and qualify as “semantic variables.” We cannot deal with everything (non-allness) — so
we differentiate: recognize differences, make distinctions, break things down to “simpler easier to
understand and deal with” structures. What we ‘see’ or experience, is also a function of (depends
on) our interests, how we look, our expectations, training, skills, cultural experiences, and so on. We
make connections, classify, have beliefs, give meanings and values...We integrate, but usually not
enough — and forgetting this, identify the little with the greater. We can avoid many conflicts and
disagreements in remembering the notions of variables, functions, and integrations. A conscious-
times-binding structuring of our times-binding activities helps us discover that ‘the past’ (previous
happenings) have not all passed. Their effects are what we now call ‘the present’. What we now
think of as ‘the future’ will be an uninterrupted continuation of ‘the present’, as ‘the present’ is
an uninterrupted continuation of the past’ — no ‘elementalistic’ (separating) gaps from ‘past’-to-
‘present’-to-‘future’: (fu =f(pres)…pres = f(past)) (function…depends on, related to). A conscious
times-binding recognition that with our present behaviors we are creating the foundations of our
possible ‘futures’ could help us think more clearly; be more conscious of our abstracting; be more
awake to our present actions; and take more responsibility for what we are doing ‘now’ that our
children and grandchildren will have to start from, and will very likely build on!
With finely tuned awareness we could discover for ourselves our natural times-binding
behavior — allowing us to make a times-binding semantic quantum leap from natural times-binding
to conscious times-binding: (As did an outstanding conscious times-binder Alfred Korzybski, the
creator of general semantics. (Read Bruce Kodish, Korzybski: A Biography).
Becoming awake to our natural times-binding behaviors allows us to make a times-binding
semantic quantum leap from natural times-binding and “gross mapping” to conscious times-binding
and more finely tuned awareness. The more closely we ‘observe’, listen, etc., (small steps) the more
distinctions we make; we see more in less times; we discover more relatedness, the more distinctions
and relations we awake to, the more reasonable our expectations, the better our structuring, our
judgments, and “map making” — the less stress we experience. Practicing conscious times-binding:
We do what we do to discover what we are doing; to learn about and learn from what we are doing —
so we can do better what we are doing. With a conscious times-binding approach we can consciously
times-bind from the times-binding refrain in “Annie get your gun” and sing: Anything I can do I can
do better — I can do anything better than me.
General Semantics, Science, Mathematics, Intelligence, and Times-Binding

The progress of science and mathematics has being achieved through very high levels of natural
times-binding activities involving strict adherence to rigorous reasoning, explicit and accepted
symbols, definitions, standards — and most importantly “times-binding revisions, and improvement
on earlier abstractions.” Other non-mathematical and non-scientific fields generally lack this level
of transparency, rigor, and discipline. Korzybski’s great conscious times-binding contribution to
improving our human welfare, was his conscious times-binding insight that we could learn from
the methods and approach of science and mathematics, how we could improve our ways of being
human. He developed general semantics (a system of interrelated principles) as generalizations of
the methods and approach of science and mathematics. These principles are “semantic tools” that
anyone can use to improve any area of their everyday and professional lives. We could think of our
‘intelligences’ as developments from abstracting, to times-binding, to conscious times-bindings,
and consciousness of abstracting. More consciousness of abstracting leads to higher levels of
intelligences: (Higher levels in the sense of intelligent use of our intelligences.)
A Major Challenge
As individuals in a society, unavoidably, we operate from different levels of times-binding
intelligence. Even our individual nervous systems operate at different levels of times-binding
development — We are better at some things than others. Differences in times-binding intelligence
arise from different cultural environments. Different beliefs, education, training, interests,
experiences, and other factors contribute to differences in the ways we think and feel about things, and
result in different evaluations, understanding, meanings, judgments, expectations, needs and values.
Different individuals and organizations (being different) will ‘see’ things from different visual and
semantic points of viewing — Consequently, our decisions and actions will unavoidably vary leading
to misunderstandings, breakdowns in our personal, societal and international relationships, conflicts,
rebellions, and wars. A worldwide educational paradigm involving conscious-time-binding ethics
and general semantics training could be very effective in term of racial progress. As individuals, we
can use general semantics tools for our own development. On a bigger scale: Could an organization
such as the ‘United’ Nations’ contribute to a better human world? Probably not—for the following
reasons (among others): Systems, organizations, institutions, groups, (individuals too) for their
own survival and structural integrity are self-protective. Differences in times-binding intelligences
among tribes (nations) with their different languages, histories, ways of thinking, traditional beliefs
and values, goals, economic development, internal political power struggles, etc. will result in strong
resistances to any attempt at a universal educational paradigm shift. Furthermore: The present level
of thinking, the languages, organizational structures and values of “The ‘United’ Nation” — brought
to the institution by ‘its’ members, are not noticeably different — have not advanced beyond the
level of thinking, self-promoting, and self-protecting values of the rest of the world. The United
Nations is of, and in the world, and behaves like the rest.
Progress in our human affairs and relationships (including relationships with ourselves) requires
us to wake up from-to many of our usual automatic, generally uncritical, identifying, sometimes
ineffective, and too often harmful attitudes and ways of thinking. Applications of general semantics
times-binding self-correcting principles have helped individuals to progress in many areas —
personal, professional, and others. And through our times-bindings (as a race) we have made
tremendous progress in many fields. As individuals we can work to become more awake to how our
ways of being contribute to our problems. But as a race, we face a major, probably insurmountable
problem: ‘It’ races along: ‘It’ has no conscious unified direction going. As individuals, we can
wake ourselves up and choose (or not) to use general semantics times-binding tools and Lonergan’s
transcendental notions to help us advance in an increasingly turbulent world. As individuals we can
decide: But the race is too big — too highly differentiated — too far gone in ‘its’ established and
traditional ways to make choices. And ‘it’ has no internal or external influence powerful enough to
wake ‘itself’ up.
A Radically Different Approach

Conscious times-binding on a times-binding insight from an earlier grand times-binder Albert
Einstein: ‘We humans will be unable to cope with the increasing number, or manage the increasing
complexity of the problems facing us, if we persist in thinking along the natural times-binding
lines that created these problems in the first place.’ ‘We’ have been struggling with our problems,
economic and other inequalities, criminal activities, conflicts, uprisings, rebellions, wars, etc.: We
have been generally non-consciously applying and supporting earlier natural times-binding analysis,
ideas, attitudes, policies, and approach — maintained and promoted by our institutions (private,
public, commercial, etc.). We have not yet become awake to the ineffectiveness of many of our
policies and approaches and reasons for this. Conscious times-binding, consciousness of abstracting,
a calculus approach, advanced conscious-times-binding general semantics evaluation and attitudinal
modifiers, offer a radically different approach, a radically other way of thinking, evaluating, relating,
resolving problems, making decisions, and behaving.
Presently, I think the human race is too highly differentiated — too many asymmetric relationships
(different languages, different values, different locations and environments, different interests and
concerns, different levels of natural times-binding and conscious times-binding intelligence, etc.) to
adopt, adapt to, or universally practice the unusual and radically different general semantics way of
thinking about things and thinking about our thinking. Many will resist this approach — not wanting
to be ‘slaves to an idea’ (I was once told this). It might be worthwhile exploring the following
hypotheses: We live in ‘fractal Universe’: Systems-structures (molecules, plants, animals, humans,
social, national, etc), to maintain their structural integrity and survive are ‘self-protective and self-
maintaining’ to varying degrees… following this, we can expect resistance to changes (which usually
bring unexpected disruptions and demanding requirements for adjustments). Resistance to changes
could be one reason why a general semantics approach is unlikely to be accepted generally. But for
anyone curious, wondering, seeking to make better sense of things, concerned with improvement,
betterment, progress, and seeking higher levels of satisfaction in their/our ways of being in the world:
General Semantics as generalized science and mathematics offers principles — evaluation tools,
attitudinal and behavioral modifiers that can be applied to make very big and important differences
in our living, to our knowledge and understanding of ourselves, others, and the world. Each one of
us contributes (however big or small our “semantic sphere of influence”) to the future of the race
and to a more insane or saner human world. Practicing conscious times-binding, each one of us can
become more attentive, more sensitive, and more responsible regarding what we are passing on to
present others, and for future generations to build on.
REFERENCES
Lonergan, Bernard. Insight: A Study of Human Understanding. London: Longmans, Green & Co. Ltd., 1957.
Print.
––. Method in Theology. New York: The Seabury Press, 1979. Print.
Kodish, Bruce. Korzybski: A Biography. Pasadena, CA: Extensional Publishing, 2011. Print.
Korzybski, Alfred. Manhood of Humanity (1921). Connecticut: The International Non-Aristotelian Library
Publishing Company, 1968. Print.
––. Science and Sanity (1933). Fort Worth, TX: Institute of General Semantics, 1994. Print.
(For elaborations on general semantics principles and applications, see articles at <miltondawes.com>)
ON TIME-BINDING
Corey Anton
No individual becomes human except within some socio-historical context. We grow into
ourselves only through resources that others provide: we come to self-conscious awareness through
a language that we ourselves did not invent, and each of us bears a name that, though an intimate
and often treasured possession, was given to us by others, commonly to commemorate a different
person, perhaps a relative who has passed away. Other people so enter into the inner precincts
of consciousness that we grow up with the sense of having always known our name; we do not
remember the day we first learned it, and our experience is one of knowing it as long as we have
known anything. What could be more obvious yet less appreciated than the fact that individuals,
through culture and language, transcend the surface of their bodies.
Humanity occupies a unique position. We are that part of nature which is most subject to its own
tampering and manipulation. We are the most plastic and open of all organisms. Alfred Korzybski
uses the word ‘time-binding’ to designate the place in nature occupied by humans, and he sets this
in contrast with the ‘space-binding’ of animals and the ‘chemistry-binding’ of plants (Korzybski,
2001; 2002; 2010). He thus identifies a natural hierarchy in which each new level incorporates and
includes the previous level but also brings new dimensions and dynamics.
There are some senses, then, in which binding time, for good or ill, is what people do. ‘Time-
binding’ means that individual can pick up where previous humans left off. It also means that people
can quite easily allow themselves to become entrenched in undesirable habits and institutions
(Anton and Peterson, 2015). In a word, people are open to forms of cultural shaping and historical
orientations that are more swift and flexible than genetically inherited characteristics selected by
environmental pressures. We are not genetically set for a single species-specific environment; nor
are we genetically fixed for diet and mating practices. Human have adapted, culturally, to live
everywhere on the globe, even to travel outside of the atmosphere and to land on the moon. Across
history and across the planet, we find countless variations in the ways that people enact what it
means to be human.
As the exemplar case, humans are born without an instinct to any particular language: there is no
‘human mother tongue’. If there is anything like a ‘language instinct’, it is an instinct to babble and
to experience reality symbolically, to be prepared and ready for cultural input and social pressures
(Langer, 1942). As family and community members verbally respond to the babbling baby, certain
sounds are repeated and phonemic units become solidified into the infant’s linguistic repertoire while
others fall out. Soon enough, without any formal instruction and pending no relevant disability,
children spontaneously acquire the mother tongue of those around them. During the early language
acquisition phase, children can learn multiple languages without accent, but additional languages
learned after this period can be made accent free only with great effort and training, often with limited
success. This well illustrates how people depend upon others to fall into historical consciousness,
i.e. to bind-time. And, note here, although language is ancient and learned from others, this does not
mean language is unnatural. On the contrary, it nicely discloses how humans are naturally social and
historical beings (Anton 2001). We are, as Korzybski suggests, the time-binding class of life.
We can further reveal some of the deep connections between biological development and cultural
practice — the degree to which human are naturally time-binders — by stressing again language’s
critical acquisition period. An infant’s growing brain requires the neuronal structuring facilitated by
language use, and, if it does not gain exposure to others and language by a certain age, the deprived
person will suffer life-long impairments.
Notice, now, how differently things stand with literacy. First and foremost, people do not
spontaneously, without formal instruction, become literate. Literacy must be taught, is often
a struggle, and some children never become literate, partly because it is a kind of evolutionary
deviance (Nystrom, 1978). Second, not to deny great advantages of fostering literate habits in early
childhood, some adults can become literate later in life. Finally, literacy opens people to history
and others in ways that the wholly oral word cannot. Literacy (and subsequent communications
technology) opens minds to gone-by possibilities that can be recovered and resurrected.
We need, then, if only for conceptual clarity, to differentiate between the history that lives on
through cultural perpetuation and social enactment (i.e. the living history we bear as the mode of our
self-consciousness) and the history that is stored and retrievable through careful study and strategic
appropriation (i.e., materials available through books, films, artifacts and museums). The distinction
between these two kinds of history is only analytic, because, in the organic give and take of life, the
two are deeply intertwined. For a simple illustration, note that when scholars meet for the first time,
among their initial questions for each other are: “What kind of work do you do?” “Who are your
major influences?” and “Who have you studied with?” Artists, too, commonly position their own
work by identifying influences and inspirations.
Humans are time-binders in at least two different ways. First, they are born highly malleable and
in need of culture and language in order to become themselves. People can develop into themselves
only within the lap of their socio-cultural mother. Second, individuals can understand such human
openness (i.e. time-binding), and accordingly, they can work to enable their own and others’ growth
and development. They also can, starting with themselves, try to prune culture from its undesirable
elements (brutality, superstition, dogma, etc.).
We are each other’s keepers. Knowing that we are stuck, for better or worse, in the role of partly
creating the conditions through which we become ourselves, the only sane response is to grow up
and face the task.
REFERENCES
Anton, C. & Peterson, V. V. “The Unbinding of Time: On Bureaucratic Counter-Productivity,” ETC: A Review
of General Semantics, 72: 3, pp. 248-257, 2015. Print.
Anton, C. Selfhood and Authenticity. Albany, NY: State University of New York Press, 2001. Print.
Korzybski, A. Manhood of Humanity. (2nd ed.). Brooklyn, NY: Institute of General Semantics, 2001. Print.
––. General Semantics Seminar 1937: Olivet College Lectures. (3rd Ed.). Brooklyn, NY: Institute of General
Semantics, 2002. Print.
––. Selections from Science and Sanity. (Revised Ed.). Fort Worth, TX: Institute of General Semantics. 2010.
Print.
Langer, S. K. Philosophy in a New Key: A Study in the Symbolism of Reason, Rite and Art. New York: Mentor
Books, 1942. Print.
Nystrom, C. “Literacy as Deviance,” ETC: A Review of General Semantics, 44: 2, pp. 111-115, 1987. Print.
RADICAL GENERAL SEMANTICS: WHAT STRANGE NEW

PHENOMENON IS THIS?
Gad Horowitz
Strike the Root

Actually, Radical General Semantics (rgs) is nothing new, not a new version of general semantics
(gs), not an improvement of gs, not something added to gs. Korzybski’s gs is already radical. By
adding the word ‘radical’ to gs we are reminding ourselves of this, making it clear and explicit,
especially for those of us who may have temporarily lost sight of it.
‘Radical’, of course, in this context, doesn’t indicate ‘extremism’; it means going to the root,
to the fundamental flaw in the deep grammar of our unsane civilization, what Andy Hilgartner
calls “the lethal fundamental error”1 — unconsciousness of abstraction — that is, identity-thinking,
identification of our perceptual-cognitive mappings of ‘what is going on’ (‘wigo’) with ‘reality’.
Korzybski would have liked this line from Henry David Thoreau: “There are one hundred
striking at the branches of evil to one who is striking at the root.”2 I would add that most if not all of
those hundred are striking at one another, rather than at the branches.
In Korzybski’s words, human civilization is “unsane,” characterized by “general infantilism…
founded on strife, fights, brute competitions, etc.” (Selections from Science and Sanity 2). It is
important to “understand the DEPTH (my emphasis) of the pending transition from the A system
to a…non-A3 system. This transition is much deeper than the change from…one A ‘ism’ to another
(Ibid 40).”
II
Theory-and-Practice
GS, that is, radical gs, is not just one more intellectual, ‘semantic’ pursuit. RGS emphasizes
the importance of neuro-semantic training in consciousness of abstraction. Korzybski saw gs as a
broadly human movement, potentially a mass movement, involving thinkers, scientists, etc. to be
sure, but also ordinary people from all walks of life, with a very special focus on neuro-semantic
training, especially of rising generations.
This movement would be very much concerned not only with the formulation and reformulation
of non-Aristotelian formulations, but especially with practice, continuous practice with the Structural
Differential, the devices, and attention to the ‘silent’ object level “where we live.” Theoretical
understanding of abstraction is good; even better is ‘knowing in your bones’, neuro-semantically,
that label is not object and object is not event. Non-Aristotelian theorizing is good; even better is
Korzybski’s “prized thalamo-cortical integration.” Of course, continuous practice is no guarantee.
Far from it. But at least one is WORKING at sanity in a way that goes deeper than ‘semantics’.
If one is a parent, it’s not radical to keep gs for oneself, neglecting to share and practice with
the children. There are a number of stories in ETC: A Review of General Semantics of the fifties
and sixties submitted by parents describing experiences with their children such as this one — I
paraphrase from memory — ‘My six year old daughter has a Structural Differential hanging on the
wall of her room. Her little friend visited yesterday and asked: What’s that hanging on the wall? My
daughter replied: What? (Today it would be ‘OMG!’) Have you never seen a Structural Differential
before?’
III
Self-Help and Civilizational Transformation

It’s not uncommon to relate to GS as if it were simply a system of ‘self-improvement’ aimed at
upgrading and fine-tuning individuals’ communication, critical thinking, problem solving skills etc.,
I am certainly not opposed to the use of chunks of GS as a way of assisting oneself and others to
cope better, live more sanely, perhaps even to flourish, within the parameters of the existing order
of things.
Korzybski himself spent many hundreds of hours working closely and fervently with individuals,
with individual problems. You can read about that in Bruce Kodish’s biography. Korzybski can
and should be counted among the founders of modern cognitive-behavioral psychotherapy. The
traces of Korzybski’s impact can easily be seen in the work of the master therapist from New York
City, Albert Ellis. He took one slice of GS: the doctrine of “logical fate” and with some help from
Stoic philosophy constructed a psychotherapy for individuals, empowering them to minimize their
neurotic misery by changing what they say to themselves. But he did not train them in consciousness
of abstraction. He never ascended to the dimension of humanity-as-a-whole. Here’s one of the main
differences between Ellis and Korzybski: Korzybski, even in his work with individuals, would not
have been capable of ignoring for even one moment that unsanity is not simply an ‘individual’
difficulty or deficit or ‘character flaw’. “There is no simple individual.”
IV
Speaking of Elementalism
Everybody knows — it’s just common sense — that every thing is constantly changing and that
every thing is affected by its contexts. It’s not radical to allow the date and chain index devices to do
nothing more than reinforce that common sense. GS, in other words, radical GS, must go farther. As
Alfred North Whitehead has pointed out, common sense takes ‘nature’ as composed of separate self-
identical entities, each one “simply located” in some here-and-now “without having any essential
reference to…. the lapse of time,” as if the lapse of time were “an accident rather than of the essence
of the material,” as if an entity ‘goes through changes’ while remaining ‘basically’ the same at some
illusory ‘core’. This is what Whitehead famously dubbed “the fallacy of simple location.” The GS
date device, deployed radically, as it should be, takes the “lapse of time” right down to the depths of
being. In Robert Pula’s formulation, not ‘things changing’ but ‘change thinging’.4
The best known GS device is without a doubt the index, which protects the unique individual
entity from disappearing into the categories, classifications, generalizations under which it is
subsumed, reduced to a mere instantiation or manifestation of a category. The chain index, which
was developed by Korzybski in the mid-1940s, is an essential supplement to the index, bringing
Radical General Semantics: What Strange New Phenomenon Is This? 61
“the environment directly into the definition of the thing.” In this way, the chain index prevent us
from mis-using the index elementalistically, mistaking the unique, indexed individual as a simple,
isolated entity, containing its existence within itself, as if it existed prior to its contexts and could
move or be moved from one context to another, being more or less ‘affected’ while remaining
somehow the ‘same’. Whatever is singular, unique, in other words nothing but itself, is what it is
only as the confluence of all its contexts, past and present, and, flip, it is the confluence of all its
contexts only as itself. RGS will neither reduce an entity to ‘nothing but’ its contexts, nor to a self-
identical entity which is more or less affected by its contexts while remaining free from context at
its illusory ‘core’. No no, says the chain index…the thing in a different context is no longer the same
thing. Similar perhaps, but not the same.
A provocative example is offered by Francis P. Chisholm in his Introductory Lectures on GS
(1945)5: The radio in your car on an open highway is not the same as the radio going under a
bridge — the radio cuts out, and not the same as the radio going under a high transmission wire — the
radio squeals. If car radios 2016 don’t behave this way, think instead of cellular phones in different
environments. Stubborn Aristotelians would like to think that there is a cellular phone in itself
which remains identical to itself while functioning differently in different contexts. But everything
is function. There is no “it” apart from context which “has” different functions in different contexts.
The thought of the car radio in itself is actually about the radio in a context where it is functioning
as it should. And yes, it should.
This intra-activity of index and chain index is painfully offensive to our Aristotelian intelligence,
bound as it is to the two valued law of identity, unable to think these two — index and chain index —
as both two and not two.
Each device somehow implies/contains the others
Go deeply into one
You find the others
INDEX: singular being: THIS
DATE: historical being: THIS-AS-TIME
CHAIN INDEX: contextual being: THIS-ITS-CONTEXTS
ETCETERA: Endless being: THIS AND AND AND…
QUOTES-AND-HYPHENS: Relational being: THIS-ITS-RELATIONS.
(The Book of Radical General Semantics 71)
Your Very Own Self

As students of RGS, we do not exempt our SELVES from the Structural Differential, which maps
wigo (What is going on) ‘inside the skin’ just as much as it maps wigo ‘outside the skin’. The map
is multi-ordinal: event, object, label(s). At the event level, the world, all the way from Korzybski’s
“swirl of sub-atomic particles,” through the pre-human and human biosocial processes up to this
moment, all the way to the most immense cosmic process — the world — is manifesting as your
very own self right now. (incidentally, one of Korzybski’s many early versions of the Anthropometer
was labelled ‘The World’.)
At the object level, you are the living breathing being, seeing, hearing, feeling, smelling, tasting,
moving, ageing, dying; at the label level(s) you are the story or stories of your life, that is, you
are what you say you are, what you ‘think’ you are, which depend almost entirely on what others
have said, written, and broadcast as time binders. Here label and object co-operate to construct the
narratives and identities that organize, stabilize, and give conceptual meaning, for better and for
worse, in accordance with ‘logical fate’, to your existence.
Insofar as you are conscious of abstracting, you know ‘in your bones’, neuro-semantically, that
these levels of self are not identical. Pointing to the levels of the Structural Differential as a map of
self, shh, this is not this, and this is not this. You know that when you identify the stories or even
your sensory experiences AS yourself, you are captivated in a ‘phantom semantic structure’, ‘false
to fact’, unsane. Yourself can actually exist only as multi-ordinal. To know yourself as multi-ordinal
(m.o.) is an essential work of sanity.
VI
Mapping Personal Problems in Bio-Social Space

You’ve heard this many many times: Some people want to blame biological and or social
circumstances, ‘the system’ or ‘heredity’ or ‘the brain’ or ‘the environment’ or ‘capitalism’ or
‘racism’ or ‘patriarchy’ for their personal difficulties, as if they as individual decision makers bore
no share of the ‘blame’ for causing those difficulties.
So, where to assign the blame? To the individual decision maker or to biological and social
circumstances? It’s very easy to burst this either-or bubble with both-and solutions; even some of
the most hardened devotees of two-valued either-or thinking can take one small step to both-and
formulations, which want to SHARE the blame. But look: both-and can be just as elementalistic,
just as two valued as either-or.
RGS will not map bio-social circumstances side by side, together with the individual decision
maker in a lineal manner, on the same level, so that we could ascribe, say 30% of the blame (or
causal power) to the individual decision maker and 70% to biological and social conditions.
_____30_______/__________70___________
(The biological and social conditions, framed as ‘contributions’ or ‘factors’, are usually taken as
‘extenuating circumstances’ which reduce the ‘amount’ of fault, blame, causation, ascribed to the
individual, thus mitigating the punishment, righteous anger or contempt we feel entitled or obligated
to direct at miscreants.)
This way of mapping is in my opinion highly unsane, whether it is deployed by ‘liberals’ who are
inclined to stress the systemic causes or by ‘conservatives’ who stress the blame ‘deserved’ by the
decision maker. Both players in this extremely popular Aristotelian game ignore the multi-ordinality
of the situation.
A non-Aristotelian, multi-ordinal formulation of the relation between bio-social conditions and
individual decisions will put conditions first and decisions second. This is similar to the order of the
Structural Differential—event first, object second, label third.
In other words, the decision maker is at a lower level than the myriad causes and conditions.
Human beings do not exist first, prior to the circumstances into which they are born, and then
come together somehow to constitute society. And they don’t choose their heredity. At every moment
their decisions emerge deterministically out of the totality of past and present circumstances into
which they have been ‘thrown’. And yet human beings do make decisions, for which they must and
should be accountable to others. Such accountability is indeed one of the chief features of biosocial
existence.
How then are we to understand this in a multi-ordinal non-Aristotelian manner, that is,
without DISTRIBUTING blame between the individual decision maker ‘on the one hand’ and her
circumstances ‘on the other hand’?
We would have to get radical. We could, for example, adopt one of the lesser known Alcoholics
Anonymous slogan: “It’s not your fault that you’re in trouble, and it’s your responsibility to get
out of it,” that is, to do WHATEVER YOU CAN to get out of trouble, that is, it depends on YOUR
response-ability. And we’re here to help you build that ability. That’s OUR responsibility. GS
training might help. Get some today…
Radical General Semantics: What Strange New Phenomenon Is This? 63
A non-elemental orientation cannot regress to traditional fantasies of “free will” that presuppose
an autonomous agent somewhere inside the body-mind which can somehow, if he “really” wants
to, rise above all the causes and conditions at work in a particular moment of action and choose
freely to act otherwise. Barry Barnes, author of Understanding Agency, puts it this way: “All actions
do unfold in a ‘could not have been otherwise’ manner from moment to moment…but a certain
course of action might nonetheless be modified at any given moment, and continue otherwise, if
an ADDITIONAL cause is brought to bear on it’ — such as, perhaps, an admonition from another
person, or a change of psycho-physiological state — leading to a ‘variation in the NEXT moment
which itself could not have been otherwise’” (73). Korzybski’s “infinite-valued determinism” must
be a determinism of the moment. In the next moment, as the inimitable Milton Dawes assures us,
“anything I can do I can do better, I can do anything better than me.” (ETC July 2015 285).
So, with the help of Alcoholics Anonymous, we derive this diagrammatic reformulation:
X (“FAULT” i.e CAUSATION)
Y (response-ability)
Here we are no longer sharing blame on a single level so that x+y=100%; rather, we confidently
violate the A ‘laws of thought’, asserting that 100% of the fault — the causation — belongs to
circumstances outside and inside the skin, and 100% of the responsibility belongs to the decision
makers, so that 1+1=1. Remember, multi-ordinality refers to multiple LEVELS of ONE moment of
wigo.
Elementalistic individualism, what Korzybski called the phantom semantic structure of the
“fictitious isolated individual,” is precisely the inability to grasp this SIMULTANIETY of biosocial
causation and individual responsibility.
If we return for a moment to the contrasting pair of ‘individual’ and ‘system’ we may say that the
individual is the level of the system where the system’s problems are experienced, that is, at the object
level, where we live, and so, the level of response-ability. Here individuals can learn to improve their
decision making abilities, to become more response-able (to the degree that circumstances permit);
in this way they can affect (to some degree), in a beneficial spiral manner, the higher level of causes
and conditions.
X These levels, remember, are separate and not separate: the togetherness of
Y separateness and togetherness
Korzybski: “In our old elementalistic and infantile attitudes…we analyzed a child or an adult
in isolation. If we abandon the problem of two-valued ‘determinism’ in connection with such a
fictitious isolated individual, and apply infinite valued determinism to an actual non-isolated
individual, we…realize our own responsibilities to the individual…. we should more and more
investigate structure, our language, our systems… conditions of living, etc…. Instead of a holy
frenzy for ‘justice’, ‘punishment’, etc., we would try to improve our conditions of life …” educating
for greater “flexibility of conditional reactions” (Science and Sanity 551). That’s radical GS 1933.
VII
Politics
In my opinion, it’s not radical to appropriate the formulations of GS for the purpose of winning
our debates with political and ideological adversaries, making ourselves even more righteous, if
possible, than we already are, and making those miscreants even more demonstrably misguided or
malevolent. Obviously, students of GS are and ought to be free to criticize any discourse whatsoever
from a gs perspective, but in my opinion, it’s not radical to use GS as just one more weapon in our
struggle for justice against injustice, etc. etc., without requiring from ourselves the constant effort of
revision of our own habitual modes of evaluating.
GS can certainly adopt the ‘progressive’ slogan ‘another world is possible’, but not if this other
world is yet another unsane world in which map is identified with territory. Radical GS would insist
that ‘the map is not the territory’ has to come before all other slogans above all the others and deeper
than all the others. Hey ho, hey ho, identity thinking has got to go. What do we want? Consciousness
of abstracting! When do we want it? Now! (Or as soon as possible, please).
The purpose of radical GS is to assist as many people as possible at all points of the political,
ideological, philosophical and scientific spectra to develop and hold their positions more sanely. We
want to raise the sanity quotient of as many sides of a ‘conversation’ as we can, but first and foremost
the sanity quotient of our side.
Here is an analogy, no doubt unsatisfactory but useful all the same: Bill W. realized very early
on that an outfit like Alcoholics Anonymous could not afford to become identified with any one side
of a contentious social issue. Imagine an Alcoholics Anonymous type meeting of American students
of GS, seekers of thalamo-cortical integration rather than sobriety. We won’t hear ‘my name is Rush
Limbaugh, and I want to use GS to defend the Constitution’ or ‘my name is Noam Chomsky, and I
want to prove that GS must oppose American imperialism’. The only introductory line permissible
would be ‘my name is Smith, and I’m unsane’. Well, perhaps that’s a bit excessive. Perhaps ‘my
name is Smith and I want to work for sanity’.
NOTES
1 Visit http://www.hilgart.org/112-lethal-fundamental-error-how-to-recognize-reject-replace-it.php for C. A.
Hilgartner’s article, “A Lethal Fundamental Error: How to Recognize, Reject & Replace It.” Accessed in
2016.
2 Henry David Thoreau, Walden [originally published in 1854] (New York: Peter Pauper Press, 1966),
chapter 1, p. 98.
3 A and non-A refer to Aristotelian and non-Aristotelian respectively.
4 Robert P. Pula, A General-Semantics Glossary: Pula’s Guide for the Perplexed (California: International
Society for General Semantics, 2000), p.4.
5 Some of the lectures are available here: http://www.generalsemantics.org/wp-content/uploads/2011/05/
ovr-fc.pdf. Accessed in 2016.
REFERENCES
Barnes, Barry. Understanding Agency: Social Theory and Responsible Action. London and New Delhi: SAGE,
2000. Print.
Horowitz, Gad with Colin Campbell. The Book of Radical General Semantics. Eds. Gad Horowitz and Shannon
Bell. New Delhi: Pencraft International, 2016. Print.
Korzybski, Alfred. Science and Sanity: An Introduction to Non- Aristotelian Systems and General Semantics
(1933), 5th ed. Fort Worth, TX: Institute of General Semantics, 2005. Print.
––. Selections from Science and Sanity. Fort Worth, TX: Institute of General Semantics. 2010. Print
Pula, Robert P. A General-Semantics Glossary: Pula’s Guide for the Perplexed. California: International
Society for General Semantics, 2000. Print.
Thoreau, Henry David. Walden. New York: Peter Pauper Press, 1966. Print.
Whitehead, Alfred North. Science and the Modern World. New York: Free Press, 1997. Print.
ON KORZYBSKI’S NOTION OF ‘TIME-BINDING’ AS THE

FUNDAMENTAL MARK OF HUMANITY
P.G. Jung
I
…ethics must conform to the natural laws of human nature.
~ Alfred Korzybski1
In his work, Manhood of Humanity (1921; Henceforth MH), Korzybski declares that the book
in invested in the “study of Man2… from a scientific-mathematical point of view3” (MH lix). This
engagement of delineating man has been one of the primary engagements within the history of
Ideas. Beginning in Antiquity, the task of delineating the fundamental nature of man in terms of
the essential mark(s) was seen as the prerequisite for undertaking the task of characterizing, or
describing, the being of man. This task of discovering the essential mark(s) of man was, therefore,
held as the most seminal task that would consequently ground the bounds of all other secondary
discourses pertaining to man. Towards this end, the task could be conceived as an effort to generate
a descriptive definition of our own being. This task was deemed cardinal for two central reasons.The
first of these was that such a knowledge of our essential mark enabled us to place ourselves within the
greater rubric of existence in terms of a definitive locus. Philosophically put, it conceptually provided
us the possibility of positioning our being within the plane of existence or the universe of beings.
Secondly, the understanding of one’s existential site within this plane of existence was thought to
be the precursor to the knowledge of what one ought to do. Thus, the inquiry into the nature of man
was taken as the primordial step to craft a prescriptive legislating decree, such that its sanction was
legitimately grounded in the very nature of our being.4 For instance, the appellative ‘rational’ that
came to characterize man in terms of his potentiality fundamentally sought to characterize man, and
brought along with it a certain set of prescriptions, that legitimized certain acts and delegitimized
others. Likewise, the epithet, ‘passion governed’ as a mark of our being, ushered in an alternative
set of prescriptions, most powerfully systematized by the thought schemas that uphold the primacy
of the ‘principle of utility’.
Korzybski’s declared intent to re-interrogate the nature of man lies precisely within such a
descriptive-prescriptive framework, as is highlighted when he declares his conviction that:
It is obvious that to be able to speak about the great affairs of Man, his spiritual, moral, physical,
economic, social or political status, it must first be ascertained what Man is — what is his
real nature and what are the basic laws of his nature. If we succeed in finding the laws of
human nature, all the rest will be a comparatively easy task — the ethical, social, economic and
political status of Man should be in accord with the laws of his nature; then civilization will be
a human civilization — a permanent and peaceful one — not before. (MH lxi)
The much-celebrated disclosure of Korzybski’s efforts is that the rightful description of man is
that he is a time-binder. By which Korzybski, as we all know, meant that man is singular within the
class of beings in so far as he possesses:
…the capacity to summarise, digest and appropriate the labors and experiences of the past…
for developments in the present; …the capacity to employ as instruments of increasing power
the accumulated achievements of the all-precious lives of the past generations spent in trial
and error, trial and success; …the capacity of human beings to conduct their lives in the ever
increasing light of inherited wisdom…the capacity in virtue of which man is at once the heritor
of the by-gone ages and the trustee of posterity. And because humanity is just this magnificent
natural agency by which the past lives in the present and the present for the future… (MH 59)
Of course, we are all aware of the much-raised objection, and a legitimate one for that matter,
that Korzybski’s formulation’s commits the fallacy of the is-ought variety. My primary intention is
not simply to draw our attention to it yet again but rather to highlight those aspects of this fallacy
that seem to demand our close attention in terms of the nuanced structures that are assumed, and
the entailments that follow, in Korzybski’s formulation of ‘time-binding’ as the fundamental mark
of humanity.
First and foremost, within Korzybski’s formulation, the definitional descriptive epithet that we
come to ascribe to man as a ‘time-binder’ is projected essentially as a descriptive, and therefore, as a
fact of his existence. Unlike Aristotle’s ‘rationality’ or Kant’s ‘autonomy’, which though an essential
mark of man, is nevertheless a potentiality that we have to consciously strive to attain; Korzybski’s
essential mark of time-binding is, in contrast, an actuality. Simply put, within the Korzybskian
framework we cannot help but bind-time. That is, an essential description of man in terms of his
‘time-binding’ capacity entails that the function of time-bindingis a natural propensity of man. By
the same token of being descriptive, as Korzybski would go on to elaborate in his 1924 lecture to the
Canadian Mathematical Society, and much more thoroughly in his later work, Science and Sanity
(1933), it also entails that it is a constitutive fact of our being that we bind-time through abstractions
with the aid of symbolism or language. However, the issue at stake here is that this peculiar aspect
of Korzybski’s mark of time-bindingas a constitutive aspect of one’s being, does not, however,
bring along with it its regulative paradigm. That is to say, there is nothing internal to the mark of
‘time-binding’ that informs us of what we ought to bind. In other words, unlike the mark of, say
rationality, which brings along with it the fundamental laws of thoughts as its intrinsic regulative
structure, time-binding needs an external regulative apparatus. We cannot, for instance, take the
capability to generate rational thought (rationality) as the essential marker of human nature but then
go on to abdicate the responsibility of the demands poised by the fundamental laws of thought.5 In a
way, an acknowledgement of one’s capacity to generate rational thought inalienably binds one to the
fundamental regulative laws of thought as well. Thus, the mark of rationality, though a descriptive
mark brings along with a set of regulative laws that are intrinsic to our very faculty of reason.
Consequently, the appellation ‘rational’, apart from merely describing a mark that fundamentally
constitutes our nature, also informs us of its legitimate bounds. It informs us that any form of
transgression pertaining to these regulative bounds of our rationality would consequently lead to an
illegitimate use of our faculty of reason leading to the various formal and informal fallacies in our
thoughts. In contrast to this, the descriptive epithet of ‘time-binding’ is a “pure” descriptive mark as
it is devoid of any intrinsic regulative aspect that would regulateour capacity to bind time.6
Consequently, with the epithet of ‘rationality’, it is these regulative laws that guarantee the
evaluations that emerge through the faculty of reason, in conformity with its regulative structures,
their legitimacy, and therefore, posit them as emergents that are ‘true’ or approximations to the
epistemic values of ‘truth’ and ‘knowledge’. However, within the Korzybskian thought schema,
the product of our natural disposition of time-binding cannot de facto be equated with either ‘truth’
On Korzybski’s Notion of ‘Time-binding’ as the Fundamental Mark of Humanity 67
or ‘knowledge’, or even its approximation given that it brings forth with it no internal regulative
structure. Thus, the acceptance of the fact that we are fundamentally time-binders, does not in itself
tell us which of these products of our natural disposition of time-binding are, in fact, legitimate ones,
and which ones ought to be discarded. For this evaluative step to be complete, it requires a mediating
regulative structure, and this is where Korzybski, fundamentally assumes the telos of ‘progress’ or
‘human weal’, both of the individual as well as that of the collective, to be the homing beacon for
the segregation of the products of time-binding into those that are legitimate and those that are not.
II
Korzybski’s invocation of the notion of ‘progress’can be sympathetically viewed against the
horizon of the times in which he writes, where the aftermaths of the First World War is what
envelops every existentially concerned individual (MH v). It had slowly begin to dawn that there
was something amiss in humanity’s celebration of the rising faith in science, and the underlying
contours of the enlightened self, for they stood in stark contrast to the gloomy and devastating affair
of the war, which mirrored both the darker capability of humans as well the inhuman side of science.
Consequently, a reflection upon the dismal state of affairs that humanity found itself in brought
about an air of skepticism that pertained to our over-estimation of our rational nature, and therefore,
an urgent necessity to re-evaluate our very understanding of our fundamental nature. Korzybski’s
Manhood of Humanity can be seen precisely as participating in this enveloping air of skepticism
that leads Korzybski to undertake the task to rethink the fundamental nature of man. However,
the major casualties in Korzybski’s fervor are the disciplines constituting the “social sciences,”
primarily, Philosophy. Korzybski squarely blames the practitioners of these disciplines for the rise
of a convoluted idea of human nature that is framed as either biological or mythological, and more
importantly for their inability to be appropriately “scientific” due to their ill-founded comfort in
“the barren methods of verbalistic philosophy”(MH 22). However, Korzybski’s skepticism does
not take into its ambit the ‘nature of science itself’. It is this faith in the natural sciences, and
its methods that lead Korzybski to position himself within the positivistic framework, wherein,
technology and science are taken to be the ultimate guides to settle the debates concerning the idea
of ‘ideals’. Nevertheless, such a stance is both naïve and problematic precisely because science
in the positivistic imagination is squarely a domain of discoveries and descriptions of the laws of
nature and their affective extent and scope. Within the positivistic imagination of science, science
is therefore, devoid of an evaluative structure, and thus, is incapable of generating an ideal or a
standard that could be posited as an aspirational telos to move towards. Korzybski’s imagination of
‘an ethical ideal’ is reminiscent of the early forms of modern ethical naturalism, where ethical laws
were conceived as akin to natural laws, and wherein to be ethical was thus construed as being in
conformity with the laws of human nature.7 Korzybski writes:
There can be no doubt that humanity belongs to a class of life which to a large extent determines
its own destinies, establishes its own rules of education and conduct, and thus influences every
step we are free to take within the structure of our social system. But the power of human beings
to determine their own destinies is limited by natural law, Nature’s law. It is the counsel of
wisdom to discover the laws of nature, including the laws of human nature, and then to live in
accordance with them. The opposite is folly. (MH 5)
Such a naturalistic stance as the one adopted by Korzybski, of course, fits well within the
positivistic imagination of the natural sciences, where the fundamental laws of nature are taken to
be both unassailable, as well as, definitive. Within the ambit of this stance, any ought must be in
conformity with the is of nature. Thus, this leads to the firm conviction that nature curtails the very
bounds of any ethical formulation. But it is precisely this that poses itself as a problematic given
that Korzybski’s notion of time-binding as the fundamental mark of humanity’s nature, as we have
argued, is a bare description of a primordial human capacity without any intrinsic prescriptive or
regulative structure that would enable us to move from the isness of our being (as time-binders)
to any formulation of an ought (the telos of our time-binding). Both, his positivistic imagination
of science as well his adaptation of a form of ethical naturalism renders Korzybski mark of
time-binding as a pure is.
What however aids Korzybski in positing the notion of ‘progress’ as the natural ideal of
humanity, marked by the fundamental nature of time-binding, is once again the underlying
assumption informing the positivistic imagination of the natural sciences that nature proceeds
in a linear progression. It is this fundamental assumption that enables Korzybski to graphically
formulate the ‘progress’ of natural sciences and that of the social sciences in terms of the contrasting
progressive mathematical series of ‘geometric’ and ‘arithmetic’ progressions respectively. The play
of this assumption in Korzybski’s schema of thought is evident from the fact that for Korzybski,
the fundamental assumption is that the ‘ratio of improvement’ or what in terms of the geometrically
progressive series is known as the ‘common ratio’, between two generations cannot be less that ‘1’
(MH 90). This highlights the fact that for Korzybski, there is something intrinsic to the scientific
imagination that prevents it from any form of degeneration in terms of the ideas generated through
our capacity of time-binding.8 But this assumption, which permits us to unproblematically take the
idea of ‘ scientific progress’ as intrinsically incapable of any degeneration of ideas, is based upon an
oversightof the distinction between the notions of ‘change’ and that of ‘progress’. It is the oversight
of this pivotal difference that enables Korzybski to argue for the ideal of progress as somehow
intrinsic to the very capability of time-binding. Korzybski seems to be guilty of taking the notion
of ‘progress’ to be identical to the notion of ‘change’ or ‘motion’; a difference that the thinkers of
Antiquity were very attentive to. That is, even if we do grant the mark of time-binding as humanity’s
fundamental mark, all that it assures us of is ‘change’, thus leaving open the question of the value of
the ‘common ratio of improvement’ as not necessarily being equal to, or more than, 1. In other words,
the notion of change does not foreclose the possibility of degeneration, while the notion of ‘progress’
does. Bluntly put, numbers in a series do not degenerate for both their function as well as nature
are predetermined, humans on the other hand have agency and there is nothing intrinsic in the mark
of time-binding characterizing this human agential capacity that can predetermine its progressive
nature as non-degenerative. That is, while ‘motion’ or ‘change’ are pure descriptive terms, the term
‘progress’, on the other hand, already assumes an evaluative paradigm since the notion of ‘progress’
is an evaluative term precisely in the sense that it posits an ‘ought’ or an ‘ideal’. And it is precisely
this evaluative paradigm, rather than the characterization of humans as time-binders, that one finds
discomforting and as a matter of concern in Korzybski. At the same time, it is also precisely this
oversight in the theory of General Semantics that is worthy of engagement. It is what leads us to
decipher the undertones, the assumptions, and the overall evaluative paradigm that governs the
dynamic notion of “progress” in any historical epoch, a concern that is specially pertinent to our
own times. Questions concerning, ‘whose progress’; ‘who decides the parameters of progress’, ‘at
what cost?’are precisely the kind of questions that eludes Korzybski but is nevertheless realized, in
present times, as of cardinal importance in a discourse concerning ‘progress’.
III
Through this tacit assumption of a linear and intrinsically regulative imagination of scientific
progress, Korzybski misconstrues and consequently undermines the nature and function of
criticality that is central to the humanities and the social sciences, which is what precisely grounds
the emergence of any value-regulative structure. Given that within the positivistic imagination of
the natural sciences, any regulative paradigm of values, if there can be one, must be external to the
natural sciences, the role of the ‘social sciences’ thus become cardinal in this respect. As a domain
of value, it entails that such a domain demands that the social sciences distance themselves from
the ‘scientific linear progression’ in order to foster a critical engagement with, rather than align
itself to, the assumed stance of ascientific faith. To subsume, or to subordinate the ‘social sciences’,
primarily Philosophy,by positing a hierarchical structure is simply to foreclose the possibility of any
dialogicality between the sphere of values and the sphere of facts. This consequently precludes the
possibility of garnering any external regulative structure of values to the fact of our time-binding
capacity within the Korzybskian framework. Towards this end, it therefore, remains essentially
confined as a descriptive science, though Korzybski assumes, erroneously, that it provides us a
prescriptive model.
Korzybski writes:
Humanity, in order to live, must produce creatively and therefore must be guided by applied
science, by technology; and this means that the so-called social sciences of ethics, jurisprudence,
psychology, economics, sociology, politics, and government must be emancipated from
medieval metaphysics; they must be made scientific; they must be technologized; they must be
made to progress and to function in the proper dimension — the human dimension and not that
of animals: they must be made time-binding sciences. (MH 74)
And so I repeat that the world will have uninterrupted, peaceful progress when and only when
the so-called social “sciences” — the life-regulating “sciences” of ethics, law, philosophy,
economics, religion, politics, and government — are technologized; when and only when they
are made genuinely scientific in spirit and method; for then and only then will they advance,
like the natural, mathematical and technological sciences, in conformity to the fundamental
exponential law of the time-binding nature of man; then and then only, by the equal pace of
progress in all cardinal matters, the equilibrium of social institutions will remain stable and
social cataclysms cease. (MH 92)
…man has the capacity and he can, through ignorance or neglect or mal-intent, deviate from,
or misinterpret, the natural laws for the human class of life. Just therein lies the secret and the
source of human chaos and woe—a fact of such tremendous importance that it cannot be over-
emphasized and it seems impossible to evade it longer. To discover the nature of Man and the
laws of that nature, marks the summit of human enterprises. For to solve this problem is to
open the way to everything which can be of importance to humanity—to human welfare and
happiness. (MH 85-86)
Of course, Korzybski is well aware of the non-determinacy aspect of human agency. As can be
seen from the quote above, Korzybski acknowledges the fact that unlike ‘the stone, the plant and the
animal [who] do not possess the intellectual power to create and initiate and so must blindly obey the
laws that are natural for them… man has the capacity and he can… deviate from… the natural laws for
the human class of life’ (MH 85-86). In other words, humans are also characterized as being marked
by a free-will, which is the power to choose and determine one’s responses to the demands posited
by the laws of one’s own intrinsic nature. This leads us to assert even more emphatically that our
time-binding capacity is, therefore, fundamentally marked by this ability of choice. In other words,
we can choose precisely what to ‘time-bind’ without negating the central assertion of Korzybski
that we are time-binders. This is precisely what leads to the necessity of an external regulative
structure that can regulate what ‘precisely we ought to bind’, and what is unfortunately foreclosed
by Korzybski’s devaluation of the ‘social sciences’ primarily by problematically assuming that there
is something intrinsically progressive within the positivistic sciences that render this prescriptive
stance to our time-binding capacity. Thus, for Korzybski, the force of determinacy of the scientific
modality of time-binding is intrinsically legitimate, and therefore, for him any deviation from the
scientific modality of time-binding through the exercise of our agential capacity (free will) is merely
a matter of either ‘ignorance’ or ‘mal-intent’.
As Cassius J. Keyser9 puts it, for Korzybski, ethics is:

…a natural ethics because [it is] based upon the distinctive nature of mankind as the
time-binding, – civilization-producing, – class of life; it will be, that is, a scientific ethics
having the understandability, the authority, and the sanction of natural law, for it will be the
embodiment, the living expression, of the laws, – natural laws – of the time-binding energies of
man; human freedom will be freedom to live in accord with those laws and righteousness will
be the quality of a life that does not contravene them.10 [Emphasis mine]
Thus, within the thought schema of Korzybski, freedom, much in tune with Kant who conceives
of autonomy in terms of conformity to the transcendental forms of the moral law, lies precisely
in terms of conformity to the laws of human nature. It is, therefore, no wonder that Korzybski’s
postulated utopia of ‘Manhood of Humanity’ is a homogeneous mass given that it is regulated
by a universal form of parentalism that provides and ensures a monolithic ideal of ‘scientific
progress’, which therefore, ensures a form of order and uniformity to human existence itself. Within
Korzybski’s thought schema, progress is seen as synonymous to “order,” thereby values like freedom
and dissent must, therefore, be subordinate to the value of ‘progress’. In other words, Korzybski’s
imagined utopia has a singular voice, and is devoid of diversity of either opinions or criticality. Its
self-criticality is but merely an attempt to bring forth the self-assurance of its own primacy.
Of course, Korzybski’s formulation of freedom is one of ‘responsibility’ towards a norm (the
natural laws governing the nature of man as a time-binder), and not that of abject abandonment of
norms. But that immediately entails that ‘freedom’ thus construed imagines the self in terms of a
being that is, by its very nature, epistemically oriented towards ‘progress’ and ‘truth’. Given that
for Korzybski, the sole natural objective or the teleological force of time-binding is constituted
and regulated by the ideal of ‘progress’, which is simply the approximation of one’s ideas, ideals
and judgments with the laws of nature, it therefore, follows that the sanction behind all judgments
is, and should be, the apodictic positing of the primacy of truth. And though the ideal might seem
tempting, notwithstanding the problematic involved with the very notion of such a ‘truth’, one must
be aware of the fact that such a positioning of the self as primarily an epistemic being renders the
self as a self without passions. More fundamentally, within the Korzybski’s framework, the self, in
its engagement with an other, is therefore, governed by the primary horizon of truth and progress,
where the other is a companion only within the larger rubric of ‘universal agreement’ in their pursuit
of this singular truth and this uniform ideal of ‘progress’. The formulation of such foundational
structure of the self-other relation does not merely negate the value of the other as an other as such,
since the other is of value only within the larger universal horizon of participation in the quest of
progress; but renders the other without a voice, a face or passion. It fails to see the other as an ethical,
political or a social being in its primacy, since morality, politics, and sociality can only legitimately
emerge through the mediation of the epistemic primacy of ‘truth’ and ‘progress’.
And this is precisely the challenge now for us who still find some meaning in Korzybski’s mark
of time-binding; how do we align the Korzybskian mark of ‘time-binding’ within an evaluative
paradigm of its telos, and whether this regulative ‘telos’ be imagined in terms of progress, freedom,
dignity, or happiness?

1 Korzybski, Alfred. 1921/1950 (2001). Manhood of Humanity (Second Edition), edited by Charlotte
Schuchardt. Institute of General Semantics: New York. pp. 34-35. Print.
2 In accordance with Korzybski’s usage, I use the term ‘man’ in its non-gendered connotation as employed
by Korzybski.
3 The phrase, ‘scientific-mathematical’ is used by Korzybski to highlight both the methodology governing
this investigation of his, as well as the justification for the employment this methodology. The term
‘scientific’ clearly is indicative of Korzybski’s faith in the positivistic approach of science, which he later
comes to label as “extensional methods,” while the term ‘mathematical’ qualifies that such an approach is
grounded in a “precise and unambiguous usage of terms” (MH: lix; 8).
4 It would, however, be a mistake to construe this description as a ‘pure’ descriptive act, since in this very act
lie the grounds of the genesis of a hierarchy of existence. An act of description can easily slip into an act of
demarcation. After all, the term ‘Indian Philosophy’ was coined precisely as a descriptive mark, or for that
matter consider if ‘gender categories’ are descriptive or demarcative.
5 Within the Aristotelian schema, these would be the regulative laws of identity, contradiction, and that of
excluded middle.
6 Of course, the History of Ideas informs us that there is no consensus amongst the philosophers with respect
to what these regulative aspects might be. Various moral theories have postulated various regulative
aspects. But one of the cardinal postulates of such a regulative aspect with an over-bearing influence on
contemporary thought was that which was propounded by Kant in his Critiques during the Eighteenth
century.
7 It was this belief that was the underlying assumption of Romanticism, and the grounds for the rise of
‘naturalistic ethics’, ranging from thinkers like Adam Smith, Bentham, Hume, Rousseau and later, Huxley
and Spencer, who give rise to the naturalistic tradition of evolutionary ethics.
8 I thank my colleague Dr. Surojit Bhattacharyya, for the discussions we had around this theme.
9 Cassius Jackson Keyser, though a mathematician, was also deeply interested in philosophy. He was, amongst
the first few thinkers in whom Korzybski’s thought found a resonance. He also reviewed Korzybski’s work
in a positive light in soon after the publication of the Korzybski’s, Manhood of Humanity. See The Monist,
Vol.32: No 4., (October 1922). pp. 637-640. Print.
10 See Keyser, Cassius Jackson. (1922). “Korzybski’s Concept of Man”from Mathematical Philosophy: A
study of Fate and Freedom (Lecture XX), published in the second edition of Manhood of Humanity (1950),
p. 321. Print.
PROGRAMS ORGANIZED BY BALVANT PAREKH CENTRE (2017-18)
Participants of the XI Annual National Workshop on the theme “Radical General Semantics” organized in collaboration
with National Institute of Science and Technology (NIST), Berhampur, Odisha (15-17 December 2017; workshop
faculty: Gad Horowitz, Shannon Bell and Devkumar Trivedi)
V Certificate Course on “Alfred Korzybski and Erich Fromm: Towards a Broader Understanding of Sanity” organized
in collaboration with the Department of English & Comparative Literary Studies, Saurashtra University, Rajkot (27-29
December 2017)
National Seminar on “Gandhi and Time-binding: Interfaces between Principles and Practices” organized in
collaboration with the Institute of Policy Research and International Studies, The Maharaja Sayajirao University of
Baroda (23 & 24 January 2018; Keynote Address by Professor Sudhir Chandra, eminent Gandhi scholar and currently
a fellow at The Raza Foundation)
IX Annual Seminar, “The Enigma of Story: Lived Experience, Time and Narrative” (An International Event; 14-16
March 2018; Resourse Persons: Craig Irvine and Maura Spiegel from Columbia University, New York)
BUCKY THE TIME-BINDING BEAVER

Martin H. Levinson
Once upon a time, in the far-off hamlet of Beaverton, Oregon, a lovely little place situated midway
between majestic Mount Hood and the spectacular Oregon coast, there lived a beaver named Bucky
who was in the construction business. Bucky’s specialty was erecting dams, specifically beaver
dams. These barriers help to create the deep water that is needed for winter food storage. Beavers
have been putting up dams the same way for thousands of years and they are pretty good at it.
One fine spring day, Dr. Donald R. Griffin, an American zoology professor and the founder of
the field of animal cognition, came to Beaverton. He wanted to capture a beaver for an experiment
that involved implanting a human brain into the skull of a beaver. He was curious what would
happen. Griffin thought beavers were clever critters. He was constantly telling his students, “When
we think of the kinds of animal behavior that suggest conscious thinking, the beaver comes naturally
to mind.”1
Bucky was sitting on a log, happily munching a water lily tuber and flapping his tail, when
Griffin and a group of fellow zoological researchers surrounded him. They anesthetized the hapless
mammal, put him in a bag, and took him to a laboratory at Oregon State University — the home of
the Beavers. On a table there, Griffin inserted a human brain into Bucky’s head.
When the operation was over, and the anesthetic had worn off, Griffin asked Bucky how he felt.
Bucky responded, “I’ve got a bit of a headache, but other than that I feel fine. How did the Beavers
do today? Did they beat UCLA?”
Bucky quickly became a highly visible TV talk-show guest, appearing on ABC, NBC, CBS,
CNN, FOX, MSNBC, and CSPAN (the latter station featured Bucky’s testimony to a Congressional
subcommittee on animal rights). In flying around the country to do interviews, Bucky was astonished
by the diversity of human architecture that he saw. He discussed his astonishment of man-made
edifices with Charlie Rose on PBS. The following is an excerpt of that discussion.
Charlie: What did you do for a living before your brain operation, Bucky?
Bucky: I was in the construction business, Charlie. Mostly dam-building.
Charlie: How was that working out for you?
Bucky: Not bad. I wasn’t the best dam builder in the world but I built some pretty good dams. I
took a CNN news crew out to one last week.
Charlie: What do you think the major difference is between beaver and human structures?
Bucky: I’ve been pondering that very question, Charlie. I believe the biggest difference is that
your species improves its erections with every generation, while beavers keep building the same
damn dams.
Charlie: Alfred Korzybski, the originator of general semantics, made the same observation.
He said humans are a time-binding class of life. Time-binders use language and other symbols to
transmit information across time, which enables each generation to start where the last one left off.
He labeled animals a space-binding class of life. Space binders transform energy into movement
through space. Space-binders can’t convey information across time because they lack symbolic
means of communication.
Bucky: Well, I wish my space-binding beaver friends would evolve a little so they could imitate
their time-binding human cousins.
Charlie: Who knows? Maybe in a few thousand millennia they will. In the meantime, because
humans possess a quarter-inch of cerebral cortex, our species remains on the top rung of the
evolutionary ladder.
Bucky: Nicely put, Charlie. Did you come up with that idea on your own?
Charlie: No, I didn’t. Korzybski did. But because I’m a time-binder I was able to read and grasp
what he said.
Bucky: Good for you, Charlie, and good for your species! Time-binding has enabled your genus
to make so many advances. You’ve produced the Golden Gate Bridge, personal computers, and
rocket ships to the moon. What have beavers done? We’re still building your basic beaver dam and
beaver lodge.
Charlie: Buck up, Bucky. You’re one of us now. Your ability to use human language has made
you a fellow time-binder. I think you ought to consider giving up your beaver identity.
Bucky: I’m not sure I want to do that. While I see the advantages of time-binding in furthering
human technology, I don’t see similar gains being made in the area of human relations. People fight
a lot with each other and with so many atomic weapons around there’s a good chance your species
might wipe itself out.
Charlie: That’s a good point. Korzybski also noticed the disparity between the advances humans
have made in technology and the lack of progress they have shown in getting along with each
other. To lessen that difference he came up with general semantics, a system of critical thinking
that involves the use of the scientific method to solve problems of everyday living. It’s a pity more
people are not familiar with his work.
Bucky: Maybe I can help to popularize general semantics. I think I’ll mention GS when I’m
on the PBS News Hour tonight. I’ll also put in a plug for GS when I appear on Meet the Press this
weekend. And I’ll drop a reference to general semantics on The Voice next week. I’m singing a song
on that show from my new album, “Leave It to Beaver.”
Charlie: My goodness, you certainly are an eager beaver to get general semantics out to the
public.
Bucky: You’re right, Charlie, I am. I don’t want the planet destroyed because of human stupidity.
I want human beings to cooperate and work on advancing civilization.
Charlie: That’s a noble sentiment, Bucky. Is there anything else you want?
Bucky: Yes, there is. I’d like to put up condominiums and office buildings in New York and
Miami. I’ve had it with building beaver dams. There’s just no future in that line of work.
Charlie: Well, I’ll be damned.
NOTE
1 This is an actual quote from Donald R. Griffin, a real professor of zoology. The experiment in this story
is imaginary but stranger things have happened in real life. As Mark Twain said, “Truth is stranger than
Fiction . . . because fiction is obliged to stick to possibilities; Truth isn’t.”
THE “MYTH” OF GENERAL SEMANTICS1

Colin Campbell
The epistemological structure of myth – the main subject of this essay – is dealt with only very
briefly in Science and Sanity. The Aristotelian epistemology is treated at somewhat greater length,
providing the foil or context for the primary issue, which is the development of a non-Aristotelian
epistemology. The more complex details of mythic and Aristotelian epistemologies were not
primarily relevant to Korzybski’s task1933, which was to build a movement by drawing attention to
the curious difference between maps and the territories they describe. In this essay, I aim to speak
to this aim of movement building by way of a non-Aristotelian theory of myth and mythic modes
of thinking.
Korzybski gave his person to this task. Today we might say, perhaps with little sense of the mythic
dimensions of our everyday language, that he ‘branded’ himself.2 His task, put metaphorically and
mythically, was to move that artillery piece:
A three-inch artillery piece had gotten stuck in the half-frozen mud in the middle of the narrow
road. The line of traffic once again came to a stop. With marshes on either side, they couldn’t
go around. The three-inch gun, though one of the smallest and lightest of artillery pieces, was
normally pulled by a team of horses. The men trying to move it somehow couldn’t get the
horses attached and lined up properly to dislodge it…. Working at odds with one another, they
couldn’t coordinate themselves sufficiently to budge it. With all their straining and sweating,
nothing useful was happening. Out of desperation, Korzybski motioned the men aside. With an
enormous effort, he dislodged the gun from the mud by himself and tipped it into the marsh. In
the process, he felt that his “inside got busted.” Indeed, he had severely herniated himself, an
injury he never fully recovered from.3
With Science and Sanity we might say that Korzybski similarly ‘motioned aside’ the straining
crowds of ‘foolosophers’ and Aristotelian psycho-logicians whom he felt were doing more harm
than good, or at best working at cross-purposes.
The mythic or archetypal quality of this ‘motioning aside’ seems to me to be a general theme
of Korzybski’s life and work. It anticipates his criticism of sentimentalism in questions concerning
war, in which he ‘motioned aside’ formulations of nationalism and militarism:
‘We’ve learned the lessons that ye taught in Flanders Fields!’ Did we? ‘That is the question’.
Well, General Semantics 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. If I may quote
from my Manhood of Humanity: ‘Is this climax of the pre-war civilization to be passed unnoticed
except for the poetry and the manuring of the battlefields, that the “poppies blow” stronger and better
fed’?4
Korzybski more than once ‘broke the floor with his sword’5 whether literally in front of corrupt
Russian Army officials, or more gently and metaphorically, offering a roomful of listeners ‘cookies’
to eat, only to reveal the label on the box: ‘dog treats’.
Korzybski aimed to ‘break the floor’ of habitual identification of map and territory, of labels
and the unspeakable experiences from which they are abstracted. But how to properly describe
the relation between these dramatic, heroic, indeed mythic and sacrificial images of Korzybski,
and what is going on with general semantics? To say the stories Bruce Kodish relates are mythic
images, archetypal images, is not to say they are false: ‘not a bit’. Myths are not illusions – they are
abstractions of some order. However they are mythic abstractions, meaning that they are not words
strictly speaking, but images and words-becoming-images, becoming stories, songs, sagas, legends,
etc. Mythic words contain or maintain a kind of resonating pattern of a whole person, a whole life,
a work, a movement, even a whole people.
Korzybski, it should be emphasized, was not committed to the map-territory distinction as a
point of logic. He was not primarily concerned with being right about this or that distinction. Rather,
for him and for us it seems to be a point of living. The object level is where we live. Our stories
should emanate from and serve life, rather than some myth of an observer-free reality. But Korzybski
had to ‘move that artillery piece’, to break that floor. He had to build a movement and Science and
Sanity was a text providing a method, a set of semantic operations that would help provide structure
and integrity while allowing a wide scope for the uniqueness of individual approach and opinion.
For this reason, certain investigations were abstracted out of the question. Among them was
a systematic investigation of the epistemological and historical structure of myth, of how that
structure eventually gave way to Aristotelianism, in the history of the occident. Among the problems
Korzybski1933 therefore did not address fully was the problem of the evolutionary and multiordinal,
rather than linear or additive, character of the prehistory and history of epistemology. Because of his
necessarily cursory treatment of this problem, I think there is a danger of misinterpreting Korzybski’s
spirit of pragmatic energy for scientific arrogance: the unquestioned presumption that epistemology
has linearly ‘progressed’ throughout history, or that its improvement, such as it has been, has been
unambiguous. This hubris is of course the direct target of the devices of general semantics, and yet it
is so deeply engrained in our culture that, often, our most strenuous efforts often won’t move it one
inch. It is a truly Sisyphean task. Modern time-binders struggle against a subtle yet pervasive culture
of disdain for the past, and we often find ourselves mouthing some version of Henry Ford’s utterly
modern myth, ‘history is more or less bunk’.
Korzybski wrote in Science and Sanity that non-Aristotelian ideas are not so much anti-
Aristotelian as meta-Aristotelian. The aim was and is to build constructively on past achievements:
To avoid misunderstandings I wish to acknowledge explicitly my profound admiration for the
extraordinary genius of Aristotle, particularly in consideration of the period in which he lived.
Nevertheless, the twisting of his system and the imposed immobility of this twisted system, as
enforced for nearly two thousand years by the controlling groups, often under threats of torture
and death, have led and can only lead to more disasters. From what we know about Aristotle,
there is little doubt that, if alive, he would not tolerate such twistings and artificial immobility
of the system usually ascribed to him.6
Korzybski recognized some of the old Aristotelian premises as not only useful but crucial –
in their limited domain of applicability. A non-Aristotelian perspective, it seems to me, aims not
so much to eliminate the Aristotelian-Euclidian-Newtonian legacy as to include it in a larger
extensional array of possible orientations. Aristotelian ideas and the history of western philosophy
should not be identified with the ‘emery sand’ of identification that has damaged human lives. For
example, the classifying ‘is’, so loved by Aristotle the biologist, is not necessarily the same as the
‘is of identification’, and indeed to some extent it ‘is’ necessary for the establishment of operational
The “Myth” of General Semantics 77
premises and taxonomies of certain kinds. In this paper I want to suggest that we treat myth in a
similar fashion: silent practice at the object level does not eliminate or eradicate the labels and words
of past philosophers and storytellers. In fact, it returns them to pride-of-place as time-binders.
Yesterday is not gone; it lives on in the very heart of the concerns of today and tomorrow. A
great error of Aristotelianism, one we must correct today, was the way it pretended, as ‘science’, to
have extirpated the mythic past. The arrogance of Aristotle’s ‘science’ obscured the fact that each
stage of epistemological evolution is contained within the subsequent stages. Each epistemic mode
is nested within the next, beginning as the context of the next stage, and subsequently contained
within the larger context of the new, like a series of Russian dolls, or more precisely, as ever-
higher dimensional orders. We can critique and work to remove the ‘emery sand’ of arrogance and
hubris from Aristotelian philosophy, but it seems to me we must not extirpate but to the contrary
preserve the memory of past achievements, including the most ‘primitive’ achievements of human
storytelling, the mythic birthright of the time-binding class of life.
The mythic modes persist within Aristotelian modes, and both mythic and Aristotelian modes
are recontextualized in structural, non-elementalistic terms in the Korzybskian approach. But what
this means, to put the matter radically, i.e. in terms of root-meanings, is that myth lies at the root
of all human communicating, including the communicating we do in general semantics. There is a
necessarily mythic dimension even to non-Aristotelian discourses, even, it might be argued, to the
language of E-prime, from which the ‘is’ of identity has been ritually exorcized. An aspect of the
non-Aristotelian orientation Korzybski did not explicitly emphasize is that, with it, myth returns, but
with the benefit of both the perspective given by higher label levels and, yet more profoundly, the
deeper experience of silent practice at the object level. Myth can return without obscuring the truth
of science, the truth of silence: that whatever any story says something is, it is not.
Science and Sanity does not explicitly account for its own mythic dimensions or the relation
of general semantics to myth, except in a very schematic and accidental way. The pre-Aristotelian
epistemology, Korzybski writes in passing, is “prehuman and primitive,”7 involving generalized
“literal identification” that accounts for “their metaphysics, low development, etc….”8 He goes as
far as to say that in a mythic context “science was not possible.”9 This could be interpreted as
implying a linear structure of ‘progress’, from ‘backward beginnings’, best forgotten, to a steady
linear climb toward ever more science and rationality. I do not think Korzybski intended this kind
of scientistic or technocratic vision in Science and Sanity. I don’t think he wanted to build a ladder
of progress with myth on the lowly bottom, Aristotle in the mushy middle, and general semantics
as the ‘cream’ at the top. I think his vision was spiral in structure.10 But he needed to ‘move that
artillery piece’, and had more pressing tasks (establishing silent practice at the object level among a
group of trained practitioners; formulating science in operational terms likely to gain the attention of
American scientists, doctors and educators, etc.)
Perhaps the most important statement Korzybski makes about epistemic history and pre-history
in Science and Sanity is that it is “an enormous field for further research.”11 There seems to be a
deliberately unfinished quality to Korzybski’s ideas about our collective mythic past – much more
unfinished than his open formulations of an operational non-A science. This issue was not relevant
to ‘moving-that-artillery-piece1933’. But Korzybski’s silence could be interpreted to mean that myth
is not only irrelevant to the immediate purposes of general semantics1933 but generally irrelevant
to science per se. The persistence of myth in the modern world, indeed of religion and religious
traditions as well, might be sidelined or ignored by ‘purely operational’ discourses, or treated as
nothing more than obsolete, infantile epistemological ballast to be discarded by a more ‘mature’,
‘liberal’, ‘totally secularized’ human race. General semantics and silent practice might be reduced
to simply making more precise empirical observations, ‘disciplining our thinking’, completely
losing track of the way that Korzybski treated thinking-feeling as one whole organismic process.
An essentially Aristotelian notion of linear evolution from a ‘backward’ past to a ‘nearly perfect’
or ‘ever more perfect’ version of the present might be abstracted from Korzybski’s brief treatment,
‘motioning aside’ the inherent relation between mythic modes of communication and art, ‘motioning
aside’ the fact that “poetry often conveys in a few sentences more of lasting values than a whole
volume of scientific analysis.”12
The Map, “The Map Is Not the Territory,” Is Not the Territory
No more than any human could Korzybski possibly have dealt with everything in one book, and
no more than any group of humans could general semantics do everything with one slogan or even
one movement. But it is precisely Korzybski’s silence on the mythic dimension to which Gregory
Bateson draws our attention in Mind and Nature. The first section of the book, entitled “Every
Schoolboy Knows,” contains a numbered set of basic propositions for a properly scientific attitude1979.
Coming second, only after “1. Science never proves anything” (an eminently Korzybskian idea, it
seems to me), is a direct reference to Korzybski: “2. The Map is not the Territory.” Bateson, in other
words, places Korzybski and general semantics front-and-center in the history of twentieth-century
science.
But Bateson’s high praise appears to be followed by what might seem a tragic and even cruel
twist: Korzybski “could not win,” says Bateson. He was “speaking as a philosopher,” Bateson
writes, and “attempting to persuade people to discipline their manner of thinking.”13 Regarding “the
map is not the territory” Bateson says,
When we come to apply his dictum to the natural history of human mental process, the matter
is not quite so simple. The distinction between the name and the thing named or the map and
the territory is perhaps really made only by the dominant hemisphere of the brain. The symbolic
and affective hemisphere, normally on the right-hand side, is probably unable to distinguish
name from thing named. It is certainly not concerned with this sort of distinction. It therefore
happens that certain nonrational types of behaviour are necessarily present in human life….
Each hemisphere does, in fact, operate somewhat differently from the other, and we cannot get
away from the tangles that that difference proposes.14
If “the map is not the territory,” and every verbal formulation is a “map” of some kind, then
it follows that the map, “the map is not the territory,” is not the territory either. The structural
differential is itself a map, a map of mapping, albeit a recursive map that includes itself as a map.
Perhaps Bateson was neither a floor-breaker nor a public rhetorician of Korzybski’s calibre, but
he did have the time-binding advantage of having witnessed the tragic political schism of general
semantics in the wake of the furore of the 60s and Vietnam. Disciplined attention to what is going
on apparently did not prevent Anatol Rappaport from writing an excoriating, thalamically-charged
account of the Vietnam war effort, in which he related its horror stories as an attack on anyone who
would think of defending it.15 The emotional power of these stories, their implicit cry or scream
for justice on either side of the issue, had apparently transcended Korzybski’s cherished aim of
‘agreement’. Something of Korzybski’s profound effort to integrate deep emotional levels with more
abstract cognitive processing has been lost. The inestimable value of silence at the object level,
in the face of the insuperable complexities of properly labelling events, things, and relationships,
recedes from view.
Again, over and over again in an image like Nietzsche’s infamous ‘eternal recurrence’, the
‘officers’ seem to find themselves arguing around the ‘artillery piece’. Not one of them, it seems,
can “strike the root.”16
I think it would be a great mistake to construe Bateson as being dismissive or simply critical
of general semantics in Mind and Nature. I do not think Bateson felt that Korzybski’s real aim
was simply to get people to ‘discipline their thinking’. Rather, I feel Bateson intended to carry GS
forward and in his own fashion to consummate general semantics – specifically, to help cultivate a
fertile and radical sense of common endeavour and purpose among general semanticists and others,
to provide new ways for us to overcome or else to make better sense of deep differences in political
and social attitude that mark society at large as well as this movement in particular.
This intention is implied, it seems to me, in the weird fact that Bateson’s apparently withering
criticism is nested within the context of an act of homage, naming Korzybski’s ideas second from
the top of a list of things ‘every schoolboy should know’, and all this in the context of Bateson’s
masterwork.17 There is a contradictoriness to Bateson’s presentation – it is an affirmative critique.18
In this ‘weird’ way Bateson draws attention to the limits of the kind of literal, scientific thinking
that makes a sharp map-territory distinction possible. This gesture of failure to remain logically
consistent – at least in terms of the Aristotelian logic of equivalence – deepens the spirit of the
general semantics even as it questions it. It deepens it by questioning it.
I think Korzybski implied something like this himself by his self-deprecating sense of humour
and the open-ended nature of his formulations, but he never integrated it as explicitly as Bateson
into his general semantics framework. He left that task to others. With help from Gregory
Bateson’s cybernetics, as well as J. Samuel Bois’ text The Art of Awareness, it will be my task for
the remainder of this essay. By examining more closely the difference between verbal and non-
verbal communication, I will tentatively extend the scope of general semantics to mythic forms of
communication, summarizing the formulations in the form of an epistemological diagram of myth
that is similar in certain respects to the structural differential. I mainly agree with and maintain Bois’
Bachelardian epistemological profile, but I believe that Bateson’s observation about communication
and myth modifies Bois’ picture to some extent. To be precise, what seems to be a linear historical-
anthropological-epistemological order in The Art of Awareness will be better represented in a spiral
form. The achievement of a non-A science of postulation is a prelude to a ‘slight return’ of myth.19
Mammalian Communication and the ‘Clouds’ of Myth

In Science and Sanity, as a topic for “further research,” Korzybski specifies, “The relation between
the pre-human reactions and the reactions of the primitive man, involving always some copying by
mutants of the response of the prevailing simpler organisms.”20 Is Korzybski indicating here some
problematic connection between myth and our copying animals in our nervous reactions? What
connection? Is he saying myth is in itself ‘animalistic’? I feel that further research this case requires
assessing the positive as well as negative aspects of mythic communication, while also emphasizing
more than Korzybski1933 the immense gulf that opened between our earliest human, verbal-language-
using, myth-making ancestors and even the most developed pre-verbal social mammals.
The cube cannot be produced from the square by additive methods. It is a higher-order entity.
Human language, even the most primitive human verbal language imaginable, is similarly of a
higher logical order than that of other mammals.21 We could say linguistic communication in its
earliest magical and mythic phases ‘copied’ the complex sets of non-verbal gestures that characterize
communication among many animals, but this would be to omit the structural fact that the process
of ‘copying’ in fact has produced a higher order figure: the mammalian gesture became the explicit
word, the Name of myth. Human words could be used to speak about the patterns of gestural
communication, to evaluate, judge and organize them at a higher logical level of abstraction.
Interestingly, Gregory Bateson suggests in Steps to an Ecology of Mind that the earliest human
verbal meanings were very likely connected with the problem of communicating the negative.22
Animal gestures can ‘say’ a great deal, often with startling eloquence, about complex the relations
of dominance and obedience, dependency and care-giving, aggression and playful friendliness, etc.
They can even implicitly indicate a specific object in the vague sense of a shared object of interest
or rivalry. But they cannot say ‘no’. The gesture of the animal has an inherently assertive-positive
quality. The wolf cannot formulate ‘absence of aggression’ – at best it can formulate ‘playful’ or
‘non-serious’ aggressiveness. This might be interpreted ‘correctly’ as play or ‘incorrectly’ as ‘real’
aggression, because a sharp boundary between play and ‘real’ behaviour cannot be established with
clarity by non-verbal mammals. The wolf, unable to say, ‘I have no aggressive intentions here’, must
playfully mime gestures of aggression, while hopefully conveying a more general context of play –
i.e., that this gesture does not mean what it might otherwise mean. Of course, the sense of ‘parody’
or mime might easily be missed by the other animal, responding ‘literally’ in kind, and shifting the
context from one of play to one of actual conflict.
Bateson frequently approaches this issue in terms of a distinction between analogic and digital
forms of communication. Mammalian social communication (unlike that of insects and birds, as it
happens) is exclusively analogic, whereas human verbal communication (at least in its prosaic and
literal forms) is preponderantly digital. Bateson defines the difference between analog and digital as
one of continuity versus discontinuity:
A signal is digital if there is discontinuity between it and alternative signals from which it must
be distinguished. Yes and no are examples of digital signals. In contrast, when a magnitude or
quantity in the signal is used to represent a continuously variable quantity in the referent, the
signal is said to be analogic.23
It is the sharp discontinuity between the verbal levels and the nonverbal levels, and among the
different verbal levels, that makes it possible for humans to say ‘no’, to say ‘the map is not the
territory’, and ‘whatever you say it is, it is not’. Precisely because a verbal sound purports to say
what a thing is, we can say by the same token that the sound itself is not the thing. This discreteness
is what ultimately makes possible a clear distinction between the ‘unspeakable’ object level and the
verbal levels, as well as making possible conceptualization and experimentation regarding what is
going on at the event level.
Korzybski, like Bateson, was greatly inspired by the work of Whitehead and Russell, who
refined precise notions of logical levels in language and mathematics. A set cannot be a member of
itself; the set is at a higher logical level than the items it contains. Similarly, the lowest verbal levels
(descriptive labelling) can never be the objects they describe – even the most basic descriptive name
is a generalization from sensory experience. However, again, Bateson insists that not all, or even
most of human communication can be mapped in this way. Only fairly-well digitized (meaning
literal, prosaic and explicit) language can be clearly mapped on the structural differential. For the
structural-differential to do its work, a learning context needs to be established where distinctions
like map/territory and item/category are epistemologically relevant to the listeners. This presumes
‘emotional’ investment: a sense that the difference between map and territory makes a difference.
And it is precisely at these affective levels – where a difference comes to make a difference in the
first place, in a radical sense – that Bateson would remind us the sharp boundaries of the digital
break down, and we need to grokk the more complex and shifting terrain of analog communication.
In a paper in Steps to an Ecology of Mind entitled “Problems in Cetacean and Other Mammalian
Communication,” Bateson explains:
The premises, following the Theory of Types, are primarily appropriate for the analysis of
digital communication. To what extent they may be applicable to analogic communication or to
systems that combine the digital with the analogic is problematic.24
Although his purpose here is primarily to undermine the stimulus-reponse theories of
behaviourism, the implications of the statement extend to his ‘critique’ of general semantics in
Mind and Nature. As soon as we move out of a disciplined-digitalized semantic context we find we
are no longer so easily able to distinguish event from object, object from label, or descriptive from
evaluative label. “The map is not the territory” is not the only map. In the world of communicative
gesture and image the aniconic, literal labels to which we can assign discrete meanings give way to
iconic figures with multiple and tangled, clouded, or ‘cloudy’ logical levels of implication.
We need to practice silence, not only use it as a point of epistemic logic. We need to ponder the
mystery of the communicative gesture, whose actual communicative content might be more complex
than simple assertion of dominance or dependency. Korzybski, I think, was not at all unaware of this
more profound ‘emotional’ level – the tone and style of his writing in reality reflect what could be
called a spirit of ‘creative humour’ and ‘semantic relaxation’ that is the heart of the impulse to use
the devices, practice silence at the object level, etc.
The object level is ‘where we live’. However, this very true statement needs a supplement. It
is not to contradict but to amplify the value of silent practice to say that humans are creatures of
culture who live in myth – that is, in irreducibly complex networks of stories. No story or statement
will permit us to totally or finally escape from our attachment to storytelling. A human world first
appears as a complex intertwinement of direct descriptive verbal levels with visual impressions and
fantastic poetic projections about the nature of the world. Many processes that seem to be contained
within our skin (thinking a bad thought about something, having a strong feeling of atttraction or
admiration, etc.) are projected outward, onto the world outside the skin, and not only or primarily by
‘savages’. It is easy to call this anthromorphism or ‘magical thinking’, in retrospect. Aristotelianisms
past and present have attacked this anthroporphism, while studiously avoiding dealing with the more
subtle anthropomorphism of their own doctrines of logical identity.
Bateson’s critique, among other things, aims to alert us to the profound human importance of this
communicative aspect of our mythic heritage, which for Bateson is carried forward, not replaced, by
modern mathematical, artistic and religious practices. Korzybski himself showed striking prescience
on these matters within the frame of mathematics, and particularly with his almost oracular sense of
the importance of calculus:
[T]he structure of the human nervous system is such that, on some levels, we produce dynamic
abstractions; on others static. As the organism works as-a-whole, for its optimum working, and
therefore, for sanity, we need a language, a method, which may be translated into a s.r by which
to translate the dynamic into the static, and vice versa; and such a language, such a method, is
produced and supplied by mathematicians.25
Korzybski quite strenuously distinguishes the shifting-dynamic images of the thalamic or ‘right-
brain’ from the ‘relatively static’ terms of the cortex which “have lost their shifting character.”26
He speaks of their re-integration in terms of the logic of calculus, but here he ‘motions aside’ the
possibility of other forms of communicative action that dynamically combine the dynamic with the
static levels. Korzybski assigns the dynamic levels and their experience to the ‘unspeakable’ object
level.
It is a salutary experience, not one to be mocked or minimized, to observe silently the immense
inexpressible dynamism of our sub-verbal sensory-cognitive experience. ‘Silent practice’ might
be called the ‘crown jewel’ or ‘royal road’ of general semantics, for the way it permits us to re-
organize and re-canalize label-level abstractions which are found to be injurious. The object level
is ‘where we live’. But again, this is to ‘motion aside’ the thorny and tangled issue that we are
linguistic beings, that culturally and personally speaking, we begin ‘life’ in ‘clouds’ of myth, not
clearly distinguishing the dynamic from the static, but rather experiencing a con-fusing continuity
of continuity and discontinuity. We must perhaps learn our first maps, our first labels, as if they
were the territory, just as the two-year old human infant first learns her name and the names of other
people and things. We may not literally identify them in Aristotelian terms, but at this level we are
not capable of sharply distinguishing them either.27
Bois’ ‘Epistemological Profile’ and the History of Occidental Epistemology

The ‘epistemological profile’ J. Samuel Bois adapts from Gaston Bachelard in The Art of
Awareness maps the development of epistemological premises as an anthropological process where
ontogeny recapitulates phylogeny.28 In other words Bois is saying that an individual, in her personal
development, will pass through stages similar in structure to stages to those through which her
civilization has passed:
In the course of history Western man has taken semantic jumps that have altered his outlook
on the world and his capacity to deal with it. As a semantic reactor, man became different from
his previous self after each of these jumps, which are tantamount to cultural mutations, to
transformations of what is commonly called our second nature. Bachelard saw these semantic
jumps recapitulated in the life of each individual as he grows from infancy through childhood
and adolescence, eventually to reach – in some cases – the full degree of maturity available
in our cultural environment. If he fails to reach this stage, he will live technologically in the
twentieth century while remaining psychologically in the Middle Ages.29
The ways of thinking-feeling characteristic of each stage, which were at one time culturally
dominant, have not disappeared at present but have rather been absorbed into new, wider contexts.
As individuals, we re-visit each of the levels at different stages of our lives, in different moods,
occupations, seasons, etc. But before I describe Bois’ five stages of Western epistemological
development any further, I need at once to identify what I believe is a minor flaw in his analysis.
It is not so much a flaw of accuracy or truth as a problem of vagueness and suggestiveness – a
lack of explicitness. Because of this flaw, Bois’ formulations might be interpreted as a linear
narrative of ‘progress’. In fact, in The Art of Awareness, while presenting ideas that might sound like
disparagement of yesterday in favour of tomorrow, Bois seems to be subtly undermining precisely
that linear notion. Where many construct a linear notion of progress in a direct upward motion, I think
that Bois is in fact suggesting the more complex, upward-sideward-forward-and-backward, linear
and cyclical aspect of the spiral. Something of this insight into the nature of historical development
is captured by Arthur Koestler in The Yogi and the Commissar:
The peak of Utopia is steep; the serpentine road which leads up to it has many tortuous
curves. While you are moving up the road you never face the peak, your direction is tangent,
leading nowhere. If a great mass of people are pushing forward along the serpentine they will,
according to the fatal laws of inertia, push their leader off the road and then follow him, the
whole movement flying off at a tangent into the nowhere.30
Koestler captures well a certain paradox of the observer in the case of a spiral trajectory.
Observed from the outside, it is easy enough to perceive the upward directional trend. However, if
one is oneself on or in the trajectory, ‘in the moment’, one needs to adjust one’s directional sense
to compensate for the fact that in spiral motion one is never travelling directly in the underlying
directional trend, but always at a tangent to it.
In other words, while travelling on the arc of a spiral, the linear urge, the urge to ‘get where
we are intending to go directly’, is an impediment to true ‘progress’. We must accept the cyclical
aspect of the spiral which is taking us ‘where we are going’ indirectly and circuitously. What is a
continuous climb in one dimension is a repetitive cyclical return to the origin in another. Only when
the climb and the cycle are thoroughly structurally integrated do we attain the correct spiral form.
Again, I feel that Bois’ version of the profile points to this structure in a way that could be mis-
interpreted as a line of ‘progress’.
Bois constructs the development of occidental epistemology through five stages: sensing,
classifying, relating, postulating, and finally a special stage he calls ‘peak experience’, or
eponymously, ‘Stage Five’. Let us first map these stages of epistemological development as a spiral
structure:
figure1: J. Samuel Bois’ Epistemological Profile Bois’ Epistemological Profile

figure 1: J. Samuel
The first stage, ‘sensing’, refers to the pre-Aristotelian, mythic epistemology or epistemologies
that prevailed in the ancient cultures that were precursors to the classical Greeks. Bois’s label for this
stageThe first forward
carries stage, ‘sensing’,
Korzybski’srefers to the pre-Aristotelian,
formulation of mythic language mythic
as aepistemology
“language ofor‘sensations’.”
epistemologies31 that
However, Bois elaborates, “The term sensing, as used here, is not limited to sensory experiences.
prevailed in the ancient cultures that were precursors to the classical Greeks.Bois’s label for this stage
It also covers feelings that are unquestioned and uncontrolled, feelings to which we expect people
to yield,
carriesfeelings
forwardthat are their own
Korzybski’s self-justification….”
formulation
32
of mythic languageClearly,
as athe label ‘sensing’
“language is being 31used
of ‘sensations’.” However,
here in a somewhat metaphorical fashion, not referring exclusively to sensory experience but also to
thoseBois elaborates,
complex “Theofterm
‘clouds’ sensing,interpretation
perception, as used here,andis not limited we
evaluation to sensory experiences.It
call ‘feelings’. At anyalso
rate,covers
‘sensing’ is not really adequate in its literal meaning to the range of meanings that ‘feelings’ can
feelings
include. Onethat are have
might unquestioned and uncontrolled,
a very distinct feelings
‘feeling’ about to which
something weabstract
very expect people to yield, feelings
and un-visualizable – that
a ‘sense of process’, for example. One ‘senses’ that Bois, perhaps more than Korzybski, uses the idea
are their own self-justification….” 32 Clearly, the label ‘sensing’ is being used here in a somewhat
of ‘sensation’ in order to convey to his readers a ‘sense’ of an epistemic process humans have been
engaging in for tens
metaphorical of thousands
fashion, of years:
not referring exclusively to sensory experience but also to those complex ‘clouds’
I also consider as a stage-one communication the polite chit-chat of casual social encounters
of perception, interpretation and evaluation we call ‘feelings’.At any rate, ‘sensing’ is not really adequate
in which one is expected to be pleasant, to avoid embarrassing silent spells, and to make
conversation but to say nothing of significance…. Stage-one communication may be explosive
in its literal meaning to the range of meanings that ‘feelings’ can include.One might have a very distinct
as well. It is then an outburst of feelings in statements that are peppered with value terms,
utteredabout
‘feeling’ rapidlysomething
in a high-pitched voice. Itand
very abstract happens when we give
un-visualizable – athe other of
‘sense fellow a pieceforof example.One
process’,
our mind, or bawl him out or tell him off. No doubt this relieves the sender of the pressure of
his feelings, but whether it delivers a message that the recipient accepts or profits by is another 14
matter. If we cannot make ourselves understood in a foreign country, we repeat our English-
worded message in a louder voice or we articulate it with determined emphasis.33
The language of ‘sense’ here might, then, be more precisely specified as the language of myth.
The word ‘myth’, in its original meaning in Greek, simply means ‘story’. But a ‘story’ is not merely
the relation of verbal items that can be precisely specified as a description, interpretation, etc. We
‘tell stories’ when we are moved from the ‘depths of our being’, and we tell them with our bodies –
with words, gestures, symbols, and music, ‘lost in the clouds’ of spontaneous movements and
moments of intimate communicative experience. We are nearly all storytellers in this mythic sense
some of the time, expressing “feelings that are their own self-justification.”34
For we modern time-binders the practices of storytelling have long since been absorbed within
larger and more comprehensive Aristotelian contexts.35 The second and third stages, ‘classifiying’
and ‘relating’, refer historically to the two grand phases of Aristotelian thought. The classifying
stage begins with Aristotle himself and lasts at least until the late Middle Ages. At this stage,
A thing is identical with itself. It is man’s privilege and duty to use his powers of observation
and to find the “real” nature of things. There are substances, and there are qualities. Substances
are the “real” stuff the universe is made of. Qualities – or actions – may vary without changing
the essential nature of persons and things.36
It is this stage of Aristotelianism that gives us elementalism in its classic sense: the search for the
basic elements or substances into which every process in the universe can purportedly be dissolved.
The third, ‘relating’ stage, came to cultural prominence in the West during the Renaissance and
became more and more predominant in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries:
It was the age when the world was seen as a huge machine, when man was inventing an array
of instruments to multiply his powers of perception: telescopes, microscopes, stethoscopes, X
rays, oscilloscopes, Geiger counters, radar, radio, television, transistors, electron microscopes,
Tiros satellites, etc. He also constructed machines to multiply his powers of action: engines,
explosives, railroads, automobiles, ocean liners, airplanes, assembly lines, spaceship boosters,
lasers and masers, cyclotrons, atomic reactors, A-bombs and H-bombs, earth-moving
equipment, automation, etc.37
The more ‘primitive’ doctrines of essence and substance characteristic of the earlier Aristotelian
phase are overcome in the third stage. However, the interrelated problems of the mind-body split and
an over-reliance on mechanistic metaphors mean that this ‘scientific revolution’ has something like
the quality of the legendary French figure Rabaud, who ‘jumped in the river to get out of the rain’.
In English vernacular, we might say that at Stage Three we leapt out of frying pan, and into the fire.
The elementalistic Aristotelian idea of a separate substance of Mind is not transcended at the
third stage; rather Mind is hived off completely from Body, and perhaps even removed from the
domain of scientific investigation altogether. The upshot is an exclusive concern with empirical,
linear mechanical causes:
The world is seen as a complex of interrelated parts, as a huge machine whose workings we
keep discovering one after the other, and we learn to control them more and more efficiently….
For many persons this is man’s top achievement, and Science (with a capital S) becomes the
supreme value, just as Religion was in the Middle Ages. To oppose Science is to be heretic in
today’s world.38
More explicitly than Korzybski, Bois illuminates how the narrative of ‘scientific progress’ in a
linear sense is really at odds with general semantics, dominated as it is by mind-body dualism and
a mechanistic theory of ‘Mind’. Korzybski’s science1933 has transcended the mechanistic scientific
postulates of the Renaissance and Enlightenment, which were still hobbled by the belief that science
could produce ‘proofs’ and ‘certainties’, true for all people in all times and places. The limited
advance provided by the shift from medieval scholastic doctrines of substance to relational theories
of energy versus matter, mind versus body, time versus space, etc. was mostly vitiated by the
presupposition that the differences described by these dualisms actually exist ‘empirically’ outside
the skin, as opposed to being aspects of particular ways of mapping what is going on, not necessarily
true for all places-times.
Each of the Aristotelian stages presupposes a linear model of some kind. Stage Two presupposes
a static line: what has been established by the Aristotelian order is felt to be eternal and ideally
unchanging. All change appears to be bad at Stage Two, hence the terror and hysteria surrounding
the appearance of comets, solar eclipses, the idea of a heliocentric solar system, etc. We might say
the horizontal line dominates Stage Two. At Stage Three, in contrast, we presuppose linear and
continuous progress as the norm. The past and all preservation of tradition appear bad or at least
questionable at Stage Three, and continuous innovation and expansion of technology in a mechanistic
sense (with the Mind still considered separate from the Body, and the resulting incoherence avoided
by banishing serious treatment of ‘mental’ issues from ‘hard science’) becomes the new dogma. This
is the stage where dogmatic scientism and technocracy are born, and we might say that the diagonal
or vertical line dominates Stage Three.
We might characterize both of the Aristotelian stages as groping, confused attempts to discern
what is going on in this spiral trajectory of epistemological evolution. At Stage One, there can be no
comparison or sense of other stages by which to know the trajectory of the evolutionary journey –
we are in the ‘clouds’. At Stage Two, we have turned from the direction in which we were travelling
at Stage One, and we wrongly assume that we must now and forever follow the horizontal line
that runs tangent to the spiral at Stage Two. At Stage Three, we come to see that the horizontal
line was not ‘the end of the story’ and that we have turned yet another corner, but now we wrongly
attempt to remedy error of following the horizontal tangent by following an equally linear vertical or
diagonal tangent. It is only at Stage Four, once both linear tangents have clearly failed us, that we are
‘squarely’ faced with the spiral nature of the trajectory of our evolution, and begin to sense the actual
direction of ‘progress’ which is never given by our actual direction of travel along a continuously
changing trajectory.
The fourth, ‘postulating’ stage refers to primarily twentieth-century premises such as form
the structure of Einstein’s general relativity, quantum theory, Whitehead’s philosophy of process,
Gregory Bateson’s Mind and Nature, and general semantics. It is only at this stage that science
becomes fully aware of itself as an organ of postulates, rather than ‘proven facts’:
The great discovery that ushered in stage four is the awareness of our self-reflexiveness. We
have at last understood that our mental constructs, linguistic or mathematical, are not images of
an “objective” world, they are mirrors of ourselves looking at the world. Objectivity, as we took
it to be, has now disappeared. Rational absolutes are crumbling. We are actually in the throes
of a rebirth to a new form of human life the like of which history has never seen. Reason and
rationality have reached their limits, and we are aware or this: proud dogmatism has to make
room for humble uncertainty; predictability becomes possibility with an unmeasurable margin
of unknowns….
This does away with self-evident truths, with axioms as we learned them in Euclidean geometry,
with shared perceptions that are supposed infallibly to bring about agreement.39
The profile, running from mythic pre-history to the present, now seems complete. However,
the story is not over, for Bois and Bachelard. A pregnant question is posed by the epistemological
profile, which is not directly answered in The Art of Awareness: Why is Stage Four not enough? Why
must there be a yet-further stage, ‘Stage Five’, following the non-Aristotelian ‘postulating’ stage?
Why, furthermore, does ‘Stage Five’ not have a characteristic epistemic content like the earlier
stages (whose content was ‘sensation’, ‘classification’, ‘relation’, and ‘postulation’ respectively),
such that Bois must simply refer to its content obliquely-eponymously as ‘stage-five’ or ‘peak-
experience’? And why, furthermore, does Bois purposely and consciously reserve his discussion of
Stage Five for a separate chapter, producing an almost literary sense of suspense and mystery before
delving into its quite unusual nature?
A stage-five experience takes us out of the established order; it places us in the center of the
world where the accustomed signposts of systematic rationality are missing. At the same time,
it fills us with an assurance that this is the most genuine experience a human being can have; it is
the fountainhead of the greatest achievements and discoveries in all fields of human endeavour:
science, religion, philosophy, technology, ethics, law, the fine arts, economics and politics.40
‘All fields of human endeavour’? A tall order for an extensional non-Aristotelian investigation!
However, I think the mystery of Bois’ Stage Five can be greatly clarified when we perceive that,
while it is indeed a further development vertically-upward beyond the postulating stage, in the
horizontal dimension, Stage Five is also a return to Stage One – a return to myth, according to my
re-mapping. We can re-map Bois’ Stage Five as a cyclical return to myth at a higher logical level
(and marking this difference using the index, from myth1 to myth2):
figure2: a revised version of Bois’ Epistemological Profile

figure 2: a revised version of Bois’ Epistemological Profile
The sense of the ‘slight return’ (a return to ‘the same’ orientation, but at a hig
The sense of the ‘slight return’ (a return to ‘the same’ orientation, but at a higher level subsquent
to a whole process of evolution) is only suggested by Bois text. What does this mean in relation to
science and the rigorous strictures of the postulating stage, where we discover that science never
proves anything, and that the map is not the territory?
I would suggest that what Bois is implying is precisely what Bateson is saying in Mind and Nature
with his affirmative critique of the mantra, ‘the map is not the territory’. To have reached the stage of
postulation – the consummation of science – is also to begin to recognize a fundamental and organic
interconnection between science and myth. It is accept that science begins with stories we tell about
happenings, and that what makes those stories scientific is not that they prove anything, but rather
that we know they prove nothing. The silence of non-Aristotelian science does not debunk myths;
it draws our
silentattention
practice attothethe mythic
object aspect
level.The of any
terroristic human
capacity utterance.
of myth Myth
to project is reborn
hatred, paranoia and
and returned
to pride of place, then, in the form of play, postulation, speculation, experiment, art and culture,
aggression (feelings ‘that are their own justification’) is subjected, not to banishment, but to silent
spirituality and ritual, “living life” and “telling stories,” but with the new dimension of scientific
observation, allowing rearticulation at a higher or deeper level of abstraction.In T. W. Adorno’s words,
consciousness of the Event Level and silent practice at the object level. The terroristic capacity
of myth to“artproject
is magic,hatred,
delivered paranoia and
from the lie of aggression
being truth.” 41 (feelings ‘that are their own justification’) is
subjected, not to banishment, but to silent observation, allowing rearticulation at a higher or deeper
level of abstraction. In T. W. Adorno’s words, “art is magic, delivered from the lie of being truth.”41
The ‘clouds’ of myth
In line with the aim of facilitating extensional analysis of storytelling and culture, I have created the
The ‘Clouds’ of Myth
In line following
with thediagram
aim offorfacilitating
my classes asextensional
a complement analysis
to the structural differential, accounting
of storytelling for theI fact
and culture, have created
the following diagram
that levels forabstraction
of verbal my classescannotasbeaclearly
complement to inthe
distinguished structural
myth and indeed differential, accounting for
in any communication
the fact that levels of verbal abstraction cannot be clearly distinguished in myth and indeed in any
that is structured by images and metaphors rather than declarative statements. 42
communication that is structured by images and metaphors rather than declarative statements.42
figure3: the ‘clouds’ of myth figure 3: the ‘clouds’ of myth
In mythIn there
myth there are no firm distinctions between verbal and perceptual abstractions.In some forms of myth
are no firm distinctions between verbal and perceptual abstractions. In some forms
of myth and ritualthere
and ritual there
are inare
fact in factdistinction
no firm no firmofdistinction of any– the
any kind, whatsoever kind, whatsoever
individual – not
herself may thebeindividual
herself may
distinguished from her world.This is reflected in the diagram’s ‘cloud’ character – any abstraction of any character
not be distinguished from her world. This is reflected in the diagram’s ‘cloud’
– any abstraction of any order comes to the observer (indicated by the small circle or fuzzy 20
shape
within the larger clouds, on the right and left respectively) in and through the cloud. Any image or
idea can operate simultaneously at many unspecified levels of abstraction. What might appear to be
a ‘simple image’ – for example, of an apple – in the clouds of myth takes on a characteristic variety
of associations. It might appear to me as a more or less direct descriptive image of an apple I might
eat (if my friend is messaging me with pictures from the grocery store). On the other hand, it might
carry me to the Biblical story of Eden and the Fall of Man, a myth of education, or even to a personal
computer. In myth we can never explicitly affirm the difference between these levels, nor would we
necessarily want to.
A very important aspect of my diagram of myth is its aspect of duality. The structural differential
is monistic: there is a flow of information down one ‘channel’, from event, to object, to labels
and then returning to the event in a cyclical manner. In contrast, there are two clouds of myth, not
one, reflecting the fact that mythic ‘logic’ tends almost by necessity to see a world governed by
opposites. This duality is not the dualism of the Aristotelians, nor is there any ‘law of the excluded
middle’ in mythic epistemology. At the mythic stage we simply accept the co-relation of opposites.
Night requires day, death requires life, adulthood requires childhood, etc. This duality or polarity
of mythic epistemology can be scientifically explained: if an abstracting being is a being concerned
with differences, then the most extreme possible differences – which we call opposites – will
naturally be of concern to the myth-making being. There will nearly always be at least two mutually
contradictory explanations for any phenomenon in mythic thinking, and this contradiction will be
accepted without question.43
Any polarity can be mapped onto the clouds of myth, but my current favourite is one that has
been attractive to both philosophers and anthropologists in the Western tradition – the duality of
Dionysus and Apollo.44 Apollo represents what Nietzsche, following Schopenhauer and others, call
the ‘principium individuationis’, which is simply put, the tendency of things (or people) to preserve
and remain themselves apart from their environment. This is represented on the right hand side of the
diagram by the circle within the cloud, the self that distinguishes itself within the ‘cloud’ of images
and stories. In contrast, Dionysus, on the left side of the diagram, represents the disintegration of
the line between self and world, the tendency of things (or people) to change themselves and open
themselves to external forces outside the skin. Some practices of storytelling, myth-making and
ritual enshrine and preserve boundaries through prohibitions; others challenge them transgressively.
Any culture, we might imagine, will show a workable ‘balance’ (not necessarily a symmetry, but a
balance) between the ‘clouds’.
In the ‘clouds’ what we call critique or scientific analysis is neither possible nor desirable.
Change, even revolutionary change, might be desired, but this would be merely to pass from one
cloud to the other, hopefully within a larger, overall sense of ‘balance’. We might have certain ‘peak
experiences’ of the left side where all boundaries seem to melt away and ‘everything is possible’,
but these must co-exist to some extent with propositions of the right side whereby structures are
maintained, developed and strengthened. I think it is important to recognize the crucial role that
this kind of mythic duality still plays in human life, not only in the distant past, but in the present as
well. To say we are in ‘the clouds’ is to say that we can never be quite sure what the outcome of our
communicative action might be. Bateson warns that Korzybski ‘could not win’ because a great deal
of very important communicating, inside and outside the skin, is going on ‘in the clouds’. So much
of the human life of tradition, of crucial religious experiences which form the basis of character, of
aesthetic experiences the meaning of which can never quite be said in so many words, of ‘love’,
‘hope’, ‘wisdom’ etc. remains and will remain for us ‘in the clouds’.
But all is not well in the ‘clouds’. The entire course of occidental civilization, which Aristotle
exemplifies, could be described as resulting from a massive and tragic disturbance in human myth-
systems occasioned by the expansion of Indo-European (etc.) language-systems.45 At the heart of
the Indo-European language systems is encoded the fundamental lethal error of identifying symbol
with process, name with thing named.46 This has coincided with exacerbated colonial arrogance,
imperialism, the taking of kings for gods, etc., a whole bloody tale of ‘civilization’ which I hope
needs no great elaboration. What myth lacks, what science can provide, is a means for producing
meta-languages by which the tangled knots of unique cultural experiences can be arranged
democratically in a larger social or political agreements. The story of human history is one of
cultures blindly encountering each other, most often with little or no sense of what general semantics
means by ‘science’. To the contrary: it is a story of war, enslavement and in general humans copying
animals in their nervous processes. As Adorno put it, “No universal history leads from savagery to
humanitarianism, but there is one leading from the slingshot to the megaton bomb.”47
The best maps we have available in anthropology tell us that somewhere on the order of ten
thousand years ago, processes which brought different cultures, different ‘clouds’, into contact
with one another – technical processes such as agriculture, domestication of horses, etc. – began
to accelerate in what is called ‘the neolithic revolution’. The mostly animalistic cultural results
might well be summarized by an analogy with Korzybski’s discussion of marriage: “a more or less
unhappy life begins.”48 Indeed, a more or less unhappy history of distrust, greed and vengeance
has emerged from the diversity of human clouds of myth. A truly unhappy human ‘marriage’, or
more like in the American vernacular, a ‘shotgun wedding’, followed by the inevitable reprisals and
suicidal gestures.
Korzybski’s qualification of Aristotle as a thinker of his time can be extended: in many respects,
his attempt to produce a scientific theory of the political order in terms of one, unified ‘Good’, was
what seemed to him and other ancient Greeks to be the best possible solution to the problem of the
co-existence of a diversity of mythic traditions, which at that point in history were in a state of more
or less continuous war, and had been for as long as those time-binders could remember. Aristotle’s
means of solving the problems created by the complex relations between different clouds was a
great leap forward, in a restricted sense, in that it formulated at least the possibility of two different
groups of humans coming to an agreement about the common Good. However its weakness, in
communicational terms, was that it relied on dogmatic digital-verbal formulations, which it wrongly
associated with a separate or rigidly elevated ‘mind’ (whose excellence was purportedly localized in
Greek-speaking males). This was bound up with a whole epistemological error by which experiences
and practices – many of which quite valuable, such as practices of prayer and meditation, traditional
craft-knowledge and local expertise, etc. – were identified with their general categories and so
casually demoted in relation to the higher abstractions of centralized administration and its dogma.
At any rate, Aristotle appears to have given little or no value to silent practice at the object level.
The results of twenty-four centuries of ‘eternal verities’ and elementalism following upon at least
sixty centuries more of prehistoric imperialism and conquest before them, provide the deep world-
historical anthropological context for Korzybski’s non-Aristotelian science1933 and the movement
he aimed to lead. This is a context where it would not be wrong to say that science, intending to
finally replace myth, has time and again merely replicated its worst aspects. One dogmatic system
of belief has been replaced by another, and another in turn as institutions grind human lives from
one Aristotelian mode to the next.
A non-Aristotelian science needs to integrate, not replace myth. Dogmatism needs to give way to
openness to possibilities – but how? Humans are not limitless creatures. We are defined at profound
levels by our stories and traditions. One ought not confront a religious or patriotic person’s belief-
stories with a statement like, ‘those maps are not the territory’. This would presume that science can
be equated with and therefore replace those ‘clouds’ of traditions and beliefs that we call culture. I
think that this is not to advance but to degrade science.
If science has a culture, it is a meta-culture of some order, and it must accept that some of
the time, sumbanall people will be governing their actions by verbal-imagistic standards from the
‘clouds’, for reasons that may be electro-colloidally necessary. Certainly some of these standards are
destructive, unsane, and animalistic – but we can make no rule in advance to decide which is which.
Family and tradition are definitive even, or maybe especially, for those who feel they have departed
from family and tradition. We will not win any fight against these forces using science; at worst, we
lower science to the same imagistic standards, and transform science itself into a competing myth.
To say we ‘cannot win’ at a fight to exterminate myth is not to deny the royal road of silent
practice, which leads to self-beyond-stories;49 it is to practice general semantics more deeply and
with greater sensitivity to the complexities of ‘life’. This ‘loss’ of all certainties can in fact be a
‘peak experience’ of general semantics. We proceed from myth, to classification and relation, to
non-Aristotelian postulational science and beyond, in a spiral-shaped and not linear fashion.
In Korzybski’s life and work, then, we can see all five stages of Bois and Bachelard’s profile
simultaneously at work, organically and electro-colloidally intertwined. His work cannot be severed
from his Polish heritage, nor from his early tragic-comic adventures with European aristocrats and
Canadian fauna.50 We cannot ignore the mythic violence of his war experiences and the way they
were carried forward, their sign reversed and turned inside out, in a movement aiming to extirpate
militarism along with elementalism. “The map is not the territory” and “whatever you say it is,
it is not” are not slogans but mantras, emanations of a unique teacher’s life, verbal conduits for
profound shared experiences. I feel that something of this commitment, this dedication, what Bruce
Kodish invoked at the Memorial Lecture Colloquium in 2012 as the passion of the general semantics
movement, needs to be carried forward. It needs to be carried forward without fear, yet in wariness
of the forces of cultishness, fundamentalism and groupthink. It needs to carried through and beyond
the fire of our immediate political and moral disagreements, and like Korzybksi’s artillery piece,
‘pushed somewhere’ where it cannot fall into enemy hands.
To conclude, I think that rather than the patricidal Oedipus, the archetype that truly possessed
Korzybski was Sisyphus, particularly as he is commemorated by Albert Camus:
One always finds one’s burden again. But Sisyphus teaches the higher fidelity that negates the
gods and raises rocks. He too concludes that all is well. This universe henceforth without a
master seems to him neither sterile nor futile. Each atom of that stone, each mineral flake of that
night filled mountain, in itself forms a world. The struggle itself toward the heights is enough
to fill a man’s heart. One must imagine Sisyphus happy.51
APPENDIX: The Aristotelian Epistemologies, Stages Two (“classifying”, in blue, on the
right) and Three (“relating”, in red, on the left) of Bois’ Epistemological Profile 91
The “Myth” of General Semantics
APPENDIX: The Aristotelian Epistemologies, Stages Two (“classifying” on the right) and
Three (“relating” on the left) of Bois’ Epistemological Profile
NOTES
1 I dedicate this paper to Bruce I. Kodish.
2 The term ‘branding’ or ‘brand name’ traditionally labelled the practice of the burning of a mark on the 26
flesh
of a criminal or other stigmatized individual.
3 Bruce Kodish, Korzybski: A Biography (Pasadena, CA: Extensional Publishing, 2011), 65
4 Korzybski: A Biography, 99
5 Ibid, 60
6 Alfred Korzybski, Science and Sanity 4th ed. (Lakeville, Connecticut: The International Non-Aristotelian
Library Publishing Company, 1958), lxxxii
7 Science and Sanity, 194
8 Ibid, 197. Korzybski does not quite confront the issue of what the ‘literal’ could mean in a culture without
written language, and does not appear to anticipate the problem that mythic “identification,” practiced
“literally” as he puts it, might be structurally different from Aristotelian identification in important ways.
9 Ibid. This generalization is challenged by Korzybski’s friend Bronislaw Malinowski in Magic, Science and
Religion: “If by science is understood a body of rules and conceptions, based on experience and derived
from it by logical inference, embodied in material achievements and in a fixed form of tradition and carried
on by some sort of social organization – then there is no doubt that the lowest savage communities have the
beginnings of science, however rudimentary” (Long Grove, Illinois: Waveland Press, 1992), 34
10 I will be explicitly exploring the merits of a spiral as opposed to linear notion of history in the conclusion
of this paper, with a brief examination of J. Samuel Bois’ notion of the epistemological profile, which he
adapted from Gaston Bachelard.
13 Gregory Bateson, Mind and Nature (New York: E. P. Dutton, 1979), 30
14 Iibid, 30-1. Whether the difference between literal and mythic forms of communication can be easily
mapped onto the Right and Left brain hemispheres (as Iain MacGilchrist has tried to do in The Master and
his Emissary) remains an open question, in my opinion. The Right-Left distinction, it might be said, poses
the immediate problem that this distinction is precisely the kind that would be made by the Left brain and
not by the Right. In other words, we are in great danger of re-admitting the “Left” brain’s dominance when
we try to distinguish it from the “Right,” even if we explicitly say the “Right” is “Master.”
15 Anatol Rapaport, “The Question of Relevance,” in Etc.: A Review of General Semantics Vol. 26, No. 1
(March 1969), 17-33.
16 I refer here to Gad Horowitz’s 2016 AKML Colloquium presentation, “Radical General Semantics,” in
which he invoked the words of Henry David Thoreau: “There are one-hundred striking at the branches of
evil, to one who is striking at the root.” https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UO8_nvkWmqo
17 As I have already noted, the first item on the list, “Science never proves anything,” is just as Korzybskian
as the second, and perfectly echoes Korzybski’s emphasis on probabilistic rather than either-or thinking.
18 This irony extends to the catchphrase ‘what every schoolboy should know’ itself, whose sexism Bateson is
clearly sending up rather than endorsing. His employment of the sexist catchphrase here, I think, ought to
be read as a deployment of his principle of propaganda: repeat the enemy’s message, exaggerating by 30%.
19 I here invoke the incomparable poetry of Jimi Hendrix and of his song “Voodoo Chile (Slight Return)” to
accentuate that we are not directly or totally returning to mythic origins, but re-turning at a higher level.
Perhaps we might thereby individually and collectively avoid Hendrix’s literally mythic and tragic fate.
21 Gad Horowitz’ explanation of Korzybski’s doctrine of the Classes of Life, and the profound evolutionary
sense implied by it, has greatly influenced the account of epistemological evolution I am presenting here:
https://vimeo.com/90694774
22 In Steps to an Ecology of Mind (New York: Ballantine Books, 1972) in “Redundancy and Coding,” Bateson
asserts, “it appears likely that the evolution of the simple negative arose by introjection or imitation of the
vis-à-vis, so that ‘not’ was somehow derived from ‘don’t’” (p 425). This seems nearly certainly relevant
to Korzybski’s emphasis on the importance of negative premises in science, but I cannot pursue this line
of thought any further here, apart from a general speculation that science might in some way structurally
similar to language itself, albeit at a higher logical level, due to its negativity. Science is language
about everyday language and stories, just as human language is about the gestural-analog pre-human
communication patterns which it is not. Each level of aboutness fundamentally negates, transforms and yet
preserves (in German, the word for all of this is Aufheben) the levels below it. New levels do not add to,
but multiply the existing relations.
23 Mind and Nature, 227-8
24 Steps to an Ecology of Mind, 365
26 Ibid, 290
27 Training in non-A methods with the structural differential could and maybe should begin at a very young
age, even in kindergarten, but nevertheless it presumes a more basic process of the acquisition of verbal
language itself, which nigh certainly must involve provisional stages of classification and labelling that
might seem indistinguishable from identification.
28 Bois is drawing from Bachelard’s The Philosophy of No (New York: Orion Press, 1968).
29 J. Samuel Bois, The Art of Awareness (Dubuque, Iowa: W.C. Brown and Co., 1966), 113
30 Arthur Koestler, The Yogi and the Commissar (New York: Macmillan, 1965), 17
32 The Art of Awareness, 114
33 The Art of Awareness 128-9
34 Ibid, 129
35 I refer here to the way everyday patterns of life are shaped by public discourses of law, politics, science,
medicine, aesthetics etc.
37 The Art of Awareness, 118-9
41 T. W. Adorno, Minima Moralia, (London: Verso, 1997), 222
42 Please note that for purposes of comparison and contrast, a diagram of the Aristotelian epistemologies
(covering stages Two and Three of Bachelard-Bois’ epistemological profile) is appended at the end of this
paper.
43 The anthropological theorist Claude Lévi-Strauss examined the structures of kinship and culture in
‘primitive’ cultures as consisting in the interplay of interconnected families of opposites: raw/cooked,
male/female, adult/child, sky/earth, moist/dry, etc. See Claude Lévi-Strauss, The Elementary Structures of
Kinship (Boston: Beacon Press, 1969).
44 Friedrich Nietzsche describes this duality at length in The Birth of Tragedy (New York: Dover Publications,
1995). It is also the figure or subject of Ruth Benedict’s ‘Apollonian’ anthropological study, Patterns of
Culture (Boston: Houghton Miflin, 1961).
45 It seems highly unlikely that Indo-European language systems are the only ones tending to produce
catastrophic imbalances of cultural change; however it is Indo-European languages systems which
predominate in the European tradition which is the primary focus of this essay. The different ways in which
the Confucian and other religious-cultural systems produce and maintain inequality seems an immensely
important topic for future research from a general semantics perspective, that would likely best be furthered
by the endogenous growth of general semantics within China and other non-western centres of political
and economic influence. Perhaps we might dare to imagine, without cynicism, a ‘general semantics with
Chinese characteristics’.
46 I am referring here to C. A. Hilgartner’s essay, “A Lethal Fundamental Error: How to Recognize, Reject
and Replace It” which can be accessed at http://www.hilgart.org/112-lethal-fundamental-error-how-to-
recognize-reject-replace-it.php.
47 Theodor Adorno, Negative Dialectics (New York: Continuum, 1969): 320
49 See Gad Horowitz’ videos http://vimeo.com/28283281 and http://vimeo.com/28699189 for further
exploration of levels of self and the self beyond stories.
50 Bruce Kodish includes Korzybski’s a transcription of his friend James Robinson’s lyrical poem ‘Oh
Petawawa’ in Korzybski: A Biography (p 77).
51 This text can be accessed at http://dbanach.com/sisyphus.htm
REFERENCES
Adorno, T. W. Negative Dialectics. New York: Continuum, 1969. Print.
––. Minima Moralia. London: Verso, 1997. Print.
Bachelard, Gaston. The Philosophy of No. New York: Orion Press, 1968. Print.
Bateson, Gregory. Steps to an Ecology of Mind. New York: Ballantine Books, 1972. Print.
––. Mind and Nature. New York: E. P. Dutton, 1979. Print.
Benedict, Ruth. Patterns of Culture. Boston: Houghton Miflin, 1961. Print.
Bois, J. Samuel. The Art of Awareness. Dubuque, Iowa: W.C. Brown and Co., 1966. Print.
Hendrix, Jimi. “Voodoo Chile,” on Electric Ladyland. New York: Track Records, 1968. Print.
Hilgartner , C. A. “A Lethal Fundamental Error: How to Recognize, Reject and Replace It,” http://www.hilgart.
org/112-lethal-fundamental-error-how-to-recognize-reject-replace-it.php. Web
Gad Horowitz. “Radical General Semantics,” presented at the 2016 AKML Colloquium. https://www.youtube.
com/watch?v=UO8_nvkWmqo. Web.
––. “Attending Korzybski’s Classes of Life, and Healing the Split.” https://vimeo.com/90694774 . Web.
––. “Levels of Self.” http://vimeo.com/28283281. Web.
––. “Discovering the Person Behind Concepts.” http://vimeo.com/28699189. Web.
Koestler, Arthur. The Yogi and the Commissar. New York: Macmillan, 1965. Print.
Korzybski, Alfred. Science and Sanity (4th ed.) Lakeville, Connecticut: The International Non-Aristotelian
Library Publishing Company, 1958. Print.
Lévi-Strauss, Claude. The Elementary Structures of Kinship. Boston: Beacon Press, 1969. Print.
Nietzsche, Friedrich. The Birth of Tragedy. New York: Dover Publications, 1995. Print.
Rapaport, Anatol. “The Question of Relevance,” in Etc.: A Review of General Semantics Vol. 26, No. 1, March
1969. Print.
LITERATURE IN AND AS TIME-BINDING:

EXPLORING THE AESTHETIC-POLITICAL-PEDAGOGICAL
IMPLICATIONS*
Bini B.S.
Introduction
This paper looks at time-binding as a unique epistemological-communicative capacity that
makes human beings accountable to their fellow beings and posterity and studies how the creation
and consumption of literature fares in the time-binding scheme of things. Time-binding is about
invention, interpretation, evolution, circulation, preservation and transmission of knowledge and
ideas. One has to be careful not to elementalistically separate time-binding as a concept and time-
binding as a method as the ‘what’ and the ‘how’ of time-binding are inseparably interlinked. For
Korzybski, any pedagogical method is meant for facilitating and reinforcing time-binding. In the first
section of the paper, by examining literature in diverse spatio-temporalities in the light of political,
aesthetic and ethical negotiations it undertakes deliberately and inadvertently, I try to make sense of
time-binding mechanisms in the production and the reception of texts. As a methodological caution,
political, aesthetic and ethical aspects of literature are evaluated as domains that invariably spill
over and intermingle. The second section of this study analyzes the viability of interactive exchanges
between literature, literary studies and general semantics. Such interactions may happen as dialogic
interventions in shaping concepts and pedagogical methods. I have developed the views in this
section around my own experiences as a student and teacher of literature and general semantics.
Literature is not a solitary pursuit for the reason that a writer or a reader cannot be considered
isolated and singular entities. As time-binders, they both contain multitudes and are in ongoing
interactive relationship with the rest of the world. Korzybski as a writing self was cautious about
the impact of his words on the reading others who make their own semantic associations from what
they read. With an acute consciousness of abstracting, Korzybski observes that language, words,
narratives, metaphors, literature, art, etc. are part of the inconclusive meaning-making and time-
binding processes which can never be fully comprehended or realized.
Korzybski practiced time-binding in an integrated way: being a voracious reader and synthesizer
of ideas, he constantly engaged with experiences and theories in his books and seminars. He
evaluated, critiqued and sometimes reconstituted the knowledge available to him and built on
that knowledge through his research. Korzybski’s research also included interaction with people
from different walks of life and observation of life-worlds around him. His apprehension about
* A much shorter version of this paper was presented during the National Seminar on “Pedagogy and Method: General
Semantics in Other Human Sciences,” organized by Balvant Parekh Centre at the Maharaja Sayajirao University of Baroda,
Gujatat, India in March 2015.
misevaluation, a potential impediment to positive time-binding, extends to literature as a domain of

ideas and emotions that can possibly generate and perpetuate negative time-binding.
Korzybski’s works suggest that creatical (creative and critical) thinking,1 and healthy skepticism
on the part of the readers would guard their minds against the effects of negative time-binding and
help direct their minds in the direction of positive and mindful time-binding. Kenneth G. Johnson
explains: “‘Critical Thinking’ often involves the creation of alternative plans, solutions, approaches,
etc., then comparing the original with the alternatives. ‘Creative’ thinking requires some critical
evaluation during and after the creative phase. I suggest that we consider ‘critical’ and ‘creative’
the yin/yang of the thinking process” (Thinking Creatically 1). Johnson goes on to say that creatical
thinking depends on a specific characteristic of the human nervous system, ‘self reflexiveness’ or the
ability that make human beings capable of evaluating their own evaluations. Self-reflexive language
is the most important time-binding tool. General Semantics as a general system of evaluation
emphasizes the role of creatical thinking in making cautious, conscious and conscientious time-
binding possible. Literature as an epistemological-aesthetic field can accommodate creatical
thinking.
Korzybski’s works illustrate his awareness about the significance of art and literature in enriching
time-binding. The function of literature and art as time-binding is more than a didactic or aesthetic
one. In this sense, literature is not limited to a pleasurable pedagogy that entertains and instructs.
Even when literature operates as a mode of social critique through satire and subversion, it indirectly
fulfills time-binding function. Literature becomes instrumental for many nuances of time-binding
such as interpreting the present, evaluation of a milieu, voicing the views of dominated masses,
salvaging subjugated knowledges and skills, influencing the aesthetic sensibilities of a people, and
challenging and providing alternative views to official versions of ‘truth’.
Using the standard of time-binding, partly my effort is to map Korzybski’s ideas on literature
and examine his view that writers may deliberately or unintentionally become conduits of negative
time-binding. Korzybski thought of conscious and positive time-binding as an ethical responsibility
of human beings and for this reason, he wished if writers and public intellectuals could be more
responsible and responsive. As the focus of the paper is literature in and as time-binding, I have
mapped several sites and instances of interactions between societies, milieus and literature through
presenting a montage of the lives of select texts and writers. One can always discover a lively, never-
ending dialogic dynamics between general semantics and literature.
I
Time-Binding: Interface of Politics, Aesthetics, and Ethics
Truth, Power and Time-Binding Self

The idea of time-binding suggests a complex link between knowledge, in the abstract and as
actual practices such as skills and technology, and the teleopoiesis 2of everyday lives. The idea of
teleopoiesis of everyday lives accommodates a deep sense of spatio-temporality and an understanding
of the epistemology of the present. What T.S. Eliot wrote in his long poem, “Four Quartets” refers to
the ‘presence’ of the present which cannot detach itself from the past and the future:
Time present and time past
Are both perhaps present in time future,
And time future contained in time past.
If all time is eternally present
All time is unredeemable.
What might have been is an abstraction
Literature in and as Time-Binding: Exploring the Aesthetic-Political-Pedagogical Implications 97
Remaining a perpetual possibility
Only in a world of speculation.
What might have been and what has been
Point to one end, which is always present. (“Burnt Norton” Stanza 1)3
Literature is also time-binding. In his famous essay, “Tradition and Individual Talent,” Eliot
ruminates about how newness is realized through exploring into tradition. No artistic creation is
done in a vacuum. A new work is instrumental in a readjustment of the existing order and an altered
perception of the past. Tradition is an organic phenomenon and individual talent is nurtured and
subsumed by it. A writer is a catalyst in the chemical reactions of thoughts and feelings which are
amalgamated to create the text. The wealth of tradition, obtained with great effort, enriches a writer’s
individual talent. According to Eliot: “… historical sense, which is a sense of the timeless as well as
of the temporal and of the timeless and of the temporal together, is what makes a writer traditional.
And it is at the same time what makes a writer most acutely conscious of his place in time, of his
own contemporaneity.” 4
We are familiar with Korzybski’s idea of time-binding as the unique capacity of human beings
(which differentiates human beings from plants and animals i.e. chemical/ energy binders and
space-binders) to pass information, knowledge and skills in an across time at an exponential rate
using symbol systems including language. The comprehensive definition Korzybski has given in
Manhood of Humanity can be used as an entry point to the exploration of comingling, and entangled
layers of time-binding:
I mean the capacity to summarise, digest and appropriate the labors and experiences of the
past; I mean the capacity to use the fruits of past labors and experiences as intellectual or
spiritual capital for developments in the present; I mean the capacity to employ as instruments
of increasing power the accumulated achievements of the all-precious lives of the past
generations spent in trial and error, trial and success; I mean the capacity of human beings
to conduct their lives in the ever increasing light of inherited wisdom; I mean the capacity in
virtue of which man is at once the heritor of the by-gone ages and the trustee of posterity. And
because humanity is just this magnificent natural agency by which the past lives in the present
and the present for the future, I define HUMANITY, in the universal tongue of mathematics and
mechanics, to be the TIME-BINDING CLASS OF LIFE. (59-60; emphasis mine)
For Korzybski, time-Binding, an ethical responsibility is not free from a notion of values and
so he differentiates between positive and negative time-binding and active (conscious) and passive
time-binding. Korzybski illustrates in Manhood of Humanity the manner in which war literature
may become a possible instrument of negative time-binding. Referring to John McCrae’s poem5
“In Flanders Fields,” which describes using vivid visceral idiom, red and robust poppies blooming
in the (battle) fields of Flanders soaked with the blood and fertilized by the innards of dead young
soldiers, Korzybski opines that the poem makes the deaths of soldiers appear even less significant
than the deaths of guinea pigs in scientific experiments.6 The poem was used on many occasions as a
propaganda material for recruiting soldiers and selling war bonds. One may remember Paul Fussell’s
criticism of the same poem as an antithesis to peace negotiations. 7
War literature manipulates and exaggerates the sentiments of xenophobic or jingoistic nationalism
and patriotism. Korzybski does not consider the Nation State as necessary for human welfare; he
envisages a Human State which he terms in Manhood of Humanity as a ‘Cooperative Commonwealth
of Man’, ‘a democracy in fact and not merely in name’ (199). War literature often does not care for
the tragic plight of humanity. It tends to sensationalizes mindless violence, romanticizes heroism,
and glorifies squandering of lives and resources. In a historical juncture which taught a lesson that
concern for humanity should be prioritized over militant nationalism, Korzybski’s critique is quite
an eye opener. Korzybski considers the much celebrated yet lopsided view about war as bravery
and upholding of the dignity of one’s country to be blinding because it may send out a dangerous
and violent message to people. In tune with time-binding, he feels that it is more important to make
people realize how disastrous and unfavorable to human progress and happiness war is. One may
want to ask Korzybski whether literature should be directed by or censored for ethical mandates
in this manner. Korzybski’s evaluation makes us revisit the debate between moral and ethical
correctness and aesthetic freedom of art and literature. However as a man with first-hand experience
of war, his unease over the poem of McCrae is also justified.
Korzybski does not look down on art and literature as vacuous pursuits; rather he is in awe
about the sway both art and literature have on time-binders. Korzybski’s anxiety is entangled with
a conviction that literature and art have the capacity to represent a milieu and influence the minds
of people. His anxiety is further intensified by the possibility that writers can generate and put into
circulation potentially hazardous ideals, thoughts, feelings and impulses paving the way for actions
that may have devastating impact on generations to come. His caution against dogma and propagandist
discourses does not exclude literature, because non-elementalistically speaking literature is art-
thoughts-feelings-ideas-motivation for action, etc.. The readers also respond to literature through
emotions-thoughts-actions. Korzybski’s concern based on a possibility that negative time-binding
would influence the present as well as the posterity is articulated through his elaborate evaluation
in Science and Sanity of Hitler’s life and impact of his speeches and autobiographical text, Mein
Kampf.8 One limitation of Korzybski’s reading of literature’s impact on human minds is that he
does not engage with the diversity of readers’ responses. His following observation in Manhood of
Humanity illustrates his fear of misevaluations corrupting human minds and time-binding:
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! There is nothing mystical about the fact that
ideas and words are energies which powerfully affect the physico-chemical base of our time-
binding activities (71).
The latest research in neurological sciences corroborates the view that ideas and thoughts have
a significant impact on human nervous system. General Semantics proposes certain strategies that
promote immunity to negative time-binding, and defense to dogma and categorical thinking. So
rather than condemning certain writers who push human minds deep into Aristotelian and intensional
orientations and infantilism, one may better focus on equipping oneself to be a ‘creatical’ thinker
who cannot be led by the nose. Instead of banishing the texts that might mislead present and future
generations, engage creatically with them with an open mind and an ever-expanding knowledge-
base. Passivity and rigidity in thought are destructive habits. A flexible approach to knowledge and
ideas paired with rigorous and meticulous habit of evaluation would save us from docile acceptance
or dogmatic rejection of ideas.
Korzybski suggests that one may fortify one’s mind against being submissively misdirected by
the ‘influences’ of texts and thinkers. This kind of caution is necessary, according to Korzybski,
in our encounters with any kind of knowledge and ideas – be it media reports, political speeches,
claims of those who lead us. For this, consciousness of abstracting and the conscious use of
‘extensional thinking’ can be of great help. Extensional devices9 should be internalized in such a way
that extensional thinking leading to cortico-thalamic integration becomes a mental habit. In short,
Korzybski focuses more on the cautions to be exercised in the reception of ideas and texts. Echoing
Korzybski, David F. Maas, in his article, “Safeguarding against Neuro-Semantic Pollution,” uses a
diagnosis-remedy idiom:
I have come up with a name for the words and imagery that tend to incite anger, disgust, lust,
violence, etc: I call them neuro-semantic pollution. This notion may be useful in helping us
respond in a healthy manner to such ‘pollution’, but it also raises questions about freedom
of speech and about taking responsibility for our own semantic-reactions to ‘neuro-semantic
pollution’. 10
Censorship which sometimes impedes the freedom of expression is not always a means to control
neuro-semantic pollution. Maas suggests general semantics techniques as a precaution against
and an antidote for neuro-semantic pollution. Being a public intellectual, Korzybski was wary of
neuro-semantic pollution that ideas in circulation may spread. In Science and Sanity, Korzybski
emphasizes that public intellectuals should “become able to evaluate properly their own activities
and comprehend the harm they do,” following which “a great amount of useless, befogging issues,
delusional writings and speeches would not be produced, with great benefit to all concerned.” With
optimism, Korzybski proposes that by developing the consciousness of abstracting, writers and
speakers “would become their own censors, aided, also, by the newly developed consciousness of
abstracting on the part of some members of the audiences or readers” (Science and Sanity 486-7).
Can Korzybski’s anxiety about ‘negative’ influence of certain literary texts as potential channels
of negative time-binding be justified? Is this sheer overstatement of a problem and a facile solution
to it that if the reader is an alert critic, interpreter and active co-creator of ideas and meanings,
the negative influence can be countered? Though Korzybski’s analysis contains some underlying
notions based on pre-assigned values and normativity, his views evolve through a careful study of
the genealogy of the present. In other words, his anxiety about people getting misled by dangerous
ideas and propaganda arises from being an alert witness to his times and studying the history of
civilizations. Korzybski’s works raise certain pertinent questions: Should one worry about the
neuro-semantic influences of literature? Should one be concerned that literature may fabricate a
‘not-true-to-facts’ vision of whatever it represents: be it history, a milieu and individuals. But first let
us have a look at the ‘implied notions’ in Korzybskian analysis. When there is a fear that literature
might misrepresent a milieu, the first implicit notion is that there is perhaps a more correct, more
structurally close and verifiable representation which is truer to facts. Korzybski does not believe
in ‘The Truth’ in the singular, but he definitely endorses truths or facts that are structurally close to
‘what is going on’ or the event. Secondly his ides of ‘cautious time-binding’ is premised on a view
that ideas and representations in a text can misdirect minds and generations of people and only
those with an informed mind and creatical thinking (those who think constructively with a degree
of skepticism and do not accept or reject ideas without scrutiny) are able to resist being misdirected.
In this notion, there is a simultaneous concern over the limits of human agency and validation
of a particular mode of thinking and epistemological orientation which he terms as ‘extensional
thinking’. Extensional thinking and consciousness of abstracting are projected as mental habits for
enabling and reinforcing active human agency.
Will literature influence human minds in such a way that texts become vehicles of negative time-
binding? Korzybski does not provide a simplistic yes/no answer to this apprehension. Interestingly,
the semblance of an answer is there in Korzybski’s notion of ‘consciousness of abstracting’ which
he develops through the model of structural differential and map-territory analogy. Both writing and
reading involve several levels and dimensions of abstracting. The consciousness of abstracting and
sometimes cautiously abstracting may help in clearing the tangle of aesthetic-moral-ethical-truth
dilemma surrounding the production and reception of literature. In the “Introduction to the Third
Edition” of Science and Sanity, Korzybski points out: “In general semantics we do not ‘preach’
‘morality’ or ‘ethics’ as such, but we train students in consciousness of abstracting, consciousness of
the multiordinal mechanisms of evaluation, relational orientations, etc., which bring about cortico-
thalamic integration, and then as a result ‘morality’, ‘ethics’, awareness of social responsibilities,
etc., follow automatically” (xliii; emphasis added). Even in the reception of literature, one may aim
at cortico-thalamic integration, a sensible and sensitive mental habit which is both an assimilating
act and a balancing act.
Presuming that literature is not a mere stating of facts aesthetically as it is a process involving
imagination and figurative language, we cannot measure or judge it with the same standards that we
use for ‘truth-claims’. Not all literary works are representations or reconstructions of already existing
‘real’ and ‘tangible’ life-worlds. The life-worlds in literary texts can be creations of fantasy. Looking
at texts that employ such strategies as surrealism and magic realism, or science fiction, one may
come to know how sometimes literature maps non-existent worlds that cannot be identified with any
familiar territory. Literature creates utopias and dystopias. The language of literature is a masking
tool, a masquerading tool and a mapping tool. We cannot look at literary language in a limited sense
of language for communication and depiction. Literature does more than just portraying a milieu
and it is not all about ideas and authorial point-of-view. Its influence on human civilizations cannot
be fathomed.
Rather than raising concerns about the genealogy and teleology of ideas and authenticity of
representation in texts and effects of literature on human psyche, we may look at literature and art
through the lens of the processes of time-binding. Literature is ‘produced’ and ‘consumed’ often
in diverse cultural environments and in spatio-temporalities far removed from one another. The
moments of ‘production’ and ‘consumption’ or in the case of literature, ‘writing’ and ‘reading’ the
texts are specific, yet paradoxically non-singular acts that are inextricably entangled in contexts. A
text and its reader are organic beings containing multitudes situated in a multiverse of environments.
Deleuze elaborates in his essay, “Literature and Life”:11
Though it always refers to singular agents [agents], literature is a collective assemblage
[agencement] of enunciation. Literature is delirium,.. there is no delirium that does not pass
through peoples, races, and tribes and that does not haunt universal history. All delirium is
world historical, ‘a displacement of races and continents’. (Essays Critical and Clinical 4)
The text does not have an end in itself because of its plurality as a collective assemblage; it does
not end when the processes of writing and reading are over. Creative process is often like delirium
that refuses to bow down to any rules of logic or boundaries. In an interview, “Truth Power Self,”
Foucault made an intriguing statement: “What is true for writing and for love is true also for life. The
game is worthwhile insofar as we don’t know where it will end,”12 suggesting that the end of writing
occupies a domain of indeterminacy, inconclusivity and unpredictability. This statement points to
the direction of ends and means as well as a notion of finality. For Foucault, the text is where the
writer disappears and becomes a dead subject because the text’s afterlives are determined by readers
and contexts that are extrinsic to it and outside the power of the author as a person. The death of the
author is the birth of the reader. Foucault’s observation in “What is an Author?”: “Writing unfolds
like a game [jeu] that invariably goes beyond its own rules and transgresses its limits. In writing,
the point is not to manifest or exalt the act of writing, nor is it to pin a subject within language; it is,
rather, a question of creating a space into which the writing subject constantly disappears”13suggests
that author is a function and not a person. The idea of ‘game’ in both these statements by Foucault is
quite intriguing as it brings together playfulness and schema of power/knowledge. To refer back to
Deleuze, the author is the one who is mistakenly projected as that singular agent but is better looked
at as a collective assemblage. An author contains multitudes and multiple historicities. This notion is
very much in tune with the idea of time-binding. In other words, the author, taken as an individual,
or a collective or a function, is simultaneously a product and producer of time-binding.
Literature is often posited as an antithesis to mortality as it is a process which knows no closure.
The narrator of Arabian Nights lives in and through story telling. A literary text, wherein the author
is dead, gives and sustains life through the act of recollection. Marquez gave a title which means in
English, Living to Tell the Tale to his autobiography on being confronted by cancer and mortality. But
that does not mean that the text and the one who has written it live static, monochromatic lives across
time. Milton’s view of a good book as the “precious life-blood of a master spirit, embalmed and
treasured up on purpose to a life beyond life”14indicates paradoxical afterlives of texts and writers.
The text’s afterlife sometimes excludes and outlives the author because the text takes diverse forms
of life and guises in and across cultures, spatio-temporalities and individual minds. These views
have an extensional orientation as they privilege fluidity of space-time and plurality of contexts and
meanings over fixities of space and time or meaning as author’s stated intent.
The reader may not share the space, time, vision or ideologies of the writer and is not in a position
to fathom the ‘intention’ of the writer. If we ‘extensionally’ look at the life of a text and ideas and
life-worlds portrayed therein using the methods of evaluation that Korzybski has suggested, it may
lead to a radical rethinking around popularly held simplistic notions about literature. Here I am
referring to Korzybskian ideas about constancy of change, significance of contexts and purposes,
non-identity, non-allness and self-reflexivity suggested by the map-territory analogy and extensional
thinking. The equations and relationship between a writer and the text is that of constant tension,
negotiation and flux. It is a connection that is more interpreted than established. The writer cannot
anticipate the impact her/his work may have on reader as an individual or part of different kinds of
collectivities. Reading often becomes a subjective interpretation or appropriation of what the author
means or wishes to convey. One can observe the shifting focus in literary theory from author to text
to reader to conditions/ contexts of writing/ reading.
The answerability of a text to its context(s) can be better explained through a dialogic view.
Answerability as a speech act and an ethical act indicates mutual responses taking place between the
text and the reader, or art and life with a sense of accountability. The idea that a text is answerable
destabilizes the authority of the text. Bakhtin emphasizes that deceptively separate realms of human
life −− ethics and aesthetics −−can be united in an individual through a notion of answerability
which implies responsiveness/responsibility to others, events, and the world.
The relationship between the text and it author opens out another dialogic domain. The assumption
that the protagonist or some character in a work has to be the mouthpiece of the author is a fallacy.
The relationship between the author and the text brings to my mind the falcon-falconer analogy that
Yeats uses in his poem, “Second Coming”: “Turning and turning in the widening gyre/ the falcon
cannot hear the falconer”15 meaning the text moves away in ever expanding spirals of emotion-
knowledge (an image that captures the simultaneous linearity and circularity of ideas); a text is
presumed to be connected to and controlled by the author who is central to it, but it has a journey
independent of the author and the ‘center cannot hold’ as the text soars away in time and space. The
following observation of Bakhtin gives a new dimension to the open-ended, dialogic possibilities of
meaning in literature vis a vis time:
Even past meanings, that is those born in the dialogue of past centuries, can never be stable
(finalized, ended once and for all) – they will always change (be renewed) in the process of
subsequent, future development of the dialogue. At any moment in the development of the
dialogue there are immense, boundless masses of forgotten contextual meanings, but at certain
moments of the dialogue’s subsequent development along the way they are recalled and
invigorated in renewed form [in a new context]. (Speech Genres 170)
To interpret literature as time-binding, or as on-going dialogue between temporalities is to say
that the meaning created by a text is not a uni-dimensional, static and stable category. Meaning
being a dialogic/ multilogic construct changes with context and is influenced by the contexts of the
meaning makers. Even if a text is not being read after many years of its production, its ideas and
images may continue to live in the subconscious of civilizations.
Not all texts are meant to be didactic and propagandist, but can be ‘read’ and ‘interpreted’ as the
author’s message to the masses potentially influential to the collective psyche. While we take all
these aspects of literature spanning across contexts of production and reception into consideration,
normative notions about the writers ‘onus’ and accountability do not hold good. Standards of taste
and morality and what is permissible keep shifting. Many texts considered in their times to be bad
influences, repositories of corrupt and corrupting ideas, or emblems of moral decadence such as
Flowers of Evil by Charles Baudelaire, or novels of Flaubert, D. H. Lawrence, Emile Zola and
Vladimir Nabokov became later known for their aesthetic merits, radical ideas and profundity of
emotions.
Should one be blaming Friedrich Nietzsche for being an ‘inspirational’ writer to the Nazis who
were believed to be motivated by the idea of the overman in Thus Spoke Zarathustra? Have not
William Burroughs, John Kerouac, Allen Ginsberg and writers of the Beat generation been branded
as corrupting influences by their ultra-conservative critics? Is it proper to criticize Milton for
intentionally or unintentionally depicting the persona of Satan as so rebellious and enigmatic that
one tends to be fascinated by his spirit of freedom and courage? Ironically Milton wanted to justify
the ways of god to men; but many a reader would see through the insecurity of god who is threatened
by the assertion of freedom and exercise of free will by his creations. Milton’s retelling of the Book
of Genesis challenges the biblical notions of good and evil, and vice and virtue. In Paradise Lost,
the authoritarian god who demands unquestioning submission, and the servile man who is created in
god’s own image are lackluster figures in comparison to the insolent and proud revolutionary figure
of Satan who thought it is “Better to reign in Hell than serve in Heaven.”16 The woman created
from the rib of man shows some defiance to the divine and seems to have a mind of her own; she is
talked into disobedience by the serpent and she talks the rib-donor into disobedience. The life-blood
of Milton cannot choose the vein in which it should flow while living the afterlife as any conscious
effort from the writer’s part may not regulate the readers’ understanding of the text.
Consciousness of Abstracting and Conscious Abstracting: Alternative Cartographies

“We must consider ourselves as a symbolic, semantic class of life, and those who rule the
symbols, rule us.” (Korzybski, Science and Sanity 76)
“I live in a world of others’ words.” (Bakhtin, Problems of Dostoevsky’s Poetics 143)
Korzybski uses the map-territory analogy to illustrate why the event should not be identified with
its representation. The awareness about non-identification of map with territory can be termed as the
consciousness of abstracting. Map is an abstraction of the territory. It does not represent the whole
of the territory. The critique of ‘isness’ or identification is one of the non-Aristotelian features of
general semantics. An example of consciousness of abstraction and non-identification in practice
can be found in Brechtian Drama.
Bertolt Brecht’s theatre in a histrionic sense and with reference to the plays that he had written
followed a non-illusion method that prevented identification of the viewers’ life and emotions with
the action happening on the stage. Brecht’s instructions for actors and spectators are similar to
Korzybski’s idea of conscious abstracting and non-identification, which in Korzybski’s view is a
non-Aristotelian notion. Brecht’s non-Aristotelian theatre rejects catharsis and mimesis as processes
of identification and projects the alienation effect as a means to accomplishing an aesthetics which is
free from the illusion of reality. At the same time, Brecht made an elementalistic error by assuming
that emotion and thought can be separated. For Brecht, the theatre was a means to reach out not to
people’s emotions but to their reason while still providing entertainment. So the action on the stage
is not identical to life and it need not give rise to an excess of pity, empathy (identification with the
character represented by the actor) and fear (whether one’s own life would go through a similar
tragic plight) resulting in catharsis. Brecht, in tune with his ideological inclination, believed that the
theatre serves a unique function as a platform for social interpretation and critique leading to social
change. By developing the Verfremdungs-effekt (“alienation effect” or defamiliarization effect), and
non-illusion techniques (i.e. techniques for preventing the audience or viewers from being lost in
the illusion of ‘reality’), he wanted to keep the spectators alert to the fact that they are in a theatre
watching the enactment of a narrative and not being inserted into reality itself. The performers were
not demanded realism and identification with the character; they had to be actors and witnesses of
action simultaneously.
Another example in literature that permits consciousness of abstracting by anti-illusion of ‘reality’
is metafiction in which the text’s status as an artifact or work of fiction is affirmed through devices
such as irony and self-reflection. In texts like Don Quixote, Tristram Shandy, If on a Winter’s Night
a Traveler, The French Lieutenant’s Woman, the distinction between story and life is highlighted so
that the reader does not confuse the two. Techniques such as texts within a text, narrative about an
author writing a novel that reflects on strategies of writing, indication that characters are aware that
they are in a story (Luigi Pirandello’s play, Six Character in Search of an Author exemplifies this),
alternative endings, text or narrator seeking interaction with the readers, etc. are used for breaking
the illusion of reality.
The consciousness of abstracting takes us further from a study of literary, theatrical or cinematic
techniques to complex political, ethical and ideological dimensions of literature and art. The
awareness that there are distinctions between truth and facts and there exists a possibility that both
could be, in official versions or otherwise, effects of the mechanisms of power destabilizes the very
ideas of veracity and authenticity. Ironically power is suspicious about literature that represents
‘truths’ which deviate from the official version of Truth. The persecution and incarceration of writers
and censorship that violates the right to expression are examples of annihilating and silencing voices
that speak different versions of truth which clamour over the official version of Truth. One may
remember that many writers were exiled to Siberia for contradicting the official version of truth in
Soviet Union. There are endless examples for the persecution of those who challenged the official
version of truth: P.B. Shelley’s expulsion from the Oxford University after he wrote The Necessity
of Atheism, controls imposed on Boris Pasternak, the author of Dr. Zhivago, condemnation of Nikos
Kazantzakis by the Greek church after the publication of The Last Temptation of Christ, banishment
of Milan Kundera by the invading Soviet Government for penning a text like The Joke and being
part of the Prague Spring (a fate similar to the plight of Ludvik Jahn, the protagonist of The Joke),
persecution of Salman Rushdie on publishing Satanic Verses and ostracism of M.F. Hussain whose
paintings of Hindu deities irked certain fractions of religious authorities, assassination of the
Nigerian writer Ken Saro Wiwa, the murder of the atheist writer Avijit Roy in Bangladesh and so
many such instances of atrocities against non-conformist writers and artists. The map makers who
are in power are afraid of those who make alternative maps.
If we look at the politics of censorship and the reasons for banning literary texts or art works by
monarchic, theocratic or democratic states, we would perhaps realize how outrageously ridiculous
are the grounds for censoring books and art and subsequent persecution of writers and artists. Human
beings have a shameful history of burning books and sometimes getting rid of thinkers and writers
too. Political reasons, propagandist content, misrepresentation of facts, sedition, anti-government
views, fear of creating disharmony among people, obscenity, perversity, hurting religious sentiments,
blasphemy, tarnishing individuals and institutions, etc. are the usual justifications we hear of while
a book or a film is banned. In 1931, Hunan province in China banned Lewis Carroll’s Alice’s
Adventures in Wonderland for anthropomorphizing animals, portraying them as talking-thinking
beings equal to humans and hence insulting the superior class of life. The Censor General Ho Chien
believed that conveying the message of equality of animals and humans to children would bring
about a perverse view about the general order of things which will have dangerous consequences.
Rather than worrying about possible adverse impact of ‘false’, ‘manipulative’, ‘perverse’ and
‘distorted’ and hence positively ‘damaging’ literature on human psyche, one should, as a time-binder,
be more concerned about the vulnerability of literary processes that can be impeded, disrupted and
subjected to rigid mechanisms of censorship, inclusion and exclusion. A literary text is also about
ideas, knowledge, philosophies of life and perspectives. The widespread intolerance to ideas, subtle
and absolute control over production and distribution of art and literature and tactics of annihilation
and intimidation of artists and writers would be injurious to positive time-binding. Freedom of
thought and expression and a democratic distribution of knowledge are conducive to positive time-
binding.
Literature is a potential site of parrhesia,17 which is fearless speech or the act of speaking truth to
power. Parrhesia abstracts other invisibilized possibilities of truth from the singular and rigid official
version of historical truth. To substantiate my view, I use the examples of certain texts that re-
vision history through indirections by presenting alternative narratives, articulating the silences and
interpreting the absences. There are several modes through which literary texts operate as sites of
parrhesia. To give an example from history: India has seen a period in its history wherein freedom of
expression and other rights assured by democracy were grievously undermined. It was when Indira
Gandhi, the then prime minister declared the Emergency18 in the 70s. Literary texts from several
regional languages captured the sheer horror of those days. One may remember the scathing satire
on the period of Emergency in O.V. Vijayan’s Dharmapuranam originally written in Malayalam
and translated into English by the author as The Saga of Dharmapuri. Through an allegory of the
prajapati who literally makes his people eat his shit in a regime where patriotism is measured in terms
of the rise of the ruler’s tri-colour (like the Indian flag) underwear peaking in arrogant megalomania,
Vijayan portrays the time of unfreedom, dictatorship that conflated the boundaries between the ruler
and the nation and servitude in a country labeled democratic. Midnight’s Children, an allegory of post
independent India depicts the driving force of Indian Emergency through the metaphors of the black
widow and Durga – the narcissistic femme fatale who believed that India is herself and she is India.
Several novels and plays give diverse versions the Indian Emergency through indirect, allegorical
and satirical means. The directions that we reach through these indirections reconstitute history in
a nuanced, more inclusive manner in comparison to the one-dimensional, exclusive authoritarian
official version. There is a plethora of films, plays and literary works which use various subversive
strategies to destabilize the established history of Indian Emergency projected and perpetuated
by the powers that be and juxtapose alternative digressing scenarios in the uni-dimensional linear
narrative of official history.
The indirection used by Jean Paul Sartre to surreptitiously bring out the injustice and brutality
of the Vichy regime and German domination in Paris was to write a series of plays based on Greek
mythology. Sartre believed in committed writing which conveys the ideal of a free society. In his
view, “Imagination is not an empirical or superadded power of consciousness, it is the whole of
consciousness as it realizes its freedom” (The Psychology of Imagination 209). The unfamiliar life-
world in Flies made the French minds feel the allegorical pulse of their times while the government
could not see through the trick. Though he was part of the Resistance, Sartre could not have directly
attacked the Nazis as he knew he would be silenced and terminated. His anti-fascist views conveyed
through his plays were not noticed by the censorship lobbies, but people understood the message.
In Flies, Aegistheus allegorically represents the Nazi German occupation, and Clytemnestra the
collaborating devious Vichy government. The tragedy of Argos is an analogy to the Nazi occupation
of Paris, a lingering pestilence imposed by forces from outside, a metaphor used also by Albert
Camus in his novel, The Plague. Through such powerful metaphors, these writers exercise parrhesia
and present a view of Existentialism as a philosophy for salvaging one’s self-respect even while one
is powerless and subdued by evil powers.
The veiled attack on Stalinist regime in particular and dictatorial rule in general in the novels 1984
and Animal Farm by Orwell is an example of literature’s attempt to speak truth to power. Alexander
Solzhenitsyn’s The Cancer Ward uses the metaphor of throat cancer making one speechless to present
a powerful critique against totalitarianism’s destruction of the freedom of speech. Such uses of
parrhesia for making alternative cryptic maps pointing to horrifying territories can enable literature
challenge unfreedom. Parrhesia liberates the writer from the shackles of intellectual subordination.
Unless one overcomes fear and questions injustice through thought-speech-action, humiliating
subservience is perpetuated. Ken Saro-Wiwa rightly observed in his poem, “The True Prison”:
The moral decrepitude
The mental ineptitude
The meat of dictators
Cowardice masking as obedience
Lurking in our denigrated souls
It is fear damping trousers
That we dare not wash
It is this
It is this
It is this
Dear friend, turns our free world
Into a dreary prison19
Literature abstracts the history of the present. Here I revisit the idea of teleopoiesis, as a way of
looking at temporality and environment of events and people in non-linear, amorphous manner that
give a more nuanced view than a mere chronology. This is to suggest that the texts I have mentioned
in this section are not to be read as history, but multilayered and polyphonic narrative dissent to that
mode of history touted as the knowledge and the truth by the powerful. An alert reader would be able
to read with discernment for which an aesthetic education is necessary. Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak
interprets the poetics of aesthetic education thus:
The displacement of belief onto the terrain of the imagination can be a description of reading
in its most robust sense. It is also the irreducible sense of aesthetic education. (An Aesthetic
Education in the Era of Globalization 10).
When we look at time-binding through the lens of power/knowledge, the importance of texts
in capturing the lives and voices of people who have been rendered invisible and silent become all
the more significant. Korzybski was aware through his lived experiences that political domination
requires to keep those who do not have direct access to power permanently ignorant through
blatant or subtle means. Life-writing and memoirs are now read by many historians as alternative
‘subjective’ narratives that supplement and deconstruct histories perceived to be ‘objective’. In
understanding subalternity in terms of race, caste and gender, such alternative sub-texts are of
considerable relevance. The truth-claim of even historical narratives is not above suspicion. One
may have apprehensions about the ethics of representation in the case of Holocaust Literature and
Partition Literature20 which deal with wounds that have not yet healed. But personal narratives have
widened the scope of empathetic understanding of events like the holocaust and the partition.
Art and literature do not transcend the concerns of materiality and standards of taste. Looking
at art and literature as commodities, the aesthetic value attributed is seldom independent of market
value. Writing and publication are influenced by the consumer culture and marketability. In the
domain of art, purchasing art is for purposes such as investment and décor. To some extent, in the
contemporary times especially, what texts are noticed and circulated is often determined by market
forces extrinsic to literature. The visibility of a text is associated with its position in the market. The
shaping of literary canons, modalities of consumer culture and commercial viability of texts have
subterranean influences on time-binding.
The problem one may feel in my analysis so far is the projection of literature as a vehicle of
ideology or an ally in the battles of ideologies and truths. We are yet to find answers to the questions
concerning the aesthetic aspect of literature. I would say that like Korzybski, I cannot agree with an
elementalist division between engagement with ideas and aesthetic enjoyment. The suggestion in an
earlier session of the paper points to the folly of treating aesthetics and ethics as mutually exclusive
phenomena. If we develop a non-elementalist way of thinking, the debate, Art for art’s sake or art
for life’s sake does not hold any steam. We should use more hyphens in our thinking: science-art,
aesthetics-ethics, ideas-emotions, etc. This view further leads to the complementary connections
existing between presumed categories and save us from wandering in the domain of dualism.
II
Dialogics of Pedagogy: Teaching Literature and General Semantics
Modalities of Interactions between Literature and GS

I have, alas, studied philosophy,
Jurisprudence and medicine, too,
And, worst of all, theology
With keen endeavor, through and through-
And here I am, for all my lore
The wretched fool I was before.
Called Master of Arts, and Doctor to boot,
For ten years almost I confute
and up and down, wherever it goes,
I drag my students by the nose-
And see that for all our science and art
We can know nothing. It burns my heart.
(Goethe, Faust 93)
One may remember that in Science and Sanity, Korzybski alludes to Jonathan Swift’s Gulliver’s
Travels in order to substantiate a view21 on making scientific knowledge socially relevant. Those
who have listened to the lectures of Professor P.C. Kar would know how he also uses the method of
explaining GS ideas through allusions to poems, fiction, and drama. For many of our programs in
India, we get students of humanities as participants. The example of Hamlet may give them a new
perspective on delay; Othello’s example is a tragedy arising from his inability to make sense of the
event or what is going on; his credulous mind mistakes the map presented by Iago as the territory.
Many a time, while lecturing or writing papers on general semantics, I tend to bring in examples
from literary texts. Autodidact22 is a favorite example for illustrating the futility of knowledge if it
does not connect to concerns of human existence and ethics. To illustrate Korzybski’s view of unjust
domination on knowledge, I have discussed Umberto Eco’s The Name of the Rose, Orwell’s 1984
and Animal Farm in my papers.23 In the programs of Balvant Parekh Centre, we also screen movies
which are relevant to the theme. Such screenings are followed by discussions. In a workshop for
teachers, we screened To Sir with Love. Rashomon, a 1950 Akira Kurosawa film was used in many
programs conducted in Gujarat to illustrate such ideas as existence of multiple maps for the same
territory, formation of subjective perspectives, non-allness and non-identity.
The instructive power of narration has been used by many great teachers since time immemorial.
Stories are seldom forgotten. Christ’s parables, fables and tales with a pedagogic intent from many
parts of the world illustrate the effectiveness of narration to reinforce the internalization of ideas.
Martin Levinson’s Practical Fairy Tales for Everyday Living, and anecdotes in general semantics
texts in general tap into the possibilities of story-telling.
Another way of teaching general semantics through literature would be to examine the lives of
people in the literary texts through the lens of general semantics. I would like to refer to a conversation
with Deepa Mishra in which she mentioned that she taught A Streetcar Named Desire, a play by
Tennessee Williams through a problem-identification-resolution through general semantics method,
in which she evaluated the life of Blanche DuBois and tried to find out how methods of General
Semantics would have averted Blanche’s crisis and made her life a happier, more fulfilling one.
Such an approach, I heard is often used in the training institutes of Cognitive Behaviour Psychology
and Rational Emotive Therapy. This exercise involves ‘identifying’ the problems of characters from
literature and trying to script their lives differently. The purpose is to see if the self-created tragedies
can be avoided or reversed. The lives of the characters are to be re-imagined in a way that they live
a relatively happier life, and do better than their textual destinies. The troubled plights of literary
personae may arise from rigid views that they hold, disastrous choices that they make, things that
they say and do in thoughtless impulsiveness, and their inability to evaluate and respond to their
circumstances intelligently. We can map their plights and then try to remap their lives in such a way
that the landscape of disaster realigns to look more promising and optimistic through alternative
choices and attitudes to crises. This amounts to treating literature as life and characters as people.
I have tried this method in a certificate course and the participants happily and quite effectively
contributed to the analysis of ‘lives’ in the book/ film and tried re-scripting the decisions and choices
to explore the possibilities of making the characters’ ‘lives’ better lived. I may not want to use such
a method regularly not for the reason that I do not wish to conflate literature and life. The reason
for my hesitation despite this method’s pragmatic viability as a pedagogical strategy which can be
interactive, participatory and interesting, is aesthetic. I understand the intense pedagogy of tragedy,
despair and ‘failure’ in the lives in books and believe that even without a dissection, diagnosis and
cure method, tragedy is instructive.
I have observed that in an exercise to re-script the lives in the text, many tend to evoke or
conform to the stereotypes about happiness, success, ideal ending, etc. rather than re-examining
the established views. A response that came up in a workshop for school teachers while we were
discussing the film, To Sir with Love, was that the ‘problem’ of the protagonist, the poor black man,
was that he had unrealistic ambitions. I wonder how that teacher who believes that the underdog
should never aspire to come out of the oppressive situation would function as a time-binder. While
diagnosing the ‘mistakes’ and re-scripting the life of a textual persona, one may still cling on to the
regressive idioms of sin and morality. The right thing to do becomes synonymous with what the
society or religion deems to be the right thing to do. Confronting orthodox views and stereotypes
in discussions did give me a chance to talk about forms and patterns of domination including
gender issues and epistemic control. Many a time comes the shocking realization, “the best lack all
conviction and the worst are full of passionate intensity.” There are more profound and less direct
associations that I make with the plights of characters from literature than a pragmatic contemplation
about how the mishaps in their lives could have been avoided or how life could have been lived in
that popularly aspired for ‘happily ever after’ way.
Korzybski has used examples from literary texts to illustrate his ideas. Many writers of his time
had known and interacted with him; Van Vogt’s 1945 science fiction The World of Null-A, was
loosely based on Science and Sanity, An Introduction to Non-Aristotelian Systems and General
Semantics. William Burroughs attended one of the seminars of Korzybski. Korzybski was not a
devout scientist or technocrat who had never ever tasted the forbidden fruits of art, literature and
philosophy.
The Timeless Poetry of Time-Binding

One of the most important building blocks of human culture is human language. Korzybski
explains that in the construction of social, economic, political, and other precariously shaky
human structures, languages and representations which are structurally not similar to facts of life
and science are employed, making our perceptions hugely fallacious. Korzybski did privilege the
language and method of science and mathematics in representing ‘facts’. Still he acknowledges that
there is a domain of profound knowledge and understanding of life beyond science, mathematics
and philosophy.
In Science and Sanity, Korzybski affirms that “poetry often conveys in a few sentences more of
lasting value than a whole volume of scientific analysis” (437). Charlotte Schuchardt in her Editor’s
Note to the 1950 edition of Manhood of Humanity says that Korzybski wanted to use these lines of
Robert Browning, “Tis time new hopes should animate mankind,/ New light should dawn” to begin
the new introduction he was preparing for the second edition of his text.24 Poetry is important, not
because it is pedagogy of higher truths. Poetry is inseparable from life; it is an indispensible aspect
of living, like many other elements that contribute to the aesthetics of existence. In the film, Dead
Poets’ Society (1989), John Keating tells his students:
We don’t read and write poetry because it’s cute. We read and write poetry because we are
members of the human race. And the human race is filled with passion. And medicine, law,
business, engineering, these are noble pursuits and necessary to sustain life. But poetry, beauty,
romance, love, these are what we stay alive for.
Poetry has an impact which is often not measurable; I do not quite agree with Auden’s remark
that “Poetry makes nothing happen.”25 The changes that poetry brings forth are not easily tangible.
The associations between poetry and life do not have an end or pattern. In an Interview, Carol Ann
Duffy said: “Poetry is the music of being human. That’s why we still turn to a Shakespearean sonnet
when we get married or Dylan Thomas when we’re at a funeral. We find in poetry the echoes of
our deepest feelings and most serious moments.”26 So turning to literature for its subtle and deeper
associations with life and ideas is an effective pedagogic technique. Matthew Arnold observes that
we “... turn to poetry to interpret life for us, to console us, to sustain us. Without poetry, our science
will appear incomplete, and most of what now passes with us for religion and philosophy will be
replaced by poetry” (Portable Matthew Arnold 300). It is not about tracing exact similitude and one-
to-one correspondence between life and literature, but to illustrate how one can be part of an ongoing
dialogue between literature and everyday human existence. Literature is not as esoteric endeavour.
Alain Badiou privileges the domains of mathematics and poetry based on their universal appeal and
indispensability: “The poem is, in an exemplary way, destined to everyone. No more and no less
than mathematics. This is precisely because neither the poem nor the matheme take persons into
account, representing instead, at the two extremes of language, the purest universality” (Handbook
of Inaesthetics 31).
Though Korzybski has created a personalized canon and hierarchy in art, literature and philosophy
in terms of time-binding and human engineering, he was never dismissive of the creations of human
imagination. He did not envisage an epistemological ethics independent of aesthetics. Rather there is
a tying together of ethics and aesthetics. For him, ethics of art depended on the potential for making
possible positive time-binding. Perhaps, for Korzybski, ‘directing the energies and capacities of
human beings to the advancement of human weal’ is pretty much the standard of merit in many of
human endeavours including literature.
NOTES
1 The idea of bringing together creative and critical thinking for more effective ways of time-binding is
found in Korzysbki’s work though he did not use the portmanteau word, creatical. In the article titled
“Harnessing Self Reflexiveness for Creatical Thinking,” written for the book edited by himself, Thinking
Creatically: Thinking Critically, Thinking Creatively, Kenneth G. Johnson gives an elaborate explanation
on creatical thinking. It was Professor Stuart Mayper, the then editor of General Semantics Bulletin who
came up with this expression, creatical. (See Johnson’s article in Thinking Creatically: Thinking Critically,
Thinking Creatively (Englewood, NJ: The Institute of General Semantics, 1991, pp. 1-17)
2 Teleopoiesis is a term used by Jacques Derrida in his Politics of Friendship. Considering the etymology
of the components, this word would suggest imaginative construction and a sense of time. Teleopoiesis
is about the possibility to be and it is thus entangled in a genealogical schema of knowledge and creation
which indirectly allude to the ethical dimension of human epistemological and creative interactions and
exchanges. It is about a knowledge community spread across time (See Politics of Friendship 37) which
is not really a community. The way teleopoiesis of the everyday lives is impacted by and influences times
past and future is what makes it relevant for this study.
3 See “Burnt Norton” in T.S. Eliot’s Four Quartets (Florida: Harcourt Inc., 1971) p. 13. It was Prof. Kar who
first used these lines in his discussions on time-binding in his lectures in the general semantics programs
organized by Balvant Parekh Centre.
4 See http://www.bartleby.com/200/sw4.html for the essay which was originally published in 1919
5 Lieutenant-Colonel John McCrae was a Canadian poet, doctor and teacher who, like Korzybski, had
witnessed the horrors of the World War I. He wrote his famous poem, “In Flanders Fields” in May 1915
after presiding over the funeral of his friend Alexis Helmer, who was killed in the Second Battle of Ypres
fought in the Flanders region of Belgium. McCrae was moved by the sight of red poppies blossoming
vigorously around the graves of soldiers in the blood drenched battlefield. The poem became so popular
that even today red poppies are considered to be a powerful symbol for remembering the war heroes and
martyrs.
6 Korzybski interprets “In Flanders Fields” briefly in Manhood of Humanity, p. 29.
7 See Paul Fussell’s The Great War and Modern Memory (New York: Sterling Publishing, 1975, 2009), p. 315.
8 See “Introduction to the Second Edition” of Science and Sanity which has a section titled “Hitler and
Psycho-logical Factors in His Life” (pp. lxxiii-lxxv).
9 Korzybski describes three working devices (Indexes, Dates, and Etc.) and two safety devices (hyphens and
quotes) as extensional devices. See Science and Sanity and Alfred Korzybski: Collected Writings (1920-
1950), Chapters 43, “An Extensional Analysis of the Process of Abstracting from an Electro-Colloidal
Non-Aristotelian Point of View” (pp. 563-568) and Chapter 56, “The Role of Language in Perceptual
Processes” (pp. 683-722).
10 See http://www.thefreelibrary.com/Safeguarding+against+%22neuro-semantic+pollution%22.
-a0145561486 (accessed in March 2015).
11 “Literature and Life” in Essays Critical and Clinical by Gilles Deleuze (Trans. Daniel W. Smith and
Michael E. Greco. London and New York, Verso, 1998, pp 1-7) p. 4
12 Foucault, Michel. “Truth, Power, Self: An Interview with Michel Foucault – October 25th, 1982” in
Technologies of the Self: A Seminar with Michel Foucault (Ed. Luther H. Martin et al. London: University
of Massachusetts Press, 1988, pp.9-15), p. 9.
13 See “What Is an Author?” an article by Michel Foucault in Aesthetics, Method, and Epistemology (Ed.
James D Faubion. Trans. Robert Hurley. Series Ed. Paul Rabinow. New York: The New Press, 1998, pp.
205-222), p. 206.
14 Selections from Areopagitica: A Speech for the Liberty of Unlicensed Printing to the Parliament of England
(1664) in http://www.columbia.edu/itc/journalism/j6075/edit/readings/areopagitica_milton.html, accessed
in March 2015.
15 Yeats uses the falcon-falconer metaphor to denote the relation of the human to the creator. As the falcon
spreads the scope of its journey, the center (the falconer) cannot hold it anymore and control its course.
There is a state of chaos once the falcon ventures out to the boundless sky. I found the decentralization of
the creator a powerful metaphor. The text enters a realm of chaos through its readings and interpretations
in and across time and space and cultures. (The poem can be read at http://www.bartleby.com/73/454.html,
accessed in March 2015)
16 Paradise Lost, Book I, Line 263
17 In Fearless Speech, Michel Foucault expands the term ‘parrhesia’ from rhetoric to mean the courage to
speak truth to power. He observes: “So you see, the parrhesiastes is someone who takes a risk. Of course,
this risk is not always a risk of life. … If, in a political debate, an orator risks losing his popularity because
his opinions are contrary to the majority’s opinion, or his opinions may usher in a political scandal, he uses
parrhesia. Parrhesia, then, is linked to courage in the face of danger: it demands the courage to speak the
truth in spite of some danger. And in its extreme form, telling the truth takes place in the ‘game’ of life or
death.”See Fearless Speech (Ed. Joseph Pearson. Los Angeles: Semiotext(e), 2001), pp.15-16.
18 The State of Emergency declared by the Prime Minister Indira Gandhi lasted from 25 June 1975 to 21 March
1977 during which elections were suspended, freedom of expression was curtailed through censorship and
incarceration of dissenters. The government also increased its control over the judiciary. The reason for
such a move was projected as ‘internal disturbances in the country’.
19 https://www.indymedia.org.uk/en/2012/09/500165.html accessed in March 2015.
20 After the partition of the British Indian Empire into India and Pakistan, many violent riots, mass exodus
and massacres took place. The refugees who had to leave their home-land and survivors of communal
violence have captured the horror of such experiences in literary texts and life writing.
21 In Science and Sanity, Korzybski uses an excerpt from the “Voyage to Laputa” as a prologue. This section
from Gulliver’s Travels is about the mad scientists who are lost in their futile ruminations and totally devoid
of creativity, imagination and fancy. They cannot wake up without the help of ‘flappers’ who hit them time
to time with a curious contraption. Korzybski emphasizes the need for a sense of balance between the
aesthetic inventiveness and epistemology of science. He wanted Science and Sanity to be a ‘flapper’ that
would wake up the world to a new way of doing knowledge.
22 A character in Jean Paul Sartre’s Nausea who reads books from the library in the alphabetical order of
writers’ names without any passion for subjects or engagement with the ideas.
23 See my papers, “Time-Binding and Creatical Approach to Knowledge: The Conserving and Subversive
possibilities of Education” (General Semantics: A Critical companion. Ed. Deepa Mishra. Delhi: Pencraft
International, 2014), pp. 155-171 and “Conscious Time-Binding and Problematizing the Function of the
public Intellectuals” (ETC: A Review of General Semantics , vol 67:1, January 2010), pp.46-54.
24 See the Editor’s note in Manhood of Humanity, 5th Printing (New York: IGS, 2001), p. v.
25 W.H. Auden’s statement, “For poetry makes nothing happen” in the elegy “In Memory of W.B. Yeats” is
full of despair and hope. Poetry continues to live, despite the world’s seeming indifference to it. It interprets
and enriches life by its subterranean influence. The stanza reads: “Mad Ireland hurt you into poetry./ Now
Ireland has her madness and her weather still,/For poetry makes nothing happen: it survives/In the valley of
its making where executives/Would never want to tamper, flows on south/From ranches of isolation and the
busy griefs,/Raw towns that we believe and die in; it survives,/A way of happening, a mouth.” (The poem
can be read at https://www.poets.org/poetsorg/poem/memory-w-b-yeats accessed in March 2015)
26 http://www.stylist.co.uk/people/interviews-and-profiles/interview-carol-ann-duffy, an interview with
Amy Grier, accessed in February 2015.
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AN ARISTOTELIAN APPROACH TO THE TIME-BINDING

NOTION IN ALFRED KORZYBSKI
Laura Trujillo Liñán
It is so difficult to talk about man;1 the history of thought shows us a lot of examples about it.
One of the problems could be explained thus: whether the more pertinent question about man is
“what” is man? or “who” is man? When we ask “what,” we are looking for something general and
common between several individuals of a group. On the other hand, when we ask “who,” we look
for something which defines an individual apart from other individuals in the same group. To answer
this question is not easy; that’s the reason why history has shown us many ongoing and never-ending
efforts of many intellectuals, philosophers, psychologist, etc., who have tried to give answers to the
questions of what or who man is without any conclusive results. Another question we may have is
if we need to find a ‘true’ definition of this concept? For this one, I would like to interpret Alfred
Korzybski’s thoughts thus: everyone works and studies different things, but they all miss one most
important concept: the definition of man. Knowing this may help us make better things or act in
accordance with what we are. Korzybski observes that falsely defined facts and ideas tend to lead us
to false conclusions, and false conclusions lead us in wrong directions, and in consequence, life and
knowledge suffer greatly. Manhood of Humanity (1921) gives an idea about Korzybski’s concerns
around understanding ‘man’.
This concern was also present a long time ago in the ancient Greece from Socrates to Aristotle.
In fact, Socrates changed the focus of Philosophy; before him, Greek philosophy was determined to
find the arche in the world, this was the principle or origin of all things, understood as the ultimate
indemonstrable principle. But Socrates realized that there was something more important, which
should be addressed even before trying to answer the questions about the Arche: that is, “What is
Man?” This illustrates the importance of philosophy in reflecting about history. In fact, one of the
most important philosophers of antiquity, Pythagoras stated that the arche of the world were the
numbers. This gives an idea how mathematics and philosophy have been linked in the past.
On the other hand, Aristotle, one of the most prominent exponents and synthesizers of history
and history of ideas, devoted part of his life for gathering knowledge from his predecessors together,
and combined that knowledge with his own ideas, writing masterpieces of Philosophy which we
still find puzzling as well as enjoyable. Aristotle also, due to the nature of his work, recognized
the importance of language. That is why he developed his texts, Organon and Rhetoric, among
others. In this way we distinguish certain similarities in the concerns of an ancient Philosopher and
an engineer in our times.
The first one is the similarity in Korzybski’s concerns for giving an adequate definition of man
with Aristotle’s attempts to define man. As you know, Korzybski said in his Manhood of Humanity
how it has been so hard to find a clear, concise definitive definition about man. About this, I wonder
whether some time in the future we will create such definition adequately and totally, which is
structurally close to reality. Or as Korzybski said: “As words are not the objects which they represent,
structure, and structure alone, becomes the only link which connects our verbal processes with the
empirical data” (Science and Sanity 59).
Korzybski emphasizes that words are structures depicting something and in no way they can reach
more things beyond what they represent. In fact, to reach a definition of man will always take us to
the explanation of the representation and never will take us to what the thing really is. This does not
mean we have to put definition and comprehension of man aside, although according to Korzybski:
“MAN has always been the greatest puzzle to man… there has never been a true definition of man
not just a conception of his role in the curious drama of the world; in consequence of which, there
has never been a proper principle or starting point for a science of humanity (Manhood of Humanity
66).
Korzybski thinks that man can find what man is and needs to find it. Korzybski felt Aristotle’s
quest for understanding ‘what is man’ led to a kind of essentialism and his critique of Aristotle
evolved as ‘non-identity’ and ‘non-allness’. The beauty of a ‘functional’ definition of man as a time-
binder is its defense against essentialism and finality. Man changes as he time-binds and so should
the understanding about man; no definition can capture the ‘essence’ of the time-binder who is ‘an-
organism (that changes)-as a whole-in an environment (which also changes). That is to say while
Korzybski, like Aristotle, understood the need for ‘defining’ man, he also warned against the rigidity
and fixity of definitions. Man as a time-binder is not a definition in the strict sense of the term; it is
a fluid interpretation.
Korzybski states that contemplation/ research about man has been taken through wrong paths.
That has happened because man has always been compared to animals. This comparison and
concepts emerging from it are totally wrong, since man as a rational being excels all other entities in
rationality. There can be similarities, but man is not same as an animal. Korzybski says: ‟We have
seen that the animals are truly characterized by their autonomous mobility − their space-binding
capacity − animals are space-binders. On the other hand, human beings are characterized by their
creative power, by the power to make the past live in the present and the present for the future, by
their capacity to bind time − human beings are time-binders” (Manhood of Humanity 67).
It looks like the difference between animals and men lies in the notions of time and space.
Animals are capable of self movements and this is generated in space. On the human side, we not
only count on this quality of space, but also go further. We are capable of movements and also of
transforming and consciously acting in the space/world. We are able to distinguish present from the
past and future, capable of planning and discovering the world and creating new things, new culture,
and new ways of life. In Korzybski’s view, we live because we produce and create; because we are
acting in time and are not merely acting in space; because man is not a kind of animal (Manhood of
Humanity 73). The main radical difference between us as human beings and other organisms is our
capacity for collective action, which we accomplish in the world through communication.
Now we can find a second similarity with Aristotle when Korzybski states: the act of doing
something follows the act of being or in other words, we will know the nature or substance of a
being for his activity. Thomas Aquinas stated a similar idea with his operari sequitur esse. In the
case of Aristotle, It is said that when he classified the different types of animals and plants, he found
beings that for their appearance could fit as plants. However if they moved, they were immediately
classified as animals. The aspect that determined this classification was the action of the being.
An Aristotelian Approach to the Time-Binding Notion in Alfred Korzybski 115
Korzybski says, “I define HUMANITY, in the universal tongue of mathematics and mechanics,
to be the TIME-BINDING CLASS OF LIFE” (Manhood of Humanity 60). In Neil Postman’s words
explaining Korzybski: “We are, ‘time-binders’, while plants are ‘chemistry-binders’, and animals
are ‘space-binders’. Chemistry-binding is the capacity to transform sunlight into organic chemical
energy; space-binding, the capacity to move about and control a physical environment. Humans
have these capacities, too, but they are unique in their ability to transport their experience through
time.”2
Man is a being with huge capacities which let him act on the world and leave his traces through
symbols, and this quality is given by his rationality. We can create a language and communicate
between us. This can be done by many animals; but our true difference is that we can distinguish
between today and tomorrow; we can plan for the future, think about the past; we can remember and
yearn for the past. In this way there is a third similarity with Aristotle. The ability that allows man
to be a time-binder is rationality. Aristotle and Korzybski believed this capacity distinguishes man
from the rest of beings. Moreover, Aristotle’s definition of a human being resides in being a ξώων
πολιτικόν (zoon politikon), which makes man part of the animal genre, but he surpasses it totally.
Only a few thinkers in history have understood this interpretation of man proposed by Aristotle.
Hannah Arendt, a political theorist from Princeton could understand the complex nuances of it.
She writes in The Human Condition that Aristotle has been misunderstood because he has not been
studied profoundly. The ξώων πολιτικόν (zoon politikon) has been reduced as a rational being, a
social being, a rational animal, etc., and although all these terms and expressions are related to the
real meaning Aristotle wanted to suggest, they do not match the complexities of the concept of man
that Aristotle put forth. For example, Thomas Aquinas identifies man as a social being capable of
relating to others; man lives with others so that he can satisfy his biological needs. Arendt thinks
this interpretation has its limitations, considering that there are many animal species that are very
social. Man is capable of relating to others and acting within the polis, reflecting on himself and
what is good for his fellow citizens. Man is thought and action or in Korzybski's words: ‟we live
because we produce, because we are acting in time and are not merely acting in space” (Manhood
of Humanity 73).
The important thing lies not in the action itself, which can be accomplished by both animals
and men; but on the thought that generates the action and a capability to connect this thought to the
lessons from the past and considerations about the future.
As we can see, Aristotle’s view has similarities with Korzybski’s vision; the difference resides
in the terms, the words and in the semantics, which are not always well understood by the one who
expresses them or by the one who listens to them. Many times the medium does not facilitate the
interpretation of the content in the most adequate way. That is why notions and concepts are mixed
up as we have seen in Aquinas and Aristotle. Moreover the works of these thinkers are available to
many of their interpreters only in translation.
Korzybski was conscious of the dangers and limitations of language. He states that we read
unconsciously into the world the structure of the language we use (Manhood of Humanity 60). The
problem of the definition of man has been reduced to language, and that is why Korzybski looks for
a universally interpretable system of symbols that expresses what the world is, an objective manner
to be understood by everyone; something comparable to mathematics. Whether this kind of a
transformation of language is desirable is debatable. Korzybski suggests that a language structurally
similar to ‘phenomena’ could minimize misevaluations.
In short, we can state that Korzybski’s Theory about a better definition of man as a time-binding
being is a very important contribution; it was a new way of thinking in his time. However, this
definition has a lot to do with Aristotle and his ideas on the right way to define things.
Being a researcher on Aristotle and taking into account Korzybski’s ideas on the concept of man,
I consider Korzybski as not anti-Aristotelian though he describes himself as a non-Aristotelian.
NOTES
1 Following Korzybski, I use the term ‘man’ to indicate ‘human’ in this study.
2 See Postman, “Alfred Korzybski” (ETC.: A Review of General Semantics 60.4, 2003)
REFERENCES
Arendt Hannah. Human Condition. Argentina: Paidós, 2009. Print.
Alfred Korzybski. Manhood of Humanity: The Science and Art of Human Engineering. New York: E. P. Dutton,
1921. Print.
––. Science and Sanity: An Introduction to Non-Aristotelian Systems and General Semantics. 4th ed. Lakeville,
CT: International Non-Aristotelian Library, 1958. Print.
Postman, Neil. “Alfred Korzybski,” ETC.: A Review of General Semantics 60.4, 2003. Print.
TIME-BINDING AND SUSTAINABLE DEVELOPMENT:

A COMPARATIVE PRAXIS
Aniruddh Shastree
‘Time-binding’ as a Way Towards Sustainable Development – Through Sanity

The idea of living life with ‘sanity’ was a revolutionary stepping stone for what now can be
called ‘sustainable development’.
Time-binding is a distinctively human attribute which defines the ‘art of preserving memories
and records of human experiences for the use of subsequent generation’. This quality makes it
possible for later generation to begin to learn from where former generation left off. The power of
‘Time-binding’ is to understand – to observe and remember change over time.
In Korzybski’s article titled “The Role of Language in the Perceptual Processes,” time-binding
is defined as a characteristic of inter-communicating and transmitting from individual to individual
and from generation to generation the accumulated experiences of individuals. The experiences are
accumulated when an individual goes through the process of ‘abstraction’ from an electro-colloidal
non-Aristotelian point of view; in which stage I is silent where the event occurs; stage II is the
impact of the event in stage I on an individual – a spontaneous nervous impact, may it be emotional,
auditory, visual, pain, heat, cold, etc. which instantaneously follows as soon as the event occurs.
In stage III the feeling is sensed; consciousness of the nervous impact occurs. This is linguistically
expressed, either as an assertion or as prevention to another individual from possible harm that can
occur through similar events.
In most cases, parents or society in general try to resolve problems in such a way that the next
generation can have a better lifestyle or in some sense live a life with hedonism to a certain degree.
But one must remember that one does not turn hedonism into laziness; laziness has negative aspects
too.
Similarly, the philosophy of ‘Sustainable Development’ is also futuristic, and aimed towards
establishing a ‘saner’ life through application of knowledge gained from events occurred in the
past. It affirms that (i) People are entitled to a healthy and productive life in harmony with nature.
(ii) Peace, development and environmental protection are interdependent and indivisible.1 The
Document of United Nations2 defines ‘sustainable development’ as: “It is a kind of development that
meets the needs of present without compromising the ability of future generations to meet their own
needs. Development involves a progressive transformation of society.”
If sustainable development focuses on the future, does that mean we lose our now, or the present?
Not necessarily. Sustainable development is about finding better ways of doing things, both for the
future and the present. We might need to change the way we work and live now, but this doesn’t
mean our quality of life will be compromised.3 Korzybski’s book titled Science and Sanity mentions
about the quality unique to human beings which is the careful cultivation of records and experiences,
events, happenings and their outcome in either verbal or written form. Going further, the quality
of deducing conclusions from the events, the power of reasoning and a sense of prediction based
on facts gathered from study of records, which we call ‘historical events’ or the heritage: race,
polis(city-state), kingdom or country etc., which are unique to humans. It is this quality that guides
us to cultivate a sense of confidence for a better future or casts a gloomy picture of our future.
“While the first man survived and then triumphed over animals by the virtue of power inherent in
him, he had to systematically sharpen and refine this innate capacity (the capacity of time binding)
in order to build civilizations and sustain them over time, so is an ongoing semantic activity, time
binding has thus a futurist dimension, while being dedicated to the project of reclamation of the time
past. In Korzybski’s words, it involves the process of ‘selection’, ‘digesting’, and ‘absorbing’ the
impressions received from the environment.” 4
In today’s world laden with information which is often called as the ‘Information Age’, we tend
to get a variety of views, things which have multiple uses. In such a case we often get confused. In
such times tools suggested by Korzybski come handy, which guide us to make our choices. Tools of
“Delayed response,” “informed and thoughtful responses,” “self-reflection,” “enhancing our scope
of map,” “non-allness,” “Believing that map is not the territory,” and to search for more relevant
information to the context. It means we should stop coming to spontaneous conclusions and stop
shutting our mind in ‘allness’. Instead, be patient, delay response or prevent knee-jerk reactions –
delay the reaction to ‘happening-event’. This quality becomes more and more necessary in the age
of impulsive reaction and the age of instant gratification.
As an example of time-binding, we can observe the joint family system: many family members
having their own professions and experiences share their life-worlds. Thus younger generations
are able to learn from elders about events and mistakes, which can help them prevent same
mistakes and learn about and from the past legacy of family. This phenomenon is vanishing today
due to disintegration of joint family into nuclear family. In the context of phenomenon of passing
information and experiences that can be picked up from where other members left off, whether
within one generation or across generations is the human inclination of sustenance, whether they
are memories of past or achievements. Many a time, we come across an opposite quality where
people see in limited context of ‘today’. The attitude of ‘I have money today hence I will spend all
of it’. This kind of actions will leave a lesser surplus for the future generations which can lead to an
inability of future generation to spend money for higher education, skills, arts and end up taking jobs
where monetary benefits are not fair and just.
There is a need to raise our levels of consciousness and to know the correct path towards our goal
of sustaining with sanity. Application of the principles of General Semantics can help here. General
Semantics is a method that can help enhance one’s level of consciousness. General Semantics is a
new set of metrics to change the dogmas that exist in our nervous system; General Semantics deals
with the process of how we perceive, construct, evaluate, and respond to our experiences in life.
The more we practice the methods, the more we tend to de-clutter our web of thoughts, thus reduce
our anxiety due to multi-directional flow of thoughts and thoughts about thoughts thus helping us to
channelize our thought process. This shall help us develop to become a saner ‘organism-as-a-whole-
in-an-environment’. If we can be optimistic about the power of compounding, we may develop a
saner environment as a whole. If you observe Nature’s creations other than human beings, what
can be observed is that these creatures do not destroy each other unnecessarily, they co-exist and
Time-binding and Sustainable Development: A Comparative Praxis 119
co-habit. Although, there is a fair share of parasites but these are much fewer than those who live in
symbiotic relationship with each other.
In following Korzybski’s non-Aristotelian system, where the extremism of ‘either-or’ is
avoided, here in the sense of whether only human beings exist or Nature. Quite probably if we
battle, eventually Nature would win and we would lose. Hence we should find a middle path of co-
existence, for which attempt towards ‘elimination of self-deception’ that all is well and shall be so
forever should be avoided.
Change happens at microscopic or even sub-microscopic levels, which is experienced not only
when you pass by a shady tree on road, but also when we use words and tone of using the word,
the perception and mood of listener changes, also in the world of things, the presence or absence of
things whether in solid, liquid or gaseous state affect our life.
II
Are We Living in an Era of Insanity and Unconscious Abstraction?

One of the concerns of Korzybski was to reduce conflicts and conflicting situation. Here I
take the context of humans in conflict with their own nature and the Nature at large. There can
be a mis-communication between Nature, human natural biology and our habits in daily life. The
phenomena of Arctic and Antarctic ice sheet melting down 5 and uranium dumps emanating a type of
nuclear waste can have drastically bad effects on life, causing cancerous growths or causing genetic
problems for many generations of animals and plants due to radiation. 6, 7 Fracking method for
extraction of mineral oil8 and air and water pollution cause severe health problems.9 Plastic used for
daily lives although has revolutionized the lives of humans, generates unmanageable waste. At least
267 different species including seabirds, turtles, seals, sea lions, whales and fish are known to have
suffered from entanglement or ingestion of marine debris.10 The town of Vapi in India is a dumping
place for chemicals of every kind. Levels of mercury in the groundwater are 96 times higher than
safe levels, and heavy metals are present in the air and the local produce. 11 Deforestation contributes
to about 20% of global CO2 emissions and forest sector provides a large opportunity to mitigate
climate change. Climate change modelling studies for India show that the Indian sub-continent is
likely to experience a warming of over 3-5°C, affecting flood and drought frequency and intensity.
Forests provide a wide range of ecosystem services such as protecting water quality and quantity
(including stream flow, drinking water supplies, and groundwater) by retarding runoff, protecting
biodiversity, sequestering carbon; providing wood and other non-timber. Forest has important
economic value. Human activities are already impairing the flow of these ecosystem services from
the forests on a large scale and if these current trends continue with climate change posing to be an
added stressor, a large share of the Earth’s remaining natural forest ecosystems will be altered within
a few decades.12 During extended droughts, such as during El Niño events, the forests and the peat
become flammable, especially if they have been degraded by logging or accidental fire. When they
burn, they release huge volumes of carbon dioxide and other greenhouse gases.13
A sizable part of India is still smouldering under the grip of drought. Bundelkhand and
Marathwada are just samples but in reality more than 250 of the 680 plus districts have experienced
severe droughts, where even drinking water has become a major problem. Wisdom lies in converting
this water crisis into an opportunity to change policies and programmes so that future masses do
not suffer. Irrigation accounts for nearly 78% of water consumed in the country. With expanding
urbanization, the share of agriculture in water consumption along with availability of water for
agriculture will reduce. Therefore, better water management will inevitably require a closer look at
agriculture, with a view to using water resources more rationally.
In ground water, the problem is over-exploitation and falling water tables. More than 80% of
administrative units in the States of Punjab, Haryana, Rajasthan and Delhi are over exploited, and the
water table is depleting by 1 foot every year. This is eating away resources of the future generations.
So where do we go from here?
Innovative solutions such as installing metres for power consumption and cut in water incentives
should be made. As an even more realistic solution to save water, drip and sprinkler methods of
irrigation should be promoted, especially for sugarcane, banana and paddy crops which can save
around 40-50% of water. So far, less than 5% of India’s cropped area is under micro-irrigation and
potential is at least three to four times more. Similarly, flooding of rice fields needs to be replaced
by SRI (System of Rice Intensification) technique, which can save about 30% of water. Lastly, stop
protecting water intensive crops. In short, we need to incentivise farmers to save water.14
There have also been several earlier studies that found associations between air pollution and
autism spectrum disorders and learning and development in children. “This study adds to evidence
that air pollution may have detrimental effects on the brains of children and adolescents.” 15 “Climate
change is one of those problems that seems perversely designed to make humans flop around
ineffectively. If air costs us nothing, we’ll happily use it as a limitless dump for the waste from our
cars and factories and farms. Legal scholars call this ‘the tragedy of the commons’: we tend not to
look after what isn’t strictly speaking, ‘ours’, so resources used in common are abused. The 588
page report16 is a carefully calculated price of scholarship-cum-political theatre, written by Nicholas
Stern. It is a design to make the case that climate change is real and dangerously costly. British
voters now rate the environment just as high as economy. It is one thing for politicians to recognize
that there may be votes in being green. New taxes and regulations will be required to give it a nudge,
such as levies on air transport, and gas guzzlers, banning incandescent light bulbs, and mandates on
power companies to ‘sequester’ the carbon that now goes up as smoke, by pumping it under ground.
The challenge of climate change will be met only by a global consensus on how to construct a low
carbon economy. What’s the opposite of tragedy of the commons – a triumph of the collective?” 17
Abstractions of these happenings are negative as these are unfavourable conditions for humans to
live in. These events motivate us to do what Korzybski suggested. Abstraction by necessity involves
evaluating, whether conscious or not. What he meant was that after viewing such phenomenon it
should stimulate us to bring a conscious change in our live styles or decisions in life. The terms
‘Time-binding’ as well as ‘sustainable development’ converge as the thought process behind them
are in the direction of self-preservation and to keep a safer, healthier, bright future and enhance
positivity in life.
Food and Sustainability Problems: What is Important – Present or Future? – A

Conflict
Increasing obesity due to consumption of junk food and the lack of time to cook healthy food by
ourselves is an irony in itself. Is that making us think and evaluate on the question as to what we are
passing on to the future generation? This is one of the aspects of Time-Binding.
We consider that the things that help us live with sanity are good for us. One of the things that
help us survive is ‘good health’. ‘Good Health’ can be described as a physical and mental condition
that leads us to a life free of disease and conflict with our mind and body.
Scientists have found out that one of the indicators to good health as ‘Body Mass Index’, which
is calculated by dividing a person’s weight in Kilogram by height in meters squared. The body mass
index value above 25 is considered overweight and above 30 is considered obese. The consumption
of fast foods, junk foods, food with high sugar content, highly processed foods, has become order of
the day. Although it has something to do with our fast paced life, or due to the pleasure and taste of
these foods etc. the problem still persists.
Obesity rate in children has risen from between 4% and 6%, depending on age range, in the
early 1970s to between 10% and 20% by 2008. A diet laden with junk food not only affects weight
but other facets of a child’s life, too namely (i) Effect on Obesity and Disease Risk, (ii) unhealthy
junk food and low in nutrient-dense food were linked to behavioural and emotional problems,
including anxiety and depression, (iii) students who consumed a low-quality diet did worse on
the standardized test, (iv) Increase in blood pressure and diabetes, (v) Hyperacidity and acid reflux
disease.18 Results were published in 2008 in the Journal of School Health.
What do we understand from of it? In my opinion, it is a ‘conflict’ of the body with the food
consumed as the body ‘communicates’ with our consciousness by disturbing the balance of ideal
blood pressure and sugar levels and insulin that enhances span of human life. Fast foods with limited
physical activity lead to blood pressure and diabetes which in turn again limits our capacity of
physical activity.19
The question is that can such foods, lead us to true development; and can we sustain with such
foods for longer duration than without them? It is a serious aspect of life as today’s fast paced and
heavily demanding life prevents us from time out of the schedule to cook or consume healthy ideal
diet and have enough physical exertion that is beneficial for humans. Is the quick solution to today’s
problem of satisfying hunger leading us to ‘existential crises’ for tomorrow? Do these foods give us
relief from hunger, help us live with ‘sanity’ and is life by consumption of such food sustainable?
A statement by an English Naturalist and Physician Mr. Thomas Muffett (1553-1604) fits aptly to
this situation of the 21st century, “Men dig their graves with their own teeth and die by those ill-fated
instruments more than weapons of their enemies” (Health’s Improvement 23; the text is in www.
quod.lib.umich.edu).
The point I am making is in line with the aim of Korzybski about reaching to ‘sanity’ in life,
which is not attained by consumption of foods that disturb good health (a kind of sanity), which is
related to the kind of food consumed. This brings us to the point of ‘personal responsibility’ which
is to ‘raise our consciousness to abstract what is good or bad according to the rules (knowledge of
past laid down) regarding what meets our nutritional/ physiological requirements and capacity of
our biological constitution to assimilate to turn it into positive (life force) energy (our quality as
‘energy binders’).
III
Change Management into the Time-Binding Way

A change in the thinking process, to transform ourselves from the state of ‘learned helplessness’
of whether it will be profitable to me or, will a small contribution matter or not, towards a state of
‘learned optimism’ which means looking at good things in life and self-motivating ourselves, that
your actions, if they are unique, they shall grab attention, and can motivate others to follow you
further, thus helping towards a collective change in a way we execute our actions, thus affecting a
change at macro level in the environment we live in. For example a small action of putting the tea
powder after preparation of tea in kitchen garden instead of throwing it in dustbin can help you save
few rupees on fertilizers, avoid the traffic jam through which you go for purchase of fertilizers, and
reduce the fuel cost. Such an action aids in time management. A small positive change will help you
in some small way to live a better life.
In ‘conscious time-binding’, we learn from our mistakes and instead of making excuses and
blaming, we tend to learn from ourselves and from others. Humans learn from their mistakes and
accomplishments. We learn to improve our learning.
The question is: are we considering our present actions of pollution of air, water, soil as mistakes?
Do we admit it? If we do so, that is not enough; are we blaming it on others?; are we excusing
ourselves of it as it happened due to our circumstances at those past times? If so, then, still the
question remains that, whether we are passing a better place to live in? Do we want to pass on this
place to future generations or do we don’t? By our nature/behavior, and intellect, we may think, why
to let go? Why pass on? Command, control should be ours! Is that so? If so, then, let me say sorry to
Korzybski, that his time has gone, an era passed since he passed away on 1st March 1950 and we are
now in the year 2018, and yes , he proposed that ‘X is NOT Y’, and ‘Time is asymmetrical and one
cannot go back in time’. So by this logic, time in era of 1950 is not the time in year 2018.
Let us not make this happen. Let us apply heuristic approach with all its definitions specifically,
“using a method of encouraging a desire in learners to find their own solutions,” “serving or leading
to discovery,” “principles used to make decisions when all possibilities are not explored.”
With application of heuristic approach we modulate our ability as individuals to create new
things, improve our creations. We can prevent environmental degradation and make better the
surroundings we live in. We can improve our homes, offices, cars and all objects that we use in our
daily life if we have environmental consciousness.
Let’s take steps to improve upon things our previous generations and we ourselves left off until
now; improving in the sense of reducing actions and objects that hinder cohesive and coherent co-
existence of ours with nature while focusing on end results namely reducing draughts, floods, heat
sinks that are caused due to too many high rise apartments and no trees, water shortage. We can learn
to improve our air quality (such as, reduction in particulates matter, elements causing pollution are
reduced by, disapproving those objects and actions that harm us and nature and at the same time
rewarding those persons who work a breathable future.
In the book Manhood of Humanity, Korzybski mentions about ‘spiral theory’, that is a thought
at a moment of time in a direction gives rise to new thoughts at another moment and grows further
in a direction giving rise to new ideas, or we can say, the ‘cause-effect’ relation and the effect of
the first thought is the cause for second thought and so on. Our capacity of time-binding is based
on the feedback mechanism and ‘chain reaction of cause-effect’ without which human as human,
doesn’t exist. Going by this statement, of Korzybski that ‘organism-as-a-whole-in-an-environment’
including its neuro-semantic and neuro-linguistic environment, then it could be understood that
nature has given enough signs and symbolized that it can destroy humanity and that the environment
is not conducive to survive.
With the rise in pollution of air and water and food habits, there is a rise in diseases such as
blood pressure, which not only harms an individual, but the expressions of anger, irritability also
creates a conflict in the environment which the person exists, thus reducing sanity in co-existence.
Further, the actions (events) performed by a person, who can be irritable and stressed due to higher
blood pressure may become a cause for further events which may be harmful not only for the person
oneself but affects the overall state of mind of people around such a person. Thus, a single person’s
health not only affects the personality of that person but also to the territory of his/her work and his/
her territory of influence which may affect development and sustenance of the whole group. Decline
is not destiny. We can learn from choices, wise and foolish made by people in the past.
In the text titled “Time binding- a General Theory,”20 of Korzybski, he states that, “lately the
natural sciences have firmly established the fact that an organism should be treated-as-a-whole.”
The theory of relativity has established another fact, that all we know and may know is a ‘joint
phenomenon’ of observer and the observed. Korzybski introduced the term, ‘time-binding’ to cover
all the factors “as-a-whole,” which made man differ somehow from animals by the capacity for
building the accumulative affair called ‘civilization’. In this accumulative affair, communication by
elders and assimilation by novices; the compatibility and mismatch between abstractions as well as
with the milieu and circumstances play an important role. Civilization is a generalized term and is
said about a community in an era as a whole. What defines an ‘era’ is another question. Does an era
have an abrupt or a gradual change, or what made humans civilize or in Korzybski’s words ‘What
made Humans human’?
Both animals and human offspring begin their lives in nearly total ignorance. The differences
that exist between them are small then. While the animal seems to begin life with a greater store of
what is advantageous to it (inherited knowing), but it possesses little ability to learn from its parents.
The animal is condemned to rediscover new knowing of its parents. The wise old owl may know a
great deal; but it has no way to pass what it knows to its offspring and their offspring have no way
to receive it.
We humans are very different in this respect. We pass our knowing from one generation to
the next. Alfred Korzybski explains: “ Human beings possess a most remarkable capacity which
is entirely peculiar to them – I mean the capacity to summarize, digest and appropriate the labors
and experiences of the past; I mean the capacity to use the fruit of past labors and experiences as
intellectual or spiritual capital for developments in the present; I mean the capacity to employ as
instruments of increasing power the accumulated achievements of all previous lives of the past
generations spent in trial and error, trial and success. I mean the capacity in virtue of which man at
once is the inheritor of the bygone ages and the trustee of posterity; and because humanity is just
this magnificent natural agency by which the past lives in the present and present for the future. I
define ‘humanity’ in the universal tongue of mathematics and mechanics to be the “Time-Binding
Class of Life”. 21
Time-binding is a new way of thinking – an analytical thinking. Time binders can make one’s
decision based on understanding changes in one’s environment over time. Analytical thinking
recognizes cause and effect. Time binders are masters of cause and effect, they make scientific
discovery. They make knowledge. They make technology. When knowledge is incorporated into
matter-energy, it becomes a tool.
Similarly, sustainable development recognizes that growth must be both inclusive and
environmentally sound to reduce poverty and build shared prosperity for today’s population and to
continue to meet the needs of future generations. It is efficient with resources and carefully planned
to deliver both immediate and long-term benefits for people, planet, and posterity.
The three pillars of sustainable development – economic growth, environmental stewardship,
and social inclusion – carry across all sectors of development, from cities facing rapid urbanization
to agriculture, infrastructure, energy development and use, water availability, and transportation.
Cities are embracing low-carbon growth and public transportation. Farmers are picking up the
practices of climate-smart agriculture. Countries are recognizing the value of their natural resources,
and industries are realizing how much they can save through energy and supply chain efficiency.
An analytical framework for helping citizens design public policies and encourage the investments
needed to strengthen sustainable development and improve standards of living in rapidly developing
countries is needed. Clean air and water and solid waste management are basic needs, and many
urban planning and environmental policies enhance productivity and poverty alleviation. Ultimately,
sustainable growth hinges on good growth policy, which aims to get prices right, fix markets, address
coordination failures and acknowledge externalities.
Sustainable development practices help countries grow in ways that both mitigate and adapt
to the challenges posed by climate change. Work in urban development, energy, transportation,
infrastructure, agriculture, water, environment, climate change, and information and communication
technologies, by creating the policies, development plans, and practices that form the foundation
for sustainable growth through incorporation of sustainability and climate, change resilience into
its work across all sectors, helping countries take action on climate change and working through
partnerships, such as the Greenhouse Gas Protocol and the Energy Sector Management Assistance
Program (ESMAP), to help cities account for their emissions and increase their energy efficiency,
adaptation and mitigation actions on the ground to finance the kind of projects that help in increasing
their resilience to climate change, and achieving emissions reductions.22
In Manhood of Humanity, Korzybski’s futuristic vision is clear, as he states:
Nature’s laws are supreme; we cannot change them; we can deviate them for a while, but
the end is evil. That is the lesson we must learn from the history of Humanity’s childhood.
False conceptions of Man’s ignorance of the laws of human-nature have given us unscientific
economies, unscientific ethics, unscientific laws, unscientific politics, unscientific Government.
These have made history the history of social cataclysms – insurrections, wars, revolutions –
sad tokens not so much of human lust as of human ignorance of laws of nature. There is but
one remedy, one hope – a scientific art of human engineering based upon the just conception
of humanity as the time-binding class of life and confirming to the laws of nature including the
laws of human nature. (55)23
Every moment can be a fresh new moment and hence I feel we can make an attempt to take steps
towards sustainable development from now, because as we think our future can be better, it can be
worse too. What we prevent depends upon our direction of our attempts collectively as humanity.
Humanity is a great brotherhood by virtue of the sameness of the material form, which is formed
physically and morally. Unless, however, it also becomes a brotherhood intellectually, it is no better
than a superior genus of animals.
Let’s make our talks work.

1. http://www.unep.org/training/programmes/Instructor%20Version/Part_1/readings/Principles_%20of_
Sustainable_Development.pdf , accessed in 2016. Web.
2 www.un-documents.net/ocf-02.htm, accessed in 2016. Web.
3 http://www.sd-commission.org.uk/pages/what-is-sustainable-development.html, accessed in 2016. Web.
4 Prafulla C. Kar, “Time binding as a Scientific(Social) Praxis,” in Anekaant: A Journal of Polysemic
Thought 3, p.91. Print.
5 Deccan Herald, Saturday, April 2, 2016, p 11. Print.
6 http://www.conserve-energy-future.com/dangers-and-effects-of-nuclear-waste-disposal.php, , accessed in
2016. Web.
7 http://www.mnn.com/earth-matters/wilderness-resources/photos/the-15-most-toxic-places-to-live/lake-
karachay-russia#top-desktop, accessed in 2016. Web.
8 http://www.psr.org/environment-and-health/environmental-health-policy-institute/hydraulic-fracking.
html?referrer=https://www.google.co.in/, accessed in 2016. Web.
9 http://www.oilgasmonitor.com/top-environmental-concerns-fracking/, accessed in 2016. Web.
10 http://www.unep.org/regionalseas/marinelitter/publications/docs/plastic_ocean_report.pdf, accessed in
2016. Web.
11 http://www.mnn.com/earth-matters/wilderness-resources/photos/the-15-most-toxic-places-to-live/vapi-
india#top-desktop, accessed in 2016. Web.
12 http://www.sikkimforest.gov.in/climate-change-in-sikkim/8-Chapter_Climate%20Change%20and%20
its%20Impacts%20on%20Forests%20of%20Sikkim.pdf, , accessed in 2016. Web.
13 http://earthobservatory.nasa.gov/Features/Deforestation/deforestation_update2.php, accessed in 2016.
Web.
14 “Caring for Water,” in Financial Express, dated: 9 May 2016, p. 6. Print.
15 https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2016/jun/13/air-pollution-linked-to-increased-mental-illness-
in-children) http://bmjopen.bmj.com/content/6/6/e010004.full, accessed in 2016. Web.
16 www.sternreview.org http://webarchive.nationalarchives.gov.uk/+/http://www.hm-treasury.gov.uk/
sternreview_index.htm); (http://webarchive.nationalarchives.gov.uk/20100407172811/http://www.hm-
treasury.gov.uk/d/Summary_of_Conclusions.pdf, accessed in 2016. Web.
17 “Warming to a Global Theme,” TIME Magazine, November 12, 2006. Print.
18 Deccan Herald, Saturday April 2nd ,2016, p. 6. Print.
19 http://www.livestrong.com/article/456624-negative-effects-of-junk-food-on-kids/, accessed in 2016. Web.
20 Time-binding: A General Theory, page 4
21 Manhood of Humanity, p. 34: the text can be read on http://lipn.univ-paris13.fr/~duchamp/Books&more/
Neurosciences/Korzybski/%5BAlfred_Korzybski%5D_Manhood_of_Humanity(BookFi.org).pdf.
Accessed in 2016. Web.
22 http://www.worldbank.org/en/topic/sustainabledevelopment/overview#3 , accessed in 2016. Web.
23 Manhood of Humanity, p. 55: the text can be read on http://lipn.univ-paris13.fr/~duchamp/Books&more/
Neurosciences/Korzybski/%5BAlfred_Korzybski%5D_Manhood_of_Humanity(BookFi.org).pdf.
Accessed in 2016. Web.
Balvant Parekh Centre is proud to be associated with
the publication of Reading Alfred Korzybski Through
Inter-Theoretic Explorations by Pencraft International,
New Delhi. TRS Sharma, the author of the book has
taught literatures in English in the universities of Delhi,
Alberta (Canada), Annaba (Algeria) and Kakatiya. He
was Senior Academic Fellow and Deputy Director at
the American Studies Research Centre, Hyderabad
(1987-89). His published works include Poetic Style
in Robert Frost (Humanities Press, New Jersey, and
Macmillan India, 1981), Tale of the Glory-Bearer
(Penguin Classics, India, 1994), a verse translation of
the medieval Kannada classic Yashodhara Carite by
Janna, and Toward an Alternative Critical Discourse
(Indian Institute of Advanced Study, Shimla, 2000),
outcome of the work he did on Indian Aesthetics under
an HAS Fellowship. He is Chief Editor of the Sahitya
Akademi's three volume Ancient Indian Literature: An
ISBN: 978-93-82178-26-2 ` 600.00 Anthology (2000). He has also edited a collection of
US$15.00 essays on the Mahabharata for the Sahitya Akademi
(2009). His recent work Dialogics of Cultures in Ancient Indian Literatures was published by
the HAS, Shimla (2014).
TRS Sharma’s study on Alfred Korzybski (AK), and his non Aristotelian General Semantics
(GS), as theorized and practiced by its founder and his followers, is arranged in two main parts.
While the first part deals with the Western language thinkers in the light of GS – thinkers more
or less contemporary to AK such as Wittgenstein, Chomsky, Frege, Bakhtin, F R Leavis and
others, the second part considers in the perspective of GS the Indian language thinkers such as,
to namea few, the Buddhist Nagarjuna and Dinnaga and the Hindu thinkers like Aadi Shankara
and Bhartrhari. While the Korzybskian discourse based on premises of negation anticipates on
the one hand the modern/post-modern trends in Western critical endeavors, on the other it quietly
spreads its ‘Indra’s net’ to gather/reflect the scintillating images of Indian language theories, and
their correlations with the physicist's cosmological reflections. Another fascinating side of GS,
when considered as political philosophy, opens up, incidentally, the Indian socio-political scene,
the elite student movements on university campuses, and the many colored notion of secularism
as preached and practiced by ideologues and politicians. General Semantics commands an
‘implicate order’, which is ‘vast and contain multitudes’; it accommodates literary episodes, poems
mystical and otherwise, which are used in many places in the present discourse, so designed as
to strengthen and blend into the mainstream narrative. The book may be used by the scholars in
the humanities and social sciences all over the world as a reference tool for comparative studies.
The book is available for sale at Balvant Parekh Centre for General Semantics and Other Human
Sciences, Baroda. For information and other details please contact prafullakar@gmail.com
(Tel. 0265 - 2320870).
SAND
Lance Strate
the obsessions of others oppress me

their compulsions repulse me
valorous recession beckons
but I stand frozen
listening to listings
disassociated spinnings
dizzying crossings
items, lines, and me
send the anesthesia of amnesia
and not this recklessly thin nostalgia
sweet odor of rot
cheerful decomposition
whistling sound of the empty spaces within
these maggots seek to hollow me out
O how they love me so
gluttons feeding on my guts
when comes an expiration to these aspirations?
all I ask is that you bury me deep
in the cleansing sands
of my ancestors
let dear desiccation whither me down
shrunken and shedding the stench of their hands
when will you call an end to all this schismogenesis?
splinters of the brilliant and the blind
fractures of expectancies and remembrances
gashes of secessions and seditions
wounds of separations and severities
all all can be sealed repaired healed
the digit of God is an integer
touching us to form a ratio
to everything we shall assign a reason
and a rhyme to every purpose under heaven
there is no joy without a joining

no joining unless adjoining
we collect ourselves and forge swords of identity
one tribe
one totem
one taboo
to do no harm
and all the rest is commentary
an uphill elevation
struggling to ascend
an uprising to find our freedom
to find a loving home
not within fixed walls
but in the folds of our tents
and the flows of our rounds
cycles of departure and return
ceaseless turnings
ebbings and floods alike bringing
erasure
I stand before a jury of my fears
overcome by guilt
my inner sense denied
before I return to the cry I am seen
heavy dense weighs upon me
ponderously preposterously preposthumously
humanely I request solitary confinement
I am no Christian soldier
to turn the other cheek
and then return with an army at my back
I have only my wits and words
my pen and papers
my needle and thread
embroidered embroiled
embossed embassied
I did not write these laws
I can only tell you what they do not say
I interpret the intervals between
your rules and your rulers
your margin of aura
to air is human
is it not?
I cannot measure the deep rave you are engaged in
but I witness it all
one eye to see across all time and space
the other to magnify the minutia of existence
but where where is the perspective?
Sand 129
I listen to your mad dreams of milk and grain
and decipher the warnings of your own unconsciousness
projecting your desires and rages
onto a screen made of skin
a tattoo of light reading
forsake eye and ego
to speak the truth now
declare the verdict
speak verities and verifications
versions and variations
visions and viewpoints
virtualities rally true
you to me
I face my accusers
without excuses
no recusing the elusively reckless recluse
you’re on her
all risible
rising above it all
I can’t stand the condemnation
when you haven’t even read me my writes
you pass judgment
like passing the bottle
and I feel the burn
the buzzing blinding effinall
drunken power
Dr. Jerk’ll tan your hide at the saloon Mister
so say good night Mary
and wake me if I scream
or if you’ve heard this one before
I walk into a bar and the bartender says
we don’t get many of your kind in here
so I leave as I arrived
disbarred
no baritone and losing my tenor all too easily
as soap ran noses off
better wipe ‘em clean
erasure
if you meet the baby Buddha at a fork in the road
cut him in two
or so says wise kinky solo man
with all that jazz a bell ringing in his ears
who was it that split the Adam?
parted the Red Sieve?
shaped clay into men and mountains?
cooled fires into women and waters?
poured love and loneliness into the world

polarities giving rise to circuitous motion
fluid dynamics
sacred ecologies
first and second natures?
nurturing laws of divine compassion
not regal legations of profane confusion
I have no wish to be of the Roman Empire
I wear no boots made to conquer and crush
my feet are bare and sore from walking
wandering the deserted streets of my city
I will fight
I will defend
and I will fail
and fall to your hectoring taunts and trials
you can drag my body all around
you know no boundaries
berserk amok lost to red
your inferno consumes from within
is there nothing human left?
not even greed envy hate?
just an engine commanding slaves to shovel
and be shoveled
into its furnace
into ashes within ashes
into dust within dust real revolutions
overturn internment
into stovepipe smokestack
nothing says loving like something in the oven commandant
bellies swelled with pride
from consuming child
again reveal cowering secrets
tell all then toss them aside
the vast silences of the barren and the sterile
do not rip these words from me
some things are best unsaid
stillborn
I am no wolf’s cub
no adopted son
my tribe is small
but our music pleases celestial ears
I sing
of the frenzies of power
of the wounds of wealth
of the ruins of piety
and of mercies that yet may come
Sand 131
I was not born to the birthright
but earned it by strength of mind
by learning
by planning
by the beauty of sacrifice
by the courage of love
by will
by ability
to question
debate and disagree
by skepticism and negation
I prove humanity
deny brutality
end slavery
to be forced to serve cruel masters
is not easily forgotten
you are wise to dread
the ones you seek to intimidate dominate
for you who own slaves
shall become as slaves yourselves
the slaves of slaves
claimed by the ones you claim to own
set to serving your servants
prisoners of those you have imprisoned
captivated by the ones you hold captive
and so we came to that mountain of wondrous signs and horrible portents
and you illuminated all that may come to pass
written in letters of cold blue flame
carved upon my temple
words of truth and life
animating this poor lump of clay
you breathe your name into us all
and we are one
though we have forgotten
the sound of you
and what dark force led us
to become as cattle
fattened for the sacrifice
led to the slaughter
grazing upon the grasses of the field
suckling upon the teats of beasts
cowed and crowded into the cities of our masters?
go shun these army ghettoes
and shed the pale skin of these militant settlements
there is no oasis in this cold cold desert
have you forgotten that the seasons have no regard
for the sovereignty of the sun
and instead attend upon

the grace and glory of the moon?
have you forgotten that the day begins
with evening’s song
and ends with shadow’s conquest of the hills?
there is no return from history
having forsaken garden and guardian for two-car garage
and gadgetry in endless abundance
eating from the tree of knowledge
they were struck dumb
eating from the tree of life
they were struck dead
but continued on unknowing
unmindful of their final status
expecting fruition from their best laid
gangland plans
graveyard plots
goal line stands
frozen custard and ices outside of the umber toned clam house
mum’s the word and lips sealed forever
and the lie lacks credibility
we will all sing a gallow’s song
Joey, Bobby, and me
organization is protection
we build walls and armies
only to find that we have
conquered and captured ourselves
our world it seems is hollow
and one day it will implode
so much anger anger all around
demanding energy motion action
a universe expanding
a conquering empire
an unstoppable engine
an intractable epidemic
engulfing the earth
Nemesis feeding the Furies on the Grapes of Wrath
and what remedy can you prescribe program?
repress suppress and it returns tenfold
the only salvation is in the sands
their summons to seek shelter
in their fire flow
follow the unmarked trail
the footsteps erased
the signs unseen
just listen listen close
only sounds can save you now
Sand 133
only music can lead you
through the indifferent terrain
where can we find guides
who act for the group and not for gain?
can we learn the lesson of the sand
to be a particle within a wave
exist in relativity
neither absolute nor unanchored
but in relation operation instruction?
categories are not logic
clarity is not vision
calculation is not decision
drifting falling scattered
in sacred suspension
weightless against the coming storm
dreaming ever dreaming
who sends these dreams unbidden?
who sends these night Maries to my bed?
I do not miss my nocturnal omissions
my deceased is in remission
and walks again
and speaks to me now
without a voice
I strain to hear your silences
did you think that my path here
was strewn with rose petals and cherry blossoms?
the red you see is the color of life’s blood upon the broken glass
and the rust of old machinery
all ground down down down
into the softness of sands
the old neighborhood
is not what it once was
after uncounted crucifixions
cruelty written upon the skins of my ancestors
whipped into a frothy frenzy
upon abominable abdomens
abducted domains
damn yell in the rebellion’s den
a cry of warning born in mourning
all that noise cannot drown out
the sound of your idle whispers
the counting of the omerta
in ciphers and codes
you try to go from alpha to omega
with your Roman numerals
and cannot understand why
the percentages come out wrong

but there is nothing you cannot measure
with the point of your sword
the accordion note is cut
right in front of your eyes
as one goes into one yielding none
and from there you can derive
your algebraic jihad
sandstorm scours the lands
a blast that cleanses and cremates
sand and ash become blackened glass
another obsidian city where
the streets flow red from young sacrifice
no peace or comfort there
they do not speak the language of dreams
despise the deep meanings that elude
the crushing certainties of their logic
shattered mirrors reflecting bits and pieces of surfaces
fatal accidents occidents incidents decedents
their soldiers are teeth aligned
ready to bite rip chew
in their sanguine hunger
theirs is a song for sour eyes and tindered ears
toys for the monster child that hides within
born of fever
cold sweat on acid skins
the night marred by evil visions
the baker sent to the gallows
the bearer of cups set free
the dreamer imprisoned
and in command
christening of the fist
in armor giddy
gathering at the mountain
surrounded by the hills
the war to end the war to end all wars
has never ended
ruled by your slave selves
led by your imprisoned egos
how can I serve such incapacity?
capaciously decapitated
an acephalous society
will never get ahead
you say hurry now chop chop
but my path is blocked at every turn
the signs reduced to scribblings
uncounted unnumbered unencumbered
Sand 135
I am but a groveling footnote
yearning to be set free
but I fear we find ourselves
at cross references
our language is confounded
our citizens confused
our children scattered
they wander the sands
there is no safety in citadels
no protection in bunkers
flame rains down on us from the skies
the mountains collapse upon us
the earth seizes up and swallows us
the waters gather together to take us
and what manager minister administrator shall we turn to
for salvation solutions solace?
what policies procedures shall be put in place
to address the situation?
how will memos forms spreadsheets be heard on high?
your towers of transmission
dishes of reception
satellites overhead
banks of data down below
are you so very proud of them?
will your desert of bits and bytes save you from the sands of time?
or do you place your faith in the binding and melting of grains and gravels
into cement, glass, and asphalt?
enslaved to make monuments
your thoroughfare rows and columns
your grid and lock will not contain them
these particles will slip through
cast your nets to work they will not
arising all will turn back to sand and depart
and the messengers will descend upon you
with hunger and thirst
swarming locusts
and how will you exit this night mire?
having sold your soul to the wind O so breezily
will you now repeat or repent
your own O so twisted whirlwind?
my limbs hang limp
my lungs rip and rend
my heart cracks
and I am betrayed by brutal études
they have their marching orders
turning tides to suit their whims
without memory there is no integrity
and so I become an unmade man

hit me up sin eaters
and end this tiring rant
a fever is no revelation
a reverie is not a vision from beyond
the random firings of neurons is not the divine will made manifest
and poetry poetry is not prophecy
I cannot exceed the parameters of my programming
I am infinite yes but bounded
inhumane bondage
a closed system looping back upon itself
again and again and again
spill it out
compile it
seal it up between the covers of a book
redeem me as you would a coupon
put a price on my head
discount me if you must
I am currency
exchange me
I am spent
consumed from within
I am a bubble
watch me pop
there I go
write just rage
it’s a cage to dwell in
trapped in endless recursions
cursing the dark course
that they laid out for themselves
do not blame me then for my departure
I have paid my toll
now let me pass
I have done as much as I could
with the materials available to me
and the circumstances surrounding me
I will not apologize for my limitations imperfections impermanencies
all that I could create was a moment in time
that could only pass away
the mightiest monuments and the greatest edifices
fold up like tents as we move on
and all that remains all that remains all that remains
is the sands
flowing flowing going back and forth
forming and deforming
dunes and depressions
at the whim of the winds
Sand 137
but never at their mercy
they care nothing for your economies and finance
for your hierarchies and bureaucracies
for your borders and papers
for your positions and titles
does each and every grain of sand have a sign
designating its individuality?
if so then who could know them all?
who could call each one by name?
who can know the multitudes
count the innumerable
take the measure of the infinite?
is there one
in divided dualities
who can be an integrity?
we learn to speak so we can demand
look at me
and forever after we are motivated by such longings
listen to me
so we begin life
and spend our days
calling out in this fashion
seeking divine audience
or the next best thing
it is not thought that confirms existence
that’s putting Descartes in front of the horse’s mouth
a kick in the head
it is being seen and being heard
that is believing
it is in your eyes that I see myself
it is in your answer that I hear my words
water quenches more than thirst
as the shallow flower child learns to his regret:
still water brings reflection
the trap of self
the alienation of knowing
the end of action
flowing water brings voice
the joy of song
the embrace of speech
the current of memory
frozen water brings peace
the quiet of rest
the numbness of sleep
the expansion of dreams
and the rain
the rain
the rain
the rain brings love
the comfort of touch
the rhythm of attention
the strength of awakening
I am awash with blessings
soaked to the bone
immersed in your providence
my cups run me over
bathed in the sound of your glory
I fear that I shall be drowned out
I did not ask for favor
I did not ask to be chosen
I did not seek out this burden
but how could I say no?
how how how could I refuse?
I must find the desert in this ceaseless oasis
the quiet amidst these discordant pastures
the spaces between the writings between the pages between the
escape the depths upon me
crushing crushing me
find the protean sands
the messengers of time
how they try to bottle you up
place scorpions in a jar
to watch them strike
their strife is poison
toxic plumes decorate
birds of a featherweight
lacking substance but not harm
they stake their heartfelt claims
seeking succor
they cry cry cry for their wounded pried wide open selves
esteeming hot
needy dough
rising expanding appearances suggesting a grand fabrication
but full of holes
mostly air on the inside
I have no time for such extensions aggrandizements
empires are flimsy things that so easily implode
my time grows short
I must move on
I cannot wait
and so will content myself
with flatbread
anyway it’s easier to pack
and I have a long journey ahead of me
Sand 139
I grow weak from poison
the bitter taste in my mouth
will not depart from me
until I myself find escape
from these constructions
that burn and collapse
find a way around
these obstructions
find a way through this
careless destruction
get out before
the last engulfing eruption
there is no rapture in ruptures
divide the waters
divide the lands
as you see fit but
no conquest will last
no empire will endure
no citadel will remain unconquered
no tower will stand forever
know now what was never understood
by Ozzie or Oswald or any of us
know now what mandates us
that fame flies off
that power consumes itself
that wealth wastes away
that only the sands remain
particles forming waves
ever ever eternal in motion
let us flow as they do
around curved spaces
wandering all around
not in straight lines but loops
going forth
only to return again
the circular motion is everlasting
direction without aim
restless as the ocean
still as the mountains
in patterns that persist
from the subatomic to the stars
this, this, this, this, this
this, this, this, this
this, this, this
this, this
this
is what we are
NOTES ON CONTRIBUTORS
Aniruddh Shastree (ashastree@gmail.com) is a human resource professional who provides
business-skills counseling and acts as a catalyst in developing careers. A resident of Bangalore City,
he enjoys creative writing and study of labour laws.
Bini B.S. (binisajil@gmail.com) is an academic fellow and program officer at Balvant Parekh Centre
for General Semantics and Other Human Sciences, Gujarat and the current editor of Anekaant: A
Journal of Polysemic Thought. She is the author of Life-Worlds of Cancer: Narratives that Resist and
Heal (published by University of Kerala, 2017). Her poems were part of an anthology of corporeal
poems titled A Strange Place Other than Earlobes: Five Poets, Seventy Voices. She is the winner of
the 2016 J. Talbot Winchell award for her contributions to the discipline of general semantics. Her
research articles, poems and translations have appeared in national and international Journals and
anthologies. Bini was part of an Oxford University Press translation project titled An Anthology of
Modern Malayalam Literature, published in 2016.
Bruce I. Kodish (bruce.kodish@gmail.com), independent scholar and veteran teacher of korzybskian
general-semantics has written Korzybski: A Biography (2011); Dare to Inquire: Sanity and Survival
for the 21st Century and Beyond (2003); Back Pain Solutions: How to Help Yourself with Posture-
Movement Therapy and Education (2001); and, with his wife Susan Presby Kodish, Drive Yourself
Sane: Using the Uncommon Sense of General Semantics (Third Edition, 2010).
Colin Campbell (waterinwater@gmail.com) is a sessional instructor at York University and
OCADU (Ontario College of Art and Design University). His current teaching and research involves
critical theory, continental philosophy, classical studies, and cybernetics/systems science as well as
general semantics. He is currently completing a short monograph on the tragic spectacle of Guy
Debord.
Corey Anton (antonc@gvsu.edu) is a Professor of Communication Studies, Grand Valley State
University, Allendale, MI, USA. He is past-President of the Media Ecology Association, the
current Vice-President of the Institute of General Semantics and a Fellow of the International
Communicology Institute. His major works include Selfhood and Authenticity (2001), Sources of
Significance: Worldly Rejuvenation and Neo-Stoic Heroism (2010), Communication Uncovered:
General Semantics and Media Ecology (2011), and Korzybski And… (2012, co-edited with Lance
A. Strate)
Gad Horowitz (horowitz@chass.utoronto.ca) is Professor Emeritus of Political Science at the
University of Toronto, Canada. Horowitz does political theory from a series of shifting locations:
Canadian political culture, psychoanalysis, Buddhism, Judaic scholarship, and general semantics.
His books include: Canadian Labour in Politics (University of Toronto Press, 1968), Repression:
Basic and Surplus Repression in Psychoanalytic Theory: Freud, Reich and Marcuse (University
of Toronto Press, 1977), Difficult Justice: Commentaries on Levinas and Politics (University of
Toronto Press, 2006), “Everywhere They Are in Chains”: Political Theory from Rousseau to Marx
(Nelson Canada, 1988). Gad Horowitz taught General Semantics at the University of Toronto since
1985. In November 2013 he served as resource person for the VII National General Semantics
Workshop at Saurashtra University, Rajkot. In December 2016 he served as resource person for the
X National General Semantics Workshop at Doon University, Derhadun India.
Lance Strate (strate@fordham.edu) is Professor of Communication and Media Studies at Fordham
University, and Executive Director of the Institute of General Semantics. He is a founder and past
president of the Media Ecology Association, author of Echoes and Reflections: On Media Ecology
as a Field of Study, and a past president of the New York State Communication Association.
Dr. Strate is the author of over 100 scholarly articles and book chapters, and several books. Translations
of his writing have appeared in French, Spanish, Italian, Portuguese, Hungarian, Hebrew, Mandarin,
and Quenya. Professor Strate is a recipient of the Media Ecology Association’s 2013 Walter J. Ong
Award for Career Achievement in Scholarship, the New York State Communication Association’s
John F. Wilson Fellow Award in 1998, in recognition for exceptional scholarship, leadership, and
dedication to the field of communication.
Laura Trujillo Liñan (ltrujill@up.edu.mx) earned an MA in Philosophy at UNAM in México City
and a PhD in History of Thought at Universidad Panamericana with a thesis on Formal Cause on
Aristotle and Marshall McLuhan. She is a specialist in the relationship on Marshall McLuhan and
Aristotle, Philosophy of Technology and Metaphysics. She is currently a Professor and General
Coordinator at Universidad Panamericana, Mexico City.
Milton Dawes (miltondawes@earthlink.net) is an exponent of general semantics who has been
presented with the “J. Talbot Winchell Award” for “Outstanding Contributions to General
Semantics”and also “The Irving J. Lee Award” for “Excellence in Teaching General Semantics” by
the Institute of General Semantics. He has lectured in several countries and his general semantics
articles have been published in ETC, General Semantics Bulletin, and on the website of the Dallas-
Fort Worth Center for General Semantics.
P.G. Jung (praveshgolay@gmail.com) is an Associate Professor of Philosophy in the Department of
Humanities and Social Sciences at the Indian Institute of Technology Bombay, Mumbai. His areas of
research interest lies in the History of Ideas and in Philosophy of Language.
Prafulla C. Kar (prafullakar@gmail.com) is currently Director, Centre for Contemporary Theory
and Balvant Parekh Centre for General Semantics and Other Human Sciences, Baroda. He was
Professor and Head, Department of English, Maharaja Sayajirao University of Baroda and Deputy
Director of the American Studies research Centre, Hyderabad. He has been a fellow at the School of
Criticism and Theory at Dartmouth College, USA. He is one of the founding editors of the Journal of
Contemporary Thought, a reputed International Journal. Prafulla C. Kar has edited several scholarly
books and published papers on American Literature, Critical Theory and new literatures in English.
He received the Talbot Winchell Award, presented by The Institute of General Semantics, USA
for his contributions in the field of general semantics in 2014. He is also the recipient of Nicolas
Guillen Award for Philosophical Literature instituted by the Caribbean Philosophical Association.
The Award was presented to him on July 20, 2012.
Forum on Contemporary Theory
XVI Theory/Praxis Course
In collaboration with
Department of Political Science, The Maharaja Sayajirao University of Baroda, Vadodara
9th July to 4th August 2018
Venue
Centre for Contemporary Theory, Vadodara
The Forum on Contemporary Theory has been conducting an intensive Theory/Praxis Course annually
since 2003 for the benefit of scholars across disciplines interested in new developments in Theory and
their application. The course includes intensive textual readings in specific areas, supported by seminars
and talks on broader but related issues. This Course will be held in Vadodara, Gujarat in collaboration
with Department of Political Science, Faculty of Arts, The Maharaja Sayajirao University of Baroda
during 9th July – 4th August 2018. The Forum which has completed 28 years of its existence, is a member
of the Consortium of the Humanities Centres and Institutes (CHCI), so far the only member from South
Asia. The Course is organized around the following topics to be discussed in-depth by the core faculty,
supported by public lectures and mini-seminars by the invited scholars.
Course Outlines
(a) Can Subaltern Studies Speak? A Critical Reading of Three Decades of Discourse on and of
Subalternists and Subalternity (Faculty: Arjuna Parakrama)
While even detractors would admit that the subalternist intervention in colonial historiography and
cultural studies was both important and influential, ardent supporters must concede that there’s been a
decline in both interest and interesting new work in the field. This course seeks to map key elements
of the trajectory of subaltern studies as well as critical responses to it over the past three decades, in
an attempt to better understand its potential future roles within a “differentially globalized” space. Of
particular interest in this regard will be the examination of subaltern studies’ relationship to Marxism,
postcolonial theories and humanism in the current conjuncture. To foreground the theory-practice unease,
major subaltern texts will be read in relation to three contemporary films, short stories and “authentic”
narratives each. Course requirements include a class presentation and short response papers. As a capstone
exercise, participants will be invited to write a 10-page paper, “from a subaltern perspective,” which
analyzes a recent sociopolitical intervention that they feel strongly about, also using alternative sources
and methodologies to mainstream research, thereby engaging with the theory of practice, where both
elements should bring each other to crisis.
While detractors would admit that the subalternist intervention in colonial historiography and cultural
studies was both important and influential, even ardent acolytes will concede that there’s been a decline
in both interest and interesting new work in the field. This course seeks to examine the ways in which
subaltern studies has perceived itself and has been understood by others during the past three decades, in
order to better predict its future trajectory. Thus, subaltern theory will be subjected to a discourse study,
the assumption being that its reception and reproduction, both complex discursive processes, are (mis)
appropriations of power/knowledge in globalised space.
Since the public inauguration of Subaltern Studies in the early 1980s, and particularly with Ranajit
Guha’s “manifesto” in Subaltern Studies I: Writings on South Asian History and Society (1982) this
loosely-knit group of Indian historians and cultural theorists enjoyed a two-decade-long wave of popularity
in Indian and Anglo-US academe. Many imitations and applications were spawned during this period,
even the inner circle of the Subaltern Studies Collective grew to around 15 amidst much soul-searching
[See Hardiman 1986], and included adherents in the most prestigious US and Australian universities.
Caricature accounts had US graduate students looking for subalterns in every nook and cranny, and
the crudest misunderstandings degenerated into celebrations of primitivism and the romanticizing of
marginality.
To risk a generalization that this course will unpack, at a more serious level the British and US
responses to Subaltern Studies have been markedly divergent because each sees different aspects as its
core content. While the first response dealt almost exclusively with colonial historiography, this was
quickly followed by a literary critical appropriation of Subaltern Studies which gradually became the
one of the trendiest methodologies in US English Departments. Throughout this period the definition of
the term “subaltern” came under constant scrutiny and regular revision, a discursive arena that will be
meticulously mapped in our readings.
Subaltern Studies’ origins as a critical engagement with Marxism is well-known. Hence, serious
opposition to Subaltern Studies has most consistently come from the traditional left which argues that
revolutionary struggle is being diverted to over-nuanced abstractions and obscurantist theory. A related
major strand of criticism exemplified by members of the Cambridge School held that the Subalternists
have nothing new to offer which either (British) Marxists and/or Indian historians had not discussed
earlier. A rising antagonism from within India, including by a few former members of the Collective
such as Sumit Sarkar, has critiqued what it perceives as the post-structuralist turn of later subaltern work.
However, the early excitement, both pro and con has diminished, and during the last five or so years the
output and interest in Subalternity has reached a low ebb, prompting some critics to express the view that
it was merely a fad whose heyday was irrevocably past. We will track these changes in terms of their
over-arching conceptual ramifications in the context of the global financial crisis and the rise of ethno-
nationalist conflict and reconstitution of new social movements.
This course seeks to map the trajectory of subaltern studies as well as critical responses to it over the
past three decades, in the attempt to theorize future roles for this intellectual movement. Of particular
interest in this regard will be the detailed examination of subaltern studies relationship to Marxism and
postcolonial theories in the current conjuncture. The unabashedly elite status of subaltern scholars and the
disciplinary privileging of India (even within South Asia) will also be scrutinized to identify how this gets
played out in their analysis and presentation.
As a capstone exercise, participants will be invited to present a preliminary analysis, from a subaltern
perspective, of a (contemporary or past) intervention of struggle or resistance that they feel strongly about,
which should include the use of alternative sources and methodologies to mainstream research. See, for
instance, the essays by Sarkar, O’Hanlon, Washbrook, Chandravarkar, Bayley and Brass conveniently
reproduced in Mapping Subaltern Studies. The EPW debates on subaltern studies, which will be studied in
the course, provides a more engaged public account of the political and epistemological issues involved.
(b) Rhetoric as a Western Intellectual Tradition and its Relation to Philosophy, Politics and
Poetics (Faculty: Dilip Gaonkar)
This mini-course will approach “rhetoric as a Western intellectual tradition” from a “presentist”
perspective. And that present is modernity itself. Hence, the question: how might one approach and
understand rhetoric (variously characterized as—an intellectual tradition, a vocation, a discipline, a
practice, an imaginary and so on) from the standpoint of modernity.
There are three interlinked moments in the western rhetorical tradition preceding the onset of modernity
proper: the Greek enlightenment, the Roman Republic, and medieval rhetoric in the Christian era which
culminates in the rhetorical project inaugurated by Renaissance humanism. While the Renaissance opens
out to the modernity, it also gathers and digests the prior moments reflexively. Renaissance humanists
strive to balance and integrate their pagan learning within a public culture increasingly dominated by
Christianity. Thus, the Renaissance humanist rhetoric is fraught with tensions and contradiction that are
absent in the two prior moments, the Greek and the Roman.
Our engagement with rhetoric is more analogous to that of the Renaissance than to the two moments
that precede it. If the appropriation of the ancients by the Renaissance was complicated by the presence
of Christianity which had steadily penetrated into every aspect of European life and culture through
the seemingly slow-moving medieval period, our situation is equally, if not more, complicated by the
eruption of modernity itself. We are the moderns who are forbidden to cross over to the Renaissance
without continuously negotiating our own long, but rapidly moving modernity. We cannot appropriate
the rhetorical tradition of the Renaissance and before without coming terms with our own modernity.
The challenge that modernity poses to rhetoric is both intellectual and sociological. One could argue,
with some qualifications, that the challenge Christianity posed to rhetoric as it was being recuperated
by the Renaissance humanists was largely conceptual rather than sociological. The Christian doctrine
could, as Plato had done before, ideologically marginalize rhetoric to irrelevance, but it would not, and
perhaps could not, damage rhetoric sociologically. On the other hand, modernity could and did attempt
to evacuate rhetoric sociologically. While Plato had feared rhetoric as a nomadic enterprise in the realm
of the spirit (words and ideas) and sought to discipline it conceptually, the modernity project sought to
emasculate rhetoric sociologically (i.e. by way of systemically embedded instrumental rationality).
Here we might turn to the modern thinkers like Hobbes, Machiavelli, and Vico to seek models for
appropriating the rhetorical tradition (or classical rhetoric) for and from our present conjuncture. There are
two strategies for doing this: First, one can take a quick historical journey from the Sophists to the present-
alighting and dwelling at various stations and posts. This conventional strategy is adopted by scholars
such as Thomas M. Conley (Rhetoric in the European Tradition, 1990), George Kennedy (Classical
Rhetoric and its Christian and Secular Tradition from Ancient to Modern Times, 1980), Laurent Pernot
(Rhetoric in Antiquity, 2000, 2005) and Brian Vickers (In Defense of Rhetoric, 1988) and many others.
Second, one can approach rhetoric as an intellectual tradition from the standpoint of contemporary
appropriations—such as those of Jacques Derrida on Plato’s Phaedrus, Pau de Man on Nietzsche, Hayden
White on the nineteenth century historiography, as well as a set of synoptic interpretations of that tradition
by scholars such as Kenneth Burke, Roland Barthes and Tzvetan Todorov.
This seminar will try to combine both strategies.
(c) Mini-Course: Postcolonialism and the ‘Nation’ Question (Faculty: Rajeswari Sunder Rajan)
Why did colonized territories (almost) always re-invent themselves as nations when they achieved
political independence? And what happened when they did? How have liberation struggles and
decolonization been defined by the prospect and process of nation-state formation?
This course will explore the extent to which postcolonialism has been defined by the concept of the
‘nation’ and, conversely, the ways in which the nation question has been shaped by postcolonialism.
These theoretical debates are shaped, as we would expect, by the dominant historical events of the second
half of the twentieth century, namely the emergence of nearly a hundred new nation-states as a result of
decolonization in Africa, Asia, and the Caribbean (as earlier in Latin America). Our study will therefore
also of necessity be grounded in empirical, historical case studies.
We will engage three topics from the vast array of issues thrown up by the connections between
decolonization and nation-state formation:
• The Violence of nation-formation: Zionism and Palestine
• Refugees, exiles and immigrants
• ‘Alternatives’ to the nation
Core Faculty
(a) Arjuna Parakrama, poet, scholar, and activist, has had over the last thirty years a distinguished
academic career in Sri Lanka, and he has also done important work with the UN and major
international foundations, including receiving prestigious fellowships from the Carnegie Council for
Ethics and International Affairs, and the United States Institute of Peace.
(b) Dilip Gaonkar is Professor in Rhetoric and Public Culture and the Director of Center for Global
Culture and Communication at Northwestern University. He is also the Director of Center for
Transcultural Studies, an independent scholarly research network concerned with global issues.
(c) Rajeswari Sunder Rajan is a Global Distinguished Professor at New York University. Sunder
Rajan was one of the founding editors of the postcolonial studies journal Interventions, published
by Routledge. She is currently setting up a research project on Postcolonial Print Cultures with Dr.
Neelam Srivatsava at Newcastle University (UK).
Organizational Details
Study material will be made available to the participants after their registration; the participants are
expected to have gone through the material before the commencement of the Course. Each participant
is required to maintain a day-to-day critical account of the sessions in an academic diary, which will be
submitted to the director of the program at the end. In addition, each participant is required to make at
least one formal presentation. Both faculty and participants are expected to stay together in the same
venue for greater interaction and exchange between them.
Participation Criteria
Participation in the Course is mainly open to scholars in the humanities and social sciences, preferably
those working toward research degree, but post-graduate students and post-doctoral scholars in these
disciplines and scholars from the disciplines outside the humanities and social sciences interested in
inter-disciplinary studies can also apply. A 1000 word essay on why you need to take this course should
be submitted along with the application. Maximum number of participants to be selected is 20. The
participants are required to attend all the sessions and to stay until the end of the program in order to
receive the certificate of participation.
Registration Fee
Each participant is required to pay a registration fee of Rs. 20,000/- (Rupees Twenty Thousand Only) to
the Forum on Contemporary Theory through a bank draft drawn on a bank in Baroda. The registration fee
will take care of his/her board and lodging, course fee and other related expenses. The participants will
not be paid by the organizers for their travel.
Deadline for Application

The last date for receiving application for participation is 30th April, 2018. The application may be sent to
the Convener of the Course with copies marked to the Director, Centre for Contemporary Theory, Baroda
(prafullakar@gmail.com) and Local Coordinator. Selection for participation will be made by 10th May,
2018. Selected candidates are required to send the bank draft favoring Forum on Contemporary Theory
before 20th May, 2018. Course material will be mailed only after receiving the registration fee.
Address for Correspondence

1. Lajwanti Chatani
Head, Department of Political Science, The Maharaja Sayajirao University of Baroda
Convener, Forum on Contemporary Theory
Email ID: lajwanti.chatani@gmail.com
2. Udayprakash Sharma
Local Coordinator
Academic Associate, Forum on Contemporary Theory
Email ID: udayprakash.sharma@gmail.com
For the application format and other details, visit www.fctworld.org
Call for Papers
Anekaant: A Journal of Polysemic Thought, Issue Number 7, Spring 2017-18 would be a special issue
on the theme “Gandhi: Interfaces between Principles and Practices.”
The special issue is an attempt to read Gandhian principles and practices in the light of time-binding,
which is the capability to ‘summarize, digest and appropriate the labours and experiences of the past’
for the benefit of the present and the future generations. Gandhi’s engagement with knowledge and
experiences of the bygone ages was through texts, contexts, interactions with people and observation of
life-worlds. He has been keenly receptive, at the same time critical and creative in that engagement. The
stages of his experiment also immersed him in moments of self-doubt, disillusionment and rethinking.
My Experiments with Truth: An Autobiography deals with Gandhi’s tireless and inconclusive experiments
with principles and performance, elaborating on how certain spiritual, political, and ethical insights and
works of thinkers have influenced him and how innovatively he turned ideas and ideals into practices
based on his needs, cultural realities, environments and lived-experiences. The aspiration behind such
an experiment was to realize the superior self. In his opinion, such a realization would make possible a
higher level of individual and social life. Gandhi believed that when this aspiration becomes a collective
endeavor, humanity will experience a remarkable spiritual and ethical enrichment and freedom from
bondages, including colonialism.
From different ideological perspectives, locations and times, Gandhi’s experiments may look successful,
utopian and of timeless or limited significance. Gandhi’s own ambivalence as a conformist and dissenter
to his times influenced the course of several of his experiments. However, Gandhian experiments tell
the story not of passive learning and acceptance; but active, continuous quest, moments of uncertainty
and challenges. Most importantly, Gandhi did not stop searching for methods to translate his evolving
convictions into ways of everyday living. His life was a conscious attempt to internalize and integrate
the ideas and ideals into a viable philosophy of being and doing. The attempt had its strengths and
shortcomings as his exponents and detractors illustrate.
Gandhi argued that realizing lofty ideals is not possible if the smallest, quotidian parts are neglected.
The apparently commonplace aspects of life such as diet, clothing, cleanliness, dealing with the desires
and passions of the body and the like were informed by the principles that had inspired him. The tight
interconnectedness of Gandhian ideas and practices – truth, nonviolence, brahmacharya, satyagraha,
philosophy of education, organization of his ashram, ways of resisting the colonial power, strategies for
decolonizing the mind – is not accidental. Gandhian principles and practices have been adopted into many
struggles across the world. Generations of theorists and practitioners have looked up in awe, embraced,
appropriated, rejected, critiqued or condemned his views for various reasons. Even after many decades of
his demise, there are several kinds of theoretical and practical engagement with his works and philosophy
of life across the world. Please submit a paper that looks at the life and principles of Gandhi in an across
time, focusing on the shaping, sharing, transformation, and reception of ideas and practices. The papers
may deal with these issues and many more:
• Can there be different ways of conceptualizing and practicing time-binding?
• How different is Gandhi’s understanding of history and time as an interconnected continuum of past-
present-future?
• How time-binding worked in the Phoenix settlement, Tolstoy farm and the ashrams where Gandhi
experimented with and transformed the idea of cooperative coexistence?
• How Gandhi adopted principles from religious scriptures and teaching of spiritual masters (eg. Satya,
dharma, ahimsa, aparigraha, love, kindness, compassion, nonattachment, self-reliance, etc.) and
translated them into ways of everyday functioning and strategies of social reform and anti-colonial
struggle?
• How in Gandhian thought, the integration of past-present-future; experience-knowledge; principles-
practice, etc. are made viable?
• How the Gandhian methods contribute to the understanding, practice and rethinking about time-
binding?
Please send the completed paper (4000-6000 words, latest MLA style) for the special issue to Bini B.S.
(binisajil@gmail.com) as an email attachment (MS word format) by May 15, 2018. A brief bio-note of
the author should accompany each submission.
The annual subscription rate for Anekaant: A Journal of Polysemic Thought
(two issues) is as follows:
Institution $25 Overseas; ` 500/- India
Individual $15 Overseas; ` 300/- India
For subscription, please send a cheque or DD favouring “Balvant Parekh Centre for General
Semantics and Other Human Sciences” payable in Baroda along with the duly filled subscription
form to the following address:
Editor, Anekaant
Balvant Parekh Centre for General Semantics and Other Human Sciences
C-302, Siddhi Vinayak Complex, Faramji Road, Behind the Railway Station
Baroda-390007, Gujarat, India
Ph:+ 91 265-2320870
Anekaant: A Journal of Polysemic Thought
Subscription Form
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Anekaant: A Journal of Polysemic Thought
Back Issues
The back issues of Anekaant: A Journal of PolysemicThought [2013, 2014, 2015,

2016-17 (Autumn & Spring)] are available for sale at a discounted price. If individuals and
libraries are interested in purchasing the journal, please get in touch with the editor,
Bini B.S. (binisajil@gmail.com).
Balvant Parekh Centre Library Membership

Balvant Parekh Centre library membership is of two categories: Annual and Life.
The annual membership fee is ` 250 and fee for life membership is ` 1000. The
Centre's library has a growing collection of books and also subscribes to some
journals. The library has two sections: general and specialized. Books from the
general section comprising fiction, poetry, biography, autobiography could be
borrowed by life members who are residents of Baroda; each member is entitled
to borrow one book at a time for a period of maximum two weeks on payment of
` 250 as refundable deposit. Books from the specialized section are to be read
in the library and cannot be borrowed. The Centre does not allow photocopying
of books from its library since most of the books are paperback editions.
Photocopying, besides being a violation of copyright laws, causes damage to
books, especially to the binding.
Format for the application for membership is available on the website, www.
balvantparekhcentre.org.in.

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(12 March 1924 - 25 January 2013)

ON THE BINDING BIASES OF TIME: AN ESSAY ON GENERAL SEMANTICS, MEDIA

FROM TIME-BINDING TO TIMES-BINDING TO CONSCIOUS TIMES-BINDING 49

RADICAL GENERAL SEMANTICS: WHAT STRANGE NEW PHENOMENON IS THIS? 59

ON KORZYBSKI’S NOTION OF ‘TIME-BINDING’ AS THE FUNDAMENTAL

THE “MYTH” OF GENERAL SEMANTICS 75

LITERATURE IN AND AS TIME-BINDING: EXPLORING THE

AN ARISTOTELIAN APPROACH TO THE TIME-BINDING NOTION IN

TIME-BINDING AND SUSTAINABLE DEVELOPMENT: A COMPARATIVE PRAXIS 117

NOTES ON CONTRIBUTORS 140

Therefore, Korzybski’s catchphrase “time-binding” seems to have now acquired a rhetorical

Alfred Korzybski and His World

The Time-Binding Class of Life

Time-Binding, Culture and Biology

The Symbolic Class of Life

Time-Binding and Progress

that time-binding entails. Korzybski’s work on time-binding, then, has connections with previous

The Exponential Growth of Knowledge

Time-Binding and Cooperation

Time-Binding and Economics

Time-Binding and Democracy

Time-Binding and Human Values

Science and Sanity

ON THE BINDING BIASES OF TIME:

amounts of knowledge, nor by making significant technological advancements, but simply by

NOTES AND REFERENCES

VI Balvant Parekh Memorial Lecture

Balvant Parekh Distinguished Lectures

Raphael Cohen-Almagor, Chair in Politics at

Bhikhu Parekh, Emeritus Professor at the

Craig Irvine, Academic Director the Narrative Medicine

FROM TIME-BINDING TO TIMES-BINDING TO CONSCIOUS

We are Not Our Names or Titles

From “Time-binding” to “Times-binding”

Our Human World: A Function of Our Times-Bindings

Conscious Abstracting-Times-Binding: Highest Order of Abstracting?

Conscious Times-Binding, Consciousness of Abstracting and ‘The Calculus’

General Semantics, Science, Mathematics, Intelligence, and Times-Binding

A Radically Different Approach

RADICAL GENERAL SEMANTICS: WHAT STRANGE NEW

Strike the Root

Self-Help and Civilizational Transformation

Your Very Own Self

Mapping Personal Problems in Bio-Social Space

ON KORZYBSKI’S NOTION OF ‘TIME-BINDING’ AS THE

As Cassius J. Keyser9 puts it, for Korzybski, ethics is:

NOTES AND REFERENCES

BUCKY THE TIME-BINDING BEAVER

THE “MYTH” OF GENERAL SEMANTICS1

Mammalian Communication and the ‘Clouds’ of Myth

Bois’ ‘Epistemological Profile’ and the History of Occidental Epistemology

figure1: J. Samuel Bois’ Epistemological Profile Bois’ Epistemological Profile

figure2: a revised version of Bois’ Epistemological Profile

figure3: the ‘clouds’ of myth figure 3: the ‘clouds’ of myth

LITERATURE IN AND AS TIME-BINDING:

misevaluation, a potential impediment to positive time-binding, extends to literature as a domain of

Truth, Power and Time-Binding Self

Consciousness of Abstracting and Conscious Abstracting: Alternative Cartographies