Always the Etc.?

Yale University had never had a guest lecturer quite like the count. He was an egg-bald old (69) gentleman who dressed in Army-style suntans, refused to wear a coat or tie, and spent most of his time in a chromium wheelchair (he was badly wounded in World War I). At times, he would bellow at his audience ("Can you hear me in the rear echelon?"), then let his voice trail to a mumble.

He wore a childlike smile when something pleased him, a chilling sneer when something did not. Sometimes he gesticulated wildly, once seemed near tears. Often he seemed merely bored ("Bah, I speak baby stuff!"). But whatever his crotchets, students and professors at Yale last week were flocking to the special seminar of Polish-born Count Alfred Korzybski.

Cures & Movie Stars. Twenty years ago, few would have walked across the street to listen to Alfred Korzybski. Today, as founder of a whole new system of thought called general semantics,* he has hundreds of followers all-over the world, and the respect of many scientists and scholars. Disciples have written articles on his subject ranging from "General Semantics and Dentistry" to "General Semantics and the Teaching of Physics." Doctors, using general semantics, have claimed it helped cure everything from alcoholism to frigidity. There are General Semantics Societies in twelve cities from Winnipeg to Sydney. Sample members: Architect Frank Lloyd Wright, President George Stoddard of the University of Illinois, Actor Fredric March.

The father of general semantics was born in 1879--the same year, he likes to point out, as Einstein and Stalin. The son of a Polish mathematician, he served through World War I in the Russian Army, was wounded, finally got sent to the U.S. as an artillery expert. Later, he mortgaged his estate, and spent the rest of his fortune, and more than ten years, writing the knotty 800-page bible of general semantics, Science and Sanity.

Alfred Korzybski has one burning conviction--that "in the old construction of language, you cannot talk sense." The reason is that because of their Aristotelian thinking habits, which he thinks outmoded, men do not properly evaluate the world they talk about; consequently, words have lost their accuracy as expressions of ideas, if they ever had any to begin with.

Statements & Statements. Life, says the count, is made up of nonverbal facts, each one different from another and each one forever changing. A man's nervous system can never take in all the characteristics of a particular fact: it merely "abstracts" certain parts and reacts to those. After abstracting once, a man will abstract again to make a verbal statement about the fact. He can then go on to make statements about statements about statements, etc.

The trouble is, says Korzybski, that men too often get the steps of this process mixed up. They speak before observing, then react to their own. verbalization as if it were the fact itself. They confuse what is "inside-the-skin" with external reality. They say "the leaf is green," without realizing that the greenness is within them.

To think--and hence to talk clearly--a man must not only be conscious of the abstracting process, but he must also know the nature of a fact. He must remember that he never knows all about a "fact": there is always, as the count says, the "etc." Secondly, a fact (pencil x or John Smith) is not the same today as it was yesterday. A, despite Aristotle, is not always A. Therefore, "you must not think 'I am going in to dinner now,' " says the count. "You must think, 'I, February 1949, am going in to dinner.' " Failure to "date" one's facts, often to the minute, leads to inaccuracy and even mental disorders. (Once a man who, as a child, had been dangled out of a window by an angry nurse came to Korzybski a nervous wreck. When the count convinced him that "20 years ago is not today," he was cured.)

Pencil Sub One. Finally, one thing is never like another--"not even two Ford cars are alike." It is inadequate to think "pencils." One must think "pencil sub one, pencil sub two, pencil sub three . . ." Failure to "index" leads to false generalizations. "Generalize all you want to," cries the count. "But don't trust it."

If the whole world adopted general semantics, treating each fact freshly without preconceived notions, Korzybski thinks i would be sane at last. Nowadays, at his Institute of General Semantics in Lakeville, Conn., he still whisks about in his wheelchair, hammering away at his subject with all the fire left in him. The world is not always with him--in fact, very littl of it is. "[We] still believe ... in the poisonous dogma that 'in the beginning was the word,'" complains the count "Infantilism is rampant . . . Pooh!" On that point, Korzybski is willing to generalize, without date, and without any "etc.'

* Not to be confused with the semantics of Harvard's I. A. Richards, which concerns itself only with the meanings of words.

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