Leaderboard

The only piece of information I found on this forum on Korzybski is the following: There is no discussion of him or his system, but I think the discussion is long overdue. First, why Korzybski, and who the hell is it? Does anyone know or has ever heard of him? Alfred Korzybski, as I found only by accident, was a 20th century thinker, who, like Rand, created his own system of thought and an institute (including an international one) with its own journals and researchers who wrote within the framework he set up. In stark contrast to Rand, however, he created, what he called, a 'non-aristotelian system of general semantics', the first of a kind and one that he thought was necessary for the world to overcome all the insanity of totalitarianisms and mental health problems in general. I am currently reading his major work Science and Sanity (Korzybski, 2000), and here are some excerpts from prefaces there: The above is a mixture of form and content impossible in Aristotelian system and in David Kelley's interpretation of Aristotle in particular. Going on: Here he is going against identity. About identification he also says the following: He generalizes the influence of Aristotle's thought on even ordinary individuals, a major contrast to what Rand thought: His comment is also coming from a war-like stance directed against Aristotle and all those in his tradition: And there is more, even though I still haven't finished reading all the prefaces yet (there is one for each edition). I wonder why Rand fought so fearlessly against Kant when she had a contemporary so much worse right at her nose. They wrote at about the same time and both lived in America. So what do you think about this guy? I know he appears to be a crackpot, but his use of contrariness against everything Aristotle and building an elaborate system around it, connecting most of modern scientific data (from einsteinian and quantum physics, psychiatry, and nascent neurology), makes him a peculiar and very nice contrast to Rand, a nice clean divide from her framework of knowledge. On every one of her yesses he says noes and vice versa. This is a more evident contrast than Kant had even been, since for Rand he mixed good and evil, or reason with unreason, while Korzybski includes Kant in the aristotelian tradition, and strangely discusses neither him, nor Rand, as far as I can see. Korzybski, A. (2000). Science and Sanity: An introduction to non-aristotelian systems and general semantics. (5th ed.). Brooklyn, NY: Institute of General Semantics.

The link of the 'early responses' leads to a pro-GS blog post, which makes an impression that Science and Sanity received mostly positive reviews and the few negative reviews it had, including the one by Hook, were misrepresentations of Korzybski's work and misunderstandings of his system for a philosophical one, as if it isn't. In this respect I would go with Albert Ellis and say that all such cognitive creations, like the system of Korzybski, are inherently philosophical (even on the unconscious level).