General Semantics is an educational discipline created by Alfred Korzybski (1879–1950)
during the years 1919 to 1933. General Semantics is distinct from semantics, a different subject.
The name technically refers to the study of what Korzybski called "semantic reactions", or
reactions of the whole human organism in its environment to some event — any event, not just
perceiving a human-made symbol — in respect of that event's meaning. However, people most
commonly use the name to mean the particular system of semantic reactions that Korzybski
called the most useful for human survival, e.g., delayed reactions as opposed to "signal
reactions" (immediate, unthinking ones).
Advocates of General Semantics view it as a form of mental hygiene that enables practitioners to
avoid ideational traps built into natural language and "common sense" assumptions, thereby
enabling practitioners to think more clearly and effectively. General Semantics thus shares some
concerns with psychology but is not precisely a therapeutic system, being in general more
focused on enhancing the abilities of normal individuals than curing pathology.
According to Korzybski, the central goal of General Semantics is to develop in its practitioners
what he called "consciousness of abstracting", that is, an awareness of the map/territory
distinction and of how much of reality is missed in the linguistic and other representations we
use. General Semantics teaches that it is not sufficient to understand this sporadically and
intellectually, but rather that we achieve full sanity only when consciousness of abstracting
becomes constant and a matter of reflex.
Many General Semantics practitioners view its techniques as a kind of self-defense kit against
manipulative semantic distortions routinely promulgated by advertising, politics, and religion, as
well as those found in self-deception. Viewed philosophically, General Semantics is a form of
applied conceptualism that emphasizes the degree to which human experience is filtered and
mediated by contingent features of human sensory organs, the human nervous system, and
human linguistic constructions.
The most important premise of General Semantics has been succinctly expressed as "The map is
not the territory; the word is not the thing defined".[1] While Aristotle wrote that a true definition
gives the essence of the thing defined (in Greek to ti ên einai, literally “the what it was to be”),
general semantics denies the possibility of finding such an essence.
Other aspects of the system
There are more elements, but these three in particular stand out:
 Time-binding: The human ability to pass information and knowledge between
generations at an accelerating rate. Korzybski claimed this to be a unique capacity,
separating us from other animals. Animals pass knowledge, but not at an exponential rate,
i.e., each generation of animals does things pretty much in the same way as the previous
generation. For example, humans used to look for food, now we grow or raise it. Animals
are still looking, i.e., they don't consciously grow or raise food.
 Silence on the objective levels: As 'the word is not the thing it represents,' Korzybski
stressed the nonverbal experiencing of our inner and outer environments. During these
periods of training, one would become "outwardly and inwardly silent."
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The system advocates a general orientation by extension rather than intension, by
relational facts rather than assumed properties, an attitude, regardless of how expressed in
words, that, for example, George 'does things that seem foolish to me,' rather than that he
is 'a fool.'
Much of General Semantics consists of training techniques and reminders intended to break
mental habits that impede dealing with reality. Three of the most important reminders are
expressed here by the shorthand "Null-A, Null-I, and Null-E".
 Null-A is non-Aristotelianism; General Semantics stresses that reality is not adequately
mapped by two-valued (Aristotelian) logics. (See also: Abductive reasoning)
 Null-I is non-Identity; General Semantics teaches that no two phenomena can ever be
shown identical (if only because they may differ beyond the limits of measurement) and
that it is more sane to think in terms of "sufficient similarity for the purposes of the
analysis we are currently performing".
 Null-E is non-Euclideanism; General Semantics reminds us that the space we live in is
not adequately described by Euclidean geometry.
The underlying purpose of these reminders is both to adjust our conceptual maps better to the
territory of reality and to keep us reminded of the limitations of all maps. Non-Aristotelian, in
this particular case, refers to the use of non-Aristotelian logic rather than the aforementioned
philosophical disagreement. However, Korzybski saw these as linked. The complex nature of the
objects we interact with means that reasoning from "essence" or definitions will often lead us
astray. This creates uncertainty, which general semantics links to the use of non-Aristotelian
logic.
Korzybski's books
Korzybski's major work was Science and Sanity, an Introduction to Non-Aristotelian Systems
and General Semantics, published in 1933. His first book, in which he defined time-binding and
explained its ramifications, was Manhood of Humanity, published in 1921. A third book of his
writings, Alfred Korzybski Collected Writings 1920-1950, was published in 1990.
History
Korzybski's most well-known student was S. I. Hayakawa, who wrote Language in Thought and
Action (1941), which became an alternative Book-of-the-Month Club selection. An earlier and
less influential book in 1938 was The Tyranny of Words, by Stuart Chase. A current book is
Drive Yourself Sane, by Susan and Bruce Kodish, published in 2000.
Two major groups were formed in the United States to promote the system: the Institute of
General Semantics, in 1938, and the International Society for General Semantics, in 1943. In
2003, the two groups merged into one organization, now called the Institute of General
Semantics, with headquarters in Fort Worth, Texas. There are also a New York Society for
General Semantics, a European Society for General Semantics, and an Australian Society for
General Semantics.
During the period of the 1940s and 1950s, general semantics entered the idiom of science fiction,
most notably through the works of A. E. van Vogt, The World of Null-A and its sequels, and
Robert A. Heinlein, Gulf. The ideas of General Semantics became a sufficiently important part of
the shared intellectual toolkit of genre science fiction to merit parody by Damon Knight and
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others; they have since shown a tendency to reappear (often without attribution) in the work of
more recent writers such as Samuel Delany, Suzette Haden Elgin and Robert Anton Wilson.
In 1952, General Semantics was pilloried in Martin Gardner's influential book, Fads and
Fallacies in the Name of Science. L. Ron Hubbard claimed that his work was based partly on
general semantics, but the compliment was not returned. Writing in Etc: A Review of General
Semantics, in the fourth quarter of 1951, Hayakawa said, "The lure of the pseudo-scientific
vocabulary and promises of Dianetics cannot but condemn thousands who are beginning to
emerge from scientific illiteracy to a continuation of their susceptibility to word-magic and
semantic hash." ("Dianetics: From Science-Fiction to Fiction-Science," pp.280-293.)
Under the supervision of psychiatrist Dr. Douglas M. Kelley, U.S. medics in World War II used
General Semantics to treat over 7,000 cases of battlefield neuroses in the European theater.
Kelley is quoted in the preface to the third edition of Science and Sanity. The development of
neuro-linguistic programming owes debts to general semantics.
General Semantics has continued to exert some influence in popular psychology, psychology,
anthropology, linguistics, and education. Usually because of the efforts of individual teachers, it
has been taught at various times and places (sometimes under other names) in high schools and
universities in the U.S.; but in general, the system has had no consistent home in academia.
Popular acceptance has likewise been very limited. As of 2005, the reputation of General
Semantics has yet to recover from the damage Martin Gardner and L. Ron Hubbard did to
it.[citation needed]
Connections to other disciplines
General Semantics has important links with analytic philosophy and the philosophy of science; it
could be characterized without too much distortion as applied analytic philosophy. The influence
of Ludwig Wittgenstein and the Vienna Circle, and of early operationalists and pragmatists such
as Charles Sanders Peirce, is particularly clear in general semantics' foundational ideas.
Korzybski himself acknowledged many of these influences.
Korzybski's concept of "silence on the objective level" and his insistence on consciousness of
abstracting are parallel to some central ideas in Zen Buddhism. Korzybski is not recorded to have
acknowledged any influence from this quarter, but he formulated General Semantics during the
same years that the first popularizations of Zen were becoming part of the intellectual currency
of educated English-speakers.
Although he appears to have misunderstood or altered some of the basics of GS, L. Ron Hubbard
is widely thought to have used the theory in his creation of Dianetics; this in turn introduced
General Semantics to a wider audience in the early 1950s, including popular science fiction
writer A. E. van Vogt, personal growth theorist Harvey Jackins and his movement Re-evaluation
Counseling and movements like Gestalt therapy. The founders of these movements did not
themselves credit Korzybski for their ideas.
Albert Ellis, who developed Rational emotive behavior therapy, acknowledges influence from
general semantics.
Criticism
Martin Gardner seems to suggest that proponents of general semantics violate their own rules
about withholding judgement, following the scientific method, and replacing dogmatic belief
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with various degrees of probability[citation needed]. Gardner also wrote of Korzybski that he
"never tired of knocking over 'Aristotelian' habits of thought, in spite of the fact that what he
called Aristotelian was a straw structure which bore almost no resemblance to the Greek
philosopher's manner of thinking."
In the preface to the first edition of his book Science and Sanity - in 1933, more than twenty
years before Gardner's criticism - Korzybski wrote the following:
"The system by which the white race lives, suffers, 'prospers', starves, and dies today is not in
a strict sense an aristotelian system. Aristotle had far too much of the sense of actualities for
that. It represents, however, a system formulated by those who, for nearly two thousand years
since Aristotle, have controlled our knowledge and methods of orientations, and who, for
purposes of their own, selected what today appears as the worst from Aristotle and the worst
from Plato and, with their own additions, imposed this composite system upon us. In this they
were greatly aided by the structure of language and psycho-logical habits, which from the
primitive down to this very day have affected all of us consciously or unconsciously, and
have introduced serious difficulties even in science and in mathematics."
The beginning of Chapter VII quotes A.N. Whitehead as saying,
...the subject-predicate habits of thought...had been impressed on the European mind by the
overemphasis on Aristotle's logic during the long medieval period. In reference to this twist
of mind, probably Aristotle was not an Aristotelian.
and
The evil produced by the Aristotelian 'primary substance' is exactly this habit of
metaphysical emphasis upon the 'subject-predicate' form of proposition.
Korzybski goes on to say, in the third paragraph of that chapter, that Aristotle
was not only a most gifted man, but who, also, because of the character of his work, has
influenced perhaps the largest number of people ever influenced by a single man; and so his
work has undergone a most marked elaboration. Because of this, his name, in this book, will
usually stand for the body of doctrines known as aristotelianism...Some of the statements may
not be true about the founder of the school; yet they remain true about the school.
In the preface to the second edition, having compared his system to non-Newtonian physics and
non-Euclidean geometry, Korzybski also writes:
I must stress that as the older systems are only special limitations of the new more general
'non' systems (see p.97), it would be incorrect to interpret a 'non' system as an 'anti' system.
In response to the charge of unscientific behavior, general-semanticists like Bruce Kodish and
Kenneth G. Johnson point to various scientific studies that they say appear to support
Korzybski's claims.
Martin Gardner and others cite an essay in Max Black's Language and Philosophy as the
"definitive critique of general semantics". However, Kodish and others argue that Black's
criticisms stem from misunderstandings of Science and Sanity (see references with external link
to Kodish).
Black repeats the charge that Korzybski misrepresents Aristotle. He also seems to argue that
Korzybski cannot prove the existence of an external world. A symbol of this external "event" or
"scientific object" appears in the Structural Differential. Black views this as a contradiction,
since Korzybski would say that our statements about this object derive in part from our nervous
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systems. Finally, Black claims "Korzybski holds the view that abstraction consists in 'leaving out
details'," (p. 243) and says he ignores the brain's active role. Kodish replies that we have good
reason to focus on this "leaving out", and that Black mistakes a practical concern for a definition.
Korzybski felt that his critics often confused their characterizations of what he said with what he
said. His response to them was: "I said what I said. I did not say what I did not say."
See also
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The map is not the territory
Alfred Korzybski
Institute of General Semantics
Robert Pula
Sanity
Structural differential
Alfred Korzybski Memorial Lecture
Cognitive science
E-Prime
Language and thought
List of NLP topics
Sapir-Whorf hypothesis
Gestalt Therapy
Cognitive therapy
Cognitive activism
Notes
1. ^ For example, Hayakawa, S.I., Language in Thought and Action, Harcourt, Brace and
Company, (New York), 1949, p.31:
The symbol is NOT the thing symbolized; the word is NOT the thing; the map is NOT
the territory it stands for.
References
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Science and Sanity An Introduction to Non-Aristotelian Systems and General Semantics,
Alfred Korzybski, Preface by Robert P. Pula, Institute of General Semantics, 1994,
hardcover, 5th edition, ISBN 0-937298-01-8 (An online version is available here).
"The Role of Language in the Perceptual Processes," Alfred Korzybski's 1950 article in
Perception: An Approach to Personality, edited by Robert R. Blake and Glenn V.
Ramsey. Copyright 1951, The Ronald Press Company, New York. online here.
The Tyranny of Words by Stuart Chase, 1938 (later reprints). Probably the first
popularization of Korzybski, pre-dating Hayakawa's first edition of Language in Action.
The art of awareness; a textbook on general semantics by J. Samuel Bois, Dubuque,
Iowa: W.C. Brown Co., 1966.
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Language in Thought and Action: Fifth Edition, S. I. Hayakawa and Alan R. Hayakawa,
Harcourt, ISBN 0-15-648240-1.
Symbol, status, and personality by S.I. Hayakawa, New York: Harcourt, Brace and
World, 1963.
Language habits in human affairs; an introduction to General Semantics by Irving J.
Lee, Harper and Brothers, 1941. Still in print from the Institute of General Semantics. On
a similar level to Hayakawa.
The language of wisdom and folly; background readings in semantics edited by Irving J.
Lee, Harper and Row, 1949. Was in print (ca. 2000) from the International Society of
General Semantics -- now merged with the Institute of General Semantics. A selection of
essays and short excerpts from different authors on linguistic themes emphasized by
General Semantics -- without reference to Korzybski, except for an essay by him.
Mathsemantics: making numbers talk sense by Edward MacNeal, HarperCollins, 1994.
Penguin paperback 1995. Explicit General Semantics combined with numeracy education
(along the lines of John Allen Paulos's books) and simple statistical and mathematical
modelling, influenced by MacNeal's work as an airline transportation consultant.
Discusses the fallacy of Single Instance thinking in statistical situations.
Crazy Talk, Stupid Talk: how we defeat ourselves by the way we talk and what to do
about it by Neil Postman, Delacorte Press, 1976. All of Postman's books are informed by
his study of General Semantics (Postman was editor of ETC. from 1976 to 1986) but this
book is his most explicit and detailed commentary on the use and misuse of language as a
tool for thought.
Operational philosophy: integrating knowledge and action by Anatol Rapoport, New
York: Wiley (1953,1965).
Semantics by Anatol Rapoport, Crowell, 1975. Both general semantics along the lines of
Hayakawa, Lee, and Postman and more technical (mathematical and philosophical)
material. A valuable survey. Rapoport's autobiography Certainties and Doubts : A
Philosophy of Life (Black Rose Books, 2000) gives some of the history of the General
Semantics movement as he saw it.
Hayakawa's critique of Dianetics here
The World of Null-A and The Pawns of Null-A (also published as The Players of Null-A)
by A. E. van Vogt, science fiction novels which take a fanciful approach on how the nonAristotelian discipline of general semantics might affect a society.
Assignment in Eternity, (1942), specifically the story "Gulf," is a representative example
of the influence of General Semantics in the work of Robert A. Heinlein. The homo novi
or "supermen" of the story express recognizably Korzybskian ideas about the relationship
between language and thought.
Fads and Fallacies in the Name of Science. by Martin Gardner, New York: Dover
Publications, 1957.
A recent critique of Martin Gardner, "In the Name of Skepticism: Martin Gardner's
Misrepresentations of General Semantics," by Bruce I. Kodish, appeared in General
Semantics Bulletin, Number 71, 2004, pp. 50-63.
Levels of Knowing and Existence: Studies in General Semantics, by Harry L. Weinberg,
Harper and Row, 1959, hardcover, 274 pages.
ETC.: A Review of General Semantics, journal, Institute of General Semantics. See a
compendium of ETC articles here.
6
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People in Quandries: the semantics of personal adjustment by Wendell Johnson, 1946 -still in print from the Institute of General Semantics. Insightful book about the application
of General Semantics to psychotherapy; was an acknowledged influence on Richard
Bandler and John Grinder in their formulation of Neuro-Linguistic Programming.
Your Most Enchanted Listener by Wendell Johnson, Harper, 1956. Your most enchanted
listener is yourself, of course. Similar material as in People in Quandries but
considerably briefer.
Living With Change, Wendell Johnson, Harper Collins, 1972.
Language and Philosophy: Studies in Method, Max Black, Cornell UP, 1949.
"Contra Max Black: An Examination of 'The Definitive Critique' of General-Semantics"
by Bruce I. Kodish closely examines Black's writing on general semantics and is
available in the articles section of http://www.driveyourselfsane.com.
Language Revision by Deletion of Absolutisms, by Allen Walker Read, 1984.
a bibliography of general semantics papers.
The Original Structural Differential.
The Structural Differential.
A Discussion of Korzybski's ethics, with emphasis on time-binding.
Related Reading
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Trance-Formations: Neuro-Linguistic Programming and the Structure of Hypnosis by
Richard Bandler and John Grinder, (1981). One of the important principles -- also widely
used in political propaganda -- discussed in this book is that trance induction uses a
language of pure process and lets the listener fill in all the specific content from their own
personal experience. E.g. the hypnotist might say "imagine you are sitting in a very
comfortable chair in a room painted your favorite color" but not "imagine you are sitting
in a very comfortable chair in a room painted red, your favorite color" because then the
listener might think "wait a second, red is not my favorite color."
The work of the scholar of political communication Murray Edelman (1919-2001),
starting with his seminal book The Symbolic Uses of Politics (1964), continuing with
Politics as symbolic action: mass arousal and quiescience (1971), Political Language:
Words that succeed and policies that fail (1977), Constructing the Political Spectacle
(1988) and ending with his last book The Politics of Misinformation (2001) can be
viewed as an exploration of the deliberate manipulation and obfuscation of the mapterritory distinction for political purposes.
Logic and contemporary rhetoric: the use of reason in everyday life by Howard Kahane
(d. 2001). (Wadsworth: First edition 1971, sixth edition 1992, tenth edition 2005 with
Nancy Cavender.) Highly readable guide to the rhetoric of clear thinking, frequently
updated with examples of the opposite drawn from contemporary U.S. media sources.
Doing Physics : how physicists take hold of the world by Martin H. Krieger,
Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1992. A "cultural phenomenology of doing
physics." The General Semantics connection is the relation to Korzybski's original
motivation of trying to identify key features of the successes of mathematics and the
physical sciences that could be extended into everyday thinking and social organization.
Metaphors We Live By by George Lakoff and Mark Johnson, (1980).
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Philosophy in the flesh: the embodied mind and its challenge to Western thought by
George Lakoff and Mark Johnson, (1997).
The Art of Asking Questions by Stanley L. Payne, (1951) This book is a short handbookstyle discussion of how the honest pollster should ask questions to find out what people
actually think without leading them, but the same information could be used to slant a
poll to get a predetermined answer. Payne notes that the effect of asking a question in
different ways or in different contexts can be much larger than the effect of sampling
bias, which is the error estimate usually given for a poll. E.g. (from the book) if you ask
people "should government go into debt?" the majority will answer "No", but if you ask
"Corporations have the right to issue bonds. Should governments also have the right to
issue bonds?" the majority will answer "Yes".
External links
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Korzybski's General Semantics
New York Society for General Semantics
Institute of General Semantics
European Society For General Semantics
Australian Society for General Semantics -- link currently not working from here, but site
can be accessed via a search engine such as Google for the exact name.
 Coro Foundation (Leadership training programs based on General Semantics. Notables
include Gene Siskel, Senator Dianne Feinstein, Congressman Jerry Lewis)
 Theoretical foundations of general semantics
 General Semantics: A Tutorial
 Dave's Web Site
 Europe
Retrieved from "http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/General_Semantics"
The Future of Consciousness Part 1 of 7
Lance Strate
April 29, 2008
An address delivered at an Institute of General Semantics symposium at the American Museum
of Natural History in New York City, April 23, 2005
Part 1 starts here:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pMPfQ59QfKw
Parts 2 - 7
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MBXb26MBGmU&feature=related
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NgbWnoFZ10g&feature=related
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Q-JQ1SQ5O7Q&feature=related
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oKga0FJRaME&feature=related
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Hbz6E_DxV7U&feature=related
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=COfAYdw0e_Y&feature=related
8
On Human Evaluation Part 1 of 7
bhimplasi August 22, 2008
How to think properly.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=n5v-WOLVhzk
Language: Mother of All Things (Dewey, Korzybski, Wilden, Holenstein)
Professoranton - June 08, 2009
For more go to: http://coreyanton.blogspot.... A short rant on General Semantics, existential and
semiotic theory.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QnAyDilvCMU
Corey Anton's Philosophy, Media Ecology and Juggling ChannelProfessoranton's Channel
http://www.youtube.com/user/Professoranton
Alfred Korzybski and Gestalt Therapy
Alfred Habdank Skarbek Korzybski
1879-1950
Perhaps the most overlooked theoretical influence on Frederick Perls and Paul Goodman, who
originally articulated Gestalt therapy theory, was Alfred Korzybski, the primary thinker behind
the general semantics movement. Gestalt therapy's "principle of the now" and it's focus on
experience and the precision of language can be directly traced to these "principles of general
semantics:"
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1. A map is not the territory.
2. A map does not represent all of a territory.
3. A map is self-reflexive in the sense that an 'ideal' map would include a map of
the map, etc., indefinitely.
Applied to daily life and language:
1. A word is not what it represents.
2. A word does not represent all of the 'facts', etc.
3. Language is self-reflexive in the sense that in language we can speak about
language.
Erving Polster, in "A Contemporary Psychotherapy" (Psychotherapy: Theory, Research and
Practice, 1966), identifies the general semantics movement as one of the distinct movements that
made the here-and-now experience important in psychotherapy before it was given crucial
emphasis by the existentialists.
"Korzybski's published works, including Science and Sanity, Manhood of Humanity, and
Collected Writings, are available on the web through the Institute of General Semantics , or
contact them via email .Here, through the courtesy of the Institute of General Semantics, is an
excellent overview of his work and an article from Collected Writings."
Joe Wysong
Editor
The Gestalt Journal
http://www.gestalt.org/alfred.htm
GENERAL SEMANTICS
Toward a new general system of evaluation
and predictability in solving human problems
Alfred Korzybski
Author of Manhood of Humanity and Science and Sanity
Paper from Alfred Korzybski: Collected Writings 1920-1950
© I.G.S. Englewood, New-Jersey
INSTITUTE OF GENERAL SEMANTICS
Englewood, New-Jersey, USA
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Permission is hereby granted to share electronic and hard copy versions of this text with individuals under
circumstances in which no direct payment is made by those to whom the text is given for the text itself, the
volume or other medium or online service in which it is included, tuition or other payment for the course or
seminar, and so forth. This notice must remain a part of the text. Any other use is reserved to the Institute of
General Semantics and/or the author and requires prior permission. For further information, e-mail the
Institute or write: The Institute of General Semantics, 163 Engle Street, #4B, Englewood, NJ 07631, USA.
GENERAL SEMANTICS.
The term general semantics originated with Alfred Korzybski in 1933 as the name for a general
theory of evaluation, which in application turned out to be an empirical science, giving methods
for general human adjustment in our private, public, and professional lives. His study has led
ultimately to the formulation of a new system, with general semantics as its modus operandi.
This theory was first presented in his Science and Sanity: An Introduction to Non-aristotelian
Systems and General Semantics.
What Makes Humans Human?
After World War I Korzybski and others began to analyze the precipitating factors of such
human disasters, realizing that some fundamental ideational revisions were due. In investigating
the problems of 'human nature', he found it unavoidable to revise the old notions about humans,
derived from primitives and codified by the ancient Greeks, and made a new, functional
definition of 'man' from an engineering, historical, and epistemological point of view, with farreaching implications. [For explanation of use of single quotes see below under Extensional
Devices.]
It became necessary to investigate for the first time potentialities of humans, not blindly
depending on static data of statistical records of past human performances, known today to be an
unreliable or even fallacious method of approach.
This was the thesis of Korzybski's first book, Manhood of Humanity: The Science and Art of
Human Engineering (1921).
He by-passed the mythological dogmas and enquired, “What is the unique characteristic of
humans which makes them human?” He observed anew that each human generation has the
potential capacity, unlike animals, to start where former generations left off. He analyzed the
neurological and socio-cultural processes by which men can create, preserve, and transmit what
they have learned individually to future generations. This unique neurological capacity he called
time-binding.
Human Engineering.
The structure of our forms of representation (languages, etc.) was found to be of pivotal
importance in the history of human cultures. With an engineering practical outlook, Korzybski
had questioned: “Why is it that structures built by engineers do not, as a rule collapse, or if they
do, then the physico-mathematical or other evaluational errors are easily discovered; yet social,
economic, political, etc., systems, also man-made, do sporadically collapse in the forms of wars,
revolutions, financial depressions, unemployment, etc.?” This led to the question: “What is it that
engineers do neurologically when they build bridges, etc.?” The answer was: “They use a
special, narrow but 'perfect' language called mathematics, which is similar in structure to the
facts they deal with, and which therefore yields predictable empirical results.”
He then investigated what the builders of social, economic, political, and other insecure human
structures do neurologically, and found that they employ languages (i.e., forms of representation)
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which are not similar in structure to the facts of science and life as known today. Consequently
their results are unpredictable and disasters follow.
Though the main facts of history are known, solutions of human problems have been blocked by
pre-scientific, mythological, metaphysical dogmas which have prevented and continue to prevent
the possibility of tracing fundamental errors.
Origin of General Semantics.
Clearly a solution required the formulation of a general system, based on physico-mathematical
methods of order, relation, etc., which would make possible proper evaluations and therefore
predictability.
The first step was to revise the primitive outlook that regarded humans as merely biological
organisms on the level of animals rather than as more complex psycho-biological organisms
which produce their own socio-cultural environments, sciences, civilizations, etc. Even the most
'intelligent' ape never achieved that.
The next step was a methodological integration of what was already known, and the production
of general teachable formulations to handle the increasingly numerous and complex factors in
human psycho-biological inter-relationships today. To cope with such problems required a
consideration of neuro-linguistic and neuro-semantic environments as environment.
The word semantics was introduced into linguistic literature by Michel Bréal, translated from the
French in 1897. It is derived from the Greek semainein (“to mean, to signify”) and Bréal stressed
meaning on the verbal level. Lady Welby, a contemporary, introduced a theory of Significs, a
more organismal evaluation of Bréal's “meaning.”
Korzybski, in 1933, called his theory “general semantics” because it deals with the nervous
reactions of the human organism-as-a-whole-in-environments, and is much more general and
organismally fundamental than the “meanings” of words as such, or Significs.
It is called “non-aristotelian” because, although it includes the still prevailing aristotelian system
as a special case, it is a wider, more general formulation to fit the world and 'human nature' as we
know it today rather than as Aristotle knew it c. 350 BC.
The aristotelian assumptions influenced the euclidean system, and both underlie the later
newtonian system. The first non-aristotelian system takes into account newly discovered
complexities in all fields, and parallels and is interdependent methodologically with the new noneuclidean and non-newtonian developments in mathematics and mathematical physics, which
made possible even the release of nuclear energy, as in the atomic bombs.
This revised and broadened general outlook makes necessary profound revisions in educational
methods, requires de-departmentalization of education, etc., which could be accomplished only
after the exact sciences and general human orientations had been unified through an adequate
methodological synthesis. Such unification, since it was based on modern scientific methods
(physico-mathematical) and the foundations of mathematics incorporated simple workable,
elementary techniques which could be applied in any human endeavor, and even to the education
of small children.
PSYCHO-LOGICAL MECHANISMS IN HUMAN BEHAVIOR
In the formulation of this synthesis it became obvious that to understand the working of the
human nervous system as-a-whole, it was necessary to extract the method of nervous functioning
as exemplified by (1) the best product of human behavior (mathematics, etc.), and (2) the worst
(psychiatric disorders). It was found that at both extremes the psycho-logical mechanisms were
12
similar, differing not in kind, but in degree, and that the reactions of most people are somewhere
in between.
Space-Time Disorientation in Psychiatric Disorders.
General observations of daily human reactions demonstrate that many 'normal' persons are
disoriented in space-time in varying degrees. Patients in psychiatric hospitals often show acute
disorientations as to “who,” “where,” and “when.” In fact, across the world in such hospitals
those are the first questions which are asked of the incoming patients, and their reactions to them
are in many ways indicative of the seriousness of their illness. Even average 'normal' individuals
often react as if certain situations, happenings, etc., here (say, Chicago) and now (say, 1947) are
identical in value with certain incidents, situations, happenings, etc., that occurred somewhere
else (say, Seattle) some years ago (say, 1926). Those persons remain unconscious of, and so
unable to deal with, these fundamental differences in space-time their reactions continuing on the
infantile level, and hence are necessarily maladjusted to their present status (of 1947).
Physicians familiar with general semantics have often treated such cases successfully, applying
these new extensional methods in psycho-therapy to eliminate identification of the past with the
present, etc., thus re-orienting the individual in space-time.
Many observations indicate that techniques for general orientation based on physicomathematical space-time ordering, etc., simplify understanding of the most complex human
problems. At the same time they point the way to neuro-preventive educational measures against
serious socio-cultural maladjustments and indicate constructive possibilities for a new applied
anthropology, and a new human ecology which takes into consideration our neuro-semantic and
neuro-linguistic environments as environment.
Space-Time Orientation in Mathematics.
The study of mathematics as a form of neuro-linguistic reactions led to a new definition of
number in terms of human behavior and relations which applies equally to the verbal and nonverbal levels. This new definition clears up the problems of mathematical infinity, reveals the
fictitious character of transfinite numbers, etc.
Until 1933 no definition of number had been produced which would explain the nature of
number, measurement, etc., and would account for the unique validity and high degree of
predictability of results arrived at through mathematical methods. The old definition of number
in terms of “class of classes” gave results eventuallv in terms of “class of classes,” which
explained nothing. The new definition of number as unique specific asymmetrical relations
produced solutions in terms of those relations, giving structure. Since structure is known to be
the only content of human knowledge, and since the non-aristotelian science of mathematics
deals only with relation and so structure, the old mystery of “why mathematics and
measurement?” is answered; the unique validity of mathematical methods is accounted for,
whether applied to mathematics, other sciences, or human problems of living.
PREMISES OF GENERAL SEMANTICS.
The premises of the non-aristotelian system can be given by the simple analogy of the relation of
a map to the territory:
2. A map is not the territory.
3. A map does not represent all of a territory.
13
4. A map is self-reflexive in the sense that an 'ideal' map would include a map of the map,
etc., indefinitely.
Applied to daily life and language:
1. A word is not what it represents.
2. A word does not represent all of the 'facts', etc.
3. Language is self-reflexive in the sense that in language we can speak about language.
Our habitual reactions today, however, are still based on primitive, pre-scientific, unconscious
assumptions, which in action mostly violate the first two premises and disregard the third.
Mathematics and general semantics are the only exceptions.
Self-Reflexiveness.
The third premise stemmed from the application to everyday life of the extremely important
work of Bertrand Russell, who gave academic prominence to self-reflexiveness in his attempt to
solve mathematical self-contradictions by his theory of mathematical types. We may speak
(verbalize) about “a proposition about all propositions,” but in actuality we cannot make a
proposition about all propositions, since in doing so we are in fact producing a new proposition,
and thus we run into stultifying self-contradictions. Russell rightly called the products of these
pathological verbal performances “illegitimate totalities.” By such unconscious overgeneralizations we humans have been living, not very successfully.
Applied by Korzybski to our everyday lives, self-reflexiveness introduced neuro-linguistic
factors important for human adjustment and maturity; i.e., the principles of different orders of
abstractions, multiordinality, the circularity of human knowledge, second-order reactions, delay
of reactions by space-time ordering, thalamo-cortical integration, etc.
Consciousness of Abstracting.
These principles in turn led to a general consciousness of abstracting as the necessary basis for
the achievement of socio-cultural maturity. This produced, among others, means of eliminating
active false knowledge, which is known to breed maladjustments. At the same time it was
discovered that mere passive ignorance in humans often is impossible, but becomes active
inferential knowledge, which may dogmatically ascribe some fictitious 'cause' for observed
'effects'-the mechanism of primitive mythologies. Inferential knowledge, however, when
consciously accepted as inferential, forms the hypothetical knowledge of modern science and
ceases to be a dogma.
EXTENSIONAL DEVICES
To achieve the coveted consciousness of abstracting, more appropriate evaluations, etc.,
techniques were taken directly from modern physico-mathematical methods, the use of which
has been found empirically effective and of most serious preventive value, particularly on the
level of children's education. Korzybski calls the following expediencies extensional devices:
 Indexes to train us in consciousness of differences in similarities, and similarities in
differences, such as Smith1, Smith2, etc.
 Chain-indexes to indicate interconnections of happenings in space-time, where a 'cause'
may have a multiplicity of 'effects', which in turn become 'causes', introducing also .
environmental factors, etc. For instance, Chair1-1 [NOTE, read chair “one” “one”] in a
dry attic as different from Chair1-2 in a damp cellar, or a single happening to an
individual in childhood which may color his reactions (chain-reactions) for the rest of his
14




life, etc. Chain-indexes also convey the mechanisms of chain-reactions, which operate
generally in this world, life, and the immensely complex human socio-cultural
environment, included.
Dates to give a physico-mathematical orientation in a space-time world of processes.
Et cetera (etc., which can be abbreviated to double punctuation, such as ., or .; or .:) to
remind us permanently of the second premise “not all”­to train us in a consciousness of
characteristics left out; and to remind us indirectly of the first premise “is not”­to develop
flexibility and a greater degree of conditionality in our semantic reactions.
Quotes to forewarn us that elementalistic or metaphysical terms are not to be trusted and
that speculations based on them are misleading. [In this article single quotes are used for
this purpose.]
Hyphens to remind us of the complexities of interrelatedness in this world.
New Structural Implications of the Hyphen.
The hyphen, representing the new structural implications:
(1) In space-time revolutionized physics, transformed our whole world-outlook, and became the
foundation of non-newtonian systems;
(2) In psycho-biological marks sharply the difference between animals and humans which
became the basis of the present non-aristotelian system.
(3) In psycho-somatic is slowly transforming medical understanding, practice, etc.
(4) In socio-cultural indicates the need for a new applied anthropology, human ecology, etc.
(5) In neuro-linguistic and neuro-semantic emphasizes that we are not dealing with mere
verbalism but with living human reactions. Etc., etc.
Oblivious of the structural implications, departmentalized specialists still isolate themselves on
either side of the hyphen, as if their specialties were actually separate entities. By eliminating the
structural hyphen from such terms as “psycho-biological” (i.e., “psychobiological”) and
“psycho-somatic” etc., the public is led to believe these issues are simple, while complexities
today have increased beyond even professional understanding.
In certain of the sciences solutions have already been found (which led to the methodological
problems generalized in the non-aristotelian revision) and indicated often by the hyphen, while in
others the painful process of re-examination is still going on.
Physics, for example, has passed from the elementalistic, split, 'absolute space' and 'absolute
time' formulations of Aristotle, Euclid, and Newton to the non-elementalistic integrated spacetime of Einstein-Minkowski, and tremendous advances have followed. In medical science,
however, consideration of psycho-biological and psycho-somatic problems is only just
beginning, requiring a complete re-evaluation of existing disciplines.
APPLICATIONS OF THE FORMULATIONS
The formulations in the first non-aristotelian system have crystallized the historical, scientific,
and epistemological trends accumulating for over two thousand years, giving methods for
teaching and general application, thus providing maximum effectiveness for the fuller
development of human potentialities and so the maturity of mankind. Scientific method (1947)
must be general and apply to any phase of life or science.
Only a few examples of the many different areas in which general semantics has already proved
useful can be mentioned here.
(1) The foundations of mathematics and so methods of teaching have been revised.
15
(2) The U.S. Senate Naval Affairs Committee discussed the new methods in connection with: (a)
the problem of national scientific research; (b) a scientific evaluation of the merger of the War
and Navy departments; and (c) the training of naval officers, wherein Capt. J. A. Saunders (Ret.)
urged that all Navy officers should be trained in the new methods.
Applications have also been made in:
(3) presentations and arguments in law courts;
(4) alleviation of combat exhaustion in the European theater of war, applied by Lt. Col. Douglas
M. Kelley, M.C., to over 7,000 cases;
(5) diagnoses in psycho-somatic medicine, and as an aid in counseling and psychotherapy,
individually or in groups;
(6) treatment of stuttering;
(7) helping reading difficulties;
(8) eliminating stage fright. Etc., etc.
Perhaps most importantly, applications have been made in the methods and contents of education
on every level, from the nursery through college and university.
If this partial list seems formidable, it should be remembered that a scientific methodology for
optimum usefulness must necessarily be universal in scope.
ALFRED KORZYBSKI
BIBLIOGRAPHY
A. Korzybski, Manhood of Humanity: The Science and Art of Human Engineering (1921, 1947)
C. J. Keyser, “Korzybski's Concept of Man”, Mathematical Philosophy (1922, 1946)
A. Korzybski, Science and Sanity : An Introduction to Non-aristotelian Systems and General
Semantics (1933, 1947)
S. I. Hayakawa, Language in Action (1939, 1941)
I. J. Lee, Language Habits in Human Affairs : An Introduction to General Semantics (1941,
1946)
M. Kendig, ed., Papers from the Second American Congress on General Semantics (1943)
E. Murray, The Speech Personality (1944)
W. B. Paul, F. Sorenson et E. Murray, “A Functional Core for the Basic Communications
Course”, Quart. Jour. Speech (Apr. 1946)
W. Johnson, People in Quandaries : The Semantics of Personal Adjustment (1946)
http://www.gestalt.org/semantic.htm
The map is not the territory
In 1933 Alfred Korzybski, a Polish Count and mathematician, published ‘Science and Sanity’ a
thesis that discussed how we experience the world through our senses and use this external
datum to build internal representations of the world within our brain. The thesis used the term
‘The Map Is Not the Territory’ to explain how the real world and the internalised perception are
different.
"A map is not the territory it represents, but if correct, it has a similar structure to the territory,
which accounts for its usefulness". What this means is that our perception of reality is not reality
itself but our own version of it, or our "map".
16
Alfred Korzybski
Anyone that has used a road map as a navigational aid can tell you that the map offers an
incomplete picture of the sights and sounds encountered on a journey. The map is not the
territory.
When Korzybski wrote 'A map is not the territory it represents' he wasn't referring to simple road
maps, rather, he was addressing how we all maintain our own individual map of reality and how
that map affects the words we use to communicate our thoughts with one another.
We are all in a state of ever flux (constant change and growth)
Our values and beliefs are in constant flux, updated in real time by a constant and sometimes
chaotic flow of new information and data. This information is then filtered and distorted into
manageable maps that make sense in the context of our individual experiences. From the
traumatic events of Nine Eleven or the wonderful experience of becoming a parent for the first
time, it seems our beliefs and values are built on sand.
We experience the world through our five senses, sight, hearing, touch smell and taste (the
territory) and build an internal representation of this external input in our brain (the map). In the
process of building the map we filter information based on our values, beliefs, memories, culture
and social background. Furthermore, although we all share a similar neurological structure, each
of us is an original ‘one off’ thus no two people will operate from the same map.
This creates an imbalance between external world events and our own maps and also between
our maps and those of others. For example two people who witness the exact same crime may
later give entirely different statements to the authorities. This is because both operate from a
unique map of the world coloured and shaped by their own internal filters and neurology.
 a map is simply an abstraction of the territory
 our understanding of external events is incomplete
 people can view external events in different ways because they operate from different
maps
Understand and respect the map of others
Your map represents your reality or perception of the world and controls the actions you take and
the way you communicate with others. If a co-worker, for example, operates from a map that is
significantly different to yours it might be difficult to communicate or build rapport with this
person. Their map may be causing them to respond according to values, beliefs, etc. which may
be at odds to yours.
Taking time to understand another person's map lets you:
 see the world though their eyes
 appreciate their point of view
 relate to them accurately
 communicate with them effectively
Thus when someone’s map does not make immediate sense to you a little understanding and
tolerance can go a long way to winning new friends and can often be an enriching experience
that expands your own map.
Common Ground
We all work from many inter-connected maps; some we share as groups including:
17
 Culture
 Religion
 Language
Although these shared map regions allow us to interact with one another to truly communicate
and build rapport a with someone a deeper understanding their Values and Beliefs is necessary.
Imposing your map on others
This complex network of maps means that each of us develops a unique and highly personalised
perception of the world. It is also forms the thinking behind reality TV shows like Big Brother.
By inviting people with openly conflicting maps, Jade Goody -Shilpa Shetty for example, to
spend time in close proximity, drama and incident is guaranteed.
The Map Is Not the Territory and other NLP Presuppositions form part of our NLP
Practitioner Training Course.
http://www.nlptrainingscotland.net/articles/map-territory.php
A READER'S TREASURY:
Science and Sanity
An Introduction to Non-Aristotelian Systems and General
Semantics
Chapter: Evolution of Consciousness
by
Alfred Korzybski
Published by Institute of General Semantics/CN in 1973
Book Review by Bobby Matherne ©2007
"The map is not the territory." That was my first
introduction to the work of Count Alfred O.
Korzybski. I heard those words in a Bandler and
Grinder(1) Seminar in 1977 and borrowed a copy of
this landmark book, his major opus, first published in
1933 from my friend Brian Kelley. He had been
directed to it by our mutual metaphysics teacher, Alex
Keller, some years earlier. I dug into the text of this
806 page book which had 657 references and 90 pages
18
of Preface and Introductions. Suddenly the basis for
the works of Samuel Bois, Kenneth S. Keyes, and S. I.
Hayakawa began to make new sense for me - all these
writers had studied under Korzybski. They were
enriching his fundamental work and making it
palatable to the general public.
Korzybski's work created the field of General
Semantics, which became known as a science and was
taught in colleges and universities. Somehow I had
missed it, up until then. I was determined to work my
way through this book to make up for lost time and
work I did: it took me an entire year of study to get
through this dense book — dense in the compression
of ideas in it. So dense that many days I was only able
to read three or four pages and then had to stop
because my brain was so full of ideas that I had to
pause for 24 hours for them to be assimilated fully
before I could proceed. And each day I applied those
ideas and processes to as many situations as came up
in my life during that day. It was, rightly understood, a
year long seminar in General Semantics for me. In this
review I hope to give you, my dear Readers, a taste of
that seminar so that the flavor of this important
science can remain with you and bring some sanity
into the science that abounds all around and inside of
you from now on.
One of the rare occasions we get to read an author
talking about the book we are reading is in Prefaces to
Second and Third Editions. After reading this book, I
19
read the precursor to it, a smaller book he wrote in
1921 entitled, "Manhood of Humanity," in which
Korzybski talked about the process of "time binding."
Time binding was to Korzybski like a single string on
a guitar — he used it as the basis of the music he made
in all of his works. "Science and Sanity" was a
symphony he composed for his one-string guitar. In
his Preface to the Third Edition (1948), he talks about
this book from the perspective of 15 years after its
publication:
[page xx] The origin of this work was a
new functional definition of 'man', as
formulated in 1921, based on an analysis
of uniquely human potentialities; namely,
that each generation may begin where the
former left off. This characteristic I called
the 'time-binding' capacity. Here the
reactions of humans are not split verbally
and elementalistically into separate
'body', 'mind', 'emotions', 'intellect',
'intuitions', etc., but are treated from an
organism-as-a-whole-in-an-environment
(external and internal) point of view. This
parallels the Einstein-Minkowski spacetime integration in physics, and both are
necessitated by the modern evolution of
sciences.
His new definition of what it means to be a human
being pinpointed an aspect of humanity that the
20
evolutionists, who were apt to call us "higher apes,"
had completely glossed over in their intense concern
with the bones and flesh aspect of evolution, i.e., our
posture, our brain size, our skull shapes, etc. What
Korzybski stressed in his 1921 work was a process
that humans had and that animals did not possess, time
binding. It is the process of time binding that allows
each generation to see further because they "stand on
the shoulders" of the previous generation.
With this present book, Korzybski sought to create the
foundation for a "science of man" by linking science
and sanity in a "structurally non-aristotelian
methodology." To achieve that he added to the process
of time-binding, the "general consciousness of
abstracting", which he calls on page xxi, "the thesis of
this book". He quotes Whitehead to support his claim
of the importance of understanding the process of
abstracting:
[page xxi] 'A civilisation that cannot burst
through its current abstractions is
doomed to sterility after a very limited
period of progress.'
This is a remarkable statement. If one applies it to the
field of art, one can see representations of art's current
abstractions embodied in the visual arts of painting
and sculpture. These abstractions show themselves in
the way current paintings are made based upon the
original works of Rembrandt, Picasso, Monet, or Van
Gogh. When an innovator in art comes along to create
21
a new abstraction, such as Mondrian, Pollock, or
Warhol, a period of exciting innovation proceeds for a
limited period of time. I have described this process in
the field of art in my essay, Art is the Process of
Destruction, which essay would likely have been
impossible but for the year I spent working through
this book which first made me aware of the process of
abstraction.
To understand the non-Aristotelian systems that
Korzybski develops in this work, we first need a
priming on the Aristotelian system that pervades our
current level of thinking, teaching, and abstracting.
Simply put the Aristotelian system is two-valued:
either-or, yes-no, day-night, life-death, black-white,
etc. The prevalence of the two-valued system of
thinking puzzled Korzybski for many years, he says,
until he "made the obvious 'discovery' that our
relations to the world outside and inside our skins
often happen to be, on the gross level, two-valued."
But he added something more to the Aristotelian twovalued system, and that something more makes all the
difference in the world to what it means to be a living
human being:
[page xxi] In living, many issues are not
so sharp, and therefore a system which
posits the general sharpness of 'either-or' ,
and so objectifies 'kind', is unduly limited;
it must be revised and made more flexible
in terms of 'degree'. This requires a
22
physico-mathematical 'way of thinking'
which a non-aristotelian system supplies.
While Korzybski developed his work independently of
semantics or semiotics, he admits that, as his work
progressed, it became obvious to him that "a theory of
meaning" was impossible. As such, he thought it
necessary to explain the derivation of the name
"General Semantics" for his corpus of work.
[page xxii] The original manuscript did
not contain the word 'semantics' or
'semantic', but when I had to select some
terms, from a time-binding point of view
and in consideration of the efforts of
others, I introduced the term 'General
Semantics' for the modus operandi of this
first non-aristotelian system. This seemed
appropriate for historical continuity. A
theory of evaluation appeared to follow
naturally in an evolutionary sense from 1)
'meaning to' to 2) 'significance' to 3)
evaluation. General Semantics turned out
to be an empirical natural science of nonelementalistic evaluation, which takes into
account the living individual, not
divorcing him from his reactions
altogether, nor from his neuro-linguistic
and neuro-semantic environments, but
allocating him a plenum of some values,
no matter what.
23
From this passage in his Introduction to the Second
Edition (1941) one can understand the paradox faced
by an author who develops a truly unique science —
to communicate to the average intelligent reader, and
also to the specialists in the very fields that are
impacted by the new science. The paradox is this:
those specialists, who ought to be better able to
understand it, are less able to understand it than the
average reader. Philosophers, who ought to be able to
understand any new field of science, are often the last
ones to grasp it, so stuffed full of their own
verbalizations as to be unable to comprehend the
thoughts of anyone with a truly new idea, as
Korzybski presented them with.
[page xxviii] Most 'philosophers' who
reviewed this book made particularly
shocking performances. Average
intelligent readers can understand this
book, as they usually have some contact
with life. It is not so with those who
indulge in mere verbalism.
Korzybski gives a salient example of one of those
philosopher-penned reviews and shows how errorprone it is and how it completely misses the point of
his work. For those of you who are still not sure what
his point is, here is an excellent summary of it:
[page xxix] Most 'philosophers',
'logicians', and even mathematicians look
at this non-aristotelians system of
24
evaluation as some system of formal nonaristotelian 'logic', which is not the case.
They are somehow not able to take the
natural science point of view that all
science, mathematics, 'logic', 'philosophy',
etc., are the product of the functioning of
the human nervous system, involving
some sort of internal orientations, or
evaluations, which are not necessarily
formalized. The analysis of such living
reactions is the sole object of general
semantics as a natural empirical science.
Not only do these philosophers miss the point entirely,
but by doing so, they will continue to heap untold
damage upon future generations of our youth by
teaching them about "identity" — something which
Korzybski clearly demonstrates within the covers of
this book — is non-existent in the world, except in the
minds and processes of philosophers and mentally
deranged human beings.
[page xxix] These 'philosophers', etc.,
seem unaware, to give a single example,
that by teaching and preaching 'identity',
which is empirically non-existent in this
actual world, they are neurologically
training future generations in the
pathological identifications found in the
'mentally' ill or maladjusted. As
explained on page 409, and also Chapter
25
XXVI, whatever we may say an object 'is',
it is not, because the statement is verbal,
and the facts are not.
Words are like maps. If a map is not the territory it
represents, a word is not the object it represents. Also
a map cannot contain all of the territory — it can only
hope to represent the structure of the territory.
[page 38] Two important characteristics
of maps should be noticed. A map is not
the territory it represents, but, if correct,
it has a similar structure to the territory,
which accounts for its usefulness. If the
map could be ideally correct, it would
include, in a reduced scale, the map of the
map; the map of the map of the map; and
so on, endlessly, a fact first noticed by
Royce.
What does all this mean? you ask. Is this important?
The answer is yes, because the presence of aristotelian
systems has kept civilization itself at the level of a
dumb animal, up until now. If you will read the first
62 pages of this book, no doubt you will agree with
this next statement, as I did:
[page 62] The present analysis shows that,
under the all-pervading aristotelianism in
daily life, asymmetrical relations, and
thus structure and order, have been
impossible, and so we have been
26
linguistically prevented from supplying
the potentially 'rational' being with the
means for rationality. This has resulted in
a semi-human so-called 'civilization',
based on our copying animals in our
nervous process, which, by necessity,
involves us in arrested development or
regression, and, in general, disturbances
of some sort.
Once upon a time, the geometry of Euclid was the
geometry of space, the universe of Newton was the
Universe. With the advent of Lobatchevski and
Einstein the geometry of Euclid proved to be only a
geometry of space and the universe of Newton proved
to be a way of looking at the Universe.
[page 86] It is not difficult to see that in
all these advances there is a common
characteristic, which can be put simply in
that it consists in a little change from a
'the' into an 'a'. Some people insist upon
sentences in one-syllable words; here we
could indeed satisfy them! The change, no
doubt, can be expressed by the exchange
of one syllable for another. But the
problems, in spite of this apparent
simplicity, are quite important; and the
rest of this volume will be devoted to the
examination of this change and of what it
structurally involves.
27
For any readers who are still not clear on the
distinction between Plato and Aristotle's approach to
philosophy, Korzybski gives us an excellent
thumbnail. Since he claims to have created nonAristotelian systems, it is necessary to understand the
tenets of an Aristotelian system.
[page 87] Psycho-logically, Aristotle was a
typical extrovert, who projects all his
internal processes on the outside world
and objectifies them: so his reaction
against Plato, the typical introvert, for
whom 'reality' was all inside, was a
natural and rather an inevitable
consequence. The struggle between these
two giants was typical of the two extreme
tendencies which we find in practically all
of us, as they represent two most diverse,
and yet fundamental psycho-logical
tendencies.
In his explanation below of how these two extreme
tendencies show up in our lives, Korzybski uses
several words which one must come to terms with in
order to make full use of the contents of this book. He
uses them so often in the book that he adopted
shorthand abbreviations for them. When these appear
in the passage below I will enclose the full word in
[brackets] the first time they appear.
[page 87] In 1933 we know that either of
these extremes in our make-up is
28
undesirable and un-sound, in science as
well as in life. In science, the extreme
extroverts have introduced what might be
called gross empiricism, which, as such, is
a mere el [elementalistic] fiction —
practically a delusion. For no 'facts' are
ever free from 'doctrines': so whoever
fancies he can free himself from
'doctrines', as expressed in the structure
of the language he uses ., [etc. ,] simply
cherishes a delusion, usually with strong
affective components. The extreme
introverts, on the other hand, originated
what might be called the 'idealistic
philosophies', which in their turn become
el delusions. We should not overlook the
fact that both these tendencies are el and
structurally fallacious. Belief in the
separate existence of el, and, therefore,
fictitious, entities must be considered as a
structurally un-sound s.r [semantic
reaction] and accounts in a
large degree for many bitter
fights in science and life.
The exact meaning of terms such as
el, m.o, s.r require a close reading
of the first chapters of the book, but
I will hazard a simple explanation
of these three important and often
used terms. An elementalistic [el]
29
term is one in which in our semantic reactions [s.r] we
ignore the multiordinal [m.o] aspects of it. This makes
it possible for us to understand the triad if we can get
our hands around what a multiordinal term is. Luckily
he provides a concise definition of his discovery of
multiordinality in this next passage:
[page 14] Terms like 'yes', 'no', 'true',
'false', fact', 'reality', 'cause', 'effect',
'agreement', 'disagreement',
'proposition', 'number', 'relation', 'order',
'structure', 'abstraction', 'characteristic',
'love', 'hate', 'doubt', etc., are such that if
they can be applied to a statement they
can also be applied to a statement about
the first statement, and so, ultimately, to
all statements, no matter what their order
of abstraction is. Terms of such a
character I call multiordinal terms.
If it makes your head ache trying to keep all these
terms like balls juggling in the air at the same time,
you will understand why I found it difficult to work
through more than a couple of pages at a time when I
first read this book. And you may be wondering how
any of this could ever be useful to the average person
who can not or will not take the immense effort it
takes to understand the work of this phenomenal
thinker, and you would be right. Luckily he taught
some brilliant people like Samuel Bois, S. I.
Hayakawa, and Kenneth Keyes who were able to
30
bring his work down to a practical and easy to
understand level. For beginners I suggest Keyes's
book, "How to Develop Your Thinking Ability" which
is available currently under the title, "Taming Your
Mind".This book covers the important bases of
"Science and Sanity" in simple everyday words using
cartoons to illustrate the main points. I utilized this
book during a course in "Effective Communication" I
gave to hundreds of maintenance people at Waterford
3 Nuclear Power Station in the 1980s(2).
Another essential phrase to come to terms with is
semantic reaction [s.r], which refers to affective
disturbances in persons related to their failure to
recognize the intention, goal, or meaning of the words
they receive from another. To Korzybski these
disturbances were failures in the education system
which he systematically set about to correct.
[page 20] Disturbances of the semantic
reactions in connection with faulty
education and ignorance must be
considered in 1933 as sub-microscopic
colloidal lesions.
31
Note his use of the
time index above
(See All Things
Change Cartoon) by
his specifying the
date during which
his writing applies to
the world.
Max Planck said in
his autobiography,
"A new scientific
truth does not
triumph by
convincing its
opponents and
making them see the
light, but rather
because its
opponents eventually die, and a new generation grows
up that is familiar with it." [italics added] One of the
reasons for this paradoxical condition of science is that
scientists are human beings and subject to semantic
reactions and every new system involves the learning
of new semantic reactionswhich scientists have
proven to be as slow at learning as the average ditchdigger. Korzybski gives us a scientific way of
understanding what we mean by the expression which
Planck used above, "familiar with":
32
[page 27] Any fundamentally new system
involves new s.r; and this is the main
difficulty which besets us when we try to
master a new system. We must reeducate, or change, our older s.r. As a
rule, the younger generation, which began
with the new s.r, has no such difficulties
with the new systems. Just the opposite —
the older s.r become as difficult or
impossible to them as the new were to the
older generations.
Another great discovery of Korzybski is the
deleterious effects of identification. He says while
identification may be useful to babies and children, it
proves harmful to adults. We can easily notice when
we are using identification because in English we will
use the verb "to be" to create the identity. Some have
suggested a convention be adopted in English in which
we consciously avoid using the verb "to be" for
identification, which form of English is called "english
prime" or simply, e'. Try it sometime, and you may
find it a very useful process — to write for a long time
without using the verb "to be" for identification. Why
is this important? The good news is that it's only
important if you're an adult.
[page 202] The 'is' of identity plays a
great havoc with our s.r, as any 'identity'
is structurally false to fact. An infant does
not know and cannot know that. In his
33
life, the 'is' of identity plays an important
semantic role, which, if not checked
intelligently, becomes a pernicious
semantic factor in his grown-up reactions,
which preserve the infantile character
and with which adult adjustment and
semantic health is impossible.
Perhaps the greatest discovery of all was the process
of abstracting. Korzybski talked about the world
outside of us as being the "What Is Going On" or
WIGO for short. That is the world before it is
experienced by anyone. To have a non-verbal
representation of the process of abstraction, Korzybski
created a diagram he called the "Structural
Differential", of which a photograph is shown in
Figure 5, page 398 [or you can click on the name to
see it on-line.] It is definitely worthwhile to take some
time to study this figure and its description.
Here is my thumbnail of abstracting: the parabola
extending to infinity is the WIGO, from which a
human perceives an Object, shown by the circular
plate, Oh, which is connected to WIGO. The human
creates the first level of abstraction by giving the
Object a label, shown by the rectangular plate L which
has some connecting wires to Oh. As higher levels of
abstraction are created, new plates, L1, L2, ... Ln are
shown, with Ln finally ending up back connected to
the WIGO parabola, because it is a part of the What Is
Going On.
34
This is not the end of understanding General
Semantics, only the beginning. We have only
inspected the foundations of this mansion and a couple
of its room. Only by living inside it for a few years
and learning all its hidden corners and useful
appliances will you come to appreciate the structure
that Alfred O. Korzybski has built for humankind.
You have had the key to this house placed in your
hand; it is up to you to open the door and begin your
personal adventure into science and sanity.
---------------------------- Reference Links for Alfred
Korzybski --------------A Reference Page of Material
written by Bobby Matherne on Science and Sanity
and its Author, Alfred Korzybski
http://www.doyletics.com/arj/aoklinks.htm
~^~
---------------------------- Footnotes ---------------------------------------Footnote 1. The subject of their seminar, unnamed in 1977, later
became known as neuro-linguistic programming, and it's clear
from the page xxii passage that Korzybski's work had a hand in
forming this field as well as its label.
35
Return to text directly before Footnote 1.
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
Footnote 2. The cartoons are available on-line thanks to the
International Society for General Semantics at:
http://www.generalsemantics.org/Cartoons/CartoonTK1.htm I
heartily recommend that readers take the time now to view these
cartoons.
http://www.doyletics.com/art/sciencea.htm
The Map Is Not The Territory
In neuro-linguistic programming, “neuro” refers to the neural pathways in our brain that send,
receive, and store the chemical signals that make up the information that is in our heads.
The “linguistic” part is the actual content of that information that moves along those neural
pathways. Even though the word “linguistic” refers to verbal information, non-verbal
information is also included here.
And the programming is the ways in which these chemical signals are manipulated to become
information that makes sense to us and that we can use.
One common way that the brain might accomplish this would be connecting it to the memory of
a prior experience already stored in our brain that seems to be similar.
We build up habits of thought and behavior by quickly linking new events to old ones in our
head that appear similar. We then react in the same fashion as we did to the experience stored in
our memory.
Unfortunately, that reaction may or may not be appropriate for this new experience, but we have
trouble dissociating the link between that stimulus and our automatic reaction.
NLP follows the declarations of Alfred Korzybski and Gregory Bateson that there is no such
thing as objective experience. That is, there is no single “out there” reality that we are all
swimming in (or if there is, we still each live in our own version of it).
Rather, each individual lives with a set of beliefs and perceptions about reality that they have
built up, often unconsciously, over a long period of time.
The phrase “the map is not the territory” was originally coined and made famous by Alfred
Korzybski, and warns against the common tendency of people to confuse a representation,
abstraction, or reaction to a thing with the thing itself.
For instance, it would be like going into a restaurant and chewing on the menu after looking at
the pretty pictures of food printed there. Or more realistically, confusing your emotional negative
reaction to a certain person with the actual person.
Learning to consciously distinguish between the actual and the representational helps open up
one’s understanding.
36
In NLP, distinguishing the map from the territory is an important guiding principle. As
individuals, we do not really have direct access to some kind of objective reality.
Instead, we perceive everything through a heavy filter made up of our beliefs, built up over a
long period of time.
http://www.brainwashmarketing.com/the-map-is-not-the-territory
February 19, 2004
Alfred Korzybski: Science and Sanity online
Posted by daev
As the man said - 'The map is not the territory'...
The entire text of Alfred Korzybski's
Science and Sanity is online, albeit in pdf format. I can't claim I've gotten through the entire book
myself... it's been bending my bookshelf for quite a while now.
The origin of this work was a new functional definition of 'man', as formulated in 1921, based on
an analysis of uniquely human potentialities; namely, that each generation may begin where the
former left off. This characteristic I called the 'time-binding' capacity. Here the reactions of
humans are not split verbally and elementalistically into separate 'body', 'mind', 'emotions',
'intellect', 'intuitions', etc., but are treated from an organism-as-a-whole-in-an-environment
(external and internal) point of view. This parallels the Einstein-Minkowski space-time integration
in physics, and both are necessitated by the modern evolution of sciences. - Alfred Korzybski
It is vital to have a constant awareness or habitual feeling that our formulation of a situation is
not the situation itself. The structure of our statements about things is not necessarily the way
things are. - Korzybski
A review of Science & Sanity »
(Thanks to Alex Burns at disinfo.com)
Read Science and Sanity »
Posted by daev at February 19, 2004 10:52 AM
http://blather.net/blather/2004/02/alfred_korzybski_science_and_s.html
The Map is Not the Territory
Alfred Korzybski coined the term "general semantics" in his book Science and Sanity. Korzybski
had an interest in the way we as human beings interact with the world outside our own skins and
sometimes take semantic shortcuts that lead us to false evaluations. He said "the map is not the
territory" to indicate that we should not confuse the "map" of reality that we carry around in our
37
heads with reality itself. Korzybski's system of general semantics gives us a set of tools that
enable us to develop awareness of our own map-making process, and thereby to make more
accurate and useful evaluations. It can result in clearer, more effective communication, more
appropriate responses to events around us, and dealing more effectively with stress in daily life.
Accessed 10/1/01: http://www.general-semantics.org.uk/frontpage.html
T he phrase "the map is not the territory" comes from Science and Sanity, by Alford Korzybski
(there does seem to be some disagreement about spelling his first name).
Science and Sanity : an Introduction to Non-Aristotelian Systems and General Semantics by
Alfred Korzybski (Hardcover - January 1995) [Amazon.com]
The idea that comes to mind for me is that modeling and simulation are a map, and they may or
may not be closely enough related to the territory to help represent and solve a specific problem.
http://www.uoregon.edu/~moursund/Math/computational_math.htm
=========================================
On Exactitude in Science
From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
"On Exactitude in Science" or "On Rigor in Science" (the original Spanish-language title is
"Del rigor en la ciencia") is a one-paragraph short story by Jorge Luis Borges, about the
map/territory relation, written in the form of a literary forgery.
Nature can never be completely described, for such a description of Nature would have to
duplicate Nature.
No Name can fully express what it represents.
It is Nature itself, and not any part (or name or description) abstracted from Nature, which is the
ultimate source of all that happens, all that comes and goes, begins and
ends, is and is not.
But to describe Nature as "the ultimate source of all" is still only a description, and such a
description is not Nature itself. Yet since, in order to speak of it, we must use
words, we shall have to describe it as "the ultimate source of all". -Jorge Luis Borges wrote in 1960 a short story that described the ambition of a group of
imaginary cartographers to represent an empire to perfection.
Rigor in Science - by Jorge Luis Borges
"... In that Empire, the Art of Cartography reached such Perfection that the map of one Province
alone took up the whole of a City, and the map of the empire, the whole of a Province. In time,
those Unconscionable Maps did not satisfy, and the Colleges of Cartographers set up a Map of
the Empire which had the size of the Empire itself and coincided with it point by point. Less
Addicted to the Study of Cartography, Succeeding Generations understood that this Widespread
Map was Useless and not without Impiety they abandoned it to the Inclemencies of the Sun and
38
of the Winters. In the deserts of the West some mangled Ruins of the Map lasted on, inhabited by
animals and Beggars; in the whole Country there are no other relics of the Disciplines of
Geography."
http://www.we-make-money-not-art.com/archives/2005/07/-google-maps-ac.php
Map–territory relation
(Redirected from Map/territory relation)
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Map/territory_relation
The map is not the territory is a remark by Polish-American scientist and philosopher Alfred
Korzybski, encapsulating his view that an abstraction derived from something, or a reaction to it,
is not the thing itself, for example, the pain from a stone falling on your foot is not the stone;
one's opinion of a politician, favorable or unfavorable, is not that person; a metaphorical
representation of a concept is not the concept itself; and so on. A specific abstraction or reaction
does not capture all facets of its source—e.g., the pain in your foot does not convey the internal
structure of the stone, you don't know everything that is going on in the life of a politician, etc.—
and thus may limit an individual's understanding and cognitive abilities unless the two are
distinguished. Korzybski held that many people do confuse maps with territories, in this sense.
The map–territory relationship
Gregory Bateson, in "Form, Substance and Difference," from Steps to an Ecology of Mind
(1972), elucidates the essential impossibility of knowing what the territory is, as any
understanding of it is based on some representation:
We say the map is different from the territory. But what is the territory? Operationally,
somebody went out with a retina or a measuring stick and made representations which
were then put on paper. What is on the paper map is a representation of what was in the
retinal representation of the man who made the map; and as you push the question back,
what you find is an infinite regress, an infinite series of maps. The territory never gets in
at all. […] Always, the process of representation will filter it out so that the mental world
is only maps of maps, ad infinitum.
Elsewhere in that same volume, Bateson points out that the usefulness of a map (a representation
of reality) is not necessarily a matter of its literal truthfulness, but its having a structure
analogous, for the purpose at hand, to the territory. Bateson argues this case at some length in the
essay "The Theology of Alcoholics Anonymous".
To paraphrase Bateson's argument, a culture that believes that common colds are transmitted by
evil spirits, that those spirits fly out of you when you sneeze, can pass from one person to another
when they are inhaled or when both handle the same objects, etc., could have just as effective a
"map" for public health as one that substituted microbes for spirits.
Another basic quandary is the problem of accuracy. In "On Exactitude in Science", Jorge Luis
Borges describes the tragic uselessness of the perfectly accurate, one-to-one map:
In time, those Unconscionable Maps no longer satisfied, and the Cartographers Guild
drew a Map of the Empire whose size was that of the Empire, coinciding point for point
with it. The following Generations, who were not so fond of the Study of Cartography
39
saw the vast Map to be Useless and permitted it to decay and fray under the Sun and
winters.
In the Deserts of the West, still today, there are Tattered Ruins of the Map, inhabited by
Animals and Beggars; and in all the Land there is no other Relic of the Disciplines of
Geography.
With this apocryphal quotation of Josiah Royce, Borges describes a further conundrum of when
the map is contained within the territory, you are led into infinite regress:
The inventions of philosophy are no less fantastic than those of art: Josiah Royce, in the
first volume of his work The World and the Individual (1899), has formulated the
following: 'Let us imagine that a portion of the soil of England has been levelled off
perfectly and that on it a cartographer traces a map of England. The job is perfect; there is
no detail of the soil of England, no matter how minute, that is not registered on the map;
everything has there its correspondence. This map, in such a case, should contain a map
of the map, which should contain a map of the map of the map, and so on to infinity.'
Why does it disturb us that the map be included in the map and the thousand and one
nights in the book of the Thousand and One Nights? Why does it disturb us that Don
Quixote be a reader of the Quixote and Hamlet a spectator of Hamlet? I believe I have
found the reason: these inversions suggest that if the characters of a fictional work can be
readers or spectators, we, its readers or spectators, can be fictions.
An alternative reason why we are bothered by the conundrum of infinite regress or the
conundrum of maps within maps is that we fail to see that the concept of a "map of a map" is the
same thing as the concept of a "map of a map of a map." In both cases, the concept is a metaphor
for the faculty of reflection. We fail to distinguish that one's capability of reflecting is an
enduring perspective and not simply a fleeting act of examining something. Each time I examine
myself examining something (or in turn reflect upon my examination of myself examining my
examination) I am exercising the same enduring ability. Husserl referred to this ability as the
"transcendental ego," the mind's eye or the capability of a human to reflect and abstract. Standing
between two mirrors, you will not be fooled by the infinite regress of the reflection of yourself in
a mirror within a mirror within a mirror (ad infinitum) precisely because you are able to see
(understand) that you are looking at mirrors facing each other and are not looking at an infinite
queue of dopplegangers. Likewise characters of a fictional work can be readers or spectators or
any other fiction that can be imagined precisely because they are fictions, but the fact that you
can reflect upon your ability to examine yourself and your thoughts means you are capable of
abstraction and need not suggest that you too are a fictional character in a fictional work.
Neil Gaiman retells the parable in reference to storytelling in Fragile Things (it was originally to
appear in American Gods):
One describes a tale best by telling the tale. You see? The way one describes a story, to
oneself or the world, is by telling the story. It is a balancing act and it is a dream. The
more accurate the map, the more it resembles the territory. The most accurate map
possible would be the territory, and thus would be perfectly accurate and perfectly
useless. The tale is the map that is the territory.
The development of electronic media blurs the line between map and territory by allowing for
the simulation of ideas as encoded in electronic signals, as Baudrillard argues in Simulacra &
Simulation:
40
Today abstraction is no longer that of the map, the double, the mirror, or the concept.
Simulation is no longer that of a territory, a referential being or substance. It is the
generation by models of a real without origin or reality: A hyperreal. The territory no
longer precedes the map, nor does it survive it. It is nevertheless the map that precedes
the territory - precession of simulacra - that engenders the territory. (Baudrillard, 1994, p.
1)
"The map is not the territory"
The expression "the map is not the territory" first appeared in print in a paper that Alfred
Korzybski gave at a meeting of the American Association for the Advancement of Science in
New Orleans, Louisiana in 1931: [1]
A) A map may have a structure similar or dissimilar to the structure of the territory...
B) A map is not the territory.
It is used as a premise in Korzybski's General Semantics, and in neuro-linguistic programming.
Korzybski's dictum ("The map is not the territory") is also cited as an underlying principle used
in neuro-linguistic programming, where it is used to signify that individual people in fact do not
in general have access to absolute knowledge of reality, but in fact only have access to a set of
beliefs they have built up over time, about reality. So it is considered important to be aware that
people's beliefs about reality and their awareness of things (the "map") are not reality itself or
everything they could be aware of ("the territory"). The originators of NLP have been explicit
that they owe this insight to General Semantics.
This is not a pipe. It is a reproduction of "The Treachery Of
Images," René Magritte’s 1928-9 painting of a pipe.
The Belgian surrealist artist René Magritte illustrated the
concept of "perception always intercedes between reality and
ourselves"[2] in a number of paintings including a famous
work entitled The Treachery Of Images, which consists of a
drawing of a pipe with the caption, Ceci n'est pas une pipe
("This is not a pipe").
This concept occurs in the discussion of exoteric and esoteric religions. Exoteric concepts are
concepts which can be fully conveyed using descriptors and language constructs, such as
mathematics. Esoteric concepts are concepts which cannot be fully conveyed except by direct
experience. For example, a person who has never tasted an apple will never fully understand
through language what the taste of an apple is. Only through direct experience (eating an apple)
can that experience be fully understood.
Lewis Carroll, in Sylvie and Bruno Concluded (1893), made the point humorously with his
description of a fictional map that had "the scale of a mile to the mile." A character notes some
practical difficulties with such a map and states that "we now use the country itself, as its own
map, and I assure you it does nearly as well."
In a sort of counterpoint to Lewis Carroll, the University of Cambridge economist Joan Robinson
(1962) emphasized the disutility of 1:1 maps and other overly detailed models: "A model which
41
took account of all the variegation of reality would be of no more use than a map at the scale of
one to one."
Korzybski's argument about the map and the territory also influenced the Belgian surrealist
writer of comics Jan Bucquoy for a storyline in his comic Labyrinthe: a map can never guarantee
that one will find the way out, because the accumulation of events can change the way one looks
at reality.
Historian of religions J. Z. Smith wrote a book entitled Map is not Territory: Studies in the
History of Religions (1978, University Of Chicago Press 1993 paperback: ISBN 0-226-76357-9).
Author Robert M. Pirsig uses the idea both theoretically and literally in his book Lila when the
main character/author becomes temporally lost due to an over reliance on a map, rather than the
territory that the map describes.
The map vs. territory distinction arises in a dramatic scene in David Foster Wallace's novel
Infinite Jest. A game of Eschaton, a fictional geopolitical wargame played on a tennis court
which is used to represent the surface of the planet Earth, dissolves into chaos when it begins to
snow. The snow exists only in the real world and therefore is falling only on the map, and not on
the territory which the map is representing; however, some players cannot understand this
distinction and begin to claim that the snow affects the damage parameters of the game. One
player then launches an attack and purposefully hits a player, instead of an area of the map,
further contributing to the degeneration of the Eschaton game. Infuriated, an authority figure on
the game rants:
Players themselves can't be valid targets. Players aren't inside the goddamn game. Players
are part of the apparatus of the game. They're part of the map. It's snowing on the players
but not on the territory.... You can only launch against the territory. Not against the map.
It's like the one ground-rule boundary that keeps Eschaton from degenerating into chaos.
Eschaton gentlemen is about logic and axiom and mathematical probity and discipline
and verity and order. You do not get points for hitting anybody real. Only the gear that
maps what's real.[3]
References
1. ^ Alfred Korzybski coined the expression in "A Non-Aristotelian System and its
Necessity for Rigour in Mathematics and Physics," a paper presented before the
American Mathematical Society at the New Orleans, Louisiana, meeting of the American
Association for the Advancement of Science, December 28, 1931. Reprinted in Science
and Sanity, 1933, p. 747–61.
2. ^ Rene Magritte's surrealism to be to illustrate the point that, "perception always
intercedes between reality and ourselves". See for example, p.15-16 Visual Intelligence:
Perception, Image, and Manipulation in Visual Communication by Ann Marie Barry(bio)
3. ^ Wallace, David Foster. Infinite Jest. 1st. ed. Boston, MA: Little, Brown and Company.
1996
See also
42
Fallacy of misplaced concreteness
Mary's room
Nominalism
Philosophy of perception
Representative realism
Simulacra and Simulation
Social constructionism
Structural differential
When a White Horse is Not a Horse
External links
The Map and the Territory
Measures and Scapes MIT Architecture
In his essay, "On Exactitude in Science", J. L. Borges touches on a couple of familiar maxims.
First we have the popular saying, the devil's in the details. As Borges' cartographers became
more and more specialized and the maps became larger (presumably) in order to add more
precise details thus making the map more accurate. Eventually, the cartographers reached 100%
accuracy with a map matching the kingdom point by point. This made the perfect map perfectly
useless. Second, we have the saying about beating a dead horse. Cartography was the big thing
of the moment. Maps got bigger and bigger, more and more detailed until the grandiosity of the
maps was trumped only by the maps' uselessness and consequently, the science of cartography
buckled under the weight of its own ego. The people had had enough and just stopped caring.
Borges' essay brings to mind an all too true but rather uneasy view of this planet on which we are
all hurtling through space. We live in a world much like that of the cartographers. People become
transfixed on whatever the new, big thing of the moment is. They devote large amounts of their
time and energy to writing essays, collecting information and creating monuments of grandiose
proportions to The New Great Thing Of The Moment.
Until the next Great New Thing Of The Moment comes along, that is. All of a sudden the last
great thing isn't so great anymore. This happens a couple of times and the monuments are
bulldozed to make room for strip malls and burger joints. After a couple of more cycles of new
big things, the one we started out with has faded completely into obscurity. Hey, remember the
Whitewater scandal? Yeah, me neither.
http://www.associatedcontent.com/article/583243/borgess_exactitude_in_science_and_climate.ht
ml
LINGUISTIC FINITUDE AS CAPABILITY IN BORGES AND WITTGENSTEIN
Romanic Review, Mar-May 2007 by Sharkey, E Joseph
http://findarticles.com/p/articles/mi_qa3806/is_200703/ai_n21186122/?tag=content;col1
43
Epistemological fantasies were dear to Borges. In a moment characteristic of his short stories, the
protagonist and narrator of "La escritura del Dios" ("The God's Script") muses on what he calls
the "enigma ... de una sentencia escrita por un dios," which happens to be encoded in the pelt of a
jaguar:
¿Qué tipo de sentencia (me pregunté) construirá una mente absoluta? Consideré que aun en los
lenguajes humanos no hay proposición que no implique el universo entero; decir el tigre es decir
los tigres que lo engendraron, los ciervos y tortugas que devoró, el pasto de que se alimentaron
los ciervos, la tierra que fue madre del pasto, el cielo que dio luz a la tierra. Consideré que en el
lenguaje de un dios toda palabra enunciaría esa infinita concatenación de los hechos, y no de un
modo implícito, sino explícito, y no de un modo progresivo, sino inmediato. Con el tiempo, la
noción de una sentencia divina parecióme pueril o blasfematoria. Un dios, reflexioné, sólo debe
decir una palabra y en esa palabra la plenitud. Ninguna voz articulada por él puede ser inferior al
universo o menos que la suma del tiempo. Sombras o simulacros de esa voz que equivale a un
lenguaje y a cuanto puede comprender un lenguaje son las ambiciosas y pobres voces humanas,
todo, mundo, universo.1
This description of what we might call an absolute language, free from all the epistemological
limits of human understanding, reminds me of what many literary theorists of recent years have
demanded of our own undivine language.
Indeed, it is a longstanding assumption in Borges criticism that stories such as this one
demonstrate Borges's frustration with the supposed inadequacy of language. Already in 1971, R.
S. Mills could write, "To point to Borges's scepticism is by now a commonplace." He goes on to
offer a typical expression of that commonplace: language is "an attempt to order reality, and it
leads to simplification of experience. Far from exhausting our experience, it represents only
facets of it . . ." ; as such, it is "arbitrary."2 A small sampling of other commentators (a
comprehensive list might include a majority) will bear out Mills' claim. According to Ana María
Barrenechea, Borges has "unrecelo radical" about language because "[l]as lenguas son, en último
termino, simplificaciones de una realidad que siempre las rebasa. . . ." Thus "nuestra condición
de hombres, imponiéndonos la comunicación mediante palabras, nos impone la metáfora y la
alegoría, es decir el engaño."3 Similarly, Jaime Rest casts Borges's philosophy of language as a
nominalism that "niega la adecuación entre el mundo y los recursos verbales" and assumes an
"antagonismo irreductible entre universo y palabra."4 Gisele Bickel writes that language,
"[c]ondenada a servir de mediadora, debe buscar su significación (o justificación) en algo que le
es exterior. No tiene la transparencia, la evidencia de la música que se basta a sí misma, es
siempre inadecuada en su función de instrumento de transmisión de la realidad." As she
interprets "La escritura del Dios," she explains, "El lenguaje es un mero vehículo de
transcripción que no aparece más que después y cuyo valor es secundario." Echoing Borges's
language, she concludes that as a means of representing the world, language is a failure: "La
escritura no puede ser más que un simulacro."5 A final example is Donald Shaw, who writes that
Borges "does not exclude literary endeavour (including his own) from his scepticism about the
value of all human endeavour." Indeed, literature "can never tell us anything about the ultimately
real, or about life, except that they are unknowable."6
Now these are astute commentators who have written intelligently on Borges (I will cite some of
them later), and they have reason to suppose that Borges is such a skeptic. After all, many of
their formulations of his skepticism borrow Borges's own words, or at least those of certain of his
44
narrators. I am tempted to say that their mistake lies merely in emphasizing the failure of
language in Borges's fiction rather than its achievement. But there are two problems that go
beyond misplaced emphasis: first, the assumptions underlying the skepticism they attribute to
Borges are unreasonable, and sometimes even incoherent; second, Borges's stories belie them.
Thus we critics of Borges should not easily subscribe to his apparent skepticism about language,
as many seem to do, as if it were true (or even sincere) because expressed with grace.
As for the first problem, consider the standards for success that this skepticism, as expressed in
the quotations above, sets for language: it should not be a simplification of reality, but its match
in complexity and detail (otherwise it counts as deceit, and betrays a fundamental antagonism for
the world); it must not be a mere transcription of reality, not secondary to it, but presumably
somehow original and primary; and it must tell us something (and something significant, it
would seem) not just about life, but about the ultimately real. One can almost hear language
crying out in frustration, What do you want from me?
As for the second problem, the contention that Borges's stories do not bear out the skepticism
some of their narrators voice should lead us to ask whether or not Borges subscribed to it
himself. The likeliest answer is that he didn't much care about the precise nature of language's
relation to the world, at least not in the way a philosopher would, as if coming to a final
explanation were all important. Borges was an artist who used philosophy (and anything else that
served the purpose) as a spur for his fiction, but he was not a philosopher. Commentators who
agree cite the epilogue to Otras inquisiciones (Other Inquisitions), where Borges confessed his
tendency "a estimar las ideas religiosas o filosóficas por su valor estético y aun por lo que
encierran de singular y de maravilloso."7 Borges was not likely, then, to grieve over language's
limits given that they were often the occasion of the wonder that was the real goal of his fiction.
In another well-known passage, from "La muralla y los libros" ("The Wall and the Books"), he
writes, "La música, los estados de felicidad, la mitología, las caras trabajadas por el tiempo,
ciertos crepúsculos y ciertos lugares, quieren decirnos algo, o algo dijeron que no hubiéramos
debido perder, o están por decir algo; esta inminencia de una revelación, que no se produce, es,
quiza, el hecho estetico."8 Borges likes to watch the horizon, as if anticipating a tardy sun, and
one suspects that it would disappoint him if it were to rise into view. With an apparent excess of
negative capability, Borges seems not to want to know any Truth that would have him as a
knower. Thus his famous preference for a world of authentic, unsolvable mysteries, one made by
angels and not chessmasters.
Wittgenstein's philosophy is helpful in the face of both of the problems we encounter in casting
Borges as a linguistic skeptic. With regard to our unreasonable assumptions about language,
consider this passage from Wittgenstein's late philosophy, in which he warns us against
comparing language as it is actually used to an abstract model of the way we think it ought to
work.
The more narrowly we examine actual language, the sharper becomes the conflict between it and
our requirement. . . . The conflict becomes intolerable; the requirement is now in danger of
becoming empty.-We have got on to slippery ice where there is no friction and so in a certain
sense the conditions are ideal, but also, just because of that, we are unable to walk. We want to
walk: so we need friction. Back to the rough ground!9
45
As I will argue, Wittgenstein helps us to see the frictionlessness of the standards for linguistic
success assumed by Borges's commentators: they are based on the confused expectation that
language not merely represent the world but that it reproduce it; language is asked to be a
medium that does not mediate.
With regard to the problem of the difference between the many professions of skepticism made
by Borges or his narrator and the performance of language in the very story he is writing or
telling, we might adapt Wittgenstein's late injunction, "don't think, but look!" (PI, §66), to
Borges's fiction as "don't listen, but look!" Because when we watch what Borges's language does
rather than listen to what Borges or his fictional selves tell us it cannot do, what strikes us about
his stories is not the failure of language but its achievement. Thus if we want to know what
Borges believed about the capability of language-not what he believed in this or that moment,
and not even what he said he believed or thought he believed, but rather what he believed in his
bones-then we should find our footing on the rough ground of his stories rather than the icy
declarations of any of the various Borgeses-narrator, author, or interviewee.
If we look instead of listen, we will also see the demonstration of four lessons about language,
the first three of which are basic to Wittgenstein's philosophy. First, that certain common
epistemological ideals concerning the capability of language, and of understanding more
generally, are unreasonable, unnecessary, and even counterproductive; rather than facilitate what
we think to achieve by them, they impede or preclude it. Second, that far from crippling our
understanding, epistemological limits make it possible; that is, our finitude is not our inability
but our capacity. Third, that a recognition of the difference between real and imagined limits
helps us to distinguish between confused demands on language and proper occasions of wonder,
among which we include Borges's aesthetic phenomena and what the early Wittgenstein called
"the mystical."10 The most important lesson is the fourth, that the creative use of language
within its finite limits can point beyond those limits, and seem even to surpass them. When
Borges illustrates this lesson, he sprints out of Wittgenstein's sight.
In an essay on Zeno's paradoxes, Borges writes, "Hay un concepto que es el corruptor y el
desatinador de los otros. No hablo del Mai cuyo limitado imperio es la ética; hablo del
infinite"11 His very short story, "Del rigor en la ciencia" ("On Precision in Science"), shows how
infinity has corrupted our understanding of the nature of representation: we judge its success
according to an ideal of unlimited exactitude. The half-page story begins with an ellipsis: ". . . En
aquel Imperio, el Arte de la Cartografía logró tal Perfección que el Mapa de una sola Provincia
ocupaba toda una Ciudad, y el Mapa del Imperio toda una Provincia. Con el tiempo, estos Mapas
Desmesurados no satisficieron y los Colegios de Cartógrafos levantaron un Mapa del Imperio,
que tenía el Tamaño del Imperio y coincidía puntualmente con él."12 Borges pretends not to see
the absurdity of a map that does not so much model an entire empire as duplicate it. Here we
have the kind of epistemological fantasy so common in Borges, one in which, to borrow
Barrenechea's language, a representation is not a simplification of a reality which exceeds it, but
instead the equal of that reality. The assumption of Borges's cartographers is that representation
strives after reproduction.
But once the wish is fulfilled, we find that it isn't what we wanted at all. Because of what use is
such a map? Don't we now need a map of the map? Or shall the empire be used for that? Or
46
should we just step onto the map and abandon the empire? Here we see an example of the first
lesson about language displayed in Borges's fictions: we are easily misled by our epistemological
ideals, in this case, the ideal of precision, according to which understanding always increases
with increased exactitude. But of course to be useful, usually a representation must simplify its
object. (A map needs to be able to fit in the glove compartment.) In the end, the kingdom's
mapmakers abandon their great map (mendicants and animals take up residence in it) and then
give up on cartography altogether. (One wishes Borges had spun his story out to the full: the
mendicants would establish their own kingdom on the map, and this map-world would come to
rival the kingdom until no one could remember or prove which was which; eventually, in order
to reveal the derivative nature of the other kingdom, each would revive the art of cartography
and secretly commission a map of its rival of such precision that soon there would be four
kingdoms.)
Wittgenstein, too, mocks the excessive drive for exactitude. To the complaint that the rather
ordinary command "Stand roughly here" is inexact, he replies,
Yes; why shouldn't we call it "inexact"? Only let us understand what "inexact" means. For it does
not mean "unusable." And let us consider what we call an "exact" explanation in contrast with
this one. Perhaps something like drawing a chalk line round an area? Here it strikes us at once
that the line has breadth. So a colour-edge would be more exact. But has this exactness still got a
function here: isn't the engine idling? (PI, §88; cf. §§ 70-71)
When we insist on standards inappropriate to ordinary language, the engine runs but the car does
not move. But of course if you are merely teaching someone to play catch, the sentence "Stand
roughly here" is wonderfully effective without a color-edge, just as "Wait a minute" is effective
without a stopwatch and "More rice, please" is effective without a measuring cup. We find that
what we might think of as "scientific" standards of precision are not merely unnecessary to
unscientific uses of language, they are hindrances. They are too precise, inflexible.
Thus Wittgenstein is content not to fix what isn't broken, and suggests that when we feel the
need for such fixing, we are probably contrasting language as it actually works with our
frictionless notions of the way we imagine it ought to work.
On the one hand it is clear that every sentence in our language 'is in order as it is.' That is to say,
we are not striving after an ideal, as if our ordinary vague sentences had not yet got a quite
unexceptionable sense, and a perfect language awaited construction by us.-On the other hand it
seems clear that where there is sense there must be perfect order.-So there must be perfect order
even in the vaguest sentence. (PI, §98)
Or, more pithily, "The sign-post is in order-if, under normal circumstances, it fulfils its purpose"
(PI, §87). Wittgenstein cautions us against looking for a language that is "better, more perfect,
than our everyday language . . . as if it took the logician to shew people at last what a proper
sentence looked like" (PI, §81). Robert Scholes, who properly emphasizes the linguistic
achievement of Borges's stories rather than their frustrations, makes a similar point in a
discussion of allegory: "For Borges, the language's tendency toward logic is a movement away
from reality. The more precise and fixed the terminology, the more inadequate it must
become."13
Another of Borges's stories, "Funes el memorioso" ("Funes the Memorious), offers a colorful
illustration of this principle and thereby helps us to see the second lesson demonstrated by
Borges's use of language: the positive corollary of the first, it is that our finitude is our capacity.
47
Here the ideal of representation pursued by Borges's cartographers is applied to human
perception and memory: Borges imagines a boy with infallible memory, such that he "no sólo
recordaba cada hoja de cada árbol de cada monte, sino cada una de las veces que la había
percibido o imaginado"14; thus he can spend Tuesday reliving Monday simply by recalling it. In
addition, his perception is superhumanly intense: "el presente era casi intolerable de tan rico y
tan nítido, y también las memorias más antiguas y más triviales."15 Troubled by what strikes
him as neglect of the particularity of the world-that the famous 33 gauchos are named by two
common signs rather than one unique sign; that the word dog can name a great variety of
creatures when to Funes a dog seen from one angle at three fourteen and the same dog seen from
another angle at three fifteen are wholly different phenomena16-Funes undertakes to invent his
own nomenclature of numbers. He assigns each quantity a unique symbol: instead of 7,013 and
7,014, for example, Funes's delightfully ridiculous substitutes are Máximo Pérez and El
Ferrocarril.17 Borges-narrator, who is also a character in the story, fails to persuade Funes of the
superior utility of the old, unimaginative names of numbers: "Yo traté de explicarle que esa
rapsodia de voces inconexas era precisamente lo contrario de un sistema de numeración. Le dije
que decir 365 era decir tres centenas, seis decenas, cinco unidades: análisis que no existe en los
'números' El Negro Timoteo o manta de carne."18 The pitiful truth is that despite his infinite
mnemonic and perceptual capacity, Funes cannot truly think: "Pensar," Borges concludes, "es
olvidar diferencias, es generalizar, abstraer."19 The paradoxical lesson of Funes is that 'absolute'
perception and memory would prohibit real understanding: a mind that indiscriminately records
every detail of its experience is no more use than a map that reproduces the terrain it maps; both
are in a sense 'ideal,' but both are useless.20
But surely the best proof that our finitude is sometimes our capacity is not the claims of the
characters in Borges's stories but the stories themselves. One thing Funes could never have done
is to write a story like the one in which he appears.21 He could not tolerate the simplification
necessary to a short story, the selection and omission of details, and he could not fathom the art
of suggestion that allows Borges to invent and communicate so vivid a tale in just a handful of
pages. Funes, the absolute historian who records every detail but evaluates none, communicates
little and teaches us nothing. Thus Borges's finite art outstrips Funes's infinity.
The third lesson about language displayed in Borges's stories is the importance of distinguishing
between the puzzlement we may experience because of our unreasonable epistemological
expectations and the wonder we experience when we encounter an authentic epistemological
limit. A respect for such limits runs throughout Wittgenstein's philosophy, but his early work
illustrates the point more dramatically than the late. It is well known that in the only book of his
early phase, the Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus, Wittgenstein held the moments in which
language reaches its limits in such respect that he advised silence before them. Toward the
conclusion, he writes that "There are, indeed, things that cannot be put into words. They make
themselves manifest. They are what is mystical" (T, 6.522) and then ends the book with the
admonition that "What we cannot speak about we must pass over in silence" (T, 7). Surprisingly,
Wittgenstein includes ethics and aesthetics among these inexpressible things (T, 6.421).
This classification makes sense in the context of the notoriously austere Tractatus, in which the
world is defined as "the totality of facts" (T, 1.1) and meaningful language as propositions which
describe possible facts (T, 4.25, 4.001). But for a better understanding of the profundity and even
poetry of Wittgenstein's early conception of linguistic limits, we turn to his "Lecture on Ethics,"
delivered (in English) less than a decade after the publication of his book. Here he says that when
48
he attempts to explain what he means by ethics, his mind always turns to one rather elusive
experience, about which he can only say, "when I have it J wonder at the existence of the world";
it makes him want to say things like "how extraordinary that anything should exist."22 These
expressions he regards as nonsensical because they declare something already taken for granted
in the conditions of the declaration. That is, we cannot imagine the world not existing, and we
could not wonder at its existence if it did not exist; we could not speak at all, about anything, if it
did not exist. We might say that for the early Wittgenstein the existence of the world is before
language, or behind it, or all around it, but not in it.
Thus Wittgenstein says of his expressions of wonder at the world, "all I wanted to do with them
was just ro go beyond the world and that is to say beyond significant language. My whole
tendency and I believe the tendency of all men who ever tried to write or talk Ethics or Religion
was to run against the boundaries of language" (LE, 11). Here is a case in which language does
indeed fall short of the thing it attempts to express, and we note that it is not skeptical cavil about
the possible failures of everyday speech; it is a profound, even a sacred thing. Over the course of
the lecture, Wittgenstein gropes after further descriptions of his wonder, saying that it is "the
experience of seeing the world as a miracle" (LE, 11) and "what people were referring to when
they said that God had created the world" (LE, 10). This wonder is concerned with the
Beginning, or the End, and the proper response is not speech but awe. Wittgenstein recognizes
his (and language's) finitude, he apprehends infinitude, and he accepts both as they are.23
Borges, too, had an aptitude for awe, and that is the reason he did not spend much time bewailing
the supposed inadequacies of language for mundane uses. Instead, he went where the awe was,
and that is why so many of his writings end in the apprehension of the Absolute, an event in
which language truly does meet its limits. One of his supposedly most skeptical essays, "El
idioma analítico de John Wilkins" ("The Analytical Language of John Wilkins"), is an instructive
example. Here Borges declares "[l]a imposibilidad de penetrar el esquema divino del universo,"
claims that "notoriamente no hay clasificación del universo que no sea arbitraria y conjetural,"
and reasons that if the universe is indeed coherent, "falta conjeturar su propósito; falta conjeturar
las palabras, las definiciones, las etimologías, las sinonimias, del secreto diccionario de Dios."24
Passages like these offer the most consistent and most coherent expression of Borges's
skepticism, if that is not too strong a word: it is not an indiscriminate distrust of language in its
ordinary tasks, and not even a disappointment in language's poetical expressiveness; it is rather a
recognition that a finite language cannot verbalize the infinite. In this essay Borges sounds rather
like Wittgenstein when he speaks of the futility of ethical nonsense: he acknowledges that
language falls short of divinity, and he accepts that limit. Shaw is correct when he claims that
Borges is skeptical of the literary endeavor because it can never tell us anything about the
ultimately real except that it is unknowable, but the tone is all wrong: to demarcate the
unknowable is a worthy service, one parallel to Wittgenstein's intentions in the Tractatus and the
"Lecture on Ethics." And Borges performs it repeatedly.
Even at the close of the essay on Wilkins, where he praises Chesterton's contemptuous
indictment of language and thus seems to confirm his own contempt, Borges implies only a
qualified criticism. Consider what Chesterton accuses language of failing to express:
El hombre sabe que hay en el alma tintes más desconcertantes, más innumerables y más
anónimos que los colores de una selva otoñal . . . cree, sin embargo, que esos tintes, en todas sus
fusiones y conversiones, son representables con precisión por un mecanismo arbitrario de
49
gruñidos y de chillidos. Cree que del interior de un bolsista salen realmente ruidos que significan
todos los misterios de la memoria y todas las agonías del anhelo.25
Chesterton is not concerned with the secret thoughts of God, but only with the most private and
personal feelings of us humans, and even here he finds that language is less subtle than its object.
Yet I would argue that in fact Chesterton is, indirectly, writing about the divine: what else is his
longing to reproduce (the tints of the soul) rather than merely to suggest (their tones, semi-tones,
blends, and unions), if not a promethean wish to bring heaven's fire down to earth? That is every
poet's longing; poets are the ever-failing aspirants to the writing of God, which is the world
itself. And yet we misread the essay if we fail to see that Borges's (and Chesterton's) criticism is
not of language for failing to match the creative power of the Logos or even Adam's pristine
nomenclature (What do you want from me?), but rather of our naïvete for thinking it could.26
When Borges laments his inability to reproduce the world in his language, then, I do not think he
is expressing a reasonable aspiration; as Wittgenstein would have it, Borges is not talking sense.
He is instead giving expression to his sense of wonder at the world. He is saying something akin
to "The world is a miracle."27 And if his stories were all like his essay on Wilkins's language, we
could stop here, because Borges would be no different from Wittgenstein: reverent before the
limits of language, and silent. But it is at just this point, in the face of the ineffable, that we see
the difference between a philosopher and a writer of fantastic fiction: just when Wittgenstein has
closed his mouth, Borges begins to talk out of both sides of his, because even as he says that
language has met its limits, he shows that it has not. Consider what happens at the end of the
Wilkins essay. Does Chesterton's language not succeed rather nicely in communicating to us the
bewildering subtleties of forests and souls? His essay, like Borges's essay and like "Funes," is a
paradoxical demonstration of the capability of finite language artistically used, which is the
fourth lesson Borges teaches us about language: through grunts and squeals, language suggests
mysteries and agonies even if it does not bring them literally into being.
Which is why it is ironic that Borges's commentators sometimes fault language (and take Borges
to do the same) for failing to express not just the extraordinary subtleties of the actual mundane,
and not just the transcendence of the possible divine, but even such patently unreal fantasies as
the Aleph (which Borges defines nonchalantly as "el lugar donde están, sin confundirse, todos
los lugares del orbe, vistos desde todos los ángulos"28), a rose as beheld by an unfallen Adam
("Marino vio la rosa, como Adán pudo verla en el Paraíso, y sintió que ella estaba en su
eternidad y no en sus palabras"29), and the writing of gods.
We can take Bickel's criticism of "El Aleph" as an example. She bases her reading on the
remarks Borges-narrator makes about language just before he describes his omnivision:
Arribo, ahora, al inefable centro de mi relato; empieza, aquí, mi desesperación de escritor. Todo
lenguaje es un alfabeto de símbolos cuyo ejercicio presupone un pasado que los interlocutores
comparten; ¿cómo trasmitir a los otros el infinito Aleph, que mi temerosa memoria apenas
abarca? . . . Lo que vieron mis ojos fue simultáneo: lo que transcribiré, sucesivo, porque el
lenguaje lo es. Algo, sin embargo, recogeré.30
In the same paragraph, Borges offers one of those explicit condemnations of language that
convinces many commentators of his deep distrust for the medium of his own art: he hopes for a
metaphor that, like those of the mystics, would allow him to communicate his vision, but asserts
that even if he found one, "este informe quedaría contaminado de literatura, de falsedad."31
Bickel writes, "Todos los símbolos que permiten la concentración del universo entero en un
50
espacio restringido (el Aleph; las manchas de piel del jaguar; el Zahir, moneda que concentra en
sí todo el conocimiento del mundo) son intransmisibles verbalmente. La palabra como símbolo
de símbolo fracasa."32 How easily the momentum of a longstanding suspicion of language
carries us to the commonplace about Borges's skeptical view: language's inability to express
mystical visions, visions that capture the totality of the universe in a glance, is counted as a
failure! Are we to fault language for that? And does Borges?
He cannot have, unless he thoroughly misunderstood his own art, or was a shameless ingrate. We
must separate the words of Borges-narrator, who frequently voices lamentations about the
inadequacy of language and whom his commentators later echo, from the deed of the story,
which as I have said I take to imply the only meaningful stance of Borges-author-who, we note,
does not discontinue his stories after such lamentations. Instead, Borges-narrator's complaints
about language usually signal an intensification of the work Borges-author is about to do with it.
(A sly man will denigrate his tools in order to make the thing he builds with them more
impressive.33) Thus when we hear Borges-narrator wistfully apologize for the beauty or
illumination or awe that he could convey to us but for his poor instrument, language, we ought to
hear Borges-author saying underneath his breath, Now watch me do it.
Thus the final irony of Borges's stories is that though Alephs and divine scripts are not merely
imaginary, but impossible, or at the least inconceivable to finite minds, Borges nevertheless
communicates or seems to communicate them to us, in language. This trick of Borges's stories
puts some commentators in the curious position of thinking that they understand what these
things are at the same time that they accept the claim of the narrator that he cannot put them into
words. Of the climax of "El Aleph," Mualem writes, "The following futile attempt to depict the
vision of the Aleph is, as Borges declares, the crux of the plot" and "Borges stresses his inability
to depict the Aleph via words."34 But where else has he depicted it except in words? It exists
nowhere else; it is not as if we saw it on the street.
Gabriela Massuh's assessment is similar but somewhat more careful. She argues that Borges's
opinion of language is revealed in "el núcleo temático del relato, que no es el Aleph en sí, sino la
incapacidad del autor de describirlo de manera acabada" (emphasis added). Yet when she
interprets the passage in which Borges despairs that putting the Aleph into words will
contaminate it "de literatura, de falsedad," she seems to fall for Borges's joke. Paraphrasing
Borges-narrator, she writes, "El solo hecho de intentar nombrarlo a traves de imágenes lo
convertiría en una mentira, en ficción."35 But of course the Aleph was never anything but
fiction. It is not that language falls helplessly into the gap between Borges's experience and ours.
Borges hasn't experienced the Aleph, either; no one has. Language is what the Aleph is made of,
the only place the Aleph has ever 'happened.'
And nevertheless, upon finishing this story, what reader will claim that he has no inkling of the
experience of beholding the Aleph? This is the delightful, preposterous achievement of Borges's
art: even if his language can be said to fall short of representing reality in some absolute sense, it
seems to succeed in representing a thing that is either unreal or infinitely more real than everyday
reality. If the thematic nucleus of the story is the (unsurprising) failure of author and language to
reproduce the (imaginary, impossible) experience of the Aleph, then it is overwhelmed by the
aesthetic nucleus, the success of author and language in seeming to communicate it.
As a conclusion, then, let us watch Borges pull off his stunt in the story with which we began,
"La escritura del Dios." The narrator whose mind boggled at the thought of a divine language is
51
granted a mystical vision of the cosmos. He prefaces his account with the usual declaration of the
incommunicability of what he proceeds to communicate, but thereafter he is anything but silent:
Entonces ocurrió lo que no puedo olvidar ni comunicar. Ocurrió la unión con la divinidad, con el
universo (no sé si estas palabras difieren). El éxtasis no repite sus símbolos; hay quien ha visto a
Dios en un resplandor, hay quien lo ha percibido en una espada o en los círculos de una rosa. Yo
vi una Rueda altísima, que no estaba delante de mis ojos, ni detrás, ni a los lados, sino en todas
partes, a un tiempo. Esa Rueda estaba hecha de agua, pero también de fuego, y era (aunque se
veía el borde) infinita. Entretejidas, la formaban todas las cosas que serán, que son y que fueron,
y yo era una de las hebras de esa trama total. . . Ahí estaban las causas y los efectos y me bastaba
ver esa Rueda para entenderlo todo, sin fin. ¡Oh dicha de entender, mayor que la de imaginar o la
de sentir! Vi el universo y vi los íntimos designios del universo. Vi los orígenes que narra el
Libro del Común. Vi las montañas que surgieron del agua, vi los primeros hombres de palo, vi
las tinajas que se volvieron contra los hombres, vi los perros que les destrozaron las caras. Vi el
dios sin cara que hay detrás de los dioses. Vi infinitos procesos que formaban una sola felicidad
y, entendiéndolo todo, alcancé también a entender la escritura del tigre.36
Through negation of the familiar finite (not before, nor behind, nor to the sides),37 through the
suggestion of a totality by the selection of evocative parts38 (the etiological list: the origins, the
mountains, the first men, the cisterns, the dogs, the gods39), through metaphor and symbolism
(the Wheel and the fabric, the water and the fire), through the invocation of already-rich
traditions of similar language use (the blazing light, the sword, the rose)-through all of this,
Borges's supposedly inadequate tool, language, becomes almost magic. It allows him to write
with some justice the wonderfully ironic exclamation, "¡Oh dicha de entender, mayor que la de
imaginar o la de sentir!", a sentence that gives us readers the sensation of understanding
something that we and Borges are in fact only imagining, or failing to imagine.
University of Washington, Tacoma
1. Jorge Luis Borges, Obras completas (Buenos Aires: Emecé, 1974), 597-98; hereafter OC
["enigma . . . of a sentence written by a god";
What type of sentence (I asked myself) will an absolute mind construct? I considered that even in
the human languages there is no proposition that does not imply the entire universe; to say the
tiger is to say the tigers that begot it, the deer and turtles devoured by it, the grass on which the
deer fed, the earth that was mother to the grass, the heaven that gave birth to the earth. I
considered that in the language of a god every word would enunciate that infinite concatenation
of facts, and not in an implicit but in an explicit manner, and not progressively but
instantaneously. In time, the notion of a divine sentence seemed puerile or blasphemous. A god, I
reflected, ought to utter only a single word and in that word absolute fullness. No word uttered
by him can be inferior to the universe or less than the sum total of time. Shadows or simulacra of
that single word equivalent to a language and to all a language can embrace are the poor and
ambitious human words, all, world, universe.
Of Exactitude in Science
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZBI9SBiSq-o
3. Elements from the Borges Story in the Film
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Borges' problematizes this concept of the model (which is the subject of his story) within his
short story, as it leads to the destruction of reality. Therefore, the group adopted this concept for
the subject matter of its short film. In order to show the viewer this collapsing reality the group
employed a number of editing techniques: stop motion animation, match cuts, and a certain
degree of alinearity.
The group used stop motion animation in order to demonstrate a growing constructed reality
within the film. Therefore the animation is obviously fake, using materials like tissue paper,
cellophane, beads, wire and fabric. The elements within the film to which the group applied the
animation were carefully considered, for example, the wooden fruit that the character throws
simultaneously demonstrates the realization of the constructed reality and its faults, and also
serves as a point in the film where the rhythm speeds up and more 'constructed elements' are
introduced. Another example are the worms, which are meant to draw the viewer's attention to
the ground - the place in the story the map resides.
The match cuts were another way in which the group created a space that dealt with the
constructed nature of film. The match cuts allowed for the group to use many different settings
combined to create one filmic space.
The model the group followed in order to create the film (above) gave a limitation and
simultaneous freedom to the actual content of the shots. While each shot correlated to a specific
word and therefore a certain camera angle, the linearity of the film became of second importance
and therefore allowed for further collapsing of a seemless reality.
http://english149-w2008.pbworks.com/Borges:-An-Exploration-in-Modeling
Borges cartographers- Order by: relevance | pagesrelevance | pages 116
http://books.google.com/books?id=02EylVe0DFgC&pg=PA122&lpg=PA122&dq=Borges+carto
graphers&source=bl&ots=Oun6ZjF2Yn&sig=lTu3m8MyYqqdmgjfCT8qGIQouo&hl=en&ei=MutTSvfJNtCLtgeByeSnCA&sa=X&oi=book_resu
lt&ct=result&resnum=2
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