Dear Fellow Time-Binder: Letters on General Semantics - Christopher Mayer

Partial Excerpts (antilibrary)

Preface

You may have had this experience before: You come across a set of ideas that just “make sense.” They stick with you and make you want to learn more about them. They give you a fresh perspective

This is the experience I had with the set of ideas called “general semantics.”

In the pages that follow, I will share with you some of the ideas I have found most useful

I hit on the idea of writing letters

the idea of using letters to instruct has a long tradition, perhaps beginning with the letters of Seneca

Letter 1: Time-Binding and Alfred Korzybski

What is a “time-binder,” you ask? You and I are both “time-binders.” And “time-binding” is the most distinctive—and arguably most consequential—ability we have

After the war, Korzybski would ask himself a question that would occupy his thinking for years: “What is the definition or defining characteristic mark of humanity?” In 1921, he published his answers in his first book, Manhood of Humanity

he thinks a comparable thing should exist for the study of humanity—a kind of human engineering that brings together the sum of our scientific learning and applies it to the “advancement of human weal.” (flourishing)

Idealistic impulses seem to drive Korzybski’s vision, and the shadow of war and loss hang over the book’s pages like a warning—a reminder that the cost of failure in this project could be immense

present plight of the world show only too sadly how dangerous and expensive it is to have the world governed by those who do not know [this contemplated art and science of human engineering].”

when humanity behaved like “a child who uses a priceless chronometer to crack nuts.”

humanity must grow up. Thus, the “manhood of humanity.”

Korzybski thought it critical to understand what makes human beings different. In that difference we could discover the “nature of man”

“What is the defining characteristic mark of humanity?” Korzybski found it in what people do, which other living things seem unable to do: Human beings possess a most remarkable capacity which is entirely peculiar to them—I mean the capacity to summarize, digest and appropriate the labors and experiences of the past.

We are, in Korzybski’s words, both an “inheritor of the by-gone ages and the trustee of posterity.” This capacity Korzybski dubbed “time-binding.” Time-binding is what humans do.