Alfred Korzybski deserves a more prominent place in our histories of science fiction, Lee Konstatinou argues:
Korzybski inspired a legion of students, and the meta-science of “General Semantics” that he created affected disciplines as diverse as literary criticism, philosophy, linguistics, psychology, and cybernetics.
But his most powerful effect might have been on John W. Campbell’s Golden Age. Indeed, Korzybski is probably the most important influence on science fiction you’ve never heard of.
Alfred Korzybski was a Polish aristocrat who came to North America near the end of World War I after being injured in the war. Trained as an engineer, he created a philosophy he called General Semantics (not to be confused with semantics as a linguistic discipline). General Semantics was part of a much larger philosophical effort, early in the twentieth century, to create a logically ideal language and a contribution to intellectual debates about the so-called “meaning of meaning.”
Attempting to build on the work of Bertrand Russell and Alfred North Whitehead, Korzbyski tried to explain, among other things, why humans were uniquely prone to self-slaughter. He hoped, quixotically, that his meta-linguistic system might save us from our own worst tendencies.
Korzybski coined the well-known slogan, “The map is not the territory,” to sum up his ideas:
To defeat our Aristotelian habits of mind, to help humankind achieve what he called “sanity,” Korzybski created a mental and spiritual training regime. He recommended that we achieve a “consciousness of abstracting,” an awareness of our own process of abstracting the world, in order to gain a better understanding of what he called “silence on the objective level,” the fundamentally non-linguistic nature of reality. Korzybski advised that we engage in a “semantic pause” when confronted with a novel stimulus, a sort of neurocognitive Time Out.
He profoundly influenced Robert A. Heinlein, L. Ron Hubbard, A.E. Van Vogt — and many others:
Many other Golden Age writers, such as H. Beam Piper and Reginald Bretnor, incorporated Korzybski into their fiction. And his influence stretches well beyond the conventional boundaries of the Golden Age.
Frank Herbert, for instance, ghostwrote a nationally syndicated column on General Semantics, under Hayakawa’s byline, while writing Dune (1965). Korzybski’s ideas are visible in Herbert’s depiction of the Bene Gesserit’s mental and physical training regime.
When I was in college back in the early 60s, my best friend stumbled across Korzybski’s book and liked it so much he stole it from the Boston Public Library. This was doable in the days before RF tags and the like.
I never really got into it, being submerged in trying to learn engineering (a different program back then), but The World of Null-A is a fond memory.
P.S. I never understood what was so Null-A about Van Vogt’s book.