Off the Map

Long things in PDF pretty much go unread by me.  I got a Kindle this week, not so much for reading books from the Kindle Store, but for reading PDF files.  For some time, I’ve had things to read in PDF version (of note, Steve Stockdale’s new book Here’s Something about General Semantics).  I thought a Kindle might make reading long PDFs easier for me because it is portable so I can take it with me to set, and it’s more like a book than a computer screen is.  So far, I really like it.  I ultimately prefer hardcopies–you can’t jump around eBooks.  But this will do.

I loaded up my Kindle with PDF versions mostly of items directly or indirectly related to general semantics.  I’ve loaded Korzybski’s Science and Sanity, his Manhood of Humanity, Walter Polakov’s Mastering Power Production, and some of the original issues of the General Semantics Bulletin.  I also have Hume and Keyser and Bréal.  And of course, I have Stockdale.  In no way could I practically cart these texts with me to set.  With a Kindle, I can cart them all, plus jump back and forth between them.

What motivated this blog entry was reading a book I downloaded for free from Google Books.  It is titled The Gantt Chart: A Working Tool of Management by Wallace Clark.  It was published in 1922.  In the appendix of this book is an essay by Walter Polakov, a good friend of Alfred Korzybski’s who was around when Korzybski was formulating his notion of time-binding and even served as Korzybski’s liaison in the United States around the publication of Korzybski’s Manhood of Humanity.

Polakov’s essay, titled “The Measurement of Human Work,” provides what I find a much clearer perspective of time-binding than Korzybski ever published.  However, Polakov provides that perspective in piecemeal, and I’d encourage the person deeply interested in general semantics to read the short essay.

In the essay, Polakov clarifies that the notion of time-binding relates specifically to the notion of production, and “production” refers specifically to things man-made as opposed to things accidentally made or made by nature.  First, Polakov writes on pages 152-153 (pages 171-172 of the Google Books PDF):

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Production may be defined as human work organized on the co-operation of living and dead men for the conscious purpose of changing the form of matter or direction or character of force.  The outstanding factor in production is human work.  That distinguishes production from any other activity.  It is human, and therefore, a logarithmic function of time which defines the human dimension.

In this passage, Polakov notes that the human component is a differentiating mark.  Differentiating from what?  On page 154 (page 173), Polakov clarifies:

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Coming back to our definition of production as human work organized on the co-operation of living and dead men for the conscious purpose of changing the form of matter or the direction or character of force, this sharply distinguishes production from animal effort, physical occurrence, individual discovery, disorganized conflicting effort, or activity independent of results accomplished by past generations of men.

Much as Korzybski differentiates human from animal in Manhood of Humanity, Polakov differentiates human from animal in his discussion of production.  It makes you wonder if Korzybski was talking about Polakov’s notion of production without more clearly stating it in Manhood of Humanity.  To drive home the connection, Polakov explicitly references time-binding in his essay on page 153 (page 172), bolding mine:

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This co-operation of living and dead men creates all our material, intellectual, and spiritual wealth.  Before we begin any work we have at our disposal sciences, knowledge, machinery, materials, ideals, methods–all created and handed down by those who worked before us.  It is our part to bring to the work our energy and the ability to co-ordinate and apply what we have received from preceding generations and thus by means of our time-binding energy to create further material, intellectual, and spiritual wealth.

Before reading Polakov’s essay, I’d been generally confused about the notion of time-binding as taught to me by Alfred Korzybski when I thought about it in more detail.  On the surface, it made sense: Humans progress by means of passing information on via symbolism we call “language.”  That behavior is a differentiating mark of humanity that means they are different from animals and should not be called animals.  Yet, I couldn’t help but feel uncomfortable about this differentiation of humanity when thinking about the biological or zoological categorization of humans.  In that perspective, humans are classified as animals and I don’t disagree with that speciation.

But Polakov provides a context for the notion of time-binding that Korzybski seems to generally neglect, or at least doesn’t seem to drive home enough for me: That animals don’t produce in the way that humans do.  Humans produce in a different way than animals.  Animals cooperate with their current generations.  Humans cooperate with their current generations, but also with their past generations.  As a point of comparison, notice how Cassius Keyser explains time-binding on page 4 of his extraordinary work Mathematical Philosophy:

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If human being are by nature civilazation-builders, or “time-binders,” and if all time-binders, or civilization-builders, are both inheritors from the toil of bygone generations and trustees for the generations to come, then we humans stand in the double relationship–debtors of the dead, trustees of the unborn–thus uniting past, present and future in one living, growing reality.

Keyser’s use of the synonym “civilization-builder” for “time-binder” implies the production aspect of time-binding that Polakov explicates and Korzybski generally neglects (in my opinion).

What does this all mean?  For me, it means that the term “time-binding” means something more like “generation-binding.”  That is, “time” refers to generations of people rather than to the reading on a clock or a duration.  “People of another time” cooperating with “people of the current time.”  It is dead people binding with living people.

But it is dead people binding with living people in the context of production.  Looking to general semantics as a whole, its value becomes seen as a helpful study of productivity, and how people inhibit their productivity, as well as how people develop or increase their productivity, along with advice to move from the former to the latter.  That is, I might define general semantics as “the study of thinking and its effects on human productivity.”  If I want to emphasize the language role in productivity, I might say general semantics is “the study of language and its effects on human productivity.”

Whatever the case, I’m adding in “human productivity” to the definition as a point of clarity on what general semantics aims to help.  This seems to make a lot of sense when we reflect on what Korzybski called what he was doing in Manhood of Humanity: He was calling what he was doing “human engineering.”  Korzybski was trying to engineer a more productive human being.

See also: cassius-keyser, definition, gantt-chart, kindle, manhood-of-humanity, mathematical-philosophy, pdf, productivity, time-binding, wallace-clark, walter-polakov