{"id":317,"date":"2010-04-02T12:29:34","date_gmt":"2010-04-02T16:29:34","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/benhauck.com\/offthemap\/?p=317"},"modified":"2010-04-02T12:29:43","modified_gmt":"2010-04-02T16:29:43","slug":"maybe-consider-learning-about-time-binding-from-someone-other-than-korzybski","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/benhauck.com\/offthemap\/2010\/04\/02\/maybe-consider-learning-about-time-binding-from-someone-other-than-korzybski\/","title":{"rendered":"Maybe Consider Learning about Time-Binding from Someone Other Than Korzybski…"},"content":{"rendered":"

Long things in PDF pretty much go unread by me.\u00a0 I got a Kindle<\/a> this week, not so much for reading books from the Kindle Store<\/a>, but for reading PDF files.\u00a0 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<\/em><\/a>).\u00a0 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.\u00a0 So far, I really like it.\u00a0 I ultimately prefer hardcopies–you can’t\u00a0jump around\u00a0eBooks.\u00a0 But this will do.<\/p>\n

I loaded up my Kindle with PDF versions mostly of items directly or indirectly related to general semantics.\u00a0 I’ve loaded Korzybski’s Science and Sanity<\/em>, his Manhood of Humanity<\/em>, Walter Polakov’s Mastering Power Production<\/em>, and some of the original issues of the\u00a0General Semantics Bulletin<\/em>.\u00a0 I also have Hume and Keyser and Br\u00e9al.\u00a0 And of course, I have Stockdale.\u00a0 In no way could I practically cart these texts with me to set.\u00a0 With a Kindle, I can cart them all, plus jump back and forth between them.<\/p>\n

What motivated this blog entry was reading a book I downloaded for free from Google Books<\/a>.\u00a0 It is titled The Gantt Chart: A Working Tool of Management<\/a><\/em> by Wallace Clark.\u00a0 It was published in 1922.\u00a0 In the\u00a0appendix 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<\/em>.<\/p>\n

Polakov’s\u00a0essay, titled “The Measurement of Human Work,” provides what I find a much clearer\u00a0perspective of time-binding than Korzybski ever published.\u00a0 However, Polakov provides that perspective in piecemeal, and I’d encourage the person deeply interested in general semantics to read the short essay.<\/p>\n

In the essay, Polakov clarifies that the notion of time-binding relates specifically to the notion of production<\/em>, and “production” refers specifically to things man-made as opposed to things accidentally made or made by nature.\u00a0 First, Polakov writes on pages 152-153 (pages 171-172 of the Google Books PDF):<\/p>\n

‘<\/span><\/div>

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<\/em>.\u00a0 The outstanding factor in production is human work.\u00a0 That distinguishes production from any other activity.\u00a0 It is human, and therefore, a logarithmic function of time which defines the human dimension.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

In this passage, Polakov notes that the human component is a differentiating mark.\u00a0 Differentiating from what?\u00a0 On page 154 (page 173), Polakov clarifies:<\/p>\n

‘<\/span><\/div>

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<\/em>, 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.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

Much as Korzybski differentiates human from animal in Manhood of Humanity<\/em>, Polakov differentiates human from animal in his discussion of production.\u00a0 It makes you wonder if Korzybski was talking about Polakov’s notion of production without more clearly stating it in Manhood of Humanity<\/em>.\u00a0 To drive home the connection, Polakov explicitly references time-binding in his essay\u00a0on page 153 (page 172), bolding mine:<\/p>\n

‘<\/span><\/div>

This co-operation of living and dead men creates all our material, intellectual, and spiritual wealth.\u00a0 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.\u00a0 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<\/strong> energy to create further material, intellectual, and spiritual wealth.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

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.\u00a0 On the surface, it made sense: Humans progress by means of passing information on via symbolism we call “language.”\u00a0 That behavior is a differentiating mark of humanity that means they are different from animals and should not be called animals.\u00a0 Yet, I couldn’t help but feel uncomfortable about this differentiation of humanity when thinking about the biological or zoological categorization of humans.\u00a0 In that perspective, humans are classified as animals and I don’t disagree with that speciation.<\/p>\n

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<\/em>.\u00a0 Humans produce in a different way than animals.\u00a0 Animals cooperate with their current generations.\u00a0 Humans cooperate with their current generations, but also with their past generations.\u00a0 As a point of comparison, notice how Cassius Keyser explains time-binding on page 4 of his\u00a0extraordinary work Mathematical Philosophy<\/em>:<\/p>\n

‘<\/span><\/div>

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.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

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).<\/p>\n

What does this all mean?\u00a0 For me, it means that the term “time-binding” means something more like “generation-binding.”\u00a0 That is, “time” refers to generations of people rather than to the reading on a clock or a duration.\u00a0 “People of another time<\/em>” cooperating with “people of the current time<\/em>.”\u00a0 It is dead people binding with living people.<\/p>\n

But it is dead people binding with living people in the context of production<\/em>.\u00a0 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.\u00a0 That is, I might define general semantics as “the study of thinking and its effects on human productivity.”\u00a0 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.”<\/p>\n

Whatever the case, I’m adding in “human productivity” to the definition as a point of clarity on what general semantics aims to help.\u00a0 This seems to make a lot of sense when we reflect on what Korzybski called what he was doing in Manhood of Humanity<\/em>: He was calling what he was doing “human engineering.”\u00a0\u00a0Korzybski was trying to engineer a more productive human being.<\/em><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Long things in PDF pretty much go unread by me.\u00a0 I got a Kindle this week, not so much for reading books from the Kindle Store, but for reading PDF files.\u00a0 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).\u00a0 I thought […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[36,9,30,34,38,37,35,33,31,32,29],"class_list":["post-317","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-general-semantics","tag-cassius-keyser","tag-definition","tag-gantt-chart","tag-kindle","tag-manhood-of-humanity","tag-mathematical-philosophy","tag-pdf","tag-productivity","tag-time-binding","tag-wallace-clark","tag-walter-polakov"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/benhauck.com\/offthemap\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/317","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/benhauck.com\/offthemap\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/benhauck.com\/offthemap\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/benhauck.com\/offthemap\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/benhauck.com\/offthemap\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=317"}],"version-history":[{"count":15,"href":"https:\/\/benhauck.com\/offthemap\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/317\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":332,"href":"https:\/\/benhauck.com\/offthemap\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/317\/revisions\/332"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/benhauck.com\/offthemap\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=317"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/benhauck.com\/offthemap\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=317"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/benhauck.com\/offthemap\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=317"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}