Series on Alfred Korzybski #1
A long, long time ago in a galaxy far away NLP began in another form and presentation than what is typically told in NLP histories. It began when an engineer during the First World War left Europe and came to the United States totally fed up with mankind’s semantic non-sense that was generating the stupidity of war and destruction. As an bridge engineer, that original thinker began thinking so thoughts that would launch a whole new way of thinking and of living.
This engineer began his thoughts wondering ever-so curiously, “What is man?” “What is a scientific description of human-kind?” And what he wanted was a definition that could be used so that solid and actionable knowledge could be built upon it—year after year, generation after generation, so that just like the construction of bridges and buildings, people could be built and supported and empowered so that things continually improve.
This attitude came from his engineering perspective.
“Why do we continually create more functional and effective buildings, bridges, airplanes, etc.? Why do we keep progressing in the hard sciences generation after generation, but not so in the soft sciences? Why have we not created a solid foundation for the social and psychological sciences? What is the difference between the tremendous advances in one while simultaneously in the other there is still major confusion, misunderstanding, and disagreement?
Now once this engineer arrived in America and learned a whole new language, he wrote two books. In the first, he created a scientific definition of man and in the second, he created a whole system for mankind’s science and sanity. He titled the first book, The Manhood of Humanity (1921)to indicate the possibilities of the human race after it grows up from infancy and childhood. He titled the second book, Science and Sanity: An Introduction to Non-Aristotelian Systems and General Semantics (1933).
Then Alfred Korzybski, founder of General Semantics, began conducting classes and trainings in the 1930s and 1940s in Neuro-Linguistics. This was his term that he invented and used in his 1933 book. And it was Korzybski who established the foundation of NLP by writing:
“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 we reflect upon our languages, we find that at best they must be considered only as maps. A word is not the object it represents; and languages exhibit also this peculiar self-reflexiveness, that we can analyse languages by linguistic means. This self-reflexiveness of languages introduces serious complexities, which can only be solved by the theory of multi-ordinality. The disregard of these complexities is tragically disastrous in daily life and science.” (p. 58)
Now classic NLP (1972-1975) quoted Korzybski on the first part (“A map is not the territory”) but it did not go further, it did not pick up on the importance of self-reflexivity or multi-ordinality. Well, NLP did not until I did that in 1991-1992 when I began publishing articles on forgotten and unknown Meta-Model distinctions of Korzybski (later incorporated in the book that updated the Meta-Model, Communication Magic 1997) and published in Anchor Point as a series of articles (1991-1993), and in 1994 with the discovery and creation of the Meta-States Model.
Every time I’m interviewed and people ask, “How did I create the Meta-States Model? Where did it come from?” I not only tell about the modeling project on resilience, I tell about my research and modeling of Korzybski’s original Neuro-Linguistic work. In fact, it wasn’t until I went back to read the source, that I discovered that Korzybski invented the terminology we use — Neuro-Linguistics, Neuro-Semantics, Human Design Engineering, etc.
My first reading of Korzybski’s massive classic work Science and Sanity was 1989. That led first to the extending of the Meta-Model by identify several key linguistic distinctions that Korzybski introduced that had not been brought into the original Meta-Model. It led secondly to exploring the self-reflexiveness in language and as part of human consciousness which led to the Meta-States Model.
Then with all that I had been writing about the General Semantics foundations of NLP, Denis Bridoux and Philip Nolan in England asked that I would do a workshop that would do a comparative analysis of General Semantics and NLP. We titled that first workshop, The Merging of the Models. And from those workshops (which we ran three times) arose the distinctive features of Neuro-Semantics that takes NLP to the next level.
It only took a little while in my very first exposure to the writings of Alfred Korzybski to realize how much NLP arose from this source— and how much NLP had failed to recover and develop from Korzybski. Classic NLP had only take a few choice bits from Korzybski and there was much, much more about the structure of experience, language, states, systems, etc.! And I’m still convinced that there is yet more to be mined from Science and Sanity for modeling excellence in human experiences. And because of that, I have recently re-read Science and Sanity for the eighth time and sure enough, I found more things that I had missed in the previous readings.
So with this post begins a series of articles the first person to actually conduct Neuro-Linguistic Trainings— Alfred Korzybski and the rich discoveries within his work. My design in this is to identify many of the basic NLP concepts that goes back to Korzybski (to give him due credit) and to identify many other things that we have brought into Neuro-Semantics that takes NLP to a next level:
A much more thorough focus on meaning
What it means that we are a semantic class of life
The nature of semantic reactions
Seven linguistic distinctions that expand the Meta-Model
Systems thinking and mapping
Why? First, to let you know more about this foundational source of NLP and also to present Korzybski’s vision for the human condition, namely, raising the level and quality of the human experience so that we can generate continuous improvement in the psychological and social realms as we do in engineering, physics, chemistry, mathematics, etc.
Michael Hall
Neuro-Semantics homepage
