Alfred Korzybski Series #3
“Birds have wings— they fly. Animals have feet—they run. Man has the capacity of time-binding—he binds time” (Korzbyski, 1921, p. 145)
If you were to start a Neuro-Linguistic/Neuro-Semantic model, where would you start? Bandler and Grinder started with the language of two world-class communicators (therapists) who did seeming “magic” with their words and actions. They used the formulations of Chomsky’s Cognitive Transformational Grammar to model the linguistic structure of what they were doing that created such fabulous results.
So where did Korzybski start? Korzybski did not have the luxury of having in his presence living models of excellence, but he did have the results of human excellence. As a engineer he stood in amazement at the engineering marvels of human beings as seen in the buildings and bridges that they made and he began to wonder:
“How is it that with every generation, we get better and better? How is it that today we are able to begin where our parents left off? How can we begin with new inventions and technologies and not have to start from scratch? What accounts for this ever-increasing quality of excellence in the hard sciences? And conversely, how is it that we are not able to do this in the social sciences? How is it that we always seem to be starting again? What is the difference?”
From these questions, Korzybski then backed-up and asked some even more fundamental questions.
“What is humankind that we are able to keep improving our knowledge, our sciences, so that we can keep on developing generation after generation? How is it that we are able to do this and the animals are not? What enables us to not be totally dependent on the environment? What enables us to build homes and businesses so that we can influence our environment?”
Now the answer he discovered was that we are a different kind of species. This is what he figured out and wrote:
Plants are a chemical-binding class of life. They can absorb chemicals from the soil and transform those chemical into themselves and they can take certain set of chemicals and from them produce another set of chemicals.
Animals are chemical-binders also, but they are more. They are a space-binding class of life. They have mobility. They are not dependent on being in the right place where the right chemicals exist, if the context is not right, they can move to where the food and shelter and nourishment is. They bind the condition of space into themselves with their mobility. Plants cannot do this.
Humans are also both chemical-binders and space-binders and they do something else. We humans are a time-binding class of life. We are not dependent on learning everything ourselves, we can bind into ourselves the learnings of other humans and we can do that over space and over time. What the first fire-builder learned once upon a time we can bind into ourselves and don’t have to reinvent that knowledge. What Plato and Aristotle and Einstein and Steven Hawkins and any other human being has ever learned—we have the possibility of binding that learning into our own nervous system and brain.
And how? How does that work? Through symbolism. We create symbols of things using gestures and movements, then pictures of such, and then words and language so that what we think and know, what we learn—we can transfer via our languages to the minds of others. The noises we make are not just signals, that’s the nature of animal “communication.” The bark or growl is a signal of the dog’s state and “mind” and is part of the message. The bark does not stand for something other than it is. The bark is a signal of warning or threat or whatever.
By contrast, we are true symbol creators and users. We use a symbol as a communication that stands for something other than it is. Chomsky said that we are born with and wired for language acquisition. Our brain is complex enough so that we can think symbolically, we can use words and symbols that refer to other things. And with that, the whole meaning-making and organizing process occurs and that explains why sometimes a world-class therapist, leader, coach, or communicate can just say some words and one’s inner world of understanding, experiencing, feeling, and responding changes.
That is, the maps we make as map-makers distinguishes us from animals and the way their nervous systems work. We have much richer and more complex nervous systems and brain and we live in a very different world as time-binding map-making meaning-makers—we are a semantic class of life. That’s why Korzybski distinguished the different classes of life with respect to dimensionality.
Level 0: Lifeless: no life. Nothing moving, ingesting nutriments from the world, responding to stimuli, etc.
Level 1: Plants: the transformation of solar energy into organic chemical energy. Plants are living things taking, transforming, and appropriating the energies of sun, soil, and air. But they do not have the autonomous power to move about in space. They are a chemistry-binding class of life. They bind chemicals into themselves, making the new chemicals and chemistry part of their own life.
Level 2: Animals: a more dynamic class of life. The energy that animals have is kinetic —they have a remarkable freedom and power that plants do not possess. They have the freedom to move about in space. This makes these two-dimensional beings, a space-binding class of life. Animals have the autonomous power to move about in space, to creep, crawl, run, swim, or fly. They bind the value and experience of space (movement, going to where food is, etc.) into their being.
Level 3: Humans. We possess a most remarkable capacity, entirely peculiar to us, the capacity to summarize, digest, and appropriate the labors and experiences of the past. We have the capacity to use the fruits of past labors and experiences as intellectual or spiritual capital for the developments in the present, to conduct their lives in the ever increasing light of inherited wisdom. And this is what makes us a time-binding class of life.
“Man is a builder of civilization, whereas animals are not.” We are a class of life that can make the past live in the present and the present in time-to-come (the future). In this we can bind time (the value and benefit of what happens in time and over time) into ourselves so that we do not have to start over with each generation, but have the capability—ideally—to start each generation where the last generation ended.
We are time-binders If time-binding is what we do, then we need a Theory of Time-Binding. In fact, Korzybski originally intended to entitle his system Time-Binding. Then on second thought, he decided to entitle it “The Science and Art of Human Engineering.” Then someone talked him out of that and it became General Semantics.
Now you’ve heard about time-lines, the time zones that we live in and visit (past, present, and future), now you know about time-binding. You know that you have this wonderful ability to bind time into yourself—that what happened in other times in the lives of other people you can now incorporate those learnings, discoveries, insights, beliefs, etc. into yourself. So an example, what Aristotle learned in 300 BC using what he saw, heard, and felt and what he concluded in his mind and the insights he created about language, ethics, classifications, science, philosophy, etc. does not have to be rediscovered in every generation. You and I can bind into our nervous systems and mind what he learned in his time. We can start from where he left off and develop new things.
As a time-binder, “we are creators” (Korzybski). We do not just find food as do animals, we create food and shelter (p. 73). We identify seeds, understand soil, water, seasons, and so plant, nurture, and harvest. We manage our environments, we create tools, we discover the governing principles, we experiment, we keep refining our knowledge, we invent language, terminology, hypothesis, and we are never satisfied with our current level of invention. There’s always more to create.
We create cultures and civilizations. We create all of this “wealth” and this wealth creation is “the definitive mark of humanity— the power to roll up continuously the ever-increasing achievements of generation after generation endlessly.” (p. 110). And without time-binding...
“... our state would be that of aboriginal man. Civilization is a creature, its create is the time-binding power of man” (p. 123)
We bind-time by our ability to use symbols and by creating semantic contexts and environments. And this time-binding gives us exponential powers for progress, wealth, and meaning. No wonder our maps and mapping is so important. In fact, the quality of our maps as symbols determines the quality of our science and progress.
Michael Hall
Alfred Korzybski Series #1
Alfred Korzybski Series #2
Neuro-Semantics homepage
