Alfred Korzybski Series #12
There’s a reason that I’ve been writing about semantic reactions. Namely, if you don’t learn how to transcend your own semantic reactions, then you will end up with a semantic block. And you don’t have to read far in Science and Sanity to know that Korzybski devoted his genius to working against and overcoming semantic disturbances, semantic reactions, and semantic pathologies. So what is a semantic disturbance?
A semantic disturbance is a disturbance in one’s nervous system, emotions, and in thinking that causes a person to be delusional about something, over-emotional about something, reactive or inappropriate in our response to something.
And just as “identifying” creates semantic reactions, so identification also leads to various delusional evaluations and “phantasies of human infancy” (p. 228). Korzybski:
“For thousands of years... humans have used a great deal of their nervous energy in worrying upon delusional questions, forced upon them by the pernicious ‘is’ of identify, such as, “What is an object?’ What is life? What is hell? What is heaven? What is space? What is time?, and an endless array of such irritants. ... The ‘is’ of identity forces us into semantic disturbances of wrong evaluation.” (Science and Sanity, p. 409)
When you identify, you “ascribe to words an entirely false value and certitude which they cannot have.” You don’t realize that your words will have different meanings to different people. When you ascribe your meanings to the words that others use, your words have become “emotionally over-loaded semantic fetishes” even as it is for the primitive person who believes in the magic of words (Ibid., p. 418).
When you “identity” one thing with another and become confused in your thinking, thinking that X is Y ... you are do not differentiating. And that is the key to sanity and mastery. The key is to differentiate. It is to abstract (classify) and thereby eliminate “allness,” and to learn to be “silent” on the un-speakable objective levels. This introduces a most beneficial neurological “delay” so that the cortex can then perform its natural function.
“Once we discriminate between the objective and the verbal levels, structure becomes the only link between the two worlds. This results in search for similarity of structure and relations...” (p. 404)
“If we identify, we do not differentiate. If we differentiate, we cannot identify.” (p. 404)
Any and every object that we refer to with our words is not words, but an un-speakable reality outside of our skin. Words are words—symbols that stand for something else. Terms are linguistic tools. But certain words and phrases are based on the identification of words with something. About these Korzybski noted this—
“[They are]... neither true nor false, but non-sense. We can make noises, but say nothing about the external world. It is easy to see that ‘absolute nothingness’ is a label for a semantic disturbance, for a verbal objectification, for a pathological state inside our skin, for a fancy, but not a symbol...” (p. 228)
Semantic disturbances, for Korzybski, show up in such states and behaviors as the following: confusion, bitterness, hopelessness, depression, infantilism, craziness, dogmatism, finalism, absolutism, hallucinations, fanaticism, regression and any other form of arrested development. Indeed, a semantic disturbance is a semantic maladjustment. It is a misusing of your neuro-semantics: it is orienting yourself by intensional definition rather than extensional. The disturbance could be a semantic havoc that simply arises when you leave out or delete characteristics.
To free yourself from such semantic blocks, here’s what to do. First, distinguish between your words about the world from the external events. This will enable you to stay conscious and mindful that you are using a symbolic tool (language) and that what you say is not the thing itself. As you do this, if a strong emotion arises within you, take a moment to stop. Then be semantically silent. Just observe the trigger and just witness your emotional response. As you allow the emotional reaction, you create a neurological delay inside yourself so that you can process that information at the next highest level in your brain’s functioning. Give yourself time for that processing and reflection. And with this, you can now consciously stop copying animals in how you use your nervous system.
This is how to correct your semantic reactions that create semantic blocks that are animalistic, unconditional responses and which limit your choices. Now you are allowing the information to be processed by the higher cortical levels of your brain.
“We see that by a simple structural re-education of the semantic reactions, which in the great mass of people are still on the level of copying animals in their nervous reactions, we powerfully affect the semantic reactions...” (Ibid., p. 29)
“The most important form of copying of animals was, and is, the copying of the comparative unconditionality of their conditional reflexes, or lower order conditionality; the animalistic identification or confusion of orders of abstractions, and the lack of consciousness of abstracting, which, while natural, normal, and necessary with animals, becomes a source of endless semantic disturbances for humans.” (Ibid., p. 36)
“Only an analysis of structure and semantic reactions, resulting in consciousness of abstracting, can free us from this unconscious copying of animals, which must factor in human nervous and semantic reactions and so vitiates the whole process.” (Ibid., p. 37)
Here’s to your full semantic awareness, your meta-state mindfulness that puts you are that choice point place where you are able to fully manage the meta-levels of your mind-body system!
L. Michael Hall, Ph.D.
