General Semantics is an educational discipline created by Alfred Korzybski (1879–1950) during the years 1919 to 1933. General Semantics is distinct from semantics, a different subject. The name technically refers to the study of what Korzybski called "semantic reactions", or reactions of the whole human organism in its environment to some event — any event, not just perceiving a human-made symbol — in respect of that event's meaning. However, people most commonly use the name to mean the particular system of semantic reactions that Korzybski called the most useful for human survival, e.g., delayed reactions as opposed to "signal reactions" (immediate, unthinking ones).

Advocates of General Semantics view it as a form of mental hygiene that enables practitioners to avoid ideational traps built into natural language and "common sense" assumptions, thereby enabling practitioners to think more clearly and effectively. General Semantics thus shares some concerns with psychology but is not precisely a therapeutic system, being in general more focused on enhancing the abilities of normal individuals than curing pathology.

According to Korzybski, the central goal of General Semantics is to develop in its practitioners what he called "consciousness of abstracting", that is, an awareness of the map/territory distinction and of how much of reality is missed in the linguistic and other representations we use. General Semantics teaches that it is not sufficient to understand this sporadically and intellectually, but rather that we achieve full sanity only when consciousness of abstracting becomes constant and a matter of reflex.

Many General Semantics practitioners view its techniques as a kind of self-defense kit against manipulative semantic distortions routinely promulgated by advertising, politics, and religion, as well as those found in self-deception. Viewed philosophically, General Semantics is a form of applied conceptualism that emphasizes the degree to which human experience is filtered and mediated by contingent features of human sensory organs, the human nervous system, and human linguistic constructions.

The most important premise of General Semantics has been succinctly expressed as "The map is not the territory; the word is not the thing defined".[1] While Aristotle wrote that a true definition gives the essence of the thing defined (in Greek to ti ên einai, literally “the what it was to be”), general semantics denies the possibility of finding such an essence.

Other aspects of the systemThere are more elements, but these three in particular stand out:

Time-binding: The human ability to pass information and knowledge between generations at an accelerating rate. Korzybski claimed this to be a unique capacity, separating us from other animals. Animals pass knowledge, but not at an exponential rate, i.e., each generation of animals does things pretty much in the same way as the previous generation. For example, humans used to look for food, now we grow or raise it. Animals are still looking, i.e., they don't consciously grow or raise food.

Silence on the objective levels: As 'the word is not the thing it represents,' Korzybski stressed the nonverbal experiencing of our inner and outer environments. During these periods of training, one would become "outwardly and inwardly silent."

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The system advocates a general orientation by extension rather than intension, by relational facts rather than assumed properties, an attitude, regardless of how expressed in words, that, for example, George 'does things that seem foolish to me,' rather than that he is 'a fool.'

Much of General Semantics consists of training techniques and reminders intended to break mental habits that impede dealing with reality. Three of the most important reminders are expressed here by the shorthand "Null-A, Null-I, and Null-E".

Null-A is non-Aristotelianism; General Semantics stresses that reality is not adequately mapped by two-valued (Aristotelian) logics. (See also: Abductive reasoning)

Null-I is non-Identity; General Semantics teaches that no two phenomena can ever be shown identical (if only because they may differ beyond the limits of measurement) and that it is more sane to think in terms of "sufficient similarity for the purposes of the analysis we are currently performing".

Null-E is non-Euclideanism; General Semantics reminds us that the space we live in is not adequately described by Euclidean geometry.

The underlying purpose of these reminders is both to adjust our conceptual maps better to the territory of reality and to keep us reminded of the limitations of all maps. Non-Aristotelian, in this particular case, refers to the use of non-Aristotelian logic rather than the aforementioned philosophical disagreement. However, Korzybski saw these as linked. The complex nature of the objects we interact with means that reasoning from "essence" or definitions will often lead us astray. This creates uncertainty, which general semantics links to the use of non-Aristotelian logic.

Korzybski's booksKorzybski's major work was Science and Sanity, an Introduction to Non-Aristotelian Systems and General Semantics, published in 1933. His first book, in which he defined time-binding and explained its ramifications, was Manhood of Humanity, published in 1921. A third book of his writings, Alfred Korzybski Collected Writings 1920-1950, was published in 1990.

HistoryKorzybski's most well-known student was S. I. Hayakawa, who wrote Language in Thought and Action (1941), which became an alternative Book-of-the-Month Club selection. An earlier and less influential book in 1938 was The Tyranny of Words, by Stuart Chase. A current book is Drive Yourself Sane, by Susan and Bruce Kodish, published in 2000.Two major groups were formed in the United States to promote the system: the Institute of General Semantics, in 1938, and the International Society for General Semantics, in 1943. In 2003, the two groups merged into one organization, now called the Institute of General Semantics, with headquarters in Fort Worth, Texas. There are also a New York Society for General Semantics, a European Society for General Semantics, and an Australian Society for General Semantics.During the period of the 1940s and 1950s, general semantics entered the idiom of science fiction, most notably through the works of A. E. van Vogt, The World of Null-A and its sequels, and Robert A. Heinlein, Gulf. The ideas of General Semantics became a sufficiently important part of the shared intellectual toolkit of genre science fiction to merit parody by Damon Knight and

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others; they have since shown a tendency to reappear (often without attribution) in the work of more recent writers such as Samuel Delany, Suzette Haden Elgin and Robert Anton Wilson.In 1952, General Semantics was pilloried in Martin Gardner's influential book, Fads and Fallacies in the Name of Science. L. Ron Hubbard claimed that his work was based partly on general semantics, but the compliment was not returned. Writing in Etc: A Review of General Semantics, in the fourth quarter of 1951, Hayakawa said, "The lure of the pseudo-scientific vocabulary and promises of Dianetics cannot but condemn thousands who are beginning to emerge from scientific illiteracy to a continuation of their susceptibility to word-magic and semantic hash." ("Dianetics: From Science-Fiction to Fiction-Science," pp.280-293.)Under the supervision of psychiatrist Dr. Douglas M. Kelley, U.S. medics in World War II used General Semantics to treat over 7,000 cases of battlefield neuroses in the European theater. Kelley is quoted in the preface to the third edition of Science and Sanity. The development of neuro-linguistic programming owes debts to general semantics.General Semantics has continued to exert some influence in popular psychology, psychology, anthropology, linguistics, and education. Usually because of the efforts of individual teachers, it has been taught at various times and places (sometimes under other names) in high schools and universities in the U.S.; but in general, the system has had no consistent home in academia.Popular acceptance has likewise been very limited. As of 2005, the reputation of General Semantics has yet to recover from the damage Martin Gardner and L. Ron Hubbard did to it.[ citation needed ]

Connections to other disciplinesGeneral Semantics has important links with analytic philosophy and the philosophy of science; it could be characterized without too much distortion as applied analytic philosophy. The influence of Ludwig Wittgenstein and the Vienna Circle, and of early operationalists and pragmatists such as Charles Sanders Peirce, is particularly clear in general semantics' foundational ideas. Korzybski himself acknowledged many of these influences.Korzybski's concept of "silence on the objective level" and his insistence on consciousness of abstracting are parallel to some central ideas in Zen Buddhism. Korzybski is not recorded to have acknowledged any influence from this quarter, but he formulated General Semantics during the same years that the first popularizations of Zen were becoming part of the intellectual currency of educated English-speakers.Although he appears to have misunderstood or altered some of the basics of GS, L. Ron Hubbard is widely thought to have used the theory in his creation of Dianetics; this in turn introduced General Semantics to a wider audience in the early 1950s, including popular science fiction writer A. E. van Vogt, personal growth theorist Harvey Jackins and his movement Re-evaluation Counseling and movements like Gestalt therapy. The founders of these movements did not themselves credit Korzybski for their ideas.Albert Ellis, who developed Rational emotive behavior therapy, acknowledges influence from general semantics.

CriticismMartin Gardner seems to suggest that proponents of general semantics violate their own rules about withholding judgement, following the scientific method, and replacing dogmatic belief

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with various degrees of probability[ citation needed ] . Gardner also wrote of Korzybski that he "never tired of knocking over 'Aristotelian' habits of thought, in spite of the fact that what he called Aristotelian was a straw structure which bore almost no resemblance to the Greek philosopher's manner of thinking."In the preface to the first edition of his book Science and Sanity - in 1933, more than twenty years before Gardner's criticism - Korzybski wrote the following:

"The system by which the white race lives, suffers, 'prospers', starves, and dies today is not in a strict sense an aristotelian system. Aristotle had far too much of the sense of actualities for that. It represents, however, a system formulated by those who, for nearly two thousand years since Aristotle, have controlled our knowledge and methods of orientations, and who, for purposes of their own, selected what today appears as the worst from Aristotle and the worst from Plato and, with their own additions, imposed this composite system upon us. In this they were greatly aided by the structure of language and psycho-logical habits, which from the primitive down to this very day have affected all of us consciously or unconsciously, and have introduced serious difficulties even in science and in mathematics."

The beginning of Chapter VII quotes A.N. Whitehead as saying,...the subject-predicate habits of thought...had been impressed on the European mind by the overemphasis on Aristotle's logic during the long medieval period. In reference to this twist of mind, probably Aristotle was not an Aristotelian.

andThe evil produced by the Aristotelian 'primary substance' is exactly this habit of metaphysical emphasis upon the 'subject-predicate' form of proposition.

Korzybski goes on to say, in the third paragraph of that chapter, that Aristotlewas not only a most gifted man, but who, also, because of the character of his work, has influenced perhaps the largest number of people ever influenced by a single man; and so his work has undergone a most marked elaboration. Because of this, his name, in this book, will usually stand for the body of doctrines known as aristotelianism...Some of the statements may not be true about the founder of the school; yet they remain true about the school.

In the preface to the second edition, having compared his system to non-Newtonian physics and non-Euclidean geometry, Korzybski also writes:

I must stress that as the older systems are only special limitations of the new more general 'non' systems (see p.97), it would be incorrect to interpret a 'non' system as an 'anti' system.

In response to the charge of unscientific behavior, general-semanticists like Bruce Kodish and Kenneth G. Johnson point to various scientific studies that they say appear to support Korzybski's claims.Martin Gardner and others cite an essay in Max Black's Language and Philosophy as the "definitive critique of general semantics". However, Kodish and others argue that Black's criticisms stem from misunderstandings of Science and Sanity (see references with external link to Kodish).Black repeats the charge that Korzybski misrepresents Aristotle. He also seems to argue that Korzybski cannot prove the existence of an external world. A symbol of this external "event" or "scientific object" appears in the Structural Differential. Black views this as a contradiction, since Korzybski would say that our statements about this object derive in part from our nervous

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systems. Finally, Black claims "Korzybski holds the view that abstraction consists in 'leaving out details'," (p. 243) and says he ignores the brain's active role. Kodish replies that we have good reason to focus on this "leaving out", and that Black mistakes a practical concern for a definition.Korzybski felt that his critics often confused their characterizations of what he said with what he said. His response to them was: "I said what I said. I did not say what I did not say."

See also The map is not the territory Alfred Korzybski Institute of General Semantics Robert Pula Sanity Structural differential Alfred Korzybski Memorial Lecture Cognitive science E-Prime Language and thought List of NLP topics Sapir-Whorf hypothesis Gestalt Therapy Cognitive therapy Cognitive activism

Notes1. ̂ For example, Hayakawa, S.I., Language in Thought and Action, Harcourt, Brace and

Company, (New York), 1949, p.31: The symbol is NOT the thing symbolized; the word is NOT the thing; the map is NOT the territory it stands for.

References Science and Sanity An Introduction to Non-Aristotelian Systems and General Semantics,

Alfred Korzybski, Preface by Robert P. Pula, Institute of General Semantics, 1994, hardcover, 5th edition, ISBN 0-937298-01-8 (An online version is available here).

"The Role of Language in the Perceptual Processes," Alfred Korzybski's 1950 article in Perception: An Approach to Personality, edited by Robert R. Blake and Glenn V. Ramsey. Copyright 1951, The Ronald Press Company, New York. online here.

The Tyranny of Words by Stuart Chase, 1938 (later reprints). Probably the first popularization of Korzybski, pre-dating Hayakawa's first edition of Language in Action.

The art of awareness; a textbook on general semantics by J. Samuel Bois, Dubuque, Iowa: W.C. Brown Co., 1966.

Language in Thought and Action: Fifth Edition, S. I. Hayakawa and Alan R. Hayakawa, Harcourt, ISBN 0-15-648240-1.

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Symbol, status, and personality by S.I. Hayakawa, New York: Harcourt, Brace and World, 1963.

Language habits in human affairs; an introduction to General Semantics by Irving J. Lee, Harper and Brothers, 1941. Still in print from the Institute of General Semantics. On a similar level to Hayakawa.

The language of wisdom and folly; background readings in semantics edited by Irving J. Lee, Harper and Row, 1949. Was in print (ca. 2000) from the International Society of General Semantics -- now merged with the Institute of General Semantics. A selection of essays and short excerpts from different authors on linguistic themes emphasized by General Semantics -- without reference to Korzybski, except for an essay by him.

Mathsemantics: making numbers talk sense by Edward MacNeal, HarperCollins, 1994. Penguin paperback 1995. Explicit General Semantics combined with numeracy education (along the lines of John Allen Paulos's books) and simple statistical and mathematical modelling, influenced by MacNeal's work as an airline transportation consultant. Discusses the fallacy of Single Instance thinking in statistical situations.

Crazy Talk, Stupid Talk: how we defeat ourselves by the way we talk and what to do about it by Neil Postman, Delacorte Press, 1976. All of Postman's books are informed by his study of General Semantics (Postman was editor of ETC. from 1976 to 1986) but this book is his most explicit and detailed commentary on the use and misuse of language as a tool for thought.

Operational philosophy: integrating knowledge and action by Anatol Rapoport, New York: Wiley (1953,1965).

Semantics by Anatol Rapoport, Crowell, 1975. Both general semantics along the lines of Hayakawa, Lee, and Postman and more technical (mathematical and philosophical) material. A valuable survey. Rapoport's autobiography Certainties and Doubts : A Philosophy of Life (Black Rose Books, 2000) gives some of the history of the General Semantics movement as he saw it.

Hayakawa's critique of Dianetics here The World of Null-A and The Pawns of Null-A (also published as The Players of Null-A)

by A. E. van Vogt, science fiction novels which take a fanciful approach on how the non-Aristotelian discipline of general semantics might affect a society.

Assignment in Eternity , (1942), specifically the story "Gulf," is a representative example of the influence of General Semantics in the work of Robert A. Heinlein. The homo novi or "supermen" of the story express recognizably Korzybskian ideas about the relationship between language and thought.

Fads and Fallacies in the Name of Science . by Martin Gardner, New York: Dover Publications, 1957.

A recent critique of Martin Gardner, "In the Name of Skepticism: Martin Gardner's Misrepresentations of General Semantics," by Bruce I. Kodish, appeared in General Semantics Bulletin, Number 71, 2004, pp. 50-63.

Levels of Knowing and Existence: Studies in General Semantics, by Harry L. Weinberg, Harper and Row, 1959, hardcover, 274 pages.

ETC.: A Review of General Semantics, journal, Institute of General Semantics. See a compendium of ETC articles here.

People in Quandries: the semantics of personal adjustment by Wendell Johnson, 1946 -- still in print from the Institute of General Semantics. Insightful book about the application

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of General Semantics to psychotherapy; was an acknowledged influence on Richard Bandler and John Grinder in their formulation of Neuro-Linguistic Programming.

Your Most Enchanted Listener by Wendell Johnson, Harper, 1956. Your most enchanted listener is yourself, of course. Similar material as in People in Quandries but considerably briefer.

Living With Change, Wendell Johnson, Harper Collins, 1972. Language and Philosophy: Studies in Method, Max Black, Cornell UP, 1949. "Contra Max Black: An Examination of 'The Definitive Critique' of General-Semantics"

by Bruce I. Kodish closely examines Black's writing on general semantics and is available in the articles section of http://www.driveyourselfsane.com.

Language Revision by Deletion of Absolutisms , by Allen Walker Read, 1984. a bibliography of general semantics papers . The Original Structural Differential . The Structural Differential . A Discussion of Korzybski's ethics, with emphasis on time-binding .

Related Reading Trance-Formations: Neuro-Linguistic Programming and the Structure of Hypnosis by

Richard Bandler and John Grinder, (1981). One of the important principles -- also widely used in political propaganda -- discussed in this book is that trance induction uses a language of pure process and lets the listener fill in all the specific content from their own personal experience. E.g. the hypnotist might say "imagine you are sitting in a very comfortable chair in a room painted your favorite color" but not "imagine you are sitting in a very comfortable chair in a room painted red, your favorite color" because then the listener might think "wait a second, red is not my favorite color."

The work of the scholar of political communication Murray Edelman (1919-2001), starting with his seminal book The Symbolic Uses of Politics (1964), continuing with Politics as symbolic action: mass arousal and quiescience (1971), Political Language: Words that succeed and policies that fail (1977), Constructing the Political Spectacle (1988) and ending with his last book The Politics of Misinformation (2001) can be viewed as an exploration of the deliberate manipulation and obfuscation of the map-territory distinction for political purposes.

Logic and contemporary rhetoric: the use of reason in everyday life by Howard Kahane (d. 2001). (Wadsworth: First edition 1971, sixth edition 1992, tenth edition 2005 with Nancy Cavender.) Highly readable guide to the rhetoric of clear thinking, frequently updated with examples of the opposite drawn from contemporary U.S. media sources.

Doing Physics : how physicists take hold of the world by Martin H. Krieger, Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1992. A "cultural phenomenology of doing physics." The General Semantics connection is the relation to Korzybski's original motivation of trying to identify key features of the successes of mathematics and the physical sciences that could be extended into everyday thinking and social organization.

Metaphors We Live By by George Lakoff and Mark Johnson, (1980). Philosophy in the flesh: the embodied mind and its challenge to Western thought by

George Lakoff and Mark Johnson, (1997).

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The Art of Asking Questions by Stanley L. Payne, (1951) This book is a short handbook-style discussion of how the honest pollster should ask questions to find out what people actually think without leading them, but the same information could be used to slant a poll to get a predetermined answer. Payne notes that the effect of asking a question in different ways or in different contexts can be much larger than the effect of sampling bias, which is the error estimate usually given for a poll. E.g. (from the book) if you ask people "should government go into debt?" the majority will answer "No", but if you ask "Corporations have the right to issue bonds. Should governments also have the right to issue bonds?" the majority will answer "Yes".

External links Korzybski's General Semantics New York Society for General Semantics Institute of General Semantics European Society For General Semantics Australian Society for General Semantics -- link currently not working from here, but site

can be accessed via a search engine such as Google for the exact name. Coro Foundation (Leadership training programs based on General Semantics. Notables

include Gene Siskel, Senator Dianne Feinstein, Congressman Jerry Lewis) Theoretical foundations of general semantics General Semantics: A Tutorial Dave's Web Site Europe

Retrieved from "http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/General_Semantics"

The Future of Consciousness Part 1 of 7Lance StrateApril 29, 2008An address delivered at an Institute of General Semantics symposium at the American Museum of Natural History in New York City, April 23, 2005

Part 1 starts here: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pMPfQ59QfKwParts 2 - 7http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MBXb26MBGmU&feature=relatedhttp://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NgbWnoFZ10g&feature=relatedhttp://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Q-JQ1SQ5O7Q&feature=relatedhttp://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oKga0FJRaME&feature=relatedhttp://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Hbz6E_DxV7U&feature=relatedhttp://www.youtube.com/watch?v=COfAYdw0e_Y&feature=related

On Human Evaluation Part 1 of 7bhimplasi August 22, 2008How to think properly.

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http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=n5v-WOLVhzk

Language: Mother of All Things (Dewey, Korzybski, Wilden, Holenstein)Professoranton - June 08, 2009For more go to: http://coreyanton.blogspot.... A short rant on General Semantics, existential and semiotic theory.http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QnAyDilvCMU

Corey Anton's Philosophy, Media Ecology and Juggling ChannelProfessoranton's Channelhttp://www.youtube.com/user/Professoranton

Alfred Korzybski and Gestalt Therapy

Alfred Habdank Skarbek Korzybski1879-1950

Perhaps the most overlooked theoretical influence on Frederick Perls and Paul Goodman, who originally articulated Gestalt therapy theory, was Alfred Korzybski, the primary thinker behind the general semantics movement. Gestalt therapy's "principle of the now" and it's focus on experience and the precision of language can be directly traced to these "principles of general semantics:"

1. A map is not the territory.2. A map does not represent all of a territory.

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3. A map is self-reflexive in the sense that an 'ideal' map would include a map of the map, etc., indefinitely.

Applied to daily life and language:

1. A word is not what it represents.2. A word does not represent all of the 'facts', etc.3. Language is self-reflexive in the sense that in language we can speak about language.

Erving Polster, in "A Contemporary Psychotherapy" (Psychotherapy: Theory, Research and Practice, 1966), identifies the general semantics movement as one of the distinct movements that made the here-and-now experience important in psychotherapy before it was given crucial emphasis by the existentialists.

"Korzybski's published works, including Science and Sanity, Manhood of Humanity, and Collected Writings, are available on the web through the Institute of General Semantics , or contact them via email .Here, through the courtesy of the Institute of General Semantics, is an excellent overview of his work and an article from Collected Writings."

Joe WysongEditor

The Gestalt Journal

http://www.gestalt.org/alfred.htm

GENERAL SEMANTICS Toward a new general system of evaluation

and predictability in solving human problems Alfred Korzybski

Author of Manhood of Humanity and Science and Sanity

Paper from Alfred Korzybski: Collected Writings 1920-1950 © I.G.S. Englewood, New-Jersey

INSTITUTE OF GENERAL SEMANTICSEnglewood, New-Jersey, USA

Permission is hereby granted to share electronic and hard copy versions of this text with individuals under circumstances in which no direct payment is made by those to whom the text is given for the text itself, the volume or other medium or online service in which it is included, tuition or other payment for the course or seminar, and so forth. This notice must remain a part of the text. Any other use is reserved to the Institute of General Semantics and/or the author and requires prior permission. For further information, e-mail the Institute or write: The Institute of General Semantics, 163 Engle Street, #4B, Englewood, NJ 07631, USA.

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GENERAL SEMANTICS. The term general semantics originated with Alfred Korzybski in 1933 as the name for a general theory of evaluation, which in application turned out to be an empirical science, giving methods for general human adjustment in our private, public, and professional lives. His study has led ultimately to the formulation of a new system, with general semantics as its modus operandi. This theory was first presented in his Science and Sanity: An Introduction to Non-aristotelian Systems and General Semantics. What Makes Humans Human? After World War I Korzybski and others began to analyze the precipitating factors of such human disasters, realizing that some fundamental ideational revisions were due. In investigating the problems of 'human nature', he found it unavoidable to revise the old notions about humans, derived from primitives and codified by the ancient Greeks, and made a new, functional definition of 'man' from an engineering, historical, and epistemological point of view, with far-reaching implications. [For explanation of use of single quotes see below under Extensional Devices.] It became necessary to investigate for the first time potentialities of humans, not blindly depending on static data of statistical records of past human performances, known today to be an unreliable or even fallacious method of approach. This was the thesis of Korzybski's first book, Manhood of Humanity: The Science and Art of Human Engineering (1921). He by-passed the mythological dogmas and enquired, “What is the unique characteristic of humans which makes them human?” He observed anew that each human generation has the potential capacity, unlike animals, to start where former generations left off. He analyzed the neurological and socio-cultural processes by which men can create, preserve, and transmit what they have learned individually to future generations. This unique neurological capacity he called time-binding. Human Engineering. The structure of our forms of representation (languages, etc.) was found to be of pivotal importance in the history of human cultures. With an engineering practical outlook, Korzybski had questioned: “Why is it that structures built by engineers do not, as a rule collapse, or if they do, then the physico-mathematical or other evaluational errors are easily discovered; yet social, economic, political, etc., systems, also man-made, do sporadically collapse in the forms of wars, revolutions, financial depressions, unemployment, etc.?” This led to the question: “What is it that engineers do neurologically when they build bridges, etc.?” The answer was: “They use a special, narrow but 'perfect' language called mathematics, which is similar in structure to the facts they deal with, and which therefore yields predictable empirical results.” He then investigated what the builders of social, economic, political, and other insecure human structures do neurologically, and found that they employ languages (i.e., forms of representation) which are not similar in structure to the facts of science and life as known today. Consequently their results are unpredictable and disasters follow. Though the main facts of history are known, solutions of human problems have been blocked by pre-scientific, mythological, metaphysical dogmas which have prevented and continue to prevent the possibility of tracing fundamental errors.

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Origin of General Semantics. Clearly a solution required the formulation of a general system, based on physico-mathematical methods of order, relation, etc., which would make possible proper evaluations and therefore predictability. The first step was to revise the primitive outlook that regarded humans as merely biological organisms on the level of animals rather than as more complex psycho-biological organisms which produce their own socio-cultural environments, sciences, civilizations, etc. Even the most 'intelligent' ape never achieved that. The next step was a methodological integration of what was already known, and the production of general teachable formulations to handle the increasingly numerous and complex factors in human psycho-biological inter-relationships today. To cope with such problems required a consideration of neuro-linguistic and neuro-semantic environments as environment. The word semantics was introduced into linguistic literature by Michel Bréal, translated from the French in 1897. It is derived from the Greek semainein (“to mean, to signify”) and Bréal stressed meaning on the verbal level. Lady Welby, a contemporary, introduced a theory of Significs, a more organismal evaluation of Bréal's “meaning.” Korzybski, in 1933, called his theory “general semantics” because it deals with the nervous reactions of the human organism-as-a-whole-in-environments, and is much more general and organismally fundamental than the “meanings” of words as such, or Significs. It is called “non-aristotelian” because, although it includes the still prevailing aristotelian system as a special case, it is a wider, more general formulation to fit the world and 'human nature' as we know it today rather than as Aristotle knew it c. 350 BC. The aristotelian assumptions influenced the euclidean system, and both underlie the later newtonian system. The first non-aristotelian system takes into account newly discovered complexities in all fields, and parallels and is interdependent methodologically with the new non-euclidean and non-newtonian developments in mathematics and mathematical physics, which made possible even the release of nuclear energy, as in the atomic bombs. This revised and broadened general outlook makes necessary profound revisions in educational methods, requires de-departmentalization of education, etc., which could be accomplished only after the exact sciences and general human orientations had been unified through an adequate methodological synthesis. Such unification, since it was based on modern scientific methods (physico-mathematical) and the foundations of mathematics incorporated simple workable, elementary techniques which could be applied in any human endeavor, and even to the education of small children.

PSYCHO-LOGICAL MECHANISMS IN HUMAN BEHAVIOR In the formulation of this synthesis it became obvious that to understand the working of the

human nervous system as-a-whole, it was necessary to extract the method of nervous functioning as exemplified by (1) the best product of human behavior (mathematics, etc.), and (2) the worst (psychiatric disorders). It was found that at both extremes the psycho-logical mechanisms were similar, differing not in kind, but in degree, and that the reactions of most people are somewhere

in between. Space-Time Disorientation in Psychiatric Disorders. General observations of daily human reactions demonstrate that many 'normal' persons are disoriented in space-time in varying degrees. Patients in psychiatric hospitals often show acute

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disorientations as to “who,” “where,” and “when.” In fact, across the world in such hospitals those are the first questions which are asked of the incoming patients, and their reactions to them are in many ways indicative of the seriousness of their illness. Even average 'normal' individuals often react as if certain situations, happenings, etc., here (say, Chicago) and now (say, 1947) are identical in value with certain incidents, situations, happenings, etc., that occurred somewhere else (say, Seattle) some years ago (say, 1926). Those persons remain unconscious of, and so unable to deal with, these fundamental differences in space-time their reactions continuing on the infantile level, and hence are necessarily maladjusted to their present status (of 1947). Physicians familiar with general semantics have often treated such cases successfully, applying these new extensional methods in psycho-therapy to eliminate identification of the past with the present, etc., thus re-orienting the individual in space-time. Many observations indicate that techniques for general orientation based on physico-mathematical space-time ordering, etc., simplify understanding of the most complex human problems. At the same time they point the way to neuro-preventive educational measures against serious socio-cultural maladjustments and indicate constructive possibilities for a new applied anthropology, and a new human ecology which takes into consideration our neuro-semantic and neuro-linguistic environments as environment. Space-Time Orientation in Mathematics. The study of mathematics as a form of neuro-linguistic reactions led to a new definition of number in terms of human behavior and relations which applies equally to the verbal and non-verbal levels. This new definition clears up the problems of mathematical infinity, reveals the fictitious character of transfinite numbers, etc. Until 1933 no definition of number had been produced which would explain the nature of number, measurement, etc., and would account for the unique validity and high degree of predictability of results arrived at through mathematical methods. The old definition of number in terms of “class of classes” gave results eventuallv in terms of “class of classes,” which explained nothing. The new definition of number as unique specific asymmetrical relations produced solutions in terms of those relations, giving structure. Since structure is known to be the only content of human knowledge, and since the non-aristotelian science of mathematics deals only with relation and so structure, the old mystery of “why mathematics and measurement?” is answered; the unique validity of mathematical methods is accounted for, whether applied to mathematics, other sciences, or human problems of living.

PREMISES OF GENERAL SEMANTICS. The premises of the non-aristotelian system can be given by the simple analogy of the relation of

a map to the territory: 2. A map is not the territory. 3. A map does not represent all of a territory. 4. A map is self-reflexive in the sense that an 'ideal' map would include a map of the map,

etc., indefinitely. Applied to daily life and language:

1. A word is not what it represents. 2. A word does not represent all of the 'facts', etc. 3. Language is self-reflexive in the sense that in language we can speak about language.

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Our habitual reactions today, however, are still based on primitive, pre-scientific, unconscious assumptions, which in action mostly violate the first two premises and disregard the third. Mathematics and general semantics are the only exceptions. Self-Reflexiveness. The third premise stemmed from the application to everyday life of the extremely important work of Bertrand Russell, who gave academic prominence to self-reflexiveness in his attempt to solve mathematical self-contradictions by his theory of mathematical types. We may speak (verbalize) about “a proposition about all propositions,” but in actuality we cannot make a proposition about all propositions, since in doing so we are in fact producing a new proposition, and thus we run into stultifying self-contradictions. Russell rightly called the products of these pathological verbal performances “illegitimate totalities.” By such unconscious over-generalizations we humans have been living, not very successfully. Applied by Korzybski to our everyday lives, self-reflexiveness introduced neuro-linguistic factors important for human adjustment and maturity; i.e., the principles of different orders of abstractions, multiordinality, the circularity of human knowledge, second-order reactions, delay of reactions by space-time ordering, thalamo-cortical integration, etc. Consciousness of Abstracting. These principles in turn led to a general consciousness of abstracting as the necessary basis for the achievement of socio-cultural maturity. This produced, among others, means of eliminating active false knowledge, which is known to breed maladjustments. At the same time it was discovered that mere passive ignorance in humans often is impossible, but becomes active inferential knowledge, which may dogmatically ascribe some fictitious 'cause' for observed 'effects'the mechanism of primitive mythologies. Inferential knowledge, however, when consciously accepted as inferential, forms the hypothetical knowledge of modern science and ceases to be a dogma.

EXTENSIONAL DEVICES To achieve the coveted consciousness of abstracting, more appropriate evaluations, etc.,

techniques were taken directly from modern physico-mathematical methods, the use of which has been found empirically effective and of most serious preventive value, particularly on the level of children's education. Korzybski calls the following expediencies extensional devices: Indexes to train us in consciousness of differences in similarities, and similarities in

differences, such as Smith1, Smith2, etc. Chain-indexes to indicate interconnections of happenings in space-time, where a 'cause'

may have a multiplicity of 'effects', which in turn become 'causes', introducing also . environmental factors, etc. For instance, Chair1-1 [NOTE, read chair “one” “one”] in a dry attic as different from Chair1-2 in a damp cellar, or a single happening to an individual in childhood which may color his reactions (chain-reactions) for the rest of his life, etc. Chain-indexes also convey the mechanisms of chain-reactions, which operate generally in this world, life, and the immensely complex human socio-cultural environment, included.

Dates to give a physico-mathematical orientation in a space-time world of processes. Et cetera (etc., which can be abbreviated to double punctuation, such as ., or .; or .:) to

remind us permanently of the second premise “not all”to train us in a consciousness of

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characteristics left out; and to remind us indirectly of the first premise “is not”to develop flexibility and a greater degree of conditionality in our semantic reactions.

Quotes to forewarn us that elementalistic or metaphysical terms are not to be trusted and that speculations based on them are misleading. [In this article single quotes are used for this purpose.]

Hyphens to remind us of the complexities of interrelatedness in this world. New Structural Implications of the Hyphen. The hyphen, representing the new structural implications: (1) In space-time revolutionized physics, transformed our whole world-outlook, and became the foundation of non-newtonian systems; (2) In psycho-biological marks sharply the difference between animals and humans which became the basis of the present non-aristotelian system. (3) In psycho-somatic is slowly transforming medical understanding, practice, etc. (4) In socio-cultural indicates the need for a new applied anthropology, human ecology, etc. (5) In neuro-linguistic and neuro-semantic emphasizes that we are not dealing with mere verbalism but with living human reactions. Etc., etc. Oblivious of the structural implications, departmentalized specialists still isolate themselves on either side of the hyphen, as if their specialties were actually separate entities. By eliminating the structural hyphen from such terms as “psycho-biological” (i.e., “psychobiological”) and “psycho-somatic” etc., the public is led to believe these issues are simple, while complexities today have increased beyond even professional understanding. In certain of the sciences solutions have already been found (which led to the methodological problems generalized in the non-aristotelian revision) and indicated often by the hyphen, while in others the painful process of re-examination is still going on. Physics, for example, has passed from the elementalistic, split, 'absolute space' and 'absolute time' formulations of Aristotle, Euclid, and Newton to the non-elementalistic integrated space-time of Einstein-Minkowski, and tremendous advances have followed. In medical science, however, consideration of psycho-biological and psycho-somatic problems is only just beginning, requiring a complete re-evaluation of existing disciplines.

APPLICATIONS OF THE FORMULATIONS The formulations in the first non-aristotelian system have crystallized the historical, scientific,

and epistemological trends accumulating for over two thousand years, giving methods for teaching and general application, thus providing maximum effectiveness for the fuller

development of human potentialities and so the maturity of mankind. Scientific method (1947) must be general and apply to any phase of life or science.

Only a few examples of the many different areas in which general semantics has already proved useful can be mentioned here. (1) The foundations of mathematics and so methods of teaching have been revised. (2) The U.S. Senate Naval Affairs Committee discussed the new methods in connection with: (a) the problem of national scientific research; (b) a scientific evaluation of the merger of the War and Navy departments; and (c) the training of naval officers, wherein Capt. J. A. Saunders (Ret.) urged that all Navy officers should be trained in the new methods. Applications have also been made in: (3) presentations and arguments in law courts;

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(4) alleviation of combat exhaustion in the European theater of war, applied by Lt. Col. Douglas M. Kelley, M.C., to over 7,000 cases; (5) diagnoses in psycho-somatic medicine, and as an aid in counseling and psychotherapy, individually or in groups; (6) treatment of stuttering; (7) helping reading difficulties; (8) eliminating stage fright. Etc., etc. Perhaps most importantly, applications have been made in the methods and contents of education on every level, from the nursery through college and university. If this partial list seems formidable, it should be remembered that a scientific methodology for optimum usefulness must necessarily be universal in scope.

ALFRED KORZYBSKI

BIBLIOGRAPHY A. Korzybski, Manhood of Humanity: The Science and Art of Human Engineering (1921, 1947)C. J. Keyser, “Korzybski's Concept of Man”, Mathematical Philosophy (1922, 1946)A. Korzybski, Science and Sanity : An Introduction to Non-aristotelian Systems and General Semantics (1933, 1947)S. I. Hayakawa, Language in Action (1939, 1941)I. J. Lee, Language Habits in Human Affairs : An Introduction to General Semantics (1941, 1946)M. Kendig, ed., Papers from the Second American Congress on General Semantics (1943)E. Murray, The Speech Personality (1944)W. B. Paul, F. Sorenson et E. Murray, “A Functional Core for the Basic Communications Course”, Quart. Jour. Speech (Apr. 1946)W. Johnson, People in Quandaries : The Semantics of Personal Adjustment (1946)

http://www.gestalt.org/semantic.htm

The map is not the territoryIn 1933 Alfred Korzybski, a Polish Count and mathematician, published ‘Science and Sanity’ a thesis that discussed how we experience the world through our senses and use this external datum to build internal representations of the world within our brain. The thesis used the term ‘The Map Is Not the Territory’ to explain how the real world and the internalised perception are different."A map is not the territory it represents, but if correct, it has a similar structure to the territory, which accounts for its usefulness". What this means is that our perception of reality is not reality itself but our own version of it, or our "map".Alfred KorzybskiAnyone that has used a road map as a navigational aid can tell you that the map offers an incomplete picture of the sights and sounds encountered on a journey. The map is not the territory.

When Korzybski wrote 'A map is not the territory it represents' he wasn't referring to simple road

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maps, rather, he was addressing how we all maintain our own individual map of reality and how that map affects the words we use to communicate our thoughts with one another.

We are all in a state of ever flux (constant change and growth)Our values and beliefs are in constant flux, updated in real time by a constant and sometimes chaotic flow of new information and data. This information is then filtered and distorted into manageable maps that make sense in the context of our individual experiences. From the traumatic events of Nine Eleven or the wonderful experience of becoming a parent for the first time, it seems our beliefs and values are built on sand.We experience the world through our five senses, sight, hearing, touch smell and taste (the territory) and build an internal representation of this external input in our brain (the map). In the process of building the map we filter information based on our values, beliefs, memories, culture and social background. Furthermore, although we all share a similar neurological structure, each of us is an original ‘one off’ thus no two people will operate from the same map. This creates an imbalance between external world events and our own maps and also between our maps and those of others. For example two people who witness the exact same crime may later give entirely different statements to the authorities. This is because both operate from a unique map of the world coloured and shaped by their own internal filters and neurology.

a map is simply an abstraction of the territory our understanding of external events is incomplete people can view external events in different ways because they operate from different

maps

Understand and respect the map of othersYour map represents your reality or perception of the world and controls the actions you take and the way you communicate with others. If a co-worker, for example, operates from a map that is significantly different to yours it might be difficult to communicate or build rapport with this person. Their map may be causing them to respond according to values, beliefs, etc. which may be at odds to yours.Taking time to understand another person's map lets you:

see the world though their eyes appreciate their point of view relate to them accurately communicate with them effectively

Thus when someone’s map does not make immediate sense to you a little understanding and tolerance can go a long way to winning new friends and can often be an enriching experience that expands your own map.

Common Ground We all work from many inter-connected maps; some we share as groups including:

Culture Religion Language

Although these shared map regions allow us to interact with one another to truly communicate and build rapport a with someone a deeper understanding their Values and Beliefs is necessary.

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Imposing your map on othersThis complex network of maps means that each of us develops a unique and highly personalised perception of the world. It is also forms the thinking behind reality TV shows like Big Brother. By inviting people with openly conflicting maps, Jade Goody -Shilpa Shetty for example, to spend time in close proximity, drama and incident is guaranteed.The Map Is Not the Territory and other NLP Presuppositions form part of our NLP Practitioner Training Course.

http://www.nlptrainingscotland.net/articles/map-territory.php

A READER'S TREASURY:

Science and Sanity An Introduction to Non-Aristotelian Systems and General

Semantics Chapter: Evolution of Consciousness

by Alfred Korzybski

Published by Institute of General Semantics/CN in 1973Book Review by Bobby Matherne ©2007

"The map is not the territory." That was my first introduction to the work of Count Alfred O. Korzybski. I heard those words in a Bandler and Grinder(1) Seminar in 1977 and borrowed a copy of this landmark book, his major opus, first published in 1933 from my friend Brian Kelley. He had been directed to it by our mutual metaphysics teacher, Alex Keller, some years earlier. I dug into the text of this 806 page book which had 657 references and 90 pages of Preface and Introductions. Suddenly the basis for the works of Samuel Bois, Kenneth S. Keyes, and S. I. Hayakawa began to make new sense for me - all these

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writers had studied under Korzybski. They were enriching his fundamental work and making it palatable to the general public.

Korzybski's work created the field of General Semantics, which became known as a science and was taught in colleges and universities. Somehow I had missed it, up until then. I was determined to work my way through this book to make up for lost time and work I did: it took me an entire year of study to get through this dense book — dense in the compression of ideas in it. So dense that many days I was only able to read three or four pages and then had to stop because my brain was so full of ideas that I had to pause for 24 hours for them to be assimilated fully before I could proceed. And each day I applied those ideas and processes to as many situations as came up in my life during that day. It was, rightly understood, a year long seminar in General Semantics for me. In this review I hope to give you, my dear Readers, a taste of that seminar so that the flavor of this important science can remain with you and bring some sanity into the science that abounds all around and inside of you from now on.

One of the rare occasions we get to read an author talking about the book we are reading is in Prefaces to Second and Third Editions. After reading this book, I read the precursor to it, a smaller book he wrote in 1921 entitled, "Manhood of Humanity," in which Korzybski talked about the process of "time binding."

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Time binding was to Korzybski like a single string on a guitar — he used it as the basis of the music he made in all of his works. "Science and Sanity" was a symphony he composed for his one-string guitar. In his Preface to the Third Edition (1948), he talks about this book from the perspective of 15 years after its publication:

[page xx] The origin of this work was a new functional definition of 'man', as formulated in 1921, based on an analysis of uniquely human potentialities; namely, that each generation may begin where the former left off. This characteristic I called the 'time-binding' capacity. Here the reactions of humans are not split verbally and elementalistically into separate 'body', 'mind', 'emotions', 'intellect', 'intuitions', etc., but are treated from an organism-as-a-whole-in-an-environment (external and internal) point of view. This parallels the Einstein-Minkowski space-time integration in physics, and both are necessitated by the modern evolution of sciences.

His new definition of what it means to be a human being pinpointed an aspect of humanity that the evolutionists, who were apt to call us "higher apes," had completely glossed over in their intense concern with the bones and flesh aspect of evolution, i.e., our

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posture, our brain size, our skull shapes, etc. What Korzybski stressed in his 1921 work was a process that humans had and that animals did not possess, time binding. It is the process of time binding that allows each generation to see further because they "stand on the shoulders" of the previous generation.

With this present book, Korzybski sought to create the foundation for a "science of man" by linking science and sanity in a "structurally non-aristotelian methodology." To achieve that he added to the process of time-binding, the "general consciousness of abstracting", which he calls on page xxi, "the thesis of this book". He quotes Whitehead to support his claim of the importance of understanding the process of abstracting:

[page xxi] 'A civilisation that cannot burst through its current abstractions is doomed to sterility after a very limited period of progress.'

This is a remarkable statement. If one applies it to the field of art, one can see representations of art's current abstractions embodied in the visual arts of painting and sculpture. These abstractions show themselves in the way current paintings are made based upon the original works of Rembrandt, Picasso, Monet, or Van Gogh. When an innovator in art comes along to create a new abstraction, such as Mondrian, Pollock, or Warhol, a period of exciting innovation proceeds for a limited period of time. I have described this process in

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the field of art in my essay, Art is the Process of Destruction, which essay would likely have been impossible but for the year I spent working through this book which first made me aware of the process of abstraction.

To understand the non-Aristotelian systems that Korzybski develops in this work, we first need a priming on the Aristotelian system that pervades our current level of thinking, teaching, and abstracting. Simply put the Aristotelian system is two-valued: either-or, yes-no, day-night, life-death, black-white, etc. The prevalence of the two-valued system of thinking puzzled Korzybski for many years, he says, until he "made the obvious 'discovery' that our relations to the world outside and inside our skins often happen to be, on the gross level, two-valued." But he added something more to the Aristotelian two-valued system, and that something more makes all the difference in the world to what it means to be a living human being:

[page xxi] In living, many issues are not so sharp, and therefore a system which posits the general sharpness of 'either-or' , and so objectifies 'kind', is unduly limited; it must be revised and made more flexible in terms of 'degree'. This requires a physico-mathematical 'way of thinking' which a non-aristotelian system supplies.

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While Korzybski developed his work independently of semantics or semiotics, he admits that, as his work progressed, it became obvious to him that "a theory of meaning" was impossible. As such, he thought it necessary to explain the derivation of the name "General Semantics" for his corpus of work.

[page xxii] The original manuscript did not contain the word 'semantics' or 'semantic', but when I had to select some terms, from a time-binding point of view and in consideration of the efforts of others, I introduced the term 'General Semantics' for the modus operandi of this first non-aristotelian system. This seemed appropriate for historical continuity. A theory of evaluation appeared to follow naturally in an evolutionary sense from 1) 'meaning to' to 2) 'significance' to 3) evaluation. General Semantics turned out to be an empirical natural science of non-elementalistic evaluation, which takes into account the living individual, not divorcing him from his reactions altogether, nor from his neuro-linguistic and neuro-semantic environments, but allocating him a plenum of some values, no matter what.

From this passage in his Introduction to the Second Edition (1941) one can understand the paradox faced

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by an author who develops a truly unique science — to communicate to the average intelligent reader, and also to the specialists in the very fields that are impacted by the new science. The paradox is this: those specialists, who ought to be better able to understand it, are less able to understand it than the average reader. Philosophers, who ought to be able to understand any new field of science, are often the last ones to grasp it, so stuffed full of their own verbalizations as to be unable to comprehend the thoughts of anyone with a truly new idea, as Korzybski presented them with.

[page xxviii] Most 'philosophers' who reviewed this book made particularly shocking performances. Average intelligent readers can understand this book, as they usually have some contact with life. It is not so with those who indulge in mere verbalism.

Korzybski gives a salient example of one of those philosopher-penned reviews and shows how error-prone it is and how it completely misses the point of his work. For those of you who are still not sure what his point is, here is an excellent summary of it:

[page xxix] Most 'philosophers', 'logicians', and even mathematicians look at this non-aristotelians system of evaluation as some system of formal non-aristotelian 'logic', which is not the case.

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They are somehow not able to take the natural science point of view that all science, mathematics, 'logic', 'philosophy', etc., are the product of the functioning of the human nervous system, involving some sort of internal orientations, or evaluations, which are not necessarily formalized. The analysis of such living reactions is the sole object of general semantics as a natural empirical science.

Not only do these philosophers miss the point entirely, but by doing so, they will continue to heap untold damage upon future generations of our youth by teaching them about "identity" — something which Korzybski clearly demonstrates within the covers of this book — is non-existent in the world, except in the minds and processes of philosophers and mentally deranged human beings.

[page xxix] These 'philosophers', etc., seem unaware, to give a single example, that by teaching and preaching 'identity', which is empirically non-existent in this actual world, they are neurologically training future generations in the pathological identifications found in the 'mentally' ill or maladjusted. As explained on page 409, and also Chapter XXVI, whatever we may say an object 'is',

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it is not, because the statement is verbal, and the facts are not.

Words are like maps. If a map is not the territory it represents, a word is not the object it represents. Also a map cannot contain all of the territory — it can only hope to represent the structure of the territory.

[page 38] Two important characteristics of maps should be noticed. 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 the map could be ideally correct, it would include, in a reduced scale, the map of the map; the map of the map of the map; and so on, endlessly, a fact first noticed by Royce.

What does all this mean? you ask. Is this important? The answer is yes, because the presence of aristotelian systems has kept civilization itself at the level of a dumb animal, up until now. If you will read the first 62 pages of this book, no doubt you will agree with this next statement, as I did:

[page 62] The present analysis shows that, under the all-pervading aristotelianism in daily life, asymmetrical relations, and thus structure and order, have been impossible, and so we have been linguistically prevented from supplying

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the potentially 'rational' being with the means for rationality. This has resulted in a semi-human so-called 'civilization', based on our copying animals in our nervous process, which, by necessity, involves us in arrested development or regression, and, in general, disturbances of some sort.

Once upon a time, the geometry of Euclid was the geometry of space, the universe of Newton was the Universe. With the advent of Lobatchevski and Einstein the geometry of Euclid proved to be only a geometry of space and the universe of Newton proved to be a way of looking at the Universe.

[page 86] It is not difficult to see that in all these advances there is a common characteristic, which can be put simply in that it consists in a little change from a 'the' into an 'a'. Some people insist upon sentences in one-syllable words; here we could indeed satisfy them! The change, no doubt, can be expressed by the exchange of one syllable for another. But the problems, in spite of this apparent simplicity, are quite important; and the rest of this volume will be devoted to the examination of this change and of what it structurally involves.

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For any readers who are still not clear on the distinction between Plato and Aristotle's approach to philosophy, Korzybski gives us an excellent thumbnail. Since he claims to have created non-Aristotelian systems, it is necessary to understand the tenets of an Aristotelian system.

[page 87] Psycho-logically, Aristotle was a typical extrovert, who projects all his internal processes on the outside world and objectifies them: so his reaction against Plato, the typical introvert, for whom 'reality' was all inside, was a natural and rather an inevitable consequence. The struggle between these two giants was typical of the two extreme tendencies which we find in practically all of us, as they represent two most diverse, and yet fundamental psycho-logical tendencies.

In his explanation below of how these two extreme tendencies show up in our lives, Korzybski uses several words which one must come to terms with in order to make full use of the contents of this book. He uses them so often in the book that he adopted shorthand abbreviations for them. When these appear in the passage below I will enclose the full word in [brackets] the first time they appear.

[page 87] In 1933 we know that either of these extremes in our make-up is

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undesirable and un-sound, in science as well as in life. In science, the extreme extroverts have introduced what might be called gross empiricism, which, as such, is a mere el [elementalistic] fiction — practically a delusion. For no 'facts' are ever free from 'doctrines': so whoever fancies he can free himself from 'doctrines', as expressed in the structure of the language he uses ., [etc. ,] simply cherishes a delusion, usually with strong affective components. The extreme introverts, on the other hand, originated what might be called the 'idealistic philosophies', which in their turn become el delusions. We should not overlook the fact that both these tendencies are el and structurally fallacious. Belief in the separate existence of el, and, therefore, fictitious, entities must be considered as a structurally un-sound s.r [semantic reaction] and accounts in a large degree for many bitter fights in science and life.

The exact meaning of terms such as el, m.o, s.r require a close reading of the first chapters of the book, but I will hazard a simple explanation of these three important and often used terms. An elementalistic [el]

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term is one in which in our semantic reactions [s.r] we ignore the multiordinal [m.o] aspects of it. This makes it possible for us to understand the triad if we can get our hands around what a multiordinal term is. Luckily he provides a concise definition of his discovery of multiordinality in this next passage:

[page 14] Terms like 'yes', 'no', 'true', 'false', fact', 'reality', 'cause', 'effect', 'agreement', 'disagreement', 'proposition', 'number', 'relation', 'order', 'structure', 'abstraction', 'characteristic', 'love', 'hate', 'doubt', etc., are such that if they can be applied to a statement they can also be applied to a statement about the first statement, and so, ultimately, to all statements, no matter what their order of abstraction is. Terms of such a character I call multiordinal terms.

If it makes your head ache trying to keep all these terms like balls juggling in the air at the same time, you will understand why I found it difficult to work through more than a couple of pages at a time when I first read this book. And you may be wondering how any of this could ever be useful to the average person who can not or will not take the immense effort it takes to understand the work of this phenomenal thinker, and you would be right. Luckily he taught some brilliant people like Samuel Bois, S. I. Hayakawa, and Kenneth Keyes who were able to

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bring his work down to a practical and easy to understand level. For beginners I suggest Keyes's book, "How to Develop Your Thinking Ability" which is available currently under the title, "Taming Your Mind".This book covers the important bases of "Science and Sanity" in simple everyday words using cartoons to illustrate the main points. I utilized this book during a course in "Effective Communication" I gave to hundreds of maintenance people at Waterford 3 Nuclear Power Station in the 1980s(2).

Another essential phrase to come to terms with is semantic reaction [s.r], which refers to affective disturbances in persons related to their failure to recognize the intention, goal, or meaning of the words they receive from another. To Korzybski these disturbances were failures in the education system which he systematically set about to correct.

[page 20] Disturbances of the semantic reactions in connection with faulty education and ignorance must be considered in 1933 as sub-microscopic colloidal lesions.

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Note his use of the time index above (See All Things Change Cartoon) by his specifying the date during which his writing applies to the world.

Max Planck said in his autobiography, "A new scientific truth does not triumph by convincing its opponents and making them see the light, but rather because its opponents eventually die, and a new generation grows up that is familiar with it." [italics added] One of the reasons for this paradoxical condition of science is that scientists are human beings and subject to semantic reactions and every new system involves the learning of new semantic reactionswhich scientists have proven to be as slow at learning as the average ditch-digger. Korzybski gives us a scientific way of understanding what we mean by the expression which Planck used above, "familiar with":

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[page 27] Any fundamentally new system involves new s.r; and this is the main difficulty which besets us when we try to master a new system. We must re-educate, or change, our older s.r. As a rule, the younger generation, which began with the new s.r, has no such difficulties with the new systems. Just the opposite — the older s.r become as difficult or impossible to them as the new were to the older generations.

Another great discovery of Korzybski is the deleterious effects of identification. He says while identification may be useful to babies and children, it proves harmful to adults. We can easily notice when we are using identification because in English we will use the verb "to be" to create the identity. Some have suggested a convention be adopted in English in which we consciously avoid using the verb "to be" for identification, which form of English is called "english prime" or simply, e'. Try it sometime, and you may find it a very useful process — to write for a long time without using the verb "to be" for identification. Why is this important? The good news is that it's only important if you're an adult.

[page 202] The 'is' of identity plays a great havoc with our s.r, as any 'identity' is structurally false to fact. An infant does not know and cannot know that. In his

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life, the 'is' of identity plays an important semantic role, which, if not checked intelligently, becomes a pernicious semantic factor in his grown-up reactions, which preserve the infantile character and with which adult adjustment and semantic health is impossible.

Perhaps the greatest discovery of all was the process of abstracting. Korzybski talked about the world outside of us as being the "What Is Going On" or WIGO for short. That is the world before it is experienced by anyone. To have a non-verbal representation of the process of abstraction, Korzybski created a diagram he called the "Structural Differential", of which a photograph is shown in Figure 5, page 398 [or you can click on the name to see it on-line.] It is definitely worthwhile to take some time to study this figure and its description.

Here is my thumbnail of abstracting: the parabola extending to infinity is the WIGO, from which a human perceives an Object, shown by the circular plate, Oh, which is connected to WIGO. The human creates the first level of abstraction by giving the Object a label, shown by the rectangular plate L which has some connecting wires to Oh. As higher levels of abstraction are created, new plates, L1, L2, ... Ln are shown, with Ln finally ending up back connected to the WIGO parabola, because it is a part of the What Is Going On.

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This is not the end of understanding General Semantics, only the beginning. We have only inspected the foundations of this mansion and a couple of its room. Only by living inside it for a few years and learning all its hidden corners and useful appliances will you come to appreciate the structure that Alfred O. Korzybski has built for humankind. You have had the key to this house placed in your hand; it is up to you to open the door and begin your personal adventure into science and sanity.

---------------------------- Reference Links for Alfred Korzybski ---------------

A Reference Page of Material written by Bobby Matherne on Science and Sanity

and its Author, Alfred Korzybskihttp://www.doyletics.com/arj/aoklinks.htm

~^~

---------------------------- Footnotes -----------------------------------------

Footnote 1. The subject of their seminar, unnamed in 1977, later became known as neuro-linguistic programming, and it's clear from the page xxii passage that Korzybski's work had a hand in forming this field as well as its label.

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Return to text directly before Footnote 1.

~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

Footnote 2. The cartoons are available on-line thanks to the International Society for General Semantics at: http://www.generalsemantics.org/Cartoons/CartoonTK1.htm I heartily recommend that readers take the time now to view these cartoons.

http://www.doyletics.com/art/sciencea.htm

The Map Is Not The TerritoryIn neuro-linguistic programming, “neuro” refers to the neural pathways in our brain that send, receive, and store the chemical signals that make up the information that is in our heads.The “linguistic” part is the actual content of that information that moves along those neural pathways. Even though the word “linguistic” refers to verbal information, non-verbal information is also included here.And the programming is the ways in which these chemical signals are manipulated to become information that makes sense to us and that we can use.One common way that the brain might accomplish this would be connecting it to the memory of a prior experience already stored in our brain that seems to be similar.We build up habits of thought and behavior by quickly linking new events to old ones in our head that appear similar. We then react in the same fashion as we did to the experience stored in our memory.Unfortunately, that reaction may or may not be appropriate for this new experience, but we have trouble dissociating the link between that stimulus and our automatic reaction.NLP follows the declarations of Alfred Korzybski and Gregory Bateson that there is no such thing as objective experience. That is, there is no single “out there” reality that we are all swimming in (or if there is, we still each live in our own version of it).Rather, each individual lives with a set of beliefs and perceptions about reality that they have built up, often unconsciously, over a long period of time.The phrase “the map is not the territory” was originally coined and made famous by Alfred Korzybski, and warns against the common tendency of people to confuse a representation, abstraction, or reaction to a thing with the thing itself.For instance, it would be like going into a restaurant and chewing on the menu after looking at the pretty pictures of food printed there. Or more realistically, confusing your emotional negative reaction to a certain person with the actual person.Learning to consciously distinguish between the actual and the representational helps open up one’s understanding.

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In NLP, distinguishing the map from the territory is an important guiding principle. As individuals, we do not really have direct access to some kind of objective reality.Instead, we perceive everything through a heavy filter made up of our beliefs, built up over a long period of time.

http://www.brainwashmarketing.com/the-map-is-not-the-territory

February 19, 2004

Alfred Korzybski: Science and Sanity onlinePosted by daev

As the man said - 'The map is not the territory'...

The entire text of Alfred Korzybski's Science and Sanity is online, albeit in pdf format. I can't claim I've gotten through the entire book myself... it's been bending my bookshelf for quite a while now.

The origin of this work was a new functional definition of 'man', as formulated in 1921, based on an analysis of uniquely human potentialities; namely, that each generation may begin where the former left off. This characteristic I called the 'time-binding' capacity. Here the reactions of humans are not split verbally and elementalistically into separate 'body', 'mind', 'emotions', 'intellect', 'intuitions', etc., but are treated from an organism-as-a-whole-in-an-environment (external and internal) point of view. This parallels the Einstein-Minkowski space-time integration in physics, and both are necessitated by the modern evolution of sciences. - Alfred Korzybski

It is vital to have a constant awareness or habitual feeling that our formulation of a situation is not the situation itself. The structure of our statements about things is not necessarily the way things are. - Korzybski

A review of Science & Sanity »

(Thanks to Alex Burns at disinfo.com)

Read Science and Sanity »

Posted by daev at February 19, 2004 10:52 AM http://blather.net/blather/2004/02/alfred_korzybski_science_and_s.html

The Map is Not the TerritoryAlfred Korzybski coined the term "general semantics" in his book Science and Sanity. Korzybski had an interest in the way we as human beings interact with the world outside our own skins and sometimes take semantic shortcuts that lead us to false evaluations. He said "the map is not the territory" to indicate that we should not confuse the "map" of reality that we carry around in our

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heads with reality itself. Korzybski's system of general semantics gives us a set of tools that enable us to develop awareness of our own map-making process, and thereby to make more accurate and useful evaluations. It can result in clearer, more effective communication, more appropriate responses to events around us, and dealing more effectively with stress in daily life. Accessed 10/1/01: http://www.general-semantics.org.uk/frontpage.htmlT he phrase "the map is not the territory" comes from Science and Sanity, by Alford Korzybski (there does seem to be some disagreement about spelling his first name).Science and Sanity : an Introduction to Non-Aristotelian Systems and General Semantics by Alfred Korzybski (Hardcover - January 1995) [Amazon.com]The idea that comes to mind for me is that modeling and simulation are a map, and they may or may not be closely enough related to the territory to help represent and solve a specific problem.

http://www.uoregon.edu/~moursund/Math/computational_math.htm

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On Exactitude in ScienceFrom Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia"On Exactitude in Science" or "On Rigor in Science" (the original Spanish-language title is "Del rigor en la ciencia") is a one-paragraph short story by Jorge Luis Borges, about the map/territory relation, written in the form of a literary forgery.

Nature can never be completely described, for such a description of Nature would have to duplicate Nature.

No Name can fully express what it represents.

It is Nature itself, and not any part (or name or description) abstracted from Nature, which is the ultimate source of all that happens, all that comes and goes, begins andends, is and is not.

But to describe Nature as "the ultimate source of all" is still only a description, and such a description is not Nature itself. Yet since, in order to speak of it, we must usewords, we shall have to describe it as "the ultimate source of all". --

Jorge Luis Borges wrote in 1960 a short story that described the ambition of a group of imaginary cartographers to represent an empire to perfection.Rigor in Science - by Jorge Luis Borges"... In that Empire, the Art of Cartography reached such Perfection that the map of one Province alone took up the whole of a City, and the map of the empire, the whole of a Province. In time, those Unconscionable Maps did not satisfy, and the Colleges of Cartographers set up a Map of the Empire which had the size of the Empire itself and coincided with it point by point. Less Addicted to the Study of Cartography, Succeeding Generations understood that this Widespread Map was Useless and not without Impiety they abandoned it to the Inclemencies of the Sun and

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of the Winters. In the deserts of the West some mangled Ruins of the Map lasted on, inhabited by animals and Beggars; in the whole Country there are no other relics of the Disciplines of Geography."http://www.we-make-money-not-art.com/archives/2005/07/-google-maps-ac.php

Map–territory relation (Redirected from Map/territory relation) http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Map/territory_relationThe map is not the territory is a remark by Polish-American scientist and philosopher Alfred Korzybski, encapsulating his view that an abstraction derived from something, or a reaction to it, is not the thing itself, for example, the pain from a stone falling on your foot is not the stone; one's opinion of a politician, favorable or unfavorable, is not that person; a metaphorical representation of a concept is not the concept itself; and so on. A specific abstraction or reaction does not capture all facets of its source—e.g., the pain in your foot does not convey the internal structure of the stone, you don't know everything that is going on in the life of a politician, etc.—and thus may limit an individual's understanding and cognitive abilities unless the two are distinguished. Korzybski held that many people do confuse maps with territories, in this sense.

The map–territory relationshipGregory Bateson, in "Form, Substance and Difference," from Steps to an Ecology of Mind (1972), elucidates the essential impossibility of knowing what the territory is, as any understanding of it is based on some representation:

We say the map is different from the territory. But what is the territory? Operationally, somebody went out with a retina or a measuring stick and made representations which were then put on paper. What is on the paper map is a representation of what was in the retinal representation of the man who made the map; and as you push the question back, what you find is an infinite regress, an infinite series of maps. The territory never gets in at all. […] Always, the process of representation will filter it out so that the mental world is only maps of maps, ad infinitum.

Elsewhere in that same volume, Bateson points out that the usefulness of a map (a representation of reality) is not necessarily a matter of its literal truthfulness, but its having a structure analogous, for the purpose at hand, to the territory. Bateson argues this case at some length in the essay "The Theology of Alcoholics Anonymous".To paraphrase Bateson's argument, a culture that believes that common colds are transmitted by evil spirits, that those spirits fly out of you when you sneeze, can pass from one person to another when they are inhaled or when both handle the same objects, etc., could have just as effective a "map" for public health as one that substituted microbes for spirits.Another basic quandary is the problem of accuracy. In "On Exactitude in Science", Jorge Luis Borges describes the tragic uselessness of the perfectly accurate, one-to-one map:

In time, those Unconscionable Maps no longer satisfied, and the Cartographers Guild drew a Map of the Empire whose size was that of the Empire, coinciding point for point with it. The following Generations, who were not so fond of the Study of Cartography

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saw the vast Map to be Useless and permitted it to decay and fray under the Sun and winters.In the Deserts of the West, still today, there are Tattered Ruins of the Map, inhabited by Animals and Beggars; and in all the Land there is no other Relic of the Disciplines of Geography.

With this apocryphal quotation of Josiah Royce, Borges describes a further conundrum of when the map is contained within the territory, you are led into infinite regress:

The inventions of philosophy are no less fantastic than those of art: Josiah Royce, in the first volume of his work The World and the Individual (1899), has formulated the following: 'Let us imagine that a portion of the soil of England has been levelled off perfectly and that on it a cartographer traces a map of England. The job is perfect; there is no detail of the soil of England, no matter how minute, that is not registered on the map; everything has there its correspondence. This map, in such a case, should contain a map of the map, which should contain a map of the map of the map, and so on to infinity.' Why does it disturb us that the map be included in the map and the thousand and one nights in the book of the Thousand and One Nights? Why does it disturb us that Don Quixote be a reader of the Quixote and Hamlet a spectator of Hamlet? I believe I have found the reason: these inversions suggest that if the characters of a fictional work can be readers or spectators, we, its readers or spectators, can be fictions.

An alternative reason why we are bothered by the conundrum of infinite regress or the conundrum of maps within maps is that we fail to see that the concept of a "map of a map" is the same thing as the concept of a "map of a map of a map." In both cases, the concept is a metaphor for the faculty of reflection. We fail to distinguish that one's capability of reflecting is an enduring perspective and not simply a fleeting act of examining something. Each time I examine myself examining something (or in turn reflect upon my examination of myself examining my examination) I am exercising the same enduring ability. Husserl referred to this ability as the "transcendental ego," the mind's eye or the capability of a human to reflect and abstract. Standing between two mirrors, you will not be fooled by the infinite regress of the reflection of yourself in a mirror within a mirror within a mirror (ad infinitum) precisely because you are able to see (understand) that you are looking at mirrors facing each other and are not looking at an infinite queue of dopplegangers. Likewise characters of a fictional work can be readers or spectators or any other fiction that can be imagined precisely because they are fictions, but the fact that you can reflect upon your ability to examine yourself and your thoughts means you are capable of abstraction and need not suggest that you too are a fictional character in a fictional work.Neil Gaiman retells the parable in reference to storytelling in Fragile Things (it was originally to appear in American Gods):

One describes a tale best by telling the tale. You see? The way one describes a story, to oneself or the world, is by telling the story. It is a balancing act and it is a dream. The more accurate the map, the more it resembles the territory. The most accurate map possible would be the territory, and thus would be perfectly accurate and perfectly useless. The tale is the map that is the territory.

The development of electronic media blurs the line between map and territory by allowing for the simulation of ideas as encoded in electronic signals, as Baudrillard argues in Simulacra & Simulation:

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Today abstraction is no longer that of the map, the double, the mirror, or the concept. Simulation is no longer that of a territory, a referential being or substance. It is the generation by models of a real without origin or reality: A hyperreal. The territory no longer precedes the map, nor does it survive it. It is nevertheless the map that precedes the territory - precession of simulacra - that engenders the territory. (Baudrillard, 1994, p. 1)

"The map is not the territory"The expression "the map is not the territory" first appeared in print in a paper that Alfred Korzybski gave at a meeting of the American Association for the Advancement of Science in New Orleans, Louisiana in 1931: [1]

A) A map may have a structure similar or dissimilar to the structure of the territory...B) A map is not the territory.

It is used as a premise in Korzybski's General Semantics, and in neuro-linguistic programming.Korzybski's dictum ("The map is not the territory") is also cited as an underlying principle used in neuro-linguistic programming, where it is used to signify that individual people in fact do not in general have access to absolute knowledge of reality, but in fact only have access to a set of beliefs they have built up over time, about reality. So it is considered important to be aware that people's beliefs about reality and their awareness of things (the "map") are not reality itself or everything they could be aware of ("the territory"). The originators of NLP have been explicit

that they owe this insight to General Semantics.This is not a pipe. It is a reproduction of "The Treachery Of Images," René Magritte’s 1928-9 painting of a pipe.

The Belgian surrealist artist René Magritte illustrated the concept of "perception always intercedes between reality and ourselves"[2] in a number of paintings including a famous work entitled The Treachery Of Images, which consists of a drawing of a pipe with the caption, Ceci n'est pas une pipe

("This is not a pipe").This concept occurs in the discussion of exoteric and esoteric religions. Exoteric concepts are concepts which can be fully conveyed using descriptors and language constructs, such as mathematics. Esoteric concepts are concepts which cannot be fully conveyed except by direct experience. For example, a person who has never tasted an apple will never fully understand through language what the taste of an apple is. Only through direct experience (eating an apple) can that experience be fully understood.Lewis Carroll, in Sylvie and Bruno Concluded (1893), made the point humorously with his description of a fictional map that had "the scale of a mile to the mile." A character notes some practical difficulties with such a map and states that "we now use the country itself, as its own map, and I assure you it does nearly as well."In a sort of counterpoint to Lewis Carroll, the University of Cambridge economist Joan Robinson (1962) emphasized the disutility of 1:1 maps and other overly detailed models: "A model which

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took account of all the variegation of reality would be of no more use than a map at the scale of one to one."Korzybski's argument about the map and the territory also influenced the Belgian surrealist writer of comics Jan Bucquoy for a storyline in his comic Labyrinthe: a map can never guarantee that one will find the way out, because the accumulation of events can change the way one looks at reality.Historian of religions J. Z. Smith wrote a book entitled Map is not Territory: Studies in the History of Religions (1978, University Of Chicago Press 1993 paperback: ISBN 0-226-76357-9).Author Robert M. Pirsig uses the idea both theoretically and literally in his book Lila when the main character/author becomes temporally lost due to an over reliance on a map, rather than the territory that the map describes.The map vs. territory distinction arises in a dramatic scene in David Foster Wallace's novel Infinite Jest. A game of Eschaton, a fictional geopolitical wargame played on a tennis court which is used to represent the surface of the planet Earth, dissolves into chaos when it begins to snow. The snow exists only in the real world and therefore is falling only on the map, and not on the territory which the map is representing; however, some players cannot understand this distinction and begin to claim that the snow affects the damage parameters of the game. One player then launches an attack and purposefully hits a player, instead of an area of the map, further contributing to the degeneration of the Eschaton game. Infuriated, an authority figure on the game rants:

Players themselves can't be valid targets. Players aren't inside the goddamn game. Players are part of the apparatus of the game. They're part of the map. It's snowing on the players but not on the territory.... You can only launch against the territory. Not against the map. It's like the one ground-rule boundary that keeps Eschaton from degenerating into chaos. Eschaton gentlemen is about logic and axiom and mathematical probity and discipline and verity and order. You do not get points for hitting anybody real. Only the gear that maps what's real.[3]

References1. ̂ Alfred Korzybski coined the expression in "A Non-Aristotelian System and its

Necessity for Rigour in Mathematics and Physics," a paper presented before the American Mathematical Society at the New Orleans, Louisiana, meeting of the American Association for the Advancement of Science, December 28, 1931. Reprinted in Science and Sanity, 1933, p. 747–61.

2. ̂ Rene Magritte's surrealism to be to illustrate the point that, "perception always intercedes between reality and ourselves". See for example, p.15-16 Visual Intelligence: Perception, Image, and Manipulation in Visual Communication by Ann Marie Barry(bio)

3. ̂ Wallace, David Foster. Infinite Jest. 1st. ed. Boston, MA: Little, Brown and Company. 1996

See also

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Fallacy of misplaced concreteness Mary's room Nominalism Philosophy of perception Representative realism Simulacra and Simulation Social constructionism Structural differential When a White Horse is Not a Horse

External linksThe Map and the Territory Measures and Scapes MIT Architecture

In his essay, "On Exactitude in Science", J. L. Borges touches on a couple of familiar maxims. First we have the popular saying, the devil's in the details. As Borges' cartographers became more and more specialized and the maps became larger (presumably) in order to add more precise details thus making the map more accurate. Eventually, the cartographers reached 100% accuracy with a map matching the kingdom point by point. This made the perfect map perfectly useless. Second, we have the saying about beating a dead horse. Cartography was the big thing of the moment. Maps got bigger and bigger, more and more detailed until the grandiosity of the maps was trumped only by the maps' uselessness and consequently, the science of cartography buckled under the weight of its own ego. The people had had enough and just stopped caring.

Borges' essay brings to mind an all too true but rather uneasy view of this planet on which we are all hurtling through space. We live in a world much like that of the cartographers. People become transfixed on whatever the new, big thing of the moment is. They devote large amounts of their time and energy to writing essays, collecting information and creating monuments of grandiose proportions to The New Great Thing Of The Moment.

Until the next Great New Thing Of The Moment comes along, that is. All of a sudden the last great thing isn't so great anymore. This happens a couple of times and the monuments are bulldozed to make room for strip malls and burger joints. After a couple of more cycles of new big things, the one we started out with has faded completely into obscurity. Hey, remember the Whitewater scandal? Yeah, me neither.http://www.associatedcontent.com/article/583243/borgess_exactitude_in_science_and_climate.html

LINGUISTIC FINITUDE AS CAPABILITY IN BORGES AND WITTGENSTEINRomanic Review, Mar-May 2007 by Sharkey, E Joseph http://findarticles.com/p/articles/mi_qa3806/is_200703/ai_n21186122/?tag=content;col1

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Epistemological fantasies were dear to Borges. In a moment characteristic of his short stories, the protagonist and narrator of "La escritura del Dios" ("The God's Script") muses on what he calls the "enigma ... de una sentencia escrita por un dios," which happens to be encoded in the pelt of a jaguar: ¿Qué tipo de sentencia (me pregunté) construirá una mente absoluta? Consideré que aun en los lenguajes humanos no hay proposición que no implique el universo entero; decir el tigre es decir los tigres que lo engendraron, los ciervos y tortugas que devoró, el pasto de que se alimentaron los ciervos, la tierra que fue madre del pasto, el cielo que dio luz a la tierra. Consideré que en el lenguaje de un dios toda palabra enunciaría esa infinita concatenación de los hechos, y no de un modo implícito, sino explícito, y no de un modo progresivo, sino inmediato. Con el tiempo, la noción de una sentencia divina parecióme pueril o blasfematoria. Un dios, reflexioné, sólo debe decir una palabra y en esa palabra la plenitud. Ninguna voz articulada por él puede ser inferior al universo o menos que la suma del tiempo. Sombras o simulacros de esa voz que equivale a un lenguaje y a cuanto puede comprender un lenguaje son las ambiciosas y pobres voces humanas, todo, mundo, universo.1 This description of what we might call an absolute language, free from all the epistemological limits of human understanding, reminds me of what many literary theorists of recent years have demanded of our own undivine language. Indeed, it is a longstanding assumption in Borges criticism that stories such as this one demonstrate Borges's frustration with the supposed inadequacy of language. Already in 1971, R. S. Mills could write, "To point to Borges's scepticism is by now a commonplace." He goes on to offer a typical expression of that commonplace: language is "an attempt to order reality, and it leads to simplification of experience. Far from exhausting our experience, it represents only facets of it . . ." ; as such, it is "arbitrary."2 A small sampling of other commentators (a comprehensive list might include a majority) will bear out Mills' claim. According to Ana María Barrenechea, Borges has "unrecelo radical" about language because "[l]as lenguas son, en último termino, simplificaciones de una realidad que siempre las rebasa. . . ." Thus "nuestra condición de hombres, imponiéndonos la comunicación mediante palabras, nos impone la metáfora y la alegoría, es decir el engaño."3 Similarly, Jaime Rest casts Borges's philosophy of language as a nominalism that "niega la adecuación entre el mundo y los recursos verbales" and assumes an "antagonismo irreductible entre universo y palabra."4 Gisele Bickel writes that language, "[c]ondenada a servir de mediadora, debe buscar su significación (o justificación) en algo que le es exterior. No tiene la transparencia, la evidencia de la música que se basta a sí misma, es siempre inadecuada en su función de instrumento de transmisión de la realidad." As she interprets "La escritura del Dios," she explains, "El lenguaje es un mero vehículo de transcripción que no aparece más que después y cuyo valor es secundario." Echoing Borges's language, she concludes that as a means of representing the world, language is a failure: "La escritura no puede ser más que un simulacro."5 A final example is Donald Shaw, who writes that Borges "does not exclude literary endeavour (including his own) from his scepticism about the value of all human endeavour." Indeed, literature "can never tell us anything about the ultimately real, or about life, except that they are unknowable."6 Now these are astute commentators who have written intelligently on Borges (I will cite some of them later), and they have reason to suppose that Borges is such a skeptic. After all, many of their formulations of his skepticism borrow Borges's own words, or at least those of certain of his

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narrators. I am tempted to say that their mistake lies merely in emphasizing the failure of language in Borges's fiction rather than its achievement. But there are two problems that go beyond misplaced emphasis: first, the assumptions underlying the skepticism they attribute to Borges are unreasonable, and sometimes even incoherent; second, Borges's stories belie them. Thus we critics of Borges should not easily subscribe to his apparent skepticism about language, as many seem to do, as if it were true (or even sincere) because expressed with grace. As for the first problem, consider the standards for success that this skepticism, as expressed in the quotations above, sets for language: it should not be a simplification of reality, but its match in complexity and detail (otherwise it counts as deceit, and betrays a fundamental antagonism for the world); it must not be a mere transcription of reality, not secondary to it, but presumably somehow original and primary; and it must tell us something (and something significant, it would seem) not just about life, but about the ultimately real. One can almost hear language crying out in frustration, What do you want from me?

As for the second problem, the contention that Borges's stories do not bear out the skepticism some of their narrators voice should lead us to ask whether or not Borges subscribed to it himself. The likeliest answer is that he didn't much care about the precise nature of language's relation to the world, at least not in the way a philosopher would, as if coming to a final explanation were all important. Borges was an artist who used philosophy (and anything else that served the purpose) as a spur for his fiction, but he was not a philosopher. Commentators who agree cite the epilogue to Otras inquisiciones (Other Inquisitions), where Borges confessed his tendency "a estimar las ideas religiosas o filosóficas por su valor estético y aun por lo que encierran de singular y de maravilloso."7 Borges was not likely, then, to grieve over language's limits given that they were often the occasion of the wonder that was the real goal of his fiction. In another well-known passage, from "La muralla y los libros" ("The Wall and the Books"), he writes, "La música, los estados de felicidad, la mitología, las caras trabajadas por el tiempo, ciertos crepúsculos y ciertos lugares, quieren decirnos algo, o algo dijeron que no hubiéramos debido perder, o están por decir algo; esta inminencia de una revelación, que no se produce, es, quiza, el hecho estetico."8 Borges likes to watch the horizon, as if anticipating a tardy sun, and one suspects that it would disappoint him if it were to rise into view. With an apparent excess of negative capability, Borges seems not to want to know any Truth that would have him as a knower. Thus his famous preference for a world of authentic, unsolvable mysteries, one made by angels and not chessmasters. Wittgenstein's philosophy is helpful in the face of both of the problems we encounter in casting Borges as a linguistic skeptic. With regard to our unreasonable assumptions about language, consider this passage from Wittgenstein's late philosophy, in which he warns us against comparing language as it is actually used to an abstract model of the way we think it ought to work. The more narrowly we examine actual language, the sharper becomes the conflict between it and our requirement. . . . The conflict becomes intolerable; the requirement is now in danger of becoming empty.-We have got on to slippery ice where there is no friction and so in a certain sense the conditions are ideal, but also, just because of that, we are unable to walk. We want to walk: so we need friction. Back to the rough ground!9

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As I will argue, Wittgenstein helps us to see the frictionlessness of the standards for linguistic success assumed by Borges's commentators: they are based on the confused expectation that language not merely represent the world but that it reproduce it; language is asked to be a medium that does not mediate. With regard to the problem of the difference between the many professions of skepticism made by Borges or his narrator and the performance of language in the very story he is writing or telling, we might adapt Wittgenstein's late injunction, "don't think, but look!" (PI, §66), to Borges's fiction as "don't listen, but look!" Because when we watch what Borges's language does rather than listen to what Borges or his fictional selves tell us it cannot do, what strikes us about his stories is not the failure of language but its achievement. Thus if we want to know what Borges believed about the capability of language-not what he believed in this or that moment, and not even what he said he believed or thought he believed, but rather what he believed in his bones-then we should find our footing on the rough ground of his stories rather than the icy declarations of any of the various Borgeses-narrator, author, or interviewee.

If we look instead of listen, we will also see the demonstration of four lessons about language, the first three of which are basic to Wittgenstein's philosophy. First, that certain common epistemological ideals concerning the capability of language, and of understanding more generally, are unreasonable, unnecessary, and even counterproductive; rather than facilitate what we think to achieve by them, they impede or preclude it. Second, that far from crippling our understanding, epistemological limits make it possible; that is, our finitude is not our inability but our capacity. Third, that a recognition of the difference between real and imagined limits helps us to distinguish between confused demands on language and proper occasions of wonder, among which we include Borges's aesthetic phenomena and what the early Wittgenstein called "the mystical."10 The most important lesson is the fourth, that the creative use of language within its finite limits can point beyond those limits, and seem even to surpass them. When Borges illustrates this lesson, he sprints out of Wittgenstein's sight. In an essay on Zeno's paradoxes, Borges writes, "Hay un concepto que es el corruptor y el desatinador de los otros. No hablo del Mai cuyo limitado imperio es la ética; hablo del infinite"11 His very short story, "Del rigor en la ciencia" ("On Precision in Science"), shows how infinity has corrupted our understanding of the nature of representation: we judge its success according to an ideal of unlimited exactitude. The half-page story begins with an ellipsis: ". . . En aquel Imperio, el Arte de la Cartografía logró tal Perfección que el Mapa de una sola Provincia ocupaba toda una Ciudad, y el Mapa del Imperio toda una Provincia. Con el tiempo, estos Mapas Desmesurados no satisficieron y los Colegios de Cartógrafos levantaron un Mapa del Imperio, que tenía el Tamaño del Imperio y coincidía puntualmente con él."12 Borges pretends not to see the absurdity of a map that does not so much model an entire empire as duplicate it. Here we have the kind of epistemological fantasy so common in Borges, one in which, to borrow Barrenechea's language, a representation is not a simplification of a reality which exceeds it, but instead the equal of that reality. The assumption of Borges's cartographers is that representation strives after reproduction. But once the wish is fulfilled, we find that it isn't what we wanted at all. Because of what use is such a map? Don't we now need a map of the map? Or shall the empire be used for that? Or

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should we just step onto the map and abandon the empire? Here we see an example of the first lesson about language displayed in Borges's fictions: we are easily misled by our epistemological ideals, in this case, the ideal of precision, according to which understanding always increases with increased exactitude. But of course to be useful, usually a representation must simplify its object. (A map needs to be able to fit in the glove compartment.) In the end, the kingdom's mapmakers abandon their great map (mendicants and animals take up residence in it) and then give up on cartography altogether. (One wishes Borges had spun his story out to the full: the mendicants would establish their own kingdom on the map, and this map-world would come to rival the kingdom until no one could remember or prove which was which; eventually, in order to reveal the derivative nature of the other kingdom, each would revive the art of cartography and secretly commission a map of its rival of such precision that soon there would be four kingdoms.) Wittgenstein, too, mocks the excessive drive for exactitude. To the complaint that the rather ordinary command "Stand roughly here" is inexact, he replies, Yes; why shouldn't we call it "inexact"? Only let us understand what "inexact" means. For it does not mean "unusable." And let us consider what we call an "exact" explanation in contrast with this one. Perhaps something like drawing a chalk line round an area? Here it strikes us at once that the line has breadth. So a colour-edge would be more exact. But has this exactness still got a function here: isn't the engine idling? (PI, §88; cf. §§ 70-71) When we insist on standards inappropriate to ordinary language, the engine runs but the car does not move. But of course if you are merely teaching someone to play catch, the sentence "Stand roughly here" is wonderfully effective without a color-edge, just as "Wait a minute" is effective without a stopwatch and "More rice, please" is effective without a measuring cup. We find that what we might think of as "scientific" standards of precision are not merely unnecessary to unscientific uses of language, they are hindrances. They are too precise, inflexible. Thus Wittgenstein is content not to fix what isn't broken, and suggests that when we feel the need for such fixing, we are probably contrasting language as it actually works with our frictionless notions of the way we imagine it ought to work. On the one hand it is clear that every sentence in our language 'is in order as it is.' That is to say, we are not striving after an ideal, as if our ordinary vague sentences had not yet got a quite unexceptionable sense, and a perfect language awaited construction by us.-On the other hand it seems clear that where there is sense there must be perfect order.-So there must be perfect order even in the vaguest sentence. (PI, §98) Or, more pithily, "The sign-post is in order-if, under normal circumstances, it fulfils its purpose" (PI, §87). Wittgenstein cautions us against looking for a language that is "better, more perfect, than our everyday language . . . as if it took the logician to shew people at last what a proper sentence looked like" (PI, §81). Robert Scholes, who properly emphasizes the linguistic achievement of Borges's stories rather than their frustrations, makes a similar point in a discussion of allegory: "For Borges, the language's tendency toward logic is a movement away from reality. The more precise and fixed the terminology, the more inadequate it must become."13 Another of Borges's stories, "Funes el memorioso" ("Funes the Memorious), offers a colorful illustration of this principle and thereby helps us to see the second lesson demonstrated by Borges's use of language: the positive corollary of the first, it is that our finitude is our capacity.

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Here the ideal of representation pursued by Borges's cartographers is applied to human perception and memory: Borges imagines a boy with infallible memory, such that he "no sólo recordaba cada hoja de cada árbol de cada monte, sino cada una de las veces que la había percibido o imaginado"14; thus he can spend Tuesday reliving Monday simply by recalling it. In addition, his perception is superhumanly intense: "el presente era casi intolerable de tan rico y tan nítido, y también las memorias más antiguas y más triviales."15 Troubled by what strikes him as neglect of the particularity of the world-that the famous 33 gauchos are named by two common signs rather than one unique sign; that the word dog can name a great variety of creatures when to Funes a dog seen from one angle at three fourteen and the same dog seen from another angle at three fifteen are wholly different phenomena16-Funes undertakes to invent his own nomenclature of numbers. He assigns each quantity a unique symbol: instead of 7,013 and 7,014, for example, Funes's delightfully ridiculous substitutes are Máximo Pérez and El Ferrocarril.17 Borges-narrator, who is also a character in the story, fails to persuade Funes of the superior utility of the old, unimaginative names of numbers: "Yo traté de explicarle que esa rapsodia de voces inconexas era precisamente lo contrario de un sistema de numeración. Le dije que decir 365 era decir tres centenas, seis decenas, cinco unidades: análisis que no existe en los 'números' El Negro Timoteo o manta de carne."18 The pitiful truth is that despite his infinite mnemonic and perceptual capacity, Funes cannot truly think: "Pensar," Borges concludes, "es olvidar diferencias, es generalizar, abstraer."19 The paradoxical lesson of Funes is that 'absolute' perception and memory would prohibit real understanding: a mind that indiscriminately records every detail of its experience is no more use than a map that reproduces the terrain it maps; both are in a sense 'ideal,' but both are useless.20 But surely the best proof that our finitude is sometimes our capacity is not the claims of the characters in Borges's stories but the stories themselves. One thing Funes could never have done is to write a story like the one in which he appears.21 He could not tolerate the simplification necessary to a short story, the selection and omission of details, and he could not fathom the art of suggestion that allows Borges to invent and communicate so vivid a tale in just a handful of pages. Funes, the absolute historian who records every detail but evaluates none, communicates little and teaches us nothing. Thus Borges's finite art outstrips Funes's infinity. The third lesson about language displayed in Borges's stories is the importance of distinguishing between the puzzlement we may experience because of our unreasonable epistemological expectations and the wonder we experience when we encounter an authentic epistemological limit. A respect for such limits runs throughout Wittgenstein's philosophy, but his early work illustrates the point more dramatically than the late. It is well known that in the only book of his early phase, the Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus, Wittgenstein held the moments in which language reaches its limits in such respect that he advised silence before them. Toward the conclusion, he writes that "There are, indeed, things that cannot be put into words. They make themselves manifest. They are what is mystical" (T, 6.522) and then ends the book with the admonition that "What we cannot speak about we must pass over in silence" (T, 7). Surprisingly, Wittgenstein includes ethics and aesthetics among these inexpressible things (T, 6.421). This classification makes sense in the context of the notoriously austere Tractatus, in which the world is defined as "the totality of facts" (T, 1.1) and meaningful language as propositions which describe possible facts (T, 4.25, 4.001). But for a better understanding of the profundity and even poetry of Wittgenstein's early conception of linguistic limits, we turn to his "Lecture on Ethics," delivered (in English) less than a decade after the publication of his book. Here he says that when

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he attempts to explain what he means by ethics, his mind always turns to one rather elusive experience, about which he can only say, "when I have it J wonder at the existence of the world"; it makes him want to say things like "how extraordinary that anything should exist."22 These expressions he regards as nonsensical because they declare something already taken for granted in the conditions of the declaration. That is, we cannot imagine the world not existing, and we could not wonder at its existence if it did not exist; we could not speak at all, about anything, if it did not exist. We might say that for the early Wittgenstein the existence of the world is before language, or behind it, or all around it, but not in it. Thus Wittgenstein says of his expressions of wonder at the world, "all I wanted to do with them was just ro go beyond the world and that is to say beyond significant language. My whole tendency and I believe the tendency of all men who ever tried to write or talk Ethics or Religion was to run against the boundaries of language" (LE, 11). Here is a case in which language does indeed fall short of the thing it attempts to express, and we note that it is not skeptical cavil about the possible failures of everyday speech; it is a profound, even a sacred thing. Over the course of the lecture, Wittgenstein gropes after further descriptions of his wonder, saying that it is "the experience of seeing the world as a miracle" (LE, 11) and "what people were referring to when they said that God had created the world" (LE, 10). This wonder is concerned with the Beginning, or the End, and the proper response is not speech but awe. Wittgenstein recognizes his (and language's) finitude, he apprehends infinitude, and he accepts both as they are.23 Borges, too, had an aptitude for awe, and that is the reason he did not spend much time bewailing the supposed inadequacies of language for mundane uses. Instead, he went where the awe was, and that is why so many of his writings end in the apprehension of the Absolute, an event in which language truly does meet its limits. One of his supposedly most skeptical essays, "El idioma analítico de John Wilkins" ("The Analytical Language of John Wilkins"), is an instructive example. Here Borges declares "[l]a imposibilidad de penetrar el esquema divino del universo," claims that "notoriamente no hay clasificación del universo que no sea arbitraria y conjetural," and reasons that if the universe is indeed coherent, "falta conjeturar su propósito; falta conjeturar las palabras, las definiciones, las etimologías, las sinonimias, del secreto diccionario de Dios."24 Passages like these offer the most consistent and most coherent expression of Borges's skepticism, if that is not too strong a word: it is not an indiscriminate distrust of language in its ordinary tasks, and not even a disappointment in language's poetical expressiveness; it is rather a recognition that a finite language cannot verbalize the infinite. In this essay Borges sounds rather like Wittgenstein when he speaks of the futility of ethical nonsense: he acknowledges that language falls short of divinity, and he accepts that limit. Shaw is correct when he claims that Borges is skeptical of the literary endeavor because it can never tell us anything about the ultimately real except that it is unknowable, but the tone is all wrong: to demarcate the unknowable is a worthy service, one parallel to Wittgenstein's intentions in the Tractatus and the "Lecture on Ethics." And Borges performs it repeatedly. Even at the close of the essay on Wilkins, where he praises Chesterton's contemptuous indictment of language and thus seems to confirm his own contempt, Borges implies only a qualified criticism. Consider what Chesterton accuses language of failing to express: El hombre sabe que hay en el alma tintes más desconcertantes, más innumerables y más anónimos que los colores de una selva otoñal . . . cree, sin embargo, que esos tintes, en todas sus fusiones y conversiones, son representables con precisión por un mecanismo arbitrario de

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gruñidos y de chillidos. Cree que del interior de un bolsista salen realmente ruidos que significan todos los misterios de la memoria y todas las agonías del anhelo.25 Chesterton is not concerned with the secret thoughts of God, but only with the most private and personal feelings of us humans, and even here he finds that language is less subtle than its object. Yet I would argue that in fact Chesterton is, indirectly, writing about the divine: what else is his longing to reproduce (the tints of the soul) rather than merely to suggest (their tones, semi-tones, blends, and unions), if not a promethean wish to bring heaven's fire down to earth? That is every poet's longing; poets are the ever-failing aspirants to the writing of God, which is the world itself. And yet we misread the essay if we fail to see that Borges's (and Chesterton's) criticism is not of language for failing to match the creative power of the Logos or even Adam's pristine nomenclature (What do you want from me?), but rather of our naïvete for thinking it could.26 When Borges laments his inability to reproduce the world in his language, then, I do not think he is expressing a reasonable aspiration; as Wittgenstein would have it, Borges is not talking sense. He is instead giving expression to his sense of wonder at the world. He is saying something akin to "The world is a miracle."27 And if his stories were all like his essay on Wilkins's language, we could stop here, because Borges would be no different from Wittgenstein: reverent before the limits of language, and silent. But it is at just this point, in the face of the ineffable, that we see the difference between a philosopher and a writer of fantastic fiction: just when Wittgenstein has closed his mouth, Borges begins to talk out of both sides of his, because even as he says that language has met its limits, he shows that it has not. Consider what happens at the end of the Wilkins essay. Does Chesterton's language not succeed rather nicely in communicating to us the bewildering subtleties of forests and souls? His essay, like Borges's essay and like "Funes," is a paradoxical demonstration of the capability of finite language artistically used, which is the fourth lesson Borges teaches us about language: through grunts and squeals, language suggests mysteries and agonies even if it does not bring them literally into being. Which is why it is ironic that Borges's commentators sometimes fault language (and take Borges to do the same) for failing to express not just the extraordinary subtleties of the actual mundane, and not just the transcendence of the possible divine, but even such patently unreal fantasies as the Aleph (which Borges defines nonchalantly as "el lugar donde están, sin confundirse, todos los lugares del orbe, vistos desde todos los ángulos"28), a rose as beheld by an unfallen Adam ("Marino vio la rosa, como Adán pudo verla en el Paraíso, y sintió que ella estaba en su eternidad y no en sus palabras"29), and the writing of gods. We can take Bickel's criticism of "El Aleph" as an example. She bases her reading on the remarks Borges-narrator makes about language just before he describes his omnivision: Arribo, ahora, al inefable centro de mi relato; empieza, aquí, mi desesperación de escritor. Todo lenguaje es un alfabeto de símbolos cuyo ejercicio presupone un pasado que los interlocutores comparten; ¿cómo trasmitir a los otros el infinito Aleph, que mi temerosa memoria apenas abarca? . . . Lo que vieron mis ojos fue simultáneo: lo que transcribiré, sucesivo, porque el lenguaje lo es. Algo, sin embargo, recogeré.30 In the same paragraph, Borges offers one of those explicit condemnations of language that convinces many commentators of his deep distrust for the medium of his own art: he hopes for a metaphor that, like those of the mystics, would allow him to communicate his vision, but asserts that even if he found one, "este informe quedaría contaminado de literatura, de falsedad."31 Bickel writes, "Todos los símbolos que permiten la concentración del universo entero en un

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espacio restringido (el Aleph; las manchas de piel del jaguar; el Zahir, moneda que concentra en sí todo el conocimiento del mundo) son intransmisibles verbalmente. La palabra como símbolo de símbolo fracasa."32 How easily the momentum of a longstanding suspicion of language carries us to the commonplace about Borges's skeptical view: language's inability to express mystical visions, visions that capture the totality of the universe in a glance, is counted as a failure! Are we to fault language for that? And does Borges? He cannot have, unless he thoroughly misunderstood his own art, or was a shameless ingrate. We must separate the words of Borges-narrator, who frequently voices lamentations about the inadequacy of language and whom his commentators later echo, from the deed of the story, which as I have said I take to imply the only meaningful stance of Borges-author-who, we note, does not discontinue his stories after such lamentations. Instead, Borges-narrator's complaints about language usually signal an intensification of the work Borges-author is about to do with it. (A sly man will denigrate his tools in order to make the thing he builds with them more impressive.33) Thus when we hear Borges-narrator wistfully apologize for the beauty or illumination or awe that he could convey to us but for his poor instrument, language, we ought to hear Borges-author saying underneath his breath, Now watch me do it. Thus the final irony of Borges's stories is that though Alephs and divine scripts are not merely imaginary, but impossible, or at the least inconceivable to finite minds, Borges nevertheless communicates or seems to communicate them to us, in language. This trick of Borges's stories puts some commentators in the curious position of thinking that they understand what these things are at the same time that they accept the claim of the narrator that he cannot put them into words. Of the climax of "El Aleph," Mualem writes, "The following futile attempt to depict the vision of the Aleph is, as Borges declares, the crux of the plot" and "Borges stresses his inability to depict the Aleph via words."34 But where else has he depicted it except in words? It exists nowhere else; it is not as if we saw it on the street. Gabriela Massuh's assessment is similar but somewhat more careful. She argues that Borges's opinion of language is revealed in "el núcleo temático del relato, que no es el Aleph en sí, sino la incapacidad del autor de describirlo de manera acabada" (emphasis added). Yet when she interprets the passage in which Borges despairs that putting the Aleph into words will contaminate it "de literatura, de falsedad," she seems to fall for Borges's joke. Paraphrasing Borges-narrator, she writes, "El solo hecho de intentar nombrarlo a traves de imágenes lo convertiría en una mentira, en ficción."35 But of course the Aleph was never anything but fiction. It is not that language falls helplessly into the gap between Borges's experience and ours. Borges hasn't experienced the Aleph, either; no one has. Language is what the Aleph is made of, the only place the Aleph has ever 'happened.' And nevertheless, upon finishing this story, what reader will claim that he has no inkling of the experience of beholding the Aleph? This is the delightful, preposterous achievement of Borges's art: even if his language can be said to fall short of representing reality in some absolute sense, it seems to succeed in representing a thing that is either unreal or infinitely more real than everyday reality. If the thematic nucleus of the story is the (unsurprising) failure of author and language to reproduce the (imaginary, impossible) experience of the Aleph, then it is overwhelmed by the aesthetic nucleus, the success of author and language in seeming to communicate it. As a conclusion, then, let us watch Borges pull off his stunt in the story with which we began, "La escritura del Dios." The narrator whose mind boggled at the thought of a divine language is

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granted a mystical vision of the cosmos. He prefaces his account with the usual declaration of the incommunicability of what he proceeds to communicate, but thereafter he is anything but silent: Entonces ocurrió lo que no puedo olvidar ni comunicar. Ocurrió la unión con la divinidad, con el universo (no sé si estas palabras difieren). El éxtasis no repite sus símbolos; hay quien ha visto a Dios en un resplandor, hay quien lo ha percibido en una espada o en los círculos de una rosa. Yo vi una Rueda altísima, que no estaba delante de mis ojos, ni detrás, ni a los lados, sino en todas partes, a un tiempo. Esa Rueda estaba hecha de agua, pero también de fuego, y era (aunque se veía el borde) infinita. Entretejidas, la formaban todas las cosas que serán, que son y que fueron, y yo era una de las hebras de esa trama total. . . Ahí estaban las causas y los efectos y me bastaba ver esa Rueda para entenderlo todo, sin fin. ¡Oh dicha de entender, mayor que la de imaginar o la de sentir! Vi el universo y vi los íntimos designios del universo. Vi los orígenes que narra el Libro del Común. Vi las montañas que surgieron del agua, vi los primeros hombres de palo, vi las tinajas que se volvieron contra los hombres, vi los perros que les destrozaron las caras. Vi el dios sin cara que hay detrás de los dioses. Vi infinitos procesos que formaban una sola felicidad y, entendiéndolo todo, alcancé también a entender la escritura del tigre.36 Through negation of the familiar finite (not before, nor behind, nor to the sides),37 through the suggestion of a totality by the selection of evocative parts38 (the etiological list: the origins, the mountains, the first men, the cisterns, the dogs, the gods39), through metaphor and symbolism (the Wheel and the fabric, the water and the fire), through the invocation of already-rich traditions of similar language use (the blazing light, the sword, the rose)-through all of this, Borges's supposedly inadequate tool, language, becomes almost magic. It allows him to write with some justice the wonderfully ironic exclamation, "¡Oh dicha de entender, mayor que la de imaginar o la de sentir!", a sentence that gives us readers the sensation of understanding something that we and Borges are in fact only imagining, or failing to imagine. University of Washington, Tacoma 1. Jorge Luis Borges, Obras completas (Buenos Aires: Emecé, 1974), 597-98; hereafter OC ["enigma . . . of a sentence written by a god"; What type of sentence (I asked myself) will an absolute mind construct? I considered that even in the human languages there is no proposition that does not imply the entire universe; to say the tiger is to say the tigers that begot it, the deer and turtles devoured by it, the grass on which the deer fed, the earth that was mother to the grass, the heaven that gave birth to the earth. I considered that in the language of a god every word would enunciate that infinite concatenation of facts, and not in an implicit but in an explicit manner, and not progressively but instantaneously. In time, the notion of a divine sentence seemed puerile or blasphemous. A god, I reflected, ought to utter only a single word and in that word absolute fullness. No word uttered by him can be inferior to the universe or less than the sum total of time. Shadows or simulacra of that single word equivalent to a language and to all a language can embrace are the poor and ambitious human words, all, world, universe.

Of Exactitude in Sciencehttp://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZBI9SBiSq-o

3. Elements from the Borges Story in the Film

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Borges' problematizes this concept of the model (which is the subject of his story) within his short story, as it leads to the destruction of reality. Therefore, the group adopted this concept for the subject matter of its short film. In order to show the viewer this collapsing reality the group employed a number of editing techniques: stop motion animation, match cuts, and a certain degree of alinearity.The group used stop motion animation in order to demonstrate a growing constructed reality within the film. Therefore the animation is obviously fake, using materials like tissue paper, cellophane, beads, wire and fabric. The elements within the film to which the group applied the animation were carefully considered, for example, the wooden fruit that the character throws simultaneously demonstrates the realization of the constructed reality and its faults, and also serves as a point in the film where the rhythm speeds up and more 'constructed elements' are introduced. Another example are the worms, which are meant to draw the viewer's attention to the ground - the place in the story the map resides.The match cuts were another way in which the group created a space that dealt with the constructed nature of film. The match cuts allowed for the group to use many different settings combined to create one filmic space.The model the group followed in order to create the film (above) gave a limitation and simultaneous freedom to the actual content of the shots. While each shot correlated to a specific word and therefore a certain camera angle, the linearity of the film became of second importance and therefore allowed for further collapsing of a seemless reality. http://english149-w2008.pbworks.com/Borges:-An-Exploration-in-Modeling

Borges cartographers- Order by: relevance | pagesrelevance | pages 116http://books.google.com/books?id=02EylVe0DFgC&pg=PA122&lpg=PA122&dq=Borges+cartographers&source=bl&ots=Oun6ZjF2Yn&sig=lTu-3m8MyYqqdmgjfCT8qGIQouo&hl=en&ei=MutTSvfJNtCLtgeByeSnCA&sa=X&oi=book_result&ct=result&resnum=2

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