I won’t argue with the literary analysis; K was stupendously tedious. I can’t think of anyone more tiresome, although I have a feeling that his style was in vogue with various systematizers in the first half of the 20th century. I remember similar pain in reading Buckminster Fuller and Lugwig Von Mises, though I couldn’t finish Fuller (tried him in my teens), and Von Mises wasn’t quite as awful. Someone in the body awareness field as well—Joseph Pilates or Alexander. Less sure on the last one.
I trudged through Science and Sanity, often gritting my teeth, and think it was worth it.
My impression of Hayakawa is that he takes the conclusions but leaves out the metamodel which generates the conclusions and ties them together. I felt that K gave me a way of thinking, while Hayakawa packaged a lot of results, but left out the way of thinking. I read K first, so Hayakawa tasted like relatively weak tea and didn’t leave a big impression.
K was more meaty particularly on the Science/Mathematics side. Mathematics as an abstraction of functional relations of actions in the world—I don’t know if it was literally tossing pebbles in a bucket, but it was close. It was the physical action of counting. Science as a semantic enterprise—finding new semantic structures to model world. Space-Time as providing a static view of dynamic change. There was something good on differential equations too, something like reductionist locality turning nonlinear relations into linear relations. It’s been almost 20 years now, so I’m a little hazy.
Anyway, I’d recommend at least having a serious chat with someone well versed in the mathematical and scientific side of Korzybski and Science and Sanity, as there is a lot of good stuff in there that doesn’t get a lot of attention even from the General Semantics crowd, who, like Hayakawa, focus on the verbal aspects of the theory.
I won’t argue with the literary analysis; K was stupendously tedious. I can’t think of anyone more tiresome, although I have a feeling that his style was in vogue with various systematizers in the first half of the 20th century. I remember similar pain in reading Buckminster Fuller and Lugwig Von Mises, though I couldn’t finish Fuller (tried him in my teens), and Von Mises wasn’t quite as awful. Someone in the body awareness field as well—Joseph Pilates or Alexander. Less sure on the last one.
I trudged through Science and Sanity, often gritting my teeth, and think it was worth it.
My impression of Hayakawa is that he takes the conclusions but leaves out the metamodel which generates the conclusions and ties them together. I felt that K gave me a way of thinking, while Hayakawa packaged a lot of results, but left out the way of thinking. I read K first, so Hayakawa tasted like relatively weak tea and didn’t leave a big impression.
K was more meaty particularly on the Science/Mathematics side. Mathematics as an abstraction of functional relations of actions in the world—I don’t know if it was literally tossing pebbles in a bucket, but it was close. It was the physical action of counting. Science as a semantic enterprise—finding new semantic structures to model world. Space-Time as providing a static view of dynamic change. There was something good on differential equations too, something like reductionist locality turning nonlinear relations into linear relations. It’s been almost 20 years now, so I’m a little hazy.
Anyway, I’d recommend at least having a serious chat with someone well versed in the mathematical and scientific side of Korzybski and Science and Sanity, as there is a lot of good stuff in there that doesn’t get a lot of attention even from the General Semantics crowd, who, like Hayakawa, focus on the verbal aspects of the theory.