Korzybski was giving a lecture about semantics and how people consume words and images to a packed auditorium. Both Isaac Asimov and William Burroughs were lucky enough to have tickets and were in the audience.
He has just begun the lecture when he casually pulled out a packet of biscuits wrapped in white paper from his briefcase.
He crunched one into the microphone and apologized, saying he has skipped breakfast and thought he could sneak a few cheeky biscuits.
As he crunched, the audience laughed, so he made a show of offering them around. He gave some to three girls in the front row, then returned to his lectern to begin..
"Nice biscuit, don't you think?" asked Korzybski, while he took another one. The students were chewing and nodded in agreement as the audience laughed again.
He then tore the white paper from the biscuits in order to reveal the original packaging. On it was a big picture of a dog's head and the words "Dog Cookies." The audience gasped. Two of the girls stood up and ran from the room while the third put her hand to her mouth but vomited through her fingers.
Korzibski laughed, popped another in his mouth, and said "You see, I have just demonstrated that people don't just eat food, but also language, and that the taste of the former is outdone by the taste of the latter."
Can you imagine someone coming to a college campus and doing that today?
They got Korzybski trolling students with dog food to make a point about epistemology and hermeneutics, and we all we get is Ben Shapiro in his jew hat and twenty armed guards because there is a purple-haired lesbian with a megaphone and a pronoun.
Jordan Carter
cringe as fuck
Elijah Adams
do dog biscuits actually taste good though?
Jacob Brown
>Can you imagine someone coming to a college campus and doing that today?
zizek could get away with that and more but thankfully he just wants to talk about his lacan and hegel instead of doing silly stunts
Kevin Davis
>do dog biscuits actually taste good though?
When I was young, my parents thought It would be cute to make a Christmas stocking for our dog. It had a bag of doggy chocolate, Christmas biscuits, pigs ears and some typical chew treats. After the Christmas dinner, as the family sat around, too stuffed and sober to begin the main Christmas games, the adults started talking about the dog treats and looking at the ingredients. Deciding they were safe for humans, they tried to make me, my brother, and a a few of the younger cousins eat them. I didn't care and thought they tasted okay. The biscuits were in the shape of Santas and tasted like biscuits with no sugar. The chocolate tasted really buttery or oily with the texture of soap. My brother, a few years older than I, was doing the, 'eww gross,' thing for ten minutes before being pressured into eating one, and he ended up heaving and running to the bathroom. An hour later, my dad caught my grandfather halfway through the bag of chocolates (He had dementia, Alzheimers, and Parkinsons), and said, "Dad, you can't eat those, they're for the dog." Everybody laughed and he put the bag down. About thirty mins later, he forgot again and ate the rest of them.
I barely remember it, but it's one of the stories that gets re-told every Christmas.
Julian Ramirez
apparently they're just a bit stale and flavorless. the story tries to sell it like he's making some grand point about the power of language but all that actually happened is he gave people some crappy food and they pretended to like it out of politeness. then they pretended that it was a profound experience, again out of polite deference to a famous person. then the anecdote was repeated and exaggerated with the addition of famous audience members, hyperbolic expressions of shock and uncontrollable vomiting. and here we are, all these years later, still eating up this guy's dog biscuits.
Jaxon Wright
>exaggerated with the addition of famous audience members,
Not the OP, but it's well known that Korzybski was a huge celebrity figure back then and was noted for his eccentric stunts. Remember, this is the 30's, before the popularity of TV. A lot of famous people, especially authors would visit him. Heinlein called Korzybski the main inspiration behind every sci-fi novel and called him greater than Einstein. Korzibski would actually go on tour charging ridiculous prices for tickets. I've heard a few wacky Korzybski anecdotes, but not the biscuit one. Looking up Burroughs, it says he was a huge fan and attended one of Korzybski's courses in the 30's with a perfect attendance. "Decades later in 1974 at an interview he said he “…was incredibly impressed by Korzybski. I still am. I think that everyone, everyone, particularly all students need to read Korzybski. [It would] save them an awful lot of time.” (1)
Caleb Mitchell
Korzibski is responsible for so much of the way contemporary society is.
L. Ron Hubbard copied Korzybski's style and cult status, stole half of his work and created Scientology out of it
Korzybski was the grandfather behind Timothy Leary and Robert Anton Wilson and the whole Dischordianism Harvard Mushroom and Acid scene in the 60's.
He was also the grandfather behind the everything to do with deconstruction, post-structuralism and the whole French intellectual scene in the 50's
It's amazing. You can read Dianetics or anything by Derrida and Foucault and see Korzybski there.
It's a shame that Korzybski is relatively forgotten today because the events he caused eclipsed him. His work was pretty final, but very dense and covering such a wide area. Hundreds of people latched on to him, grabbed a small area of his work and blew it up into a movement of some kind.
There's a reason Burroughs, Heinlein, Asimov, Houellebecq, every other author who read him begs their readers to read Korzybski. Probably not Scientologists, though. They want him kept a secret. He's perhaps the greatest philosopher of the past 500 years, yet his breadth and the movements created in his name pushed him into relative obscurity.
Luis Sullivan
Oh, and he probably gets rejected now because of the style of his teachings.
He liked to teach seminars, and regarded people as either 'qualified' to understand the depth of his work or not. A reading of his books wasn't sufficient to understand him, you literally had to go and study under him or one of his teachers, and even then you might not 'get him'. If only his work were a little easier to read and caught on today instead of the warped version it became in Scientology.
>Dischordianism Harvard Mushroom and Acid scene in the 60's.
The Discordian stuff had no direct connection to Harvard/Leary/Alpert, other than RAW being friendly with both groups.
Ayden Long
Not the OP or that guy but I happen to like Korzybski for many of the same reasons outlined in Including Robert Anton Wilson and all that jazz, plus a lot of philosophers more mainstream and acceptable than Korzybski himself, like Heidegger and the later Wittgenstein, who nevertheless share things in common with General Semantics. So I think Korzybski is perfectly cool to read, in fact he's actually all the more interesting for not being as mainstream.
That being said, you should first and foremost recognise General Semantics was (still is) a cult. A lot of these movements were cults, and once you've seen one you start to see how they form around guys like this. It's the same as New Age shit, which is why GS surged in popularity during the New Age period too. Fundamentally it's an obsession with "guru" figures, the guy who has all the answers, usually revealing truths about "consciousness transformation" along the lines of, "If only you learned my way of jiggering your mind to think properly, you'd be able to see the truth behind everything!"
So it's not limited to cults either. The stories of people worshipping Wittgenstein's random utterances like pathetic sycophants are the same as stories of Korzybski, and it's only historical fate that made Wittgenstein a "normal non cult guy" and GS a cult. Lacan is an even better example since that was a genuine cult, and pre-Lacanian psychoanalysis was almost as, if not as, bad - both Jung and Freud. All because these movements are about "thinking correctly," as propounded by a guru figure. They attract weak-willed people who want to worship a guru. Honestly, modern Wittgensteinians are just as bad - they start taking on the speech mannerisms of the Great Master and developing blind spots that they presume correspond to what he wouldn't want them to talk about, per the scholarly orthodoxy.
So as long as you understand GS as a cult, you can enjoy it without going off the fucking deep end like a New Age retard. Same with anything else really.
Short answer: Don't start with Korzybski's big book. Start with Hayakawa's book, Language in Thought and Action. He was kind of Korzybski: Remastered Edition. Same meat but less clunky presentation.
Jackson Perez
Pretty good post, user.
Kevin White
I could have sworn people on here were saying he died a month or two ago
Brody Hernandez
This guys just saying the same the same shit people realized in ancient greece. When you realize logic and perception disprove themselves there is nowhere left to go philosophically. To say there is a world outside of your own perception is an act of faith, Realizing your own perceptual limitations isn't enough to logically warrant believing in true objectivity or even no objectivity. Objectivity is a religious matter not a philosophical one. Id recommend looking into religion if you realize philosophy is a dead end
Joseph Howard
we need philosophers decapitating students and spraying lecture halls with liquid LSD mist
Tyler Long
Appreciate the detailed answer squire.
Jonathan Gray
in this case, the dog cookie label was probably fake, in order to show how the disgust induced by reading the label overcomes the inherent pleasure of eating genuinely delicious cookies i'm guessing if he gave them real doggy treats under the pretense of normal cookies, people would wonder why they taste like shit
Daniel Cruz
i don't know what the rest of your post is saying but as far as >shit people realized in ancient greece it's happened quite frequently that i'll randomnly come across some ancient greek writing that anticipates way later developments. it's pretty impressive desu
Jace Richardson
I like Korzybski but the IGS is weird these days, sort of cultish. If you watch their videos the lecturers are just restating some obvious philosophical/sociological stuff but rephrased with GS terminology. It's most peculiar.
Nolan Diaz
>You can read Dianetics or anything by Derrida and Foucault and see Korzybski there. I'm not seeing it. Korzybski is dense, but readable. What Foucalt and Derrida write, and I use the term loosely, is perilously close to gibberish, and owe more to Hegel than anything else.
Colton Russell
Thanks.
Thomas Richardson
Foucault is far more readable if you know a bit of Nietzsche. Foucault's difficulty comes mostly from the structuralism fashionable at the time. Derrida however did go head first into the very structuralism he was supposedly overcoming and admitted that he was closest to Hegel's project than any other (despite countless other obvious influences). What's interesting is that some of the terms in GS describe Deleuze & Guattari quite well (non-aristotelian, time binding), bit for the wrong reasons.
Parker Nelson
always liked this story. can i just jump into science and sanity or are there prerequisite readings?
honestly yeah
Jordan Cook
This is so true, another salient point is that to 'get' him you had to have the sort of psychological insight that would allow you to pay to attend his lectures. Cash accepted.
