Korzybski: A Biography

Korzybski: A Biography by Bruce I. Kodish WINNER - S. I. Hayakawa Book Prize 2011 "That's a crazy book!" Albert Einstein said in the early 1950s, when asked his impression of Alfred Korzybski's 1933 work Science and Sanity. More than a decade later, Richard Feynman found Korzybski's notion of "time-binding" crucial for answering the question "What is science?". Feynman didn't know that it was Alfred Korzybski who had coined the term "time-binding" in his first, 1921, book Manhood of Humanity to label what he considered the defining characteristic of humans: the potential of each generation to start where the former leaves off and thus to accumulate useful knowledge at an ever-accelerating rate. In the exact sciences and technology, time-binding seems to work reasonably well. In the rest of human life, not so much. Korzybski, a patriotic Polish nobleman and an engineer who had lived under Tsarist tyranny and had seen the horrors of World War I on the Eastern Front before coming to the