1. Introduction
Every school of philosophy, psychology, or any other school of study eventually creates and develops its own terminology, its own language.
As much as I have tried for the most part to keep my language as simple as possible in my exposition of DGB Philosophy, there comes a time when and where 'more technical (detailed, scrupulous) language' may be needed for the sake of precision.
That time and place is now.
We are entering the philosophy of meaning -- or semantics.
My early training in this regard is mainly in General Semantics as created by Alfred Korzybski and developed by many outstanding 'students' of General Semantics including the G.S. theorist and writer who introduced me to General Semantics as a Grade 12 English student through his classic book on this subject matter, 'Language in Thought in Action' -- S.I. Hayakawa.
I didn't know until recently that Hayakawa was a U.S. Senator from California, and having just written an essay on Roland Burris -- and what a U.S. Senator should not be -- I can now easily pay my greatest respect for what a U.S. Senator should be. Ad he was a Republican.
So here is a message for today's ethically battered American Republican Party:
You could/can find no better place to start in your goal to re-create your party as an epistemologically and ethically strong political party -- than the life, history, and General Semantics works of -- S.I.Hayakawa.
With all due respect, Sarah Palin is not going to take you, the American Government, and/or the People to any such sacred political territory.
The Republican Party has to go back to basics, back to their foundations, and most importantly, re-establish such values with the American people as: trust, credibility, accountability, substance, congruence, integrity, individual rights, international diplomacy, democratic dialogue -- and transparency -- to show by action, not by fake, nice-sounding ideological words, that this is all really happening, and that it isn't just more smoke and mirrors, dog and pony show, rhetorical sophism and horsebleep.
The Republicans have 4 years to work in the direction of this massive project because it certainly is not going to happen overnight -- or even in a matter of months. This project is going to take years.
Anyways, back to one of my favorite Republican Senators even though I did not know at the time that I was studying General Semantics back in the 1970s that he was an active American Republican Senator.
Perhaps, if I could isolate one key value that the American Republican Party needs to get back to -- besides running a budget in the black and balancing government spending with government income -- is 'congruence' which more simply put is: truth.
And this, basically, is what General Semantics is all about -- congruence between ideas (read also: ideology) and the actions (meaning) that these words are supposed to accurately represent.
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You can fool some of the people all of the time, and all of the people some of the time, but you can not fool all of the people all of the time.
-- Abraham Lincoln, (attributed)
16th president of US (1809 - 1865)
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S. I. Hayakawa
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S. I. Hayakawa
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United States Senator
from California
In office
January 2, 1977 – January 3, 1983
Preceded by John V. Tunney
Succeeded by Pete Wilson
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Born July 18, 1906
Vancouver, British Columbia
Died February 27, 1992 (aged 85)
Greenbrae, California
Political party Republican
Alma mater University of Manitoba
McGill University
University of Wisconsin-Madison
Profession English professor
Samuel Ichiye Hayakawa (July 18, 1906 – February 27, 1992) was a Canadian-born American academic and political figure. He was an English professor, served as president of San Francisco State University and then a United States Senator from California from 1977 to 1983. Born in Vancouver, British Columbia, Canada, he was educated in the public schools of Calgary, Alberta and Winnipeg, Manitoba; received his undergraduate degree from the University of Manitoba in Winnipeg in 1927; graduate degrees in English from McGill University, Montreal, Quebec, Canada, in 1928, and the University of Wisconsin-Madison in 1935.
Contents
1 Academic career
1.1 Student strike at San Francisco State University
2 Political career
Academic career
Professionally, Hayakawa was a psychologist, semanticist, teacher and writer. He was an instructor at the University of Wisconsin from 1936 to 1939 and at the Armour Institute of Technology from 1939 to 1947. Hayakawa was an important semanticist. His first book on the subject, Language in Thought and Action, was published in 1949 as an expansion of the earlier work, Language in Action, written since 1938 and published in 1941 to be a Book-of-the-Month Club selection. It is currently in its fifth edition and has greatly helped popularize Alfred Korzybski's general semantics and in effect semantics in general, while semantics or theory of meaning was overwhelmed by mysticism, propagandism and even scientism. In the Preface, he said:
"The original version of this book, Language in Action, published in 1941, was in many respects a response to the dangers of propaganda, especially as exemplified in Adolf Hitler's success in persuading millions to share his maniacal and destructive views. It was the writer's conviction then, as it remains now, that everyone needs to have a habitually critical attitude towards language — his own as well as that of others — both for the sake of his personal well-being and for his adequate functioning as a citizen. Hitler is gone, but if the majority of our fellow-citizens are more susceptible to the slogans of fear and race hatred than to those of peaceful accommodation and mutual respect among human beings, our political liberties remain at the mercy of any eloquent and unscrupulous demagogue."
In addition to such motivation, he acknowledged his debt as follows:
"My deepest debt in this book is to the General Semantics ('non-Aristotelian system') of Alfred Korzybski. I have also drawn heavily upon the works of other contributors to semantic thought: especially C. K. Ogden and I. A. Richards, Thorstein Veblen, Edward Sapir, Leonard Bloomfield, Karl R. Popper, Thurman Arnold, Jerome Frank, Jean Piaget, Charles Morris, Wendell Johnson, Irving J. Lee, Ernst Cassirer, Anatol Rapoport, Stuart Chase. I am also deeply indebted to the writings of numerous psychologists and psychiatrists with one or another of the dynamic points of view inspired by Sigmund Freud: Karl Menninger, Trigant Burrow, Carl Rogers, Kurt Lewin, N. R. F. Maier, Jurgen Ruesch, Gregory Bateson, Rudolf Dreikurs, Milton Rokeach. I have also found extremely helpful the writings of cultural anthropologists, especially those of Benjamin Lee Whorf, Ruth Benedict, Clyde Kluckhohn, Leslie A. White, Margaret Mead, Weston La Barre."
He was a lecturer at the University of Chicago from 1950 to 1955. During this time he presented a talk at the 1954 Conference of Activity Vector Analysts at Lake George, New York in which he discussed a theory of personality from the semantic point of view. This was later published as The Semantic Barrier. This was a definitive lecture as it discussed the Darwinism of the "survival of self" as contrasted with the "survival of self-concept".
He became an English professor at San Francisco State College (now called San Francisco State University) from 1955 to 1968. In the early 1960s, he helped organize the Anti Digit Dialing League, a group in San Francisco that opposed the introduction of all digit telephone exchange names. Among the students he trained were commune leader Stephen Gaskin and author Gerald Haslam. He became president of San Francisco State College during the turbulent period of 1968 to 1973, becoming president emeritus in 1973 and then wrote a column for the Register & Tribune Syndicate from 1970 to 1976.
Student strike at San Francisco State University
During 1968-69, there was a bitter student strike at San Francisco State University that was a major news event at the time and chapter in the radical history of the United States and the Bay Area. The strike was led by the Third World Liberation Front supported by Students for a Democratic Society, the Black Panthers and the counter-cultural community, among others. It demanded an end to racism, creation of a Black Studies Department and an end to the War in Vietnam and the university's complicity with it. Hayakawa became popular with mainstream voters in this period after he pulled the wires out from the speakers on a student van at an outdoor rally, dramatically disrupting it. [1] , [2] , [3]
Political career
1977, Congressional Pictorial DirectoryHe was elected in California as a Republican to the United States Senate in 1976, defeating incumbent Democrat John V. Tunney. Hayakawa served from January 3, 1977 to January 3, 1983. He did not stand for reelection in 1982 and was succeeded by Republican Pete Wilson.
Hayakawa founded the political lobbying organization U.S. English, which is dedicated to making the English language the official language of the United States.
The Senator was a resident of Mill Valley, California until his death in Greenbrae, California, in 1992. He was also a member of the Bohemian Club, the first member of the club of Japanese ancestry. He also had an abiding interest in traditional jazz and wrote extensively on that subject, including several erudite sets of album liner notes. Sometimes in his lectures on semantics, he was joined by the respected traditional jazz pianist, Don Ewell, whom Hayakawa employed to demonstrate various points in which he analyzed semantic and musical principles.
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S. I. Hayakawa Quotes
I'm going to speak my mind because I have nothing to lose.
S. I. Hayakawa
If you see in any given situation only what everybody else can see, you can be said to be so much a representative of your culture that you are a victim of it.
S. I. Hayakawa
In a real sense, people who have read good literature have lived more than people who cannot or will not read. It is not true that we have only one life to live; if we can read, we can live as many more lives and as many kinds of lives as we wish.
S. I. Hayakawa
In a very real sense, people who have read good literature have lived more than people who cannot or will not read.
S. I. Hayakawa
In the age of television, image becomes more important than substance.
S. I. Hayakawa
It is not true that we have only one life to live; if we can read, we can live as many more lives and as many kinds of lives as we wish.
S. I. Hayakawa
It is the individual who knows how little they know about themselves who stands the most reasonable chance of finding out something about themselves before they die.
S. I. Hayakawa
Notice the difference between what happens when a man says to himself, I have failed three times, and what happens when he says, I am a failure.
S. I. Hayakawa
So I will say it with relish. Give me a hamburger but hold the lawsuit.
S. I. Hayakawa
You guys are both saying the same thing. The only reason you're arguing is because you're using different words.
S. I. Hayakawa
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2. The W-C-P Abstraction Ladder
This part will demand a little bit of 'exercise' of your 'Apollonian-Epistemological' mind-brain, Central Ego, and/or Ego-State.
Words are 'double representations'. They are more or less high-level abstractions (labels, symbols) of a different, lower set of abstractions (concepts, theories, ideas, maps, models...) which are generally intended to represent 'real world' 'objects', 'things', 'strucures', 'processes' that we can generally but not always see and/or hear and/or feel (lowest level of abstraction) -- what DGB Philosophy will call: 'phenomena'.
Now Kant differentiated between our 'phenomenal (subjective) world' and our 'noumenal (objective, 'thing-in-itself') world' which is significantly different than our terminology here.
I may be causing some unwanted semantic confusion in the world of technical, academic philosophy but I will live with that. Kant's terminology is outdated -- who uses the world 'noumenal' these days except an academic philosophy student?
The only time you will see me using the word 'noumenal' is when I am writing specifically about Kant -- or maybe Plato -- who I think is where Kant got the word from.
Otherwise, I will use this terminology -- and trialectic distinction -- instead:
1. The Objective, Phenomenal World; vs.
2. Our Subjective, Perceptual-Conceptual (Theoretical, Single Representation) World; vs.
3. Our Verbal, Symbolic (Double Representation) World of Words/Language.
Unfortunately, no change in terminology is going to eliminate the same epistemological problem that Kant had -- and epistemologists throughout the history of mankind have had -- and that is the mind-numbing, paradoxical 'subjective-objective split'.
Here is the paradox.
Philosophers -- and particular philosophers with a scientific background -- have always wanted to talk about 'The Objective World' without any kind of 'subjective, individual or human bias'.
The Objective World is supposed to be completely devoid of any kind of human bias.
Which it is.
Unfortunately, man will never get to this 'perfect place' of Absolutely No Human Bias.
It will never happen -- not in a thousand years, not in a million years.
Man is absolutely stuck -- both individually and collectively -- with the subjective, perceptual, conceptual, narcissisitic, and righteous bias that each and everyone of us carries around with us each and every moment.
It is impossible to talk about The Objective, Phenomenal World -- without sensing perceiving, interpreting, and evaluating -- through Our Subjective, Conceptual World -- and Our Verbal World of Words.
Thus, the dialectical paradox is this: The so-called 'Objective, Phenomenal World' that we live in, which is supposed to be completely 'non-theoretical' -- is paradoxically completely theoretical.
However, I disagree with Kant on this point:
Kant stated that 'We can never know our Noumenal (Objective) World.'
Whereas I say that 'We can never completely know our Objective World but we can always partly know it -- to a greater or lesser extent.'
Thus, the issue of 'accurate representation' and/or 'structural similarity' to use Korzybski's magic words...becomes critically important to both our individual and collective survival, health, and general well-being.
Writes Korzybski:
'The map is not the territory.'
'The symbol (or word) is not the thing.'
Now what is a 'stimulus'?
What is imperative is 'accurate, structural similarity and representation'.
That is what we generally call 'truth' or 'fact' or 'congruence' or 'integrity'.
Anything else is sophism, ignorance, mistake, manipulation, and/or the product of human narcissistic-righteous bias. Often this translates into -- selfishness and/or greed.
To elaborate on, and embellish, one of the Hayakawa quotes you can find above...
Image, perception, and narcissistic sophism replace truth, quality, integrity, congruence and substance.
And that is where we will leave things today on this cold, January morning.
-- DGB, Jan. 10th, 2008, updated March 14th, 2009.
-- David Gordon Bain
-- Democracy Goes Beyond Narcissism
-- Dialectical Gap-Bridging Negotiations...
Are still in process..
