Alfred Korzybski
Man has ever been the greatest puzzle to man. There are many and important reasons for this fact. As the subject of this book is not a theoretical, academic study of man, of which too many have already been written, I will not recount the reasons, but will confine myself to the more pressing matters of the task in hand, which is that of pointing the way to the science and art of Human Engineering. The two facts which have to be dealt with first, are the two which have most retarded human progress: (1) there has never been a true definition of man nor a just conception of his role in the curious drama of the world; in consequence of which there has never been a proper principle or starting point for a science of humanity. It has never been realized that man is a being of a dimension or type different ,from that of animals and the characteristic nature of man has not been understood; (2) man has always been regarded either as an animal or as a supernatural phenomenon. The facts are that man is not supernatural but is literally a part of nature and that human beings are not animals. We have seen that the animals are truly characterized by their autonomous mobility-their space-binding capacity-animals are space-binders. We have seen that human beings are characterized by their creative power, by the power to make the past live in the present and the present for the future, by their capacity to bind time-human beings are time-binders. These concepts are basic and impersonal; arrived at mathematically, they are mathematically correct.
It does not matter at all how the first man, the first time-binder, was produced; the fact remains that he was somewhere, somehow produced. To know anything that is to-day of fundamental interest about man, we have to analyse man in three coordinates-in three capacities; namely, his chemistry, his activities in space, and especially his activities in time; whereas in the study of animals we have to consider only two factors: their chemistry and their activities in space.
Let us imagine that the aboriginal-original human specimen was one of two brother apes, A and B; they were alike in every respect; both were animal space-binders; but something strange happened to B; he became the first time-binder, a human. No matter how, this “something” made the change in him that lifted him to a higher dimension; it is enough that in some-wise, over and above his animal capacity for binding space, there was superadded the marvelous new capacity for binding-time. He had thus a new faculty, he belonged to a new dimension; but, of course, he did not realize it; and because he had this new capacity he was able to analyze his brother “A”; he observed “A is my brother; he is an animal; but he is my brother; therefore, I AM AN ANIMAL.” This fatal first conclusion, reached by false analogy, by neglecting a fact, has been the chief source of human woe for half a million years and it still survives. The time-binding capacity, first manifest in B, increased more and more, with the days and each generation, until in the course of centuries man felt himself increasingly somehow different from the animal, but he could not explain. He said to himself, “If I am an animal there is also in me something higher, a spark of some thing supernatural.”
With this conclusion he estranged himself, as something apart from nature, and formulated the impasse, which put him in a cul-de-sac of a double life. He was neither true to the “supernatural” which he could not know and therefore, could not emulate, nor was he true to the “animal” which he scorned. Having put himself outside the “natural laws,” he was not really true to any law and condemned himself to a life of hypocrisy, and established speculative, artificial, unnatural laws.
“How blind our familiar assumptions make us! Among the animals, man, at least, has long been wont to regard himself as a being quite apart from and not as part of the cosmos round about him. From this he has detached himself in thought, he has estranged and objectified the world, and lost the sense that he is of it. And this age-long habit and point of view, which has fashioned his life and controlled his thought, lending its characteristic mark and color to his whole philosophy and art and learning, is still maintained, partly because of its convenience, no doubt, and partly by force of inertia and sheer conservatism, in the very teeth of the strongest probabilities of biological science. Probably no other single hypothesis has less to recommend it, and yet no other so completely dominates the human mind.” (Cassius J. Keyser, loc. cit.) And this monstrous conception is current to-day: millions still look upon man as a mixture of animal and something supernatural.
There is no doubt that the engineering of human society is a difficult and complicated problem of tremendous ethical responsibility, for it involves the welfare of mankind throughout an unending succession of generations. The science of Human Engineering can not be built upon false conceptions of human nature. It can not be built on the conception of man as a kind of animal; it can not be built on the conception of man as a mixture of natural and supernatural. It must be built upon the conception of man as being at once natural and higher in dimensionality than the animals. It must be built upon the scientific conception of mankind as characterized by their time-binding capacity and function. This conception radically alters our whole view of human life, human society, and the world.
Read the full essay taken from Alfred Korzybski‘s Manhood of Humanity (1921)