Mireille de Moura translated Science & Sanity and took part in the elaboration of Une Carte n’est pas le Territoire (a map is not the territory), two books by the American writer Alfred Korzybski. Korzybski is also the inventor of general semantics (GS), which is the origin of a non-Aristotelian thought process. Although they were written in the first part of the 20th century, only a small part of Alfred Korzybski’s works can be found translated into French... Even if this viral and revolutionary thought influenced William S. Burroughs, Gregory Bateson, A.E. Van Vogt, Gaston Bachelard or Henry Laborit.

Frédéric Lavergne is the founder of the ECCE training firm. For more than 20 years, he has been proposing solutions both for business and education, in order to help people think and react in accordance to non-Aristotelian thought processes.

MIREILLE DE MOURA

Who was Korzybski ?
He was a Polish engineer who emigrated to the United States at the beginning of WW I. He was appalled by the atrocities of war, and he tried to understand how men came to the point of making war. He also questioned himself as to the comprehensive difficulties that manifested themselves via the scientific discoveries of his time, like relativity or quantum physics. His acknowledgement was simple. Since these theories were conceived by human brains, and since we’re all the same, then we should all be able to understand these theories. He spent his life establishing a thought-framework, which was later developed in his two main works - Manhood of Humanity, and his life’s masterpiece, which is entitled Science & Sanity and was released in the USA in 1933. From that period on, he tried to spread his ideas, for instance by founding the GS Institute.

It’s also thanks to researchers and authors like Bateson, Burroughs or Van Vogt that his thought was diffused ?
Van Vogt and Boris Vian did a lot to make Korzybski’s name known. Vian translated a novel by Van Vogt entitled The World of Null-A, in which some of Korzybski’s theories are taken up again. Van Vogt and Burroughs were amongst the first people to attend his seminars and convey this way of thinking.

How come Science & Sanity isn’t translated into French ? Is there a will to avoid spreading this type of thought ?
The translation is done, at this point it only needs to be edited. For a long time we’ve clashed with the GS American institutes, who despised these translations, but now the works are going to enter into the domain of public ownership. There is also an intellectual censorship by the French higher education, who despises American authors. Moreover, the classical linguists didn’t really want to adopt the doctrine of a man who was neither a linguist, nor a psychologist, nor a philosopher. He was simply a guy who worked like mad... We must also add that the very core of this way of thinking is based upon the mathematical concepts of his own time, most of which are now obsolete. Then we may say that this collection of essential texts (Une Carte n’est pas le Territoire), completed with some more practical works, is enough. For the real fans, there’ll always be the works written in English.

Of Korzybski’s concepts, which ones are still up to date ?
The concept that language conditions the way in which our thought functions. Some beginnings of answers to this type of question are : What is the purpose of language and how do we use it ? What is the link between what we say and reality ? What does it infer ? What makes it so that when we talk we understand each other or not ? So, there are still things that are useful. For instance, take the sentence : "A map is not the territory it represents". The map is simplified, it is only a representation of the territory. The map is only important as long as we know that it is a map and not the actual territory. The word "table" is not the table itself, but a kind of simplification, abstraction, lacking precision. We mix words and things together, and each time we mix them, we’re wrong. For instance, Korzybski’s advice is to date a fact when we mention it, to bring some precision to the level of abstraction of the word we’re talking about. Another example for practical exercise is the inference test. When you’re listening to a speech, not only do you hear words that are uttered but you also make inferences on the basis of pieces of information that were actually neither within the sentence nor in the mind of the one who pronouced it. These tests enable us to avoid making false deductions. GS has actually paved the way for what is called cognitive psychology. Korzybski also introduced another idea that was taken up again in medicine and therapy : we can’t divide people into different functions. We cannot put to one side emotion, and to the other memory, language or motivity. People evolve in an environment as a whole. This is the ecology of the soul.

Alfred Korzybski, Une carte n’est pas le territoire, L’Eclat

FREDERIC LAVERGNE

Can you tell us more precisely what non-A thought born of general semantics(GS) has enlightened, up to today ?
It enables us to seize the paradox of the power of words, but also of their weakness. They both have a spontaneous and inevitable dimension in the instant, but that often remains unsuspected with time. Non-A thought also allows us to understand how our prejudices and the implacable simplistic inferences linked to formal logics are secreted. Formal logics insensibly condition our behaviour and our habits. And even worse, it makes us justify ourselves for not being able to manage in a different way ! Just as if we were getting to like what we actually can’t abolish. Non-A thought can then lead us to more humility and in the same way, more keen on humour. It may at least allow us to be more vigilant about our slapdash little prejudgments so as to "ad-just" our map to the territory. To go further, let’s say that it invites us to have more ethics. And to be more balanced, to take enough time to integrate (in the sense of assimilating so as to enrich) subtle key-data before actually getting into action. To take time to integrate, to actually get closer to... integrity.

In a non-A and GS approach, the power of words remains essential. Is it in this way that we should refer to your work on words in your book L’Ecume des Mots (foam of the words) ?
This work enabled me to combine usefulness with pleasure. Usefulness stands for the creation of new words - which often reveal some hidden, to-be-discovered meanings behind the classical and almost contradictory definitions of our Aristotelian dictionary. I think there are more than 1,000 new words in the book. The pleasant aspect was writing the testimony of a trainer who’s amused by uncommon or revealing attitudes in a so-called modern era that more or less copes with its tragi-comic paradoxes.

Who’s part of the evocative non-A thinking scene today ?
What’s worrisome with the visionary intellectuals who have been able to enlighten the monochromic highways of thought is that we tend to appreciate them a bit too posthumously... Let’s point out that almost all of them went through the reflexive straitjacket of dialectical logics that were notably cherished by Marxists. This process of contradiction had the merit to denounce the historical rigidity of the Aristotelian thought - by working on its own paradoxes - without however succeeding in extricating itself from the confinement and from the binary opposition it presupposes. First of all I think of Edgar Morin who elaborated his "method" and was inevitably led to his "dialogics". Then there are the works of Marc Druel and Michel Desmarest, who co-founded La Créatique, a group which made the emergence of the compound logics possible. Their work was then pursued by the ECCE firm. I also think of Oscar Ichazo, a Chilean who brought his precious "trialectic" logics. According to him, they are three-fold : mutation, integration and attraction. There’s also Henri Atlan and his concept of the noise-based order, Lupasco and some others. Looking back on some encounters I’ve made in the past doing my job, I think of writings by trainer Olivier Clouzot, of Luc de Brabandere from Paradigme SA, of Meryem Le Saget. Across the Atlantic, there is Marylin Ferguson, who is tirelessly questioning some other paradigms to be lived ; Roger Van Oech, or else Thomas Schelling and his reflection that makes psychology compatible with mathematics and deals with the "tyranny of our little decisions !" At a media level - and thus more likely to be simplified, since linked to the political matter - the non-A thought has enriched itself with the Situationists’ reflections. The Situationists announced well before May 68 the difficulty which has turned extreme to really change paradigms. Non-A thought strengthens itself gradually, through sometimes pioneer relevancies of the neither-right-nor-left-wing ecologist movement, through the burgeoning of antiglobalization movement’s proposositions of non-violent catches in hand, of transversal and non-violent awareness. So as to changes our views, which are so much influenced by our mean and egocentric occidental urban way of life, in other words everything that is based on the American model... Eventually, we have to mention the progression of an open-minded scientist whose name is Henri Laborit. He came to the point of introducing the "praise of flight" that is dealt with in the movie by Alain Resnais Mon Oncle d’Amérique (My Uncle from America).

Frédéric Lavergne, L’écume des mots, Edition des Ecrivains