This is not what I went through attempting to verify the existence of Count Alfred Korzybski. However, I have written here an account of some of the things that happened along the way. Please do not confuse it with actual experience. Your mileage may vary. Offer prohibited where void.
I hadn't read anything by Robert Anton Wilson in a long time when Matthew found a copy of "Chaos and Beyond: The Best Of Trajectories" in Tower Records in New Orleans. I had heard that Wilson had recently published this book (as well as "Cosmic Trigger 3") and I felt very happy to finally see a copy of it, so of course I bought it.
I ended up having plenty of time to read the book as my flight back to Boston sat on the runway an extra hour and a half due to weather in Boston. Reading it, I found myself back in very familiar territory, among people with familiar faces. "Count Alfred Korzybski" caught my attention in an unusual way this time. Wilson wrote about Korzybski in several other books, and this time talked about how Korzybski's "Science and Sanity" had greatly influenced him when he read it decades ago. Wilson credited Korzybski with the theory of General Semantics, and with the statement "the map is not the territory". He also said that Korzybski worked with a form of English called "E-Prime" which avoids the use of the verb "to be". I've played with E-Prime several times and found it useful. People often use "to be" poorly, equating ideas with it that don't properly equate, mixing levels of abstraction poorly. and forgetting what they really mean. If I've done my job well in writing this document, I've successfully written without using forms of "to be". I've found it difficult to do so, particularly in avoiding passive tense, but I've also found it enlightening at times to have to rephrase things to say more clearly what I meant.
As I read "Chaos and Beyond" I found for some reason that I still don't understand, this time I started to wonder: did Wilson make "Korzybski" up?
After all, "Count Alfred Korzybski" really sounds like a character in Illuminatus!. And Wilson often balances precariously on the fuzzy edge of fact. I began to envision Wilson, with some interesting philosophical ideas and observations, feeling that no one would take him seriously if he declared them as his own, and instead creating a false philosopher from the early twentieth century and saying "Hey! Those ideas came from this dead white dude a long time ago, not from me! So listen up!". After all, in our society saying that a dead white man came up with some ideas seems to lend them some kind of bizarre credibility.
So it came to pass that around midnight on a Friday night I desparately wanted to find out if Count Alfred Korzybski existed. How could I do that? Well, I could have no direct physical experience with him because the supposed Count had died before I born. And I couldn't search through old birth and death certificates in a practical way, and even that would not really prove anything except the fact that someone with that name lived.
So, like any good Internet weenie, I turned to the web. I did an Infoseek search on "Alfred Korzybksi" and got some very interesting results.
I laughed pretty hard when I saw that Infoseek found Korzybski mentioned in both Dianetics and Neural Linguistic Programming web pages. If you don't understand why... well, learn a little about Dianetics or NLP. And if you still don't understand why, well... don't worry about it. Anyway, I could easily believe that these mentions of Korzybski originated with Wilson (however indirectly) as well.
I laughed at the alt.angst reference, too, and felt intrigued to find William H. Calvin listed. William Calvin works as a neurophysiologist at the University of Washington, and I've read some of his books before. I doubted that his mention of Korzybski would be Robert Anton Wilson-related, but still, what would that tell me? And I spotted a reference to Korzybski in a Ted Nelson document, but that still felt too Wilsonesque for my comfort.
Disatisfied with the results of the web search (or at least, not believing in Korzybski's existence much more than I did when I started), I turned to Melvyl, the University of California online card catalog. A Melvyl search turned up several references to Korzybski.
Finally I had some interesting information. Whoever Korzybski might have been, the Melvyl card catalog contained information that indicated several books written by someone named Alfred Korzybski, who lived during the period that Wilson had indicated someone named Alfred Korzybski had lived, and with the same titles that Wilson claimed Korzybski's books had.
Now I wanted to get copies of these books. I pointed Netscape at Amazon.Com, an online bookstore that I've used several times with mixed satisfaction. They listed several books by Korzybski and said that they had three of them ("Science and Sanity", "General Semantics Seminar" and "Manhood of Humanity") in stock and could probably ship them within two to three days. I felt a surge of belief and immediately placed an order for those and several other books that I found in their catalog.
I felt very anxious to receive the order. I wanted to read the books and find out what Korzybski actually said. I wanted to see them and feel reassured that he actually did exist (at least, once upon a time). Imagine how I felt when I received confirmation that the first part of my order had shipped and that it did not contain any of the Korzybski books, and that they would require extra time to ship.
Once I walked down the path of suspecting that Wilson had made up Korzybski, I found myself able to suspect much more than that. I felt dubious about the NLP and Dianetics references to Korzybski. After all, my experience with both NLP and Dianetics leads me to think of them as unreliable sources of information. Then when I found references to Korzybski in the Melvyl online card catalog, I had at least two reactions - "Aha! He actually did exist!" and "I could probably sneak references to books that didn't exist into Melvyl fairly easily under the right conditions".
Finding even more references to Korzybski in Amazon.Com had reassured me; after all, I felt that finding bogus data to both databases seemed a lot more improbable, unless the perpetrator had modified Books In Print... hmmmm...
When Amazon.Com reported that they hadn't shipped the Korzybski books, my confidence level dropped rapidly. Maybe he really didn't exist. After all, they couldn't actually produce any books by him.
Even if the books arrive soon (I received email last night from Amazon.Com saying that they shipped the books, which should arrive within a few days), I will have only indirect experience of Korzybski. I cannot have direct experience of him: apparently, he died in 1950. Perhaps someday I will have direct experience of someone who had direct experience of him. I have to think of Korzybski as a probability, not a certainty. Rather than say "Korzybski was a philosopher who lived in the earlier part of the 20th century, wrote several books and died in 1950" I have to say "research that I have done leads me to believe that a man named Alfred Korzybski probably lived in the earlier part of the 20th century, probably wrote these books, and probably died in 1950".
Afterword: the books arrived about a week later. So what?
The Search for Korzybski/19-Nov-95 romkey@apocalypse.org