Alfred Korzybski - "To Be"

"To Be"

Many devotees and critics of Korzybski reduced his rather complex system to a simple matter of what he said about the verb "to be." His system, however, is based primarily on such terminology as the different "orders of abstraction," and formulations such as "consciousness of abstracting." It is often said that Korzybski opposed the use of the verb "to be," which is an exaggeration (see "Criticisms" below).

He thought that certain uses of the verb "to be", called the "is of identity" and the "is of predication", were faulty in structure, e.g., a statement such as, "Elizabeth is a fool" (said of a person named "Elizabeth" who has done something that we regard as foolish). In Korzybski's system, one's assessment of Elizabeth belongs to a higher order of abstraction than Elizabeth herself. Korzybski's remedy was to deny identity; in this example, to be aware continually that "Elizabeth" is not what we call her. We find Elizabeth not in the verbal domain, the world of words, but the nonverbal domain (the two, he said, amount to different orders of abstraction). This was expressed by Korzybski's most famous premise, "the map is not the territory". Note that this premise uses the phrase "is not", a form of "to be"; this and many other examples show that he did not intend to abandon "to be" as such. In fact, he said explicitly that there were no structural problems with the verb "to be" when used as an auxiliary verb or when used to state existence or location.

It was even all right sometimes to use the faulty forms of the verb "to be," as long as one was aware of their structural limitations. This was developed into the language "E-Prime" by D. David Bourland, Jr. 15 years after his death (E-Prime a form of the English language in which the verb "to be" does not appear in any of its forms; for example, the sentence "the movie was good" could translate into E-Prime as "I liked the movie", thereby distinguishing opinion from fact).