The Book of Radical General Semantics Quotes

“We came to the conclusion that valid knowledge is not knowledge of… things directly but of the relations which exist between the energies and entities of the territory and the symbols that we have for them….Think of structure as simply a bundle of relations among things: the structure of an automobile is how the parts are related… the dynamic interplay of the parts… You can apply the notion to anything… to organisms. The relationship of parts and the interplay of organs determine the functioning of the organism (pp.43, 44).”
― Gad Horowitz, The Book of Radical General Semantics

“So let’s proceed with Chisholm’s exposition: SiS “can be seen best if we do not define it, but rather illustrate it with a few examples… There is a SiS between the grooves in the phonograph record and the music that is played from it… between a blueprint and a machine that is made from it… If you have learned to do something the way somebody else does it, there is a SiS between your habits and his… SiS depends, you see, on order and on relations which exist in the territory and in the symbolism….(p.37)”
― Gad Horowitz, The Book of Radical General Semantics

“Korzybski’s notion of Similarity in Structure is a master stroke without which the understanding of General Semantics risks sliding back to the Aristotelian orientation. That’s why he usually avoided conventional formulations which might appear to give maps the magical power to ‘represent’, ‘correspond to’ or ‘mirror’ a territory. A non-Aristotelian map has the scientific power to deliver similarity-in-structure to a territory. Not similarity, but similarity in structure. ‘Structure’ for AK is a mathematical term involving ‘order’ and especially ‘relations’.”
― Gad Horowitz, The Book of Radical General Semantics

“Precisely! Once an individual responds differently to a recurring situation or one that has held him/her in a transfixed state of identification, a new chemical-physical-colloidal matrix is established within the nervous system and this creates a new base from which the new tangent can propagate itself to form newer responses to former situations instead of reacting similarly.”
― Gad Horowitz, The Book of Radical General Semantics

“The square’s edge is not truly an obstacle to our dynamo-genic differentiation but only a tangent giving shape to the ongoing process of the curve. Perhaps we did not see this because we were moving too much in a straight line, trying to cross or break the line, to have revenge on the line of the square. We can extensionally transcend any given ‘square’ of life but only by following the natural curve of the spiral, which gently touches the edges of the square, tangentially, before moving on.”
― Gad Horowitz, The Book of Radical General Semantics

“Or we can encounter the square as tangential to our sinuous spiral curve - a temporary container for a part of our life’s path. These hates and these attachments we feel are the square’s edges for us at any given moment. As we spiral we see them as limits that give shape; we approach these old feelings-thoughts and accept them, touch them and let them touch us without fear, because we know they are merely the limit of a spiral path that runs at a tangent to those ‘hard lines.’ In time, those old attachments and hates will seem like such a small square compared to the new regions we explore.”
― Gad Horowitz, The Book of Radical General Semantics

“If you follow the progression of squares and rectangles you will discover a progression which occurs naturally in life and seems to persist in spite of disruptions. We go along in life quite happily and then something may happen, let’s say at one of the small squares, and unhappiness sets in. If we don’t have a method with which to deal with the sharp blow or painful circumstance we become led astray by ‘identification’ and continue to assign blame to that event and our life becomes entangled within that ‘engram.’ We get stuck and don’t move as we should in a four-dimensional world. And ‘pathology’ ensues.”
― Gad Horowitz, The Book of Radical General Semantics

“I love the way those terms roll off my tongue and I love to reply to someone’s query—‘what is General Semantics’ with: ‘Its about dynamo- genic differentiation—or changing how you “think” about things.’ To me, the term ‘dynamo’ means ‘the process of change which occurs within the nervous system.’ And the term ‘genic’ means ‘suitable to the processes of change.”
― Gad Horowitz, The Book of Radical General Semantics

“If you do the math and start small, you will grow and grow. The new growth will spur newer growth and that growth will catalyze more growth and sanity still in an on-going progressive fashion. The world should take on brighter and more colorful hues and you should be able to flip through fresh pages of life on which happiness and success can be written.”
― Gad Horowitz, The Book of Radical General Semantics

“the IER will dissipate and be subject to re-evaluation if its experiential components are first de-fused, separated, differentiated, and then revised as appropriate in the direction of greater sanity.”
― Gad Horowitz, The Book of Radical General Semantics

“The Structural-Differential (SD) points to the human ability to experience the difference, to differentiate, between the object level sensations which give to the IER its felt intensity, and the label level verbalizations, explicit and implicit, which give conceptual meaning to the sensations.”
― Gad Horowitz, The Book of Radical General Semantics

“What is called an “emotion” in everyday elementalistic language I would redescribe as an evaluational-reaction containing intense sensations. So then, an intense evaluational-reaction (IER), which can be more or less ‘negative’, that is, undesirable, as contributing to unnecessary suffering and to unsanity.”
― Gad Horowitz, The Book of Radical General Semantics

“General-Semantics is not so much about what to think as about how to think and how to think about thinking, so then, a discipline and a meta-discipline available in appropriately different degrees of complexity to every human being from the young child to the physics professor. Not a special field but “a general science of human evaluation,” encyclopedic in scope, involving methodical “neurosemantic” training of the human being as “organism as a whole in an environment” and relevant to all human concerns from the personal to the political, to natural and social sciences, to art and religion.”
― Gad Horowitz, The Book of Radical General Semantics