The Concept and the Significance of ‘Sanity’ in Korzybski and Shrimad Bhagvatgita

Abstract

Alfred Korzybski’s General Semantics is claimed to be a scientific study of the humans and the major problems of humanity.  Korzybski found humans facing the serious problem of their maladjustment with other human beings and the society. He also found that humans are different from other species and are gifted with the ability of time-binding and making progress. Man can do time-binding both for better or for worse. If he does it in the right manner, he will make progress, but if he does it wrongly, he may invite disasters also. He further added that the human language remains a powerful and major tool for time-binding. The language determines human responses because it is through language that he evaluates/assesses reality. Thus, human decisions are the consequences of his response to perception and the verbal construction (labelling) of the reality. They further determine the human inferences, concepts, attitudes, as well as actions. His main objective for promoting general semantics was to bring better adjustment in human life. He wanted humanity to reach manhood from childhood by using and understanding language in a matured manner and thus shaping matured attitudes in the society.  For him, General Semantics is a more scientific way of addressing human problems and making life better and smoother. In other words, he wanted to give a scientific mechanism to arrive at a proper assessment of the situation and the consequent judgement or decision.