BOO KS
4bS
adequately "the feel of modern visual experience." Until then "the old
orientation," which depended on "fixed definitions and categories,"
provided "a system of static evaluations," but this suddenly "has been
rendered obsolete" by the Industrial Revolution, Einstein, etc. Since
everything is now revealed as dynamic and fluid, "every way of abstract–
ing produces its own kind of truth, which, in the hands of one who
orders his abstractions well, results in its own kind of beauty." And more
of the same. In spite of the stress laid by general semantics on the care
·with which abstractions must be constantly referred to the external
world, Hayakawa never offers any examples to show what he means by
"the static" and "the dynamic," or what "modern visual experience"
might be, or how, under the new dispensation, we are to tell which
abstractions are ordered "well" and which not.
Therefore when in two of the three remaining essays he tells us
that the scientific objectivity of general semantics implies both a "pro–
found sense of social responsibility" and an ability "to evaluate the
relative merit of cultures," it is hard to believe him. Earlier, quoting
another of his authorities, he told us that for the extensionally oriented
person "the locus of evaluation is in the self," and added :
It isn't what teachers think, it isn't what the Ph.D. committee
thinks, it isn't what the neighbors think, it's what
I
think.
Because the fully functioning person's experiences, past and
present, are accessible to awareness, because he sees freshly
and without rigid categorizing or labeling of the situation
before him, he ultimately is his own judge of what is the needed
solution for any given problem.
But by now we want to challenge that triumphantly independent "It's
what
I
think" by asking just who or what this "I" is and what credentials
it has to pass judgment on any of the matters of serious public interest
that general semantics concerns itself with. The book shows quite clearly
that sustained appreciative contact with the extensional world can't
provide such credentials. Nor, despite Hayakawa's praise for "the habit
of critical reading," does such contact seem to have provided the means
or the desire to question the crude version of intellectual history he has
absorbed from Korzybski and others. To give just one example: for
twenty-five years now Hayakawa has evidently believed what Korzybski
asserted, without evidence, about Plato and Aristotle, the arch-villains
of "the old orientation"-that is, of pre-Korzybskian Western Thought.
At this late date, apparently speaking of the theory of forms, he can
tell us glibly that "Plato hit upon a formula ... for the complete arrest
