The Emperor’s New Clothes
I’ll start by defining Korzybski’s new word: Semantic Reaction. Put most simply, a semantic reaction is the way in which we react to words and symbols.
I’ve noticed that often when readers come across this term, Semantic Reaction, for the first time they react by thinking that it is just simply referring to how people intellectually understand the meaning of words they encounter – and that this is the sum of its meaning and nothing more. Korzybski meant by the word something much more holistic and significant.
Interestingly, how Korzybski came to coin the word is itself an example of the point of this little essay: Korzybski is like the child saying the Emperor has no clothes. I’ll elaborate; Korzybski noticed an obvious truth, which was that words and symbols can affect people. Words and symbols can make us angry, sad, mad, laugh, joyous, fearful, outraged, and hundreds of other emotions. Korzybski noticed that we react to words first and most importantly with our feelings and emotions. It is after that bodily reaction that the mind kicks in to bring us the consciously intellectual meaning of the words. Reflect on this and try to describe the process of encountering a word or symbol from the visual event that triggers it off to the point of conscious thought when you recognize a meaning.
If you do, I believe you will notice that first you react to the meaning of the words on a physical, visceral manner. Later in the process we form intellectual verbal meanings. This Illustrates that we are a mind / body unity and that we react to words and symbols as a unified being. Significantly, all of this takes place in a sequence of processes in time – first with the body and then with the mind. The totality of this reactive process is what Korzybski means by a ‘Semantic Reaction’.
I have already begun to lead us into the topic of this essay. I feel that the difficulty that Korzybski describes as the ‘discovery of the obvious’ is related metaphorically to Hans Christian Andersen’s tale, ‘The Emperor’s New Clothes’, first published in 1837 in his Danish Fairy Tale collection ‘Fairy Tales told for Children’[2].
As you may recall, the story involves two swindlers who hear about an Emperor who is very fond of and vain about the clothes he wears. The two swindlers tell the Emperor that they can weave and sew for him the most magnificent set of clothes ever made. They go on to explain can make the clothes out of a fabric that possess a special attribute. Its attribute is that the cloth would appear invisible to anyone who was ‘stupid.’ And of course, the Emperor would not want stupid advisors.
The Emperor paid a huge fee to the ‘tailors’ for the making of the clothes. All the Emperor’s court heard about the commissioning of new clothes and the clothe’ special attribute, and later so did all the people of the Emperor’s Kingdom. Everyone who was sent to report on the progress of the work came back with lavish praise for the cloth and the workmanship; no one was willing to publicly admit that they could not see it and thus, also admit that they could be ‘stupid’.
On the day the clothes were completed, the Emperor decided to have a lavish public parade to display his magnificent new clothes. All the townspeople enthusiastically praise the new clothes as the Emperor passed before them. Suddenly, one small child sees the Emperor for the first time. The child sees that the Emperor is in fact naked and then says aloud “But he has nothing on.” It took the child to finally explicitly speak the obvious truth.
Using Korzybski’s opening quotes as the lens through which to interpret the tale, let’s investigate what is going on. The ‘clothing’ and the ‘cloth’ out of which it is ‘made’ is presented as having special qualities: only those who are stupid lack the ability to see it at all. This is metaphoric of how ideas and symbols are presented to us with “baggage.” Through the process of enculturation we are told what things ‘obviously’ mean, be they images, words, etc. This process of enculturation can even demarcate the very limits of meaning – by saying or implying that a certain word, symbol, etc has such and such meaning – and that is its only true meaning. Unfortunately, we are often implicitly and sometime explicitly told how and what to think. In doing so the mind is entrapped into a small finite box. To go beyond those limits is to be defined as ‘stupid’ within the context of the community.
In the story the child is the one who has not yet been fully indoctrinated in the cultural norms and rules and thus only has the simple intelligence of perception unfiltered through the cultural community’s lens. The child “doesn’t know any better” and just sees things unfiltered and thus is able to say – the Emperor is naked.
Presenting fundamental observations and ‘fundamental truths’, for the first time often seems like the words of that child in the story who states the ‘obvious’. But the significant thing to note is that prior to the child’s statement no one spoke the truth. The child was the first.
To view the world as a ‘child’ is a metaphor used in Taoist texts. In those Taoist texts the child is a metaphor for simplicity, the natural state before one begins being molded by one’s cultural restraints.
To be like the child and state explicitly for the first time the ‘obvious’ is as Korzybski states ‘often difficult; it involves …factors of new evaluation and meanings.’
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Comments: 16
A most delightful and articulate insight into a deeply important tale.
Dick
Great story for our time.....it never goes out of style.
A 'semantic reaction' is the reaction of the mind/body unity to the encounter of symbols and symbol systems.
A SR is not merely a cognitive reaction but the reaction of one's whole being upon taking in that sensory information and then processing it.
Our ongoing socialization process provides the "shoulds" and the other expectations of what "everybody knows" - that often prevents us from asking questions, we don't want to appear foolish. But the uninformed innocent, the child of the story, doesn't know enough to know that you are suppose to think or act a certain way in a given context and just process the information without bias and expectations.
The story and my use of Korzybski's remark is about how expectations act as a filter to incoming information on the one hand.
Then on the other hand they are illustrating how for some theories that describe what one can classify as 'fundamental truths' - it seems in retrospect upon encountering this theory that it seems so "obvious".
The reason it took so long for the "obvious" to get stated was that those filters of expectations prevented others for so long to even think and question the issues brought up and resolved in the theory.
one other comment - your remark about the Taoist second body in reference to the 'child' recalled to my mind the Taoist alchemists and practitioners of the Taoists who talked of 'making' a new body to inhabit and thus become the 'child' as referenced by Lao Tzu in his text.
Whether this is/was true or not, I can not say. I tend to read Lao Tzu using the term 'child' in the simple metaphoric sense of simplicity, clarity, etc, as another variation of the other metaphors he used such as the uncarved block and water - all referring to the natural uncluttered simplicity which yields the clarity of the natural order he saw as the true essence of the Tao - which he directed his readers to emulate.
I jokingly call it "the creative power of stupidity' - experts perceive the world according to how they were taught and thus how they became 'experts' in a given field. Lay people aka 'those who are stupid' - lack the acquired study in a field don't know what they "should" or "should not know" and thus see the whole field without the colored lens of all that conventional wisdom that the experts are burdened with. They are like the child in the story.
A way to make new discoveries in any given field is to look at the situation a new - "with the eyes of a child" or with the eyes of the "stupid one" - the untutored.
In fact, without expectation, you would not be able to read this comment. After, if you abandon the expectation that it is text that you see on your display and not, say, a random pattern of dots, you would have to stop and sort that matter out before you started reading, and since, indeed, they might be some random dot pattern, thrown up by some sort of computer glitch, you would have a very hard time resolving the issue.
When expectations fail, the best thing to do is revise them, not abandon them. Fortunately, such revision is just what people normally do.
However, history and science are not on our side. The holocaust, the Asch conformity experiments, the Stanford prison experiment, and Abu Grhaib all suggest that we have within us the strongest of tendencies to conform, that conformity is the norm, even though we don't think it is, at least not in our case.
This is not all bad. We are social animals and we owe our survival to cooperation and conformity. If we each considered whether or not any and every demand of society was right for us as an individual, we would probably not have survived as a species.
So, I suppose that I will continue to stop at stop signs even when there's not another vehicle within miles of the intersection. And if I encounter someone wearing nothing but a crown, I may very well say, "Nice outfit."
With out the built in and accumulated memories of expectations we could not literally see anything....our mind refers back to the incoming data and figures out what we are sensing through the use of prior data - prior expectations....