To use words to sense reality is like going with a lamp to search for darkness.
Interpretation
Words can only describe reality but cannot fully capture it, much like using a lamp to find darkness is inherently contradictory.
Alfred Korzybski's quote highlights the limitations of language in expressing the complexities of reality. It suggests that while words are a useful tool for communication and understanding, they can never encapsulate the entirety of human experience and perception. Attempting to describe reality solely through language may lead to misunderstandings, as words can only point towards the truths of existence without fully embracing them.
In practice
In a speech about the limitations of communication, one might quote this to emphasize the gap between words and experience.
As words are not the things we speak about, and structure is the only link between them, structure becomes the only content of knowledge. If we gamble on verbal structures that have no observable empirical structures, such gambling can never give us any structural information about the world. Therefore such verbal structures are structurally obsolete, and if we believe in them, they induce delusions or other semantic disturbances.
If words are not things, or maps are not the actual territory, then, obviously, the only possible link between the objective world and the linguistic world is found in structure, and structure alone.
I want to make clear only that words are not the things spoken about, and that there is no such thing as an object in absolute isolation.
Let us repeat the two crucial negative premises as established firmly by all human experience: (1) Words are not the things we are speaking about; and (2) There is no such thing as an object in absolute isolation.
Talking to Yogi Berra about baseball is like talking to Homer about the Gods.
There is no doubt whatsoever that the universe is the merest illusion.
The lapse of ages changes all things - time - language - the earth - the bounds of the sea - the stars of the sky, and everything 'about, around, and underneath' man, except man himself, who has always been and always will be, an unlucky rascal. The infinite variety of lives conduct but to death, and the infinity of wishes lead but to disappointment. All the discoveries which have yet been made have multiplied little but existence.
Queerness isn't just Lady Gaga and overpriced drinks and fauxhawks. It's James Baldwin and Bea Arthur and Gertrude Stein and Gore Vidal.
Even an entire society, a nation, or all simultaneously existing societies taken together, are not owners of the earth. They are simply its possessors, its beneficiaries, and have to bequeath it in an improved state to succeeding generations.
Nothing is to be preferred before justice.
Subscribe for the occasional hand-picked quote. No noise.