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.
Are we the only members of the Galaxy that can actually understand what a galaxy is? Could Homo sapiens really be the pinnacle of Creation - the cleverest critters in the cosmos? If we learn the answer is 'no,' that would affect our philosophies forever.
Life has no meaning unless one lives it with a will, at least to the limit of one's will. Virtue, good, evil are nothing but words, unless one takes them apart in order to build something with them; they do not win their true meaning until one knows how to apply them.
Secrecy is for losers. . . . It is time to dismantle government secrecy, this most persuasive of Cold War-era regulations. It is time to begin building the supports for the era of openness that is already upon us.
The center that I cannot find is known to my unconscious mind.
Evolution is the creation-myth of our age. By telling us our origin it shapes our views of what we are. It influences not just our thought, but our feelings and actions too, in a way which goes far beyond its official function as a biological theory.
The life of the spirit is not our life, but the life of God within us.
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