Joseph Samuel Bois – Breeds of Men Toward the Adulthood of Humankind

Joseph Samuel Bois – Breeds of Men Toward the Adulthood of Humankind

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What is proposed here is a new classification of men according to an overall condition that is habitual with them. We call it their semantic stage of development It manifests itself in whatever they say or do, and we can evaluate them as they perform right under our eyes in a speech, in an article, in a demonstration, or an explanation. We eventually discover that men belong to different breeds, very different from one another, just as animals belong to different species that have appeared one after the other in the course of evolution. What we can expect from a particular breed is not what we can expect from one that came into existence earlier or later.

In this book these semantic breeds of men are described as they emerged one after the other in the course of the history of our Western culture, from the primitive of prehistoric times who believed in superstition to the first real thinkers who lived in Greece some 500 years before Christ and began to use their reason, then to the scientists of the seventeenth century (Newton, Galileo, Bacon, Descartes, etc.) who gave man a growing mastery over nature, eventually coming to the wizards of today’s multiplying sciences who seem to feel at home in a world where relativity reigns supreme.

The viewpoint adopted is that of evolution, of which Pierre Teilhard de Chardin wrote: “”It is a general condition to which all theories, all hypotheses, all systems must bow and which they must satisfy henceforward if they are going to be thinkable and true.””As there are old species, like ants, termites, platypuses, coelacanths, etc., that are still in existence in our day and age, there are breeds of men-and institutions-that really belong to former centuries, though they are still functioning as living fossils in a world that is way ahead of them.The problem is how to recognize them, and put our future in the hands of the more advanced breeds.

Bois was a French Canadian Jesuit priest who was forced out of the Church in the 1920’s for his radical, against-doctrine views. It is interesting that while our other great writer Teilhard de Chardin did not have to leave the Catholic priesthood, his work was not fully appreciated by his superiors either. After Bois left the Church he got a degree in psychology from McGill University in Canada. As he was born in Quebec, French was his first language. In the late 1930s, he read Alfred Korzybski’s ‘Science and Sanity’ and was shaken by it. The foundation of his primary assumptions about our humanness was rocked, so he went and studied with Korzybski and became his most adventurous student. Korzybski had started the Institute of General Semantics (IGS), first in Chicago, and later in Lakeland, Connecticut.

After he died, Bois became the heir apparent, and was the chief lecturer. Bois took seriously Korzybski’s statement in ‘Science and Sanity’: ‘In the present work, each statement is merely the best the author can make in 1933. (So) we ought not to be surprised if such a pioneering enquiry proves to need many corrections and elaborations in the future’. Bois developed his own work, epistemics, as a further elaboration of what Korzybski started, and as a new development that introduced factors which warranted calling it a new discipline. There is an annual Korzybski Memorial address, and LL Whyte was the speaker one year. After a successful career as a management consultant using general semantics, Bois started his own institute called Viewpoints. Because of the influence of Bois, Philosphere Publishers []was set up after his death