What is Man? A definition by Alfred Korzybski (1921).

‘I hope to show clearly and convincingly that the answer is to be found in the patent fact that human beings possess in varying degrees a certain natural faculty or power or capacity which serves at once to give them their appropriate dignity as human beings and to discriminate them, not only from the minerals and the plants but also from the world of animals, this peculiar or characteristic human faculty or power or capacity I shall call the time-binding faculty or time-binding power or time-binding capacity.

The matter of definitions.. is very important. I am not now speaking of nominal definitions, which for convenience merely give names to known objects. I am speaking of such definitions of phenomena as result from correct analysis of the phenomena. Nominal definitions are mere conveniences and are neither true nor false; but analytic definitions are definitive propositions: and are true or else false. ..” pp. 58-59

If we analyse the classes of life, we readily find that there are three cardinal classes which are radically distinct in function. A short analysis will disclose to us that, though minerals have various activities, they are not “living.”

The plants have a very definite and well known function–the transformation of solar energy into organic chemical energy. They are a class of life which appropriates one kind of energy, converts it into another kind and stores it up ; in that sense they are a kind of storage battery for the solar energy ; and so

I define THE PLANTS AS THE CHEMISTRY-BINDING class of life.

The animals use the highly dynamic products of the chemistry-binding class–the plants–as food, and those products–the results of plant-transformation–undergo in animals a further transformation into yet higher forms ;

and the animals are correspondingly a more dynamic class of life ; their energy is kinetic; they have a remarkable freedom and power which the plants do not possess–

I mean the freedom and faculty to move about in space; and so I define ANIMALS AS THE SPACE-BINDING CLASS OF LIFE.

And now what shall we say of human beings ?

What is to be our definition of Man ?

Like the animals, human beings do indeed possess the space-binding capacity but, over and above that, human beings possess a most remarkable capacity which is entirely peculiar to them–

I mean the capacity to summarise, digest and appropriate the labors and experiences of the past ;

I mean the capacity to use the fruits of past labors and experiences as intellectual or spiritual capital for developments in the present ;

I mean the capacity to employ as instruments of increasing power the accumulated achievements of the all-precious lives of the past generations spent in trial and error, trial and success ;

I mean the capacity of human beings to conduct their lives in the ever increasing light of inherited wisdom ;

I mean the capacity in virtue of which man is at once the heritor of the by-gone ages and the trustee of posterity.

And because humanity is just this magnificent natural agency by which the past lives in the present and the present for the future, I define HUMANITY, in the universal tongue of mathematics and mechanics, to be the TIME-BINDING CLASS OF LIFE.

These definitions of the cardinal classes of life are, it will be noted, obtained from direct observation ; they are so simple and so important that I cannot over-emphasize the necessity of grasping them and most especially the definition of Man.’

The use of bold is mine. The breaks in the original paragraphing are mine too. it doesn’t really matter the definition is quite clear. WS 2006.