[발췌] From The Sensory Order to the Liberal Order: Hayek’s Non-rationalist Liberalism (STEVEN HORWITZ, 2000)

지은이: STEVEN HORWITZ

출처: Review of Austrian Economics, 13: 23–40 (2000)

자료: http://www.gmu.edu/depts/rae/archives/VOL13_1_2000/horwitz.pdf

※ 발췌(excerpts):

Abstract: 

( ... ) we can see the psychological and epistemological underpinnings of Hayek’s belief in the mind’s limits and the indispensibility of spontaneously emergent social institutions. The Austrian view of microeconomic coordination is a logical outgrowth of Hayek’s theory of mind. Constraints on government are necessary not because self-interest leads rational government actors into temptation, but because even altruistically-motivated actors are epistemically unable to intervene effectively in spontaneously emergent institutions.

Introduction

( ... ) In this paper I wish to argue that the view of the human mind he offers in his work on theoretical psychology, The Sensory Order, is crucial to understanding both his economics and his politics, and makes use of a theoretical perspective parallel to them. The argument Hayek offers for constitutional constraints on the size and scope of government is intimately linked with his description of the limits of the human mind. Human actors require constitutional constraints because we are epistemologically unable to generate social order in any other way. ( ... )

( ... ) Ultimately, Hayek’s conception of the human mind is that it is a spontaneous order much like the various social and economic phenomena he has explored in otherworks. An important implication of this conception is that the human mind can never be fully known by the human mind, i.e., there are insurmountable limits to our ability to know, predict, and control the mind. ( ... )

( ... ... )

For Hayek, the mind is the result of twin processes of evolution. To some extent the physical structure of the brain has evolved in certain shared ways that are reflected in the strong consistencies in perception among most humans. At the same time, the environment and experiences of particular people will lead individual minds to evolve in distinct directions and guide perception in different ways. For example, the experience of learning one's mother tongue clearly shapes one's perception of the world.[3] As we move through our lives, the various experiences we encounter all affect our mental evolution and developments so that at any given point, the mind can be seen as the product of these historical and experiential events. Thus mind is a cultural product that evolves from a particular physical structure.[4] Hayek would agree with so-called "materialists" in maintaining the physical basis of the order we call mind, but he would depart from their belief that the mind can be reduced to physical phenomena. The self-organizing properties of mind take it beyond our ability to understand in physical terms, despite its ultimately material basis.[5]

[4] Even in his final book, Hayek harkened back to the themes of ^The Sensory Order^ by arguing that reason is a product of culture not biology. See Hayek(1988: 22-23)
[5] See the brief discussion of the "paradoxes" in Hayek's philosophy of mind, including his relationship to materialism, in Nadeau(1997). Nadeau's reference to recent work on "supervenience" may prove to be a fruitful way to explain Hayek's non-reductionist materialism.

( ... ... )