Thank you, Lou, for inviting me for this occasion.
Just a few introductory remarks.
My accent is quite different from Mises'.
I come from northern Germany, and in northern Germany we speak correct German.
Mises, as you can imagine, had, of course, an Austrian accent.
If you have an ear for things like this, you can immediately tell the difference between my accent and his.
What I want to do in the seminar is to reconstruct world history, so to speak, from the bottom up,
from the beginning of mankind so to speak to the present and gradually enlarge and expand the picture.
I will give you a brief overview of what I have planned, but let me say from the outset I have never given these lectures in this form before.
Before I have presented some of these topics in various lectures and in my class on comparative systems,
I talk about subjects similar to the subjects that I will deal with in the seminar.
But never before have I presented lectures structured in this way.
And because I have never done this, I have also not timed the lectures correctly.
So it sometimes can happen that I don't use all my time, and sometimes it might happen
that I will take more of the time than has been allotted for these lectures.
Also in any case I ask you to bear with me and to pardon me if I mismanage my time occasionally.
This is also supposed to be a seminar style, so I encourage you if you have questions during
During the lecture, if they are short, then please raise your hand and I will handle these
questions during the lecture.
If they are more involved questions, then I would ask you to wait until the lecture
is over and please also keep in mind that obviously some questions would be more appropriate
to be brought up somewhat later during the seminar and some questions are more appropriate
at the beginning in order to give you some basic idea of how this whole thing is structured.
The first lecture I want to talk about the nature of men, comparing men with animals and illuminating the major differences and characterizing what one can call the human condition, the condition that mankind finds itself confronted with.
was in the second lecture.
I will talk about the spread of humans across the globe
and the development, the extensification,
and the intensification of division of labor.
The third lecture deals with the next element in human and economic development, that is the development of money and the expansion of money and the consequences that money has for the development of the division of labor.
The next fundamental element will be the theory of time preference and of capital and of technology and of economic growth.
All of the lectures, by the way, will contain, so to speak, theoretical elements and also historical elements.
I'm not a historian by profession. My advantage, so to speak, is that I know more theory than most historians and reconstruct history because of that in a slightly different way than a historian might do it.
The fifth lecture will deal with ideological factors that have an influence on social and economic development, that is in particular religion, that will be a lecture on comparative religion and comparative ideologies.
and the Lecture 6 will be dealing with details of the theory of private property and the
issue of how societies would defend property rights with special reference to feudal societies
and what defense mechanisms would be used in modern societies,
where we can take some ideas or cues from the feudal age.
The lecture number seven will deal
was parasitic behavior that is exploitative behavior
and the origin of the state.
And lecture eight will be based on something
that I have done in my book, Democracy, The God That Failed.
That is the transition from monarchical states,
Monarchical Governments to Democratic Governments, the following lecture will deal with states
and imperialism and war, and the final lecture will address some strategic issues, that is,
How do we go from here to a society that is free or at least more free than the current one?
So with this, let me begin to talk about the nature of men and the human condition and
I want to speak in particular about three elements that are unique, so to speak, to mankind.
One is language, the second one is property, and the third one is production or technology.
You realize then when we begin all of this here, we are already talking, we are already
using some of our capabilities, some of our skills and achievements that are the result
of Human Evolution.
That is, the reconstruction that I will offer you of human history
makes already use of some of the tools that have only gradually
evolved in the course of time.
Actually, the origin of language is dated back roughly to 150,000, 250,000 years ago.
All of these estimates are, of course, as you can imagine, rather vague estimates.
Nobody was around at that time and recorded it exactly when they started talking.
But these are the numbers that some geneticists and biologists and anthropologists give us
for the beginning.
And you notice something else from the fact that we begin all of this enterprise by talking
to each other, that somehow humans are social animals.
You are aware of the fact that there exist people who are interested in game theory, for
instance, who seem to have sometimes problems explaining why do people cooperate at all
and do not fight each other all the time.
But the funny thing is that this debate takes already place using language, which in a way
The way, from the outset, explains that there must be something wrong with this idea that
man at some point was, so to speak, deciding whether they should fight each other or whether
they should not fight each other.
Obviously, as soon as mankind began to talk with each other, they must have already recognized
that there are certain advantages to doing this and to be social in one's endeavor.
And it is perfectly clear, of course, from the outset what the great advantage of having
a language available and communicating with other people is.
We can convey knowledge to other people in a much faster way than would be possible if
we simply have to just look what other people are doing and then try to reconstruct, so
to speak, the ideas that were behind what they were doing through language.
We have the possibility of communicating directly what it was that led us to do this or led
us to do something else.
Now with language two ideas so to speak emerge and I use here the ideas that were developed
first by some Austrian psychologist, Karl Bühler, who also had some influence on Karl Popper, who uses his ideas.
And Karl Bühler makes a point that we can distinguish when we look at language, so to speak, between four different functions,
Two of which we find already on the animal level and two of which are unique to humans.
On the animal level, we find use of symbols or sounds that express something.
Like pain, for instance.
is an expressive function of language we can ascribe easily also to animals and say in
this sense that they can express some internal feelings, they can do this.
On the other hand, language has sometimes a signal function, that is, we can produce
There are two sounds that indicate there is some danger coming, warn other animals to run away or something like this.
Both of this, of course, is also possible for humans to do.
Language has an expressive function for us and also has this signal function to make other people aware of things.
What is not found in the animal kingdom is that language has a descriptive function.
That is, language describes this is such and such.
And with the descriptive function of language, for the first time the idea of truth emerges.
That is, for expressions and signals, whether that is true or not is not really an issue.
But when we say, this is such and such, then it becomes possible to say, is that really the case?
And we can try to find out if this is the case or is not the case.
So the idea of truth comes into being because there exists, because language has a descriptive function.
And the most primitive descriptive propositions would be of the type, this is such and such.
that is having a proper name or an identifying expression and then a general term characterizing a particular object as having some general characteristics.
And the second unique function, second unique human function of language is the argumentative function.
That we have complex statements connected by and and or, several statements combined to each other
and that we investigate whether certain arguments are valid or not
and investigate, so to speak, if we drew inferences in the correct way or in incorrect ways and so forth.
And you realize that it is precisely this last function
This argumentative function that we must also use as a tool if we now want to make a more precise distinction between the abilities of man on the one hand and the abilities, the different abilities of animals.
And I want to follow here a philosopher brand Blanchard who has pointed out some important differences between animals and humans.
And I want to begin with a little quote from Blanchard in a book called Reason and Analysis,
where he says this about animals and then draws a conclusion that this is somehow still
very different from what mankind can do.
He says, what does it mean to have human reason or human rationality?
And he answers, it cannot be consciousness, of course, because no one can sensibly doubt
that animals feel fear and hunger and pleasure and pain.
Animals can also make mistakes, which we recognize
as when, for instance, a dog drops
a bone for a more inviting bone that he sees in the water.
And since only judgements can be mistaken, animals must be also in some way able to make
judgements, just come to the conclusion that I made a wrong judgment.
And since judgment is sought, we can also say that animals think.
But they do obviously not think in the same way as humans do.
Now what is the difference between our way of thinking and their way of thinking?
Let me emphasize four points in this connection which partly overlap.
The first thing to be noted is that animal thought is always tied to perception, whereas
human thought can wander around, go back to eternity, wander to the future, can think
Animals cannot think about objects that are far away, can even think about objects that have never existed.
Animals cannot think in this way.
Whatever their thinking is, it requires, so to speak, some present cue, some observation
that makes them, from which their thinking arises.
We can imagine, for instance, that animals can also think to a certain extent about things
There are things that are absent, as if a dog sits in front of a house because the dog knows that his master has gone into the house and waits there patiently until the master comes back out.
But even there you can still see that it is tied to perception.
He would not have thought the master go in there. He would not do what he does sitting there waiting.
And in any case, he cannot think about things far away or impossible or things in the far distant future.
Is it possible that my dog is not waiting for me when I come back?
So here I'm talking, so to speak, about the most developed of animals.
How do we know that they're not thinking about the stars or infinity? They don't report that.
That brings me, that brings me exactly to the second point that they, that precisely, you say, that's one other fundamental difference between humans and animals, that they cannot do this.
So even if you think they might, they might think about this sort of stuff, they have no way of conveying this type of information to us.
Or we can say animals can't abstract in the way that humans can abstract.
Certainly animals can see shapes and colors and they can perceive smells and things like this.
But it doesn't seem to be the case that they have a concept of shapes, of triangles or whatever, or a concept of green or blue or yellow, or a concept of different types of smells.
Again, this is an aspect of what I just mentioned.
It is just tied to specific events, but they cannot abstract from the specific event and build a general concept.
If they could, then we would expect them to form a word for these things.
And it is not that animals are not capable of producing sounds.
Many animals do have the equipment to produce sounds.
So this does not explain why they don't have words.
Obviously, despite the fact that they can form sounds,
they cannot form what we refer to as words.
Sounds to which we attach a certain abstract idea for which we find various instances in the real world.
The third thing that distinguishes mankind from animals are that animals cannot make inferences explicitly.
Again, this has something intimately to do with the two points that I already made.
Animals can, of course, make inferences, but these inferences are implicit.
That is to say, if you have a chicken and you give some food to the chicken that is too big,
doesn't fit into its mouth or so, and it is desperate that it can't eat it,
and then you throw another one of roughly the same size in front of it then the
chicken might refuse to even try to do the same with a second piece of material
because it recognizes that it didn't work with the first it's not going to
likely work with the second but again due to the lack of concepts they cannot
not make explicit inferences, that is, infer from one concept to another and thereby be
able to say why such and such caused such and such a problem and why it would be in
in vain to try the same thing twice that already didn't work in the first case.
And the most important difference between animals and humans is the difference that animals
do not have what we call self-consciousness.
They do have consciousness, but not self-consciousness.
And what I mean by self-consciousness is they cannot stand back, so to speak, and reflect
about their own behavior.
They cannot pause and criticize their own behavior.
Think about why their behavior was successful or unsuccessful.
They do not have anything like norms or principles against which they can judge their own behavior
and criticize their own behavior.
Let me on this point again quote Blanchard on this most important of differences that
is the human ability of self-conscious reflection.
There he says, finally human reason has added an extra dimension to the animal consciousness
in the form of self-consciousness.
An animal lacks the power which is the source in ourselves of so much achievement and so much woo, of standing off from itself and contemplating what it is doing.
It eats, sleeps and cavorts, but never pauses in the midst of a meal to take note that it is eating greedily, never asks whether it is not unseemly to sleep the hours away,
Apparently never reflects as it leaps and runs that it is a little off form today. It makes mistakes, but having made one, it cannot sit down and consider what principle of right thinking is violated.
Because it cannot contemplate its own behavior, it cannot criticize itself. Being below the level of self-criticism, it has no norms. And having no norms, it lacks one great obvious essential to the life of reason, namely the power to be guided by principle.
And Blanchard then summarizes all of what I tried to convey up to this point by saying the following.
When we say that man is a rational animal, then we seem to imply that he can command ideas independently of sense,
that he can abstract, that he can infer explicitly, and that he can sit in judgment on himself.
The highest of animals can do none of these things.
The stupidest of men, if not a pathological case, can in some measure do them all.
So much about the human ability, the human language ability characterized in particular by our ability of self-reflection, self-criticism, self-control and so forth.
This capability we can now use in order to describe the human condition, which will be my next step.
This human condition can be characterized in the following way.
Mankind finds itself equipped with consciousness and discovers that they have a physical body
and discovers that there is something outside of the physical body, what we in economics call land.
that is nature given resources, things outside, independent of our body and what we learn immediately is that we are constantly and permanently pressed by various needs and have to act in order to satisfy these needs.
What men immediately discover is that certain things he can control directly.
That is, we can all discover that we can directly control our own body.
I can just say I lift my arm and my arm is lifted, or I lift my leg and my left, my leg will go up.
And we realize that nobody else can do this. Everybody can do that with his body, of course.
But we have this ability of directly controlling something only with very limited things.
I cannot control you directly. I can only control you by being in direct control of my own physical body first.
Then I can of course indirectly make an attempt also to control you.
So this explains, so to speak, why we have the concept of I, of me, because certain things only I can do and that distinguishes me from the outset from everybody else.
This is what I can do and nobody can do this to my arm in the way I can do it.
We can also say that we discover then immediately what we mean by having a free will.
I can just want this. I just pick this up and that's it.
There's nothing that forces me. It is just my own wanting it so that makes it so.
And we also develop immediately some sort of idea of what it means to cause something.
I am the cause of this bottle of water being in my hand and I am the cause of now drinking out of it.
So we recognize our unique relationship that we have to our own physical body and that
other people have to their own physical body.
We know that I am, because of this, not you and you are not me.
We understand the concept of cause and we understand the concept of free will.
Then we recognize, secondly, that there are other things out there that we can only control
indirectly with the help of those things that we can control directly, that is, with the
with the help of our body, we can now, of course, also attempt to control things that exist external to our own physical body.
We refer to those things as means, and we realize also that there exist things that we cannot control at all.
We cannot control sunshine or rain. We cannot control the movements of the moon or the stars.
Those things we refer to as the environment, which we have to take, so to speak, as a given, as something that is beyond our control.
Control. The borderline between those things that we can control and those things that
we cannot control, the borderline, so to speak, between those are means and that is the environment
in which we act is movable. That is, certain things might come in our reach and can become
Controllable that were initially not controllable.
Just think of just to build a tool, for instance, that
makes it possible that you can, whatever, reach up high
that you initially couldn't, or reach heights
that you could initially not reach, or reach depths
that you initially could not reach.
So the limits between the range of objects that become means
and the range of objects that remain environment,
the limits are movable, flexible.
It might well be the case that one day we
are able to just move the moon around
by waving certain types of instruments, but currently at least we are unable to do so.
Then Men learns immediately that some of the means, some of the things that he can control,
that he can move, that he can manipulate can be referred to as goods and others can be referred to as bads.
Goods would obviously be those means that are suitable in order to satisfy some needs that we have
And bads would be objects that we can control, but that would have negative repercussions on us, that would not satisfy any needs, but to the contrary, may harm us or even kill us.
So, at this point, let me read you the definition of goods.
Goods being means that can be controlled and being suitable for the satisfaction of human needs or ends.
And I will give you the definition that Carl Menger provided us with.
Carl Menger pointed out that there are four requirements for objects to become goods for us.
The first is a human need.
The second requirement is such properties that render the thing capable of being brought into a causal connection with the satisfaction of this need.
That is, this object must be capable by performing certain manipulations with it to cause certain needs to be satisfied or relieved, at least, or whatever it is.
The third condition is that there must be of course human knowledge about this connection, which explains of course why it is important for people to learn, to distinguish between goods and bads.
So human knowledge about the object, our ability of controlling it, and the causal power of this object to lead to certain types of satisfactory results.
And the fourth is, as I already indicated, is of course that we must have command of the thing sufficient to direct it to the satisfaction of the need.
So in this sense, for instance, even though we might consider sunshine to be a good or also rain to be a good, it would not be an economic good because we have no control over the object that is capable of producing sun or producing rain.
Only objects that we can bring under our control and then lead to certain results would be referred to as economic goods.
Men then learn that some goods are immediately useful.
We refer to those goods as consumer goods. They can be appropriated and almost instantly turned into some form of satisfaction.
And we learn also that most things, however, are only indirectly useful.
They require that we must transform them in some way, that we reshape them in some way,
that we move or relocate them in some way using our intelligence in order to lead to satisfaction.
And those objects that we have to do something intelligent to before they lead to satisfaction,
and what we would call producer goods.
And men also recognize, and this brings me to my second main point here, besides language, the concept of property.
I have already made the point with respect to our physical bodies where it is intuitively clear that people recognize this is my body because I am the only one that can do this with it and nobody else can do it.
I have a unique relationship to my body, a relationship like nobody else has it.
When it comes now to economic means, a similar idea arises.
Those people who appropriate a certain object, bring it under their control in order to satisfy certain desires,
have thereby of course also established a unique relationship to those things that they have for the first time appropriated.
and they consider those things also theirs, maybe not in the same direct way as with my body, but as an extension of my body.
I used after all my body in order to appropriate these things and in this sense I have a unique relationship with these objects as well.
Let me read you in this connection a quote from Herbert Spencer, who also explains, so to speak, the naturalness of the idea of property.
He says that even intelligent animals display a sense of proprietorship, negatives the belief, propounded by some, that individual property was not recognized by primitive men.
When we see the claim to exclusive possession understood by a dog, so that he fights in defense of his master's clothes if left in charge of them, it becomes impossible to suppose that even in their lowest state men were devoid of those ideas and emotions which initiate private ownership.
All that may be fairly assumed is that these ideas and sentiments were first less developed than they have since become.
While in the early stages it is difficult, not to say impossible, to establish and mark of individual claims to part of the area wandered over in search of food
and Food, and I'll come to that subject later on in a future lecture, it is not difficult to mark off the claims to movable things and to habitations and these claims we find habitually recognized.
It is perfectly clear that movable objects, tools and so forth that people have at all times was private property in those objects recognized.
In the most primitive men, the concept of private property exists not only with respect to his physical body,
also with respect to those appropriated means of production that indirectly satisfied his various desires.
Now let me elaborate a little bit on this concept of property by introducing a second person Friday.
And again, you recall, we are already talking with each other, so we have to assume that these types of Fridays existed, so to speak, from the very outset of mankind on.
With a second person, it becomes possible that conflicts over scarce goods can arise.
It is not possible that conflicts arise over things that are in superabundance,
or conflicts that arise with regard to events caused by the environment,
the environment we cannot influence, and if there exists a superabundance of goods, then
it is impossible that people have different ideas of what should be done or should not
be done with the good, because whatever I do, it doesn't affect what other people can
can do with the same type of good because it simply exists in superabundance.
And what people from, again, from the most primitive stages of mankind on recognize is
How to solve these possible conflicts with regard to scarce resources?
They will point out that, look, I have an objective, perceivable, noticeable connection to such
and such a thing, because I have appropriated it, I have control over it, I have used it
for this type of purpose, and I have all of this done before you ever came along and wanted
to do something to the same object.
So my claim is better justified than yours.
As a matter of fact, your claim is not justified at all because you cannot point to any objective link established between your body and a particular object whereas I can point to a particular visible, noticeable, intersubjectively ascertainable link between me and a particular object.
And we can recognize this again by the fact that people are, again from the most primitive stages on, willing to defend these objects from invasions by other people.
If I would not defend anything, if I would not put up the slightest resistance against somebody taking whatever, my axe or my arrow, then I indicate in a way that I do not consider it to be my property.
If I show the slightest resistance, saying no or pushing my hands in the direction of the person trying to take it away from me,
this indicates clearly that I regard myself as being the owner and having a special control over these things.
Again, we can see this also if we look at small children. If they have disputes over whose toy this is, the typical response is of children to say, look, I'm already playing with the car, and you are not.
And if they put absolutely no resistance up, then they indicate that for the time being, so to speak, they have abandoned it and made it available to others.
So again, very primitive sentiments. In this sense we can probably assume that the development of children in a way repeats to a certain extent the development of mankind as a whole.
So by this, theoretically speaking, you can't steal from a pacifist or some sort of ascetic who doesn't really claim to hold any possessions, and by that you can also not really enslave them, moreover just have them do work for you?
What sense does it make to say that you steal from him when you just go to him and just take things away and he doesn't even say no?
In that case you would say he doesn't indicate that he has any particular claim to it.
That is in a way the best refutation of pacifism.
I mean, obviously, I can hardly believe that a pacifist would go as far as to not put up any resistance if I try to pull out some teeth or take out some organ out of him or a cut of his ear or something like this.
Obviously, he does claim that he owns at least that, and if he would not put up any resistance, then we would indeed doubt whether he is a man.
Not in the distinction of being a man as compared to a woman, but a man.
Now let me come to the third unique capability of mankind besides language and the recognition of property.
And I have already touched upon this sort, one that is that man can produce things, that man is a producer that is capable of developing technology.
You realize animals live, so to speak, a parasitic life in that sense that they never enhance the endowment of the world.
They eat something and in a way diminish the amount of things that are available on earth.
But they never add anything to it, except themselves, except their excrements and things like this.
But they do not do, but no goods, they do not add valuable goods to it.
They subtract something from the available resources. They eat certain things up.
In general, I think you're correct, but bees certainly produce honey, and there are ants that grow mold and eat it.
And it is not characteristic, so to speak, for the animal kingdom to do something like this.
And we can also imagine, of course, mankind in certain stages,
where they also lead by and large parasitic lives,
that would be during the stage when they are merely hunters and gatherers.
In that case, we can also say all they do is diminish the existing resources, except, again, with the small exception that they tend to use some tools to do this.
And the tools can be described, of course, as additions to the nature given resources.
They are transformed into objects that are more valuable than the objects that were initially found in nature.
So mankind can also lead a semi-parasitic life, and as long as they were hunters and gatherers,
We can describe them as, Quigley for instance in his book makes this distinction saying we are only talking about human civilizations as soon as man adds something to the existing equipment that we find in front of us.
And we would not refer to hunter-gatherer societies as civilizations precisely because, by and large, they lead a parasitic life, leaving less resources left over than they began with, so to speak.
Is this language one of those tools, or I think produced by humans?
Yes.
So it's sort of a subset of that.
Yes, of course it is a tool. Actually one of the most important tools that they produce, if you think what it is capable of doing, spreading knowledge from one person to another without having to experience all the experiences that people initially had to experience.
And then especially if you come to the stage of written languages where you can transport knowledge, so to speak, to people who live at the other end of the globe.
So obviously language is an extremely important instrument, but I'm concerned here more with technical objects.
And what we notice here is the following, man is unique in the sense that they have, as compared with most animals, a distinctive lack of specialized organs
and of instincts that makes them basically incapable of survival unless they develop, so to speak, substitutes for this lack of natural equipment that they have.
Men have no natural weapons with which to defend themselves.
Nothing to speak of, so to speak.
We have practically no instincts that guide us automatically to do this and that
and avoid this and recognize dangers without having to know about it.
So what we can say is, man needs culture in order to survive in nature.
And the two tools, the two most important tools that man has are on the one hand his hands,
and, on the other hand, of course, his brain.
But neither one of these tools can be described as a highly specialized tool.
They are useful for a wide variety of purposes, which is, so to speak, an advantage,
but it is also obviously initially a disadvantage.
We just have to learn what we can do with our hands and don't automatically know what our hands can possibly do.
And we have to learn what our brain is capable of doing and do not automatically, like most animals, know to what uses to put our brain power.
So, men must then intelligently transform nature by using brains and hands in particular.
And there are certain patterns in the development of technology that we can perceive if we look
at the Development of Mankind as a Whole.
Technology for Men has, and here I
follow a German sociologist, anthropologist, Arnold Galen,
which I recommend quite highly.
I think one of his books has also
has been translated into English, it's called simply man, I believe.
Galen does not have a very good reputation because he had some sort of connection with
the Nazis, as you know, that's always a career killer, but that does not make his observations
Any Less Important.
So he points out there are, so to speak,
attempts in our technological development
to substitute for the lack of organs that we do not have.
Then technology serves a purpose of relieving
us of insufficient capabilities, and then it has the tendency of strengthening our nature-given capabilities.
Let me just read you a quote from him, and the quote is in German,
And so I have to just ad lib that here a little bit in translation.
The man is in every natural environment incapable of survival and because of this needs culture
due to a lack of specialized organs and instincts.
without an environment that is specific to his species, in which he would fit in, without inborn purposeful behavioral patterns,
Due to a lack also of specific organs and instincts, with less than perfectly formed
senses, without any weapons, naked in his habitus embryonic, insecure in his instincts,
We must rely on action and on intelligent transformation of those circumstances that he happens to find.
Hands and brains might be considered to be specialized organs of man, but they are specialized in a different sense than animal organs are.
They can be used for many purposes. They are specialized for unspecialized purposes and achievements.
And they are, because of that, suitable for unpredictable circumstances arising in the world.
The culture of primitive people thus consists first of in its weapons, in their tools, in their huts, in their animals and gardens,
All of which is changed, transformed, cultivated, that is, newly formed nature by intelligent action.
So the first achievements of men are substitutes of lacking organs, weapons for instance, also fire as some form of natural protection and shelter.
The second type of tools that are developed are developed in order to strengthen naturally given abilities like using stones in order to strengthen the power that a fist has, for instance,
or hammers as tools that strengthen, so to speak, natural given powers
or microscopes as instruments that are more developed than the natural human organs, eyes
or telephones as instruments that strengthen and surpass the natural given abilities that we have through our ears.
And then he points out there exists in human, and again let me just, and then there exists techniques that relieve humans, save them labor.
For instance, a wheeled wagon, which allows us to carry weights that we could not carry naturally, for instance.
And instruments that even combine all of these things, that is, they are in some sense substitutes for lacking things,
In some respects, surpassing natural abilities and in some sense relieving us, saving us
labor that otherwise would be necessary such as, for instance, an airplane.
Airplane allows us to fly, which we naturally cannot do at all.
It surpasses all natural abilities that exist in this regard and it takes work away completely
in so far as it transports us without any effort on our own part from one place to another.
And Galen also points out that there exists in the history of technological development
another tendency that we can recognize that is a gradual substitution of inorganic materials
and Forces for Organic Materials and Forces.
So initially, we use stones and wood and bones.
The Stone Age ends roughly 8,000 years ago.
And then in the next stage, we already
create some sort of artificial materials, bronze out
of copper and tin, that begins roughly at 4,000
before Christ in the United States, only about 1,000
after Christ.
And then the next material, again, already further removed from the nature given materials would be iron, which comes into use around 1200 before Christ, roughly.
And then, of course, finally, steel, which is a development of a relative recent past.
Instead of organic materials, we use increasingly cement and metals and coal.
All of these things replace wood as burning material.
We use steel ropes in order to replace leather and hemp ropes.
We use synthetic colors instead of natural coloring materials.
We use increasingly synthetic medicines instead of natural herbs and so forth.
And we make ourselves successively independent of natural energy sources.
For a long time, mankind was, so to speak, dependent on his energy sources, on woods growing up again.
And the natural speed of woods growing up, so to speak, put a limitation on the speed of development that mankind could take.
and they were also dependent on natural physical forces such as the power of horses and oxen and things like this,
which also could not be deliberately enlarged or empowered.
And in the development of technology, gradually we strip ourselves of these limitations by using, first, coal and oil, and then also watercrafts.
And then, of course, finally, atomic forces, which make us essentially independent of the growth of natural materials.
Let me, to conclude this here, quote again Gehlen, who sees, so to speak, a logic in the development of human technology,
The logic that we can see only if we look back from the present, so to speak, in the past.
We would not have been able probably at the beginning of mankind to predict that this would be the stages that technological development would go through.
But looking backward, we can somehow understand that there was a certain inherent logic at work.
And he says this process of technological development has three stages.
On the first stage that of the tool, the force necessary for work
Work and the necessary mental effort still have to be done by the human subject itself.
The tools somehow make it easier for us, strengthens our forces, gives us more force than we normally
have and reduce somehow the mental effort that is necessary that we have to perform
in conducting certain tasks.
And the second stage of the machine, steam engine and cars and so forth, the physical
All force is already technically objectivated, that means we don't need any force anymore
on our own part, all the force is generated by the machines.
And finally, on the third stage of technological development, which is that of the automaton,
Even the mental effort that the subject had to show in the previous stages becomes unnecessary
or of very minor importance.
And with each of these three stages, the instrument, the tool, the machine, and then finally the
In the automaton, the objectivation of the fulfillment of the purposes of technology comes closer to its ultimate purpose.
And in the automaton it is finally reached because we can do things without our physical or mental contribution.
And with this I'll end my first lecture. Thank you.
Does your research make any statement about what portion of the human brain as an organ is being utilized by mankind in this century?
I think in this century it might be very little.
No, I have not investigated that, but I'm sure that there were centuries when more of our brains were used and is currently the case.
No, but I'm not a biologist, you know, so questions like this, maybe there is a biologist here.
And actually I can address that, that's kind of a, that's a very unfortunate thing that someone said 10 or 20 years ago, that everybody else in the world, which has never been said, that if people only use 10% of their brain, if that were true, there'd be some people making a lot of money using 20% of their brain, so, that's, yeah, well some people have more brain power than other people, that is true, but not, you know, 112.
I mean, I can't imagine we could do experiments, you know, we just chop off a little slice
by slice and then see what's left over.
But I think that will not, I think that these types of experiments will not find too many
I think you could say that only certain parts of the brain are useful for the function at hand for what's being done at a certain time. So say you use 10%, there might only be 10% of the brain that's actually useful for the given activity that person is performing at that time. That's why we don't use 100% of the brain.
When you talk about automation that reduces mental efforts, that's like using a calculator or like a scanning thing at a grocery store or something.
Yeah, but also these machines that put car parts together and so forth, robots.
I mean so I don't I mean this is this is all pretty I mean this isn't fun stuff that you want to really be thinking about all the time I mean adding up numbers in your head or writing them down you might as well use a calculator um I don't I don't know I'm I'm confused that some that it could be said that with this we use less of our brain power because I mean do you think we'll ever come to a time when um no we have
You see, it might be a better way to put it that we gain time and possibilities to use it for other than tedious things.
But nonetheless, it would be, so to speak, a relief of brain power that previously had to be dedicated to these types of purposes,
A genuinely human rather than mere animal characteristic was supported by Harold Bloom's book called Shakespeare, The Invention of Human,
in which his thesis is that a soliloquy, a speaking out loud about maybe I really shouldn't have gone to bed with my mother.
Was a self-awareness that we do think perhaps distinguishes us?
The Theory of Money and Credit
You can't get up on another leg today and things like this.
You discussed how property rights are almost a response to the existence of scarcity and the condition of scarcity,
and I was wondering what needs to be said in terms of civilization or societies that exist at different levels of your theory of society?
Now, I'll come back to that in the next lecture.
You know, obviously you have a different range of property in hunter and gatherer societies
than you have in agricultural societies, for instance.
So my point up to this stage was only that the idea of private property in certain things
seems to be the most natural thing imaginable, because we even find it on the animal level already.
It requires, so to speak, another step to develop the idea of private property in land, for instance,
which for a long time has been treated as a good that was not scarce at all, where you just were wandering around.
When we engage in ethical arguments and moral discourse, which of the four functions of language would you say we're using?
Would you characterize that as one of the argumentative functions?
You see, the argumentative function is the highest function if you rank them, so to speak.
but the argumentative function of course must make use also of the descriptive function
because arguments of course refer to certain entities and so forth
you make descriptive statements in arguments also
you make more than descriptive statements
you have conjunctions and disjunctions and so forth
We're not describing... when we make a moral claim, we're not simply then using language to pick out a property that exists in the argumentative function.
We're not describing, when we make a moral claim, we're not simply then using language to pick out a property that exists in the world, I mean, my beige shirt is beige, but if you said the beige shirt is good, you don't expect that goodness to actually be good.
But nonetheless we do talk about shirts, we do talk about objects, we do talk about you have done something to the object, he has done nothing to the object, and in so far we also need descriptive statements from which then our argument arises.
Have you been interested in the story of Prince Kropotkin who was exiled to Siberia and he studied and arrived at your complete lecture at the most remarkable parallel I hadn't recalled it until now.
He was an av to the Czars family, and his views were very much like ours, and they exiled him for a number of years in Siberia, and he spent these years studying the animal life.
It illustrates just what you say, but even a division of labor within that, there were the fast wolves that caught, there were the elders that defended, there were some that bred, etc.
Yeah, I know, but he goes too far in my view. When I will talk about division of labor among men, there is more to it than the division or what we might call division of labor between bees and birds and things like this, because their division of labor is so to speak assured by some instincts.
Whereas division of labor in the case of man can completely break down and requires insights in order to be maintained.
So in this sense, I would not go as far as Kropotkin in wanting to make analogies between animal life and the life of men.
He goes too far in my judgment.
I have one sentence to it. It was not male of the division of labor he saw, and he paralleled that with the study of the humankind, but he found a common characteristic that improved the life of the wild animals, season after season, and improved the life of the humans.
and he used a different term, not of a list, mutual aid, he minimized the importance of family to the humankind and put it into the little cultural group of which they were a part.
I'm not a great expert on Kropotkin, maybe I'll read up on Kropotkin a little. Thank you.