WEBVTT NOTE Thymology and the Struggle for Anthrocentrism in the Social Sciences 1 00:00:00.000 --> 00:00:08.600 I noticed that the lecture would also build as Austrian anthropology, right? 2 00:00:08.600 --> 00:00:12.000 I don't know who did that, but it was a sort of interesting twist. 3 00:00:12.000 --> 00:00:15.900 I don't know that there is such a thing as Austrian anthropology. 4 00:00:15.900 --> 00:00:25.000 If there were, I suppose it would be more in line with people's expectations of what anthropology is, right? 5 00:00:25.000 --> 00:00:30.500 So for example, if we're talking about anthropology, we're talking about ethnology and that sort of thing. 6 00:00:30.500 --> 00:00:35.700 We could be talking about the present governor of California's racial roots or something like that. 7 00:00:35.700 --> 00:00:37.700 I believe he's from Styria, right? 8 00:00:37.700 --> 00:00:46.300 And Styrians, I believe, in turn are Germanized Goths, Germanized Slavs or something of that nature, right? 9 00:00:46.300 --> 00:00:53.200 And they're similar to Slovakians or something like that, except somehow they wound up on the German side or something like that. 10 00:00:53.200 --> 00:00:57.500 Or we could take the governor of California's cranial measurements 11 00:00:57.500 --> 00:01:02.700 and talk about the difference between when he was eating Austrian food 12 00:01:02.700 --> 00:01:04.600 and when he moved to California, 13 00:01:04.600 --> 00:01:08.700 whether his brain has gotten bigger than his biceps or something like that. 14 00:01:08.700 --> 00:01:11.300 And this is more or less what everybody expects 15 00:01:11.300 --> 00:01:15.000 when you hear the word anthropology, right? 16 00:01:15.000 --> 00:01:17.100 And you expect lots of interesting details, 17 00:01:17.100 --> 00:01:19.400 you expect, you know, a trip around the world, you know, 18 00:01:19.400 --> 00:01:26.000 A lot of fine, fine little distinctions about ethnology, archaeology and so forth. 19 00:01:26.000 --> 00:01:29.760 And I like that stuff too, I've done it all my life in one form or another. 20 00:01:29.760 --> 00:01:32.880 But in fact, that's not what I want to talk to you about today. 21 00:01:32.880 --> 00:01:38.120 Actually something rather more difficult having to do with the organization of the sciences. 22 00:01:38.120 --> 00:01:40.600 What do we call anthropology? 23 00:01:40.600 --> 00:01:47.120 And what do we call this odd word, which occasionally crops up in Austrian literature, called thymology? 24 00:01:47.120 --> 00:01:49.120 So let's focus on those. 25 00:01:49.120 --> 00:01:57.940 I was originally not going to use this, but as long as it's here, we have simology, and 26 00:01:57.940 --> 00:02:12.400 we have anthropology. Does this work? Okay. Can you see that? It's up? Okay. Once I start 27 00:02:12.400 --> 00:02:41.400 Okay, fine. Now anthropology, this is non-controversial. The technical definition of anthropology is the study of what is human, right? What are human beings, right? That's not controversial. 28 00:02:41.400 --> 00:02:53.900 However, there's a distinction, not about the definition, but there's a distinction as to what might be termed the cognitive space, which is taken up by anthropology. 29 00:02:53.900 --> 00:03:05.400 In other words, how much of our conceptual universe is occupied by anthropology, and how much of our conceptual universe is occupied by things which are outside of anthropology. 30 00:03:05.400 --> 00:03:19.400 And that's what I'm going to be talking about today, and it's a rather difficult thing to talk about because we're talking about the organization of the sciences and we ourselves have been subject to an educational system which has taught us a particular way of cutting up this pie, right? 31 00:03:19.400 --> 00:03:25.400 And I'm going to say that that's nonsense, that we have to go back to a different way of thinking, which I'm calling the classical model. 32 00:03:25.400 --> 00:03:35.400 Now, the other word is thymology. Now, thymology is, in addition to praxeology, a neologism of Ludwig von Mises, right? 33 00:03:35.400 --> 00:03:41.400 Now, the problem is that thymology is never precisely defined, as far as I can tell. 34 00:03:41.400 --> 00:03:46.400 Now, if somebody else has found this, please inform me, you know, because I want to be open. 35 00:03:46.400 --> 00:03:54.400 But it's never been precisely defined, let's say, in a one sentence definition in Mises' works. 36 00:03:54.400 --> 00:03:57.400 How about this? This is my suggestion. 37 00:03:57.400 --> 00:04:03.400 Thymology is the study of the human mind by human minds in human terms. 38 00:04:03.400 --> 00:04:04.400 I'll repeat that. 39 00:04:04.400 --> 00:04:10.400 Thymology is the study of the human mind by human minds in human terms. 40 00:04:10.400 --> 00:04:12.400 If you like that, I like it. 41 00:04:12.400 --> 00:04:15.400 But see what that takes you to. 42 00:04:15.400 --> 00:04:18.400 Now let's go back to anthropology. 43 00:04:18.400 --> 00:04:21.400 There's a number of things which strike you. 44 00:04:21.400 --> 00:04:23.400 I was making the joke about Schwarzenegger. 45 00:04:23.400 --> 00:04:34.400 Schwarzenegger, but the first thing when you hear the word anthropology, think of the modern science called anthropology, in which anthropology is considered one of the natural sciences, right? 46 00:04:34.400 --> 00:04:43.400 So, for example, we have a science called lycology. You can figure out what lycology is, right? Lycology is the study of wolves, right? It's part of the natural sciences. 47 00:04:43.400 --> 00:04:52.400 Has anybody here ever been to Ely, Minnesota, where they have the premier Wolf Studies Institute of the United States? 48 00:04:52.400 --> 00:05:00.400 It's worthwhile, right? Very interesting. I don't know if they're roaming all over the West, the way Dr. Block was describing them, 49 00:05:00.400 --> 00:05:10.400 but they are the subjects of a particular science. In the same sense, according to the present organization of the natural sciences, 50 00:05:10.400 --> 00:05:12.800 Anthropology is one of those sciences. 51 00:05:12.800 --> 00:05:16.000 So we have lycology, which is the study of wolves. 52 00:05:16.000 --> 00:05:20.800 We have anthropology, which is the study of another species amongst many, many species. 53 00:05:20.800 --> 00:05:23.200 And we have other species, snail darters, right? 54 00:05:23.200 --> 00:05:29.200 We have whales, you know, we have all sorts of things, snakes, so forth, right? 55 00:05:29.200 --> 00:05:33.900 And they each have their own particular field of investigation, one of which is anthropology. 56 00:05:33.900 --> 00:05:35.600 And this is the way it's stated, right? 57 00:05:35.600 --> 00:05:40.100 We have anthropology departments all over the United States and state universities and private universities. 58 00:05:40.100 --> 00:05:50.800 There's another kind of anthropology that probably most people who are not from Germany have not heard of, and that is called philosophical anthropology. 59 00:05:50.800 --> 00:05:55.600 Now, philosophical anthropology is a little bit closer to what I want to talk about today. 60 00:05:55.600 --> 00:06:04.100 But philosophical anthropology was sort of the balouac or the, where I come from, it's called the rioiki, right? 61 00:06:04.100 --> 00:06:16.100 The particular province of a group of thinkers in the early 20th century, Germany, about the same time as Mises was teaching in Vienna. 62 00:06:16.100 --> 00:06:21.100 Especially, we're talking about Max Schaehler. 63 00:06:21.100 --> 00:06:29.100 He got the idea of reorganizing philosophy and the sciences around the idea of anthropology. 64 00:06:29.100 --> 00:06:35.100 Schaler was a phenomenologist, which means he was one of Husserl's disciples. 65 00:06:35.100 --> 00:06:46.100 Unfortunately, for Max Schaler and for the project of a philosophical anthropology, he ran up into a bigger bull, 66 00:06:46.100 --> 00:06:57.100 who was looking for the domination of the German philosophical scene at the time, a man named Martin Heidegger. 67 00:06:57.100 --> 00:07:04.300 Martin Heidegger, who you're all familiar with, had it sort of in for Max Schaehler 68 00:07:04.300 --> 00:07:13.300 and philosophical anthropology as a sort of dominant reorganizing paradigm sort of went the way of all flesh at that point. 69 00:07:13.300 --> 00:07:21.100 There were other intrinsic problems aside from the fact that Schaehler lost out in popularity to Heidegger. 70 00:07:21.100 --> 00:07:32.100 One was that Schuyler's idea of what a philosophical anthropology should be was based very largely on neo-Kantian concepts. 71 00:07:32.100 --> 00:07:37.100 And who here has tried to read anything by Max Schuyler, either in German or in translation? 72 00:07:37.100 --> 00:07:41.100 Is there anybody? I don't know. We have maybe one or two philosophers here. 73 00:07:41.100 --> 00:07:44.100 Don't, right? It's really bad, you know? 74 00:07:44.100 --> 00:07:49.100 And that in itself would have sunk the whole project, right? 75 00:07:49.100 --> 00:08:02.100 There's another problem with seeing this as a purely 20th century German innovation, and that is the error of what Mises called periodicism, right? 76 00:08:02.100 --> 00:08:15.100 I see, and this is the third alternative, we have alpha, which is, anthropology is a natural science, we have beta, which is a particular German philosophical tradition, philosophy in the concrete technical sense. 77 00:08:15.100 --> 00:08:24.100 The third idea is that we're all, like Molière's Mr. Javert, we're all anthropologists. 78 00:08:24.100 --> 00:08:30.100 We've just been not informed that we were thinking about what human beings were all the time, right? 79 00:08:30.100 --> 00:08:35.100 So let's look at anthropology in terms of what I'm calling the classical tradition, 80 00:08:35.100 --> 00:08:39.100 but it's really a sort of perennial project that everybody is doing all the time, right? 81 00:08:39.100 --> 00:08:43.100 We're all anthropologists in addition to being human beings, right? 82 00:08:43.100 --> 00:09:07.100 Well, more on that later. Now, again, the idea of the classical view of the human as sapient, as febure, as somebody who is both inside and out of nature, how does that tie in with Austrianism? 83 00:09:07.100 --> 00:09:15.100 Well, Austrianism, as we know, is based, in a methodological sense, on subjectivism. 84 00:09:15.100 --> 00:09:21.100 Now, when you're talking with non-economists or non-Austrians about subjectivism, 85 00:09:21.100 --> 00:09:26.100 you get these strange reactions, because, again, this is a problem of language. 86 00:09:26.100 --> 00:09:31.100 Subjectivism, in an Austrian sense, means choice. 87 00:09:31.100 --> 00:09:36.100 It means human action, that sort of thing. 88 00:09:36.100 --> 00:09:47.100 And what I'm saying is that there is also a sense in which we should be subjectivists in an anthropological sense, an anthro-centric subjectivism. 89 00:09:47.100 --> 00:09:55.100 But this subjectivism is not just fuzziness, right? And there's a tremendous problem with fuzziness, too. 90 00:09:55.100 --> 00:09:59.100 I should add a little bit to Mark Thornton's introduction of me. 91 00:09:59.100 --> 00:10:07.100 I'm originally a product, well not exactly a product, but I had some association with the hermeneutics school at George Mason. 92 00:10:07.100 --> 00:10:13.100 Now my particular take on things at this point is rather different from those people. 93 00:10:13.100 --> 00:10:18.100 I'm not, I don't want them to be held responsible for anything that I'm saying, right? 94 00:10:18.100 --> 00:10:22.100 Which is not to say that what they're saying is not good or whatever, 95 00:10:22.100 --> 00:10:31.100 But I've sort of gone 180 degrees on my view of what thymology and anthropology should be. 96 00:10:31.100 --> 00:10:41.100 Partly because of the article that I'm going to give you having to do with the nature of incorporeal intelligible. 97 00:10:41.100 --> 00:10:43.100 So I'll explain what that means later. 98 00:10:43.100 --> 00:10:49.100 But I want you to be open to a certain amount of metaphysical speculation here. 99 00:10:49.100 --> 00:11:01.600 I was the student of a great man named Don LaVoy. Don LaVoy, unfortunately, is no longer with us, and he had a very interesting idea of using a hermeneutics approach. 100 00:11:01.600 --> 00:11:14.600 Now, hermeneutics is sort of a cross between the neoconscient approach of Max Schaller and what I'm calling the classical approach, which is more Aristotelian in nature. 101 00:11:14.600 --> 00:11:20.600 Don LaVoy was a man with a tremendously clear mind in search of fuzziness. 102 00:11:20.600 --> 00:11:26.600 He thought that the strict compartmentalization of concepts, 103 00:11:26.600 --> 00:11:29.600 when you say this is a human artifact, this is something else, 104 00:11:29.600 --> 00:11:34.600 we needed to fuzz these up a little bit with more ambiguity. 105 00:11:34.600 --> 00:11:36.600 And there's a great deal to be said for that approach. 106 00:11:36.600 --> 00:11:41.600 I only, on the other hand, am a very fuzzy thinker in search of clarity. 107 00:11:41.600 --> 00:11:58.600 I'm sympathetic to people who are in search of clarity because I think we have to allow both for interpretation and also for conceptualism when we're redefining what it is that we're talking about with anthropology. 108 00:11:58.600 --> 00:12:09.600 Now, I started out saying what anthropology, in my view, is not. It is not a natural science. We're not inside nature. 109 00:12:09.600 --> 00:12:17.600 Rather, as Mises said, we have methodological dualism. 110 00:12:17.600 --> 00:12:22.600 There is the study of consciousness, there is the study of nature. 111 00:12:22.600 --> 00:12:26.600 The consciousness is inside of us and the nature is outside of us. 112 00:12:26.600 --> 00:12:29.600 He called the conscious aspect thymology. 113 00:12:29.600 --> 00:12:31.600 Again, the study of the human mind. 114 00:12:31.600 --> 00:12:36.600 He called the natural aspect the natural sciences. 115 00:12:36.600 --> 00:12:41.600 He also talked about something called the psychologist fallacy. 116 00:12:41.600 --> 00:12:44.600 What is the psychologist fallacy? 117 00:12:44.600 --> 00:12:49.600 This is that the world is a larger view of myself. 118 00:12:49.600 --> 00:12:52.600 And this is the naive version. 119 00:12:52.600 --> 00:12:56.600 In other words, I am flesh, therefore the world is flesh. 120 00:12:56.600 --> 00:12:59.600 And this is typical archaic thinking. 121 00:12:59.600 --> 00:13:02.600 We talk about primitive people, for example. 122 00:13:02.600 --> 00:13:05.600 They project what they are onto nature. 123 00:13:05.600 --> 00:13:13.600 This is animism, this is fetishism, right, not in a bizarre sexual sense, but this is real fetishes, you know, little gods and that sort of thing. 124 00:13:13.600 --> 00:13:22.600 You see this analyzed in things like Iliadé and Jung, right, and this is subjectivism in potentially a bad sense, 125 00:13:22.600 --> 00:13:27.600 although some people want to return to this kind of naive, archaic thinking. 126 00:13:27.600 --> 00:13:32.600 You know, you have people like Michael Harner and his shamanism, neo-shamanism, and so forth. 127 00:13:32.600 --> 00:13:47.600 I'm not entirely sympathetic with that sort of thing, but I can imagine, after a lot of modernistic, positivistic thoughts, that some people would want to go back to a sort of quaint shamanistic way of thinking. 128 00:13:47.600 --> 00:14:01.600 The opposite, again, modern, materialist, objectivistic in the bad sense thinking, is subject to another fallacy which I haven't found a good word for, so I invented a word. 129 00:14:01.600 --> 00:14:04.200 It's the opposite of the psychologist fallacy. 130 00:14:04.200 --> 00:14:06.520 It's the alchemist fallacy. 131 00:14:06.520 --> 00:14:11.120 And it's the idea that the world is that which opposes me. 132 00:14:11.120 --> 00:14:13.680 So in other words, I am flesh. 133 00:14:13.680 --> 00:14:16.700 Therefore, ultimate reality is metallic. 134 00:14:16.700 --> 00:14:18.560 That makes sense, doesn't it? 135 00:14:18.560 --> 00:14:20.800 Now that's the man in the streets, 136 00:14:20.800 --> 00:14:24.560 or the woman in the streets idea of enlightenment, 137 00:14:24.560 --> 00:14:26.240 of common sense. 138 00:14:26.240 --> 00:14:29.320 An intelligent person is someone who 139 00:14:29.320 --> 00:14:34.040 is not willing to project themselves into reality. 140 00:14:34.040 --> 00:14:36.640 An intelligent person is somebody who says, 141 00:14:36.640 --> 00:14:38.500 the world is alien from me. 142 00:14:38.500 --> 00:14:41.360 The world is basically efficient causes. 143 00:14:41.360 --> 00:14:44.640 The world is basically atoms in a void. 144 00:14:44.640 --> 00:14:48.320 Again, this is the basic root psychological, 145 00:14:48.320 --> 00:14:53.820 biological, if you will, appeal of materialism. 146 00:14:53.820 --> 00:14:57.120 Against this, there's a third point of view, 147 00:14:57.120 --> 00:15:10.320 Which is, the world is not subjectivistic in a naive sense, or objectivistic in its modern sense, but, again, in between, in both a temporal and in an ontological sense, 148 00:15:10.320 --> 00:15:13.720 ontological meaning the sense of what is real, right? 149 00:15:13.720 --> 00:15:21.720 This is what I'm calling the classical view, right? The classical view being basically the Aristotelian view. 150 00:15:21.720 --> 00:15:31.720 Now, by Aristotelian, I don't mean Aristotelian in some sort of fundamentalist sense that you have to believe that whatever Aristotle wrote down was the truth, right? 151 00:15:31.720 --> 00:15:39.720 This view was modified between the time of Plotinus and Descartes in accordance with all sorts of other streams of thinking, right? 152 00:15:39.720 --> 00:15:47.720 Notably, different recrudescences of Platonism, which were mixed in at one point or another. 153 00:15:47.720 --> 00:15:55.120 It's an important view because it was actually sort of the bedrock upon which our hidden common sense is based, right? 154 00:15:55.120 --> 00:16:01.920 In other words, the more sensible common sense, not the common sense of the man who embraces the alchemist fallacy, who is a materialist, 155 00:16:01.920 --> 00:16:10.720 but the more sort of uncommon common sense that we still retain is based on this kind of Aristotelian idea. 156 00:16:10.720 --> 00:16:37.720 Now, I said that von Mises himself coined the term thymology and he occasionally made a bow to philosophical anthropology but the interesting thing is that von Mises himself not only did not provide a succinct definition of thymology but it's rather unclear as to what his own philosophical point of view is. 157 00:16:37.720 --> 00:16:46.960 Dr. Block may want to make objections, but I would say just off the bat that three things 158 00:16:46.960 --> 00:16:50.600 were going along in von Mises' mind. 159 00:16:50.600 --> 00:16:53.720 Of course, with regard to praxeology, he was always very clear about what he meant. 160 00:16:53.720 --> 00:16:56.240 He was always very clear as an economist. 161 00:16:56.240 --> 00:17:02.780 Once we get out of the island of praxeology and into the depths of the theymology, understandably 162 00:17:02.780 --> 00:17:07.240 Mises and almost everybody else becomes considerably less clear. 163 00:17:07.240 --> 00:17:14.040 Mises has three things going into his mind. Again, basically the same alpha, beta, gamma 164 00:17:14.040 --> 00:17:18.920 that I originally talked about with regard to the way that we conceptualize anthropology. 165 00:17:18.920 --> 00:17:26.880 First of all, there's a kind of human skepticism that you see in books like Theory and History, 166 00:17:26.880 --> 00:17:34.120 the epistemological foundations of economics and so forth. The second is a tendency towards 167 00:17:34.120 --> 00:17:50.120 He was a product of this particular time, in which neo-Kantzian thought, the Marburg School and the Southwest German School and various others, was very strong. 168 00:17:50.120 --> 00:17:59.920 The third, and this is sort of the bedrock, which was recovered to some extent by the Rothbard tendency, 169 00:17:59.920 --> 00:18:04.420 was the classical model, what I'm calling the classical model, 170 00:18:04.420 --> 00:18:09.220 and being deliberately vague about what the classical model is, 171 00:18:09.220 --> 00:18:13.620 precisely because I want people not to be sort of herded into one category or another. 172 00:18:13.620 --> 00:18:29.420 But the classical model, as opposed to conscientism, and I hope I can get some views from the philosophers in the crowd, is an ontological rather than epistemological idea. 173 00:18:29.420 --> 00:18:37.120 Now what do I mean by that? Of course you all know that epistemology is the study of knowledge. Ontology is the study of being. 174 00:18:37.120 --> 00:18:42.000 Okay, but can you really talk about not having an epistemology? 175 00:18:42.000 --> 00:18:43.760 Well, no, you can't. 176 00:18:43.760 --> 00:18:49.520 But the point of Aristotle and the people who philosophized in that particular tradition 177 00:18:49.520 --> 00:18:56.400 is that ontology was not an antechamber that you first had to spend a certain amount of time in 178 00:18:56.400 --> 00:18:59.440 before moving into the study of reality. 179 00:18:59.440 --> 00:19:02.080 You start out by studying reality first, 180 00:19:02.080 --> 00:19:11.080 and then you develop from there into an epistemological criticism of what you're doing. 181 00:19:11.080 --> 00:19:15.080 Aristotle himself had a very interesting phrase. 182 00:19:15.080 --> 00:19:22.080 He said, when you look at the world, you look as if you are dissecting an animal. 183 00:19:22.080 --> 00:19:24.080 Again, vegetarians aren't going to like this, sorry. 184 00:19:24.080 --> 00:19:29.080 You look at if you're dissecting or you're a butcher or something like that, you cut everything of the joints. 185 00:19:29.080 --> 00:19:34.400 In other words, there's a natural way of dividing things up. 186 00:19:34.400 --> 00:19:36.920 Now, this may sound rather childish. 187 00:19:36.920 --> 00:19:40.200 Again, we're talking in highly abstract terms. 188 00:19:40.200 --> 00:19:44.160 The neoconscient way of establishing autonomy 189 00:19:44.160 --> 00:19:47.760 for the human species as a human science 190 00:19:47.760 --> 00:19:50.640 has some sort of plausibility, because we're 191 00:19:50.640 --> 00:19:53.600 talking about this dualism between the known 192 00:19:53.600 --> 00:19:54.840 and the knower. 193 00:19:54.840 --> 00:19:56.280 There's various versions of this, 194 00:19:56.280 --> 00:19:58.540 but it's all a sort of two-part model. 195 00:19:58.540 --> 00:20:00.980 There's the known, there's the knower. 196 00:20:00.980 --> 00:20:03.900 There's the numinal, there's the phenomenology. 197 00:20:03.900 --> 00:20:07.020 There's the conscious, there's the unconscious. 198 00:20:07.020 --> 00:20:11.020 So anybody who has a sort of dichotomy or duality 199 00:20:11.020 --> 00:20:13.780 has immediately sort of a consent from whoever 200 00:20:13.780 --> 00:20:15.740 they're speaking to, because we all know this. 201 00:20:15.740 --> 00:20:20.420 We're all sort of conscious beings speaking to somebody else 202 00:20:20.420 --> 00:20:22.540 as I am now to you, whatever. 203 00:20:22.540 --> 00:20:29.300 Dualism has some sort of prima facie legitimacy. 204 00:20:29.300 --> 00:20:32.180 On the other hand, if you get into ontology, 205 00:20:32.180 --> 00:20:35.260 and if you get into this what I'm calling the classical model, 206 00:20:35.260 --> 00:20:37.540 well, what is the classical model? 207 00:20:37.540 --> 00:20:41.100 The classical model coming out of De Anima and other sources 208 00:20:41.100 --> 00:20:44.100 is that the world is divided into four parts. 209 00:20:44.100 --> 00:20:45.940 We all know what the four parts are, 210 00:20:45.940 --> 00:20:48.740 because we've played this game since we were children. 211 00:20:48.740 --> 00:20:50.420 There's the mineral. 212 00:20:50.420 --> 00:20:57.420 There's the nutritional or the vegetative, there's the sensitive, and there's the intellective. 213 00:20:57.420 --> 00:21:02.420 Now, isn't that silly? We already knew that. I'm teaching the trivial. 214 00:21:02.420 --> 00:21:08.420 In fact, these medieval people even call their basic educational system the trivium. 215 00:21:08.420 --> 00:21:12.420 It's embarrassing, something that childish. 216 00:21:12.420 --> 00:21:16.420 What were they doing? Were they talking about Star Trek or whatever? No, it was something else. 217 00:21:16.420 --> 00:21:21.660 But the same way, with the four-part model, you can bring up all sorts of very interesting 218 00:21:21.660 --> 00:21:22.660 thinkers. 219 00:21:22.660 --> 00:21:29.700 I know that Rothbard referred to himself as a Thomist, but this was a universal default 220 00:21:29.700 --> 00:21:34.920 model for theorizing about human beings and other parts of the universe, right? 221 00:21:34.920 --> 00:21:37.500 The four-part de-anima model. 222 00:21:37.500 --> 00:21:40.900 And it wasn't the property of any particular philosophical school. 223 00:21:40.900 --> 00:21:45.380 You could be a Thomist, you could be a Scottist, you could be an Avicinian, you know, you could 224 00:21:45.380 --> 00:21:52.380 would be a respecter of somebody like Maimonides or Ibn Gabriel or something like that. 225 00:21:52.380 --> 00:21:58.380 Maimonides had a very interesting view of the four-part model, again, just to show how childish it seems, 226 00:21:58.380 --> 00:22:04.380 but there's a sort of wisdom behind its childishness. He said, the world is guarded by four angels, right? 227 00:22:04.380 --> 00:22:10.380 How big is each of the angels? Each of the angels is one-third of the length of the universe. 228 00:22:10.380 --> 00:22:12.880 Well, think about that. It doesn't make sense, does it? 229 00:22:12.880 --> 00:22:16.380 We've got one angel sticking out, you know? 230 00:22:16.380 --> 00:22:22.880 When you've got one angel sticking one third of the universe out of the universe, you're in bad trouble. 231 00:22:22.880 --> 00:22:33.380 But it's a way, a childish way, of making people conceptualize the way that anthropology should, in a sense, be transcendental. 232 00:22:33.380 --> 00:22:36.380 In another sense, it should not be transcendental, right? 233 00:22:36.380 --> 00:22:49.380 Because we're talking about consciousness and intelligence in relationship to sensory perception and in relationship to other more physical sort of things, right? 234 00:22:49.380 --> 00:23:02.380 Now, the fact that the classical model embraces both that conscious element, which is again your epistemic, you know, conscience type of duality, right? 235 00:23:02.380 --> 00:23:32.380 And the other three parts of the universe, right, the sensitive, right, the nutritive, the mineral, right, makes it very useful, right, because we have both a high and a low anthropology, maybe I should write this, you know, this is getting incredibly confusing for everybody, not the least of whom is myself, because it's hard thinking about simple things, it's more easy to think about complicated things, right. 236 00:23:32.380 --> 00:23:42.380 I'm inspired to do this by Dr. Block. It's not as embarrassing. After those cows, I think I can write anything. 237 00:23:42.380 --> 00:23:52.380 We have the high and the low. We have the strong and the weak. 238 00:23:52.380 --> 00:23:55.380 Excuse me, I'm already messing up, right? 239 00:23:57.380 --> 00:23:59.380 We have the strong and the weak, right? 240 00:24:03.380 --> 00:24:09.380 We have, within the strong, we have the high and the low. 241 00:24:12.380 --> 00:24:15.380 The strong anthropology is the model that I'm talking about. 242 00:24:15.380 --> 00:24:21.380 The weak anthropology is the anthropology that we've all learned from our educational curriculum, right? 243 00:24:21.380 --> 00:24:28.380 To see the human race as a particular species within a wide variety of species, right? 244 00:24:28.380 --> 00:24:34.380 So you might say that from the point of view of the strong anthropology, 245 00:24:34.380 --> 00:24:39.380 the human sciences are half of the conceptual space of the world, right? 246 00:24:39.380 --> 00:24:44.380 From the point of view of the weak anthropology, it's just the biomass of the human species, right? 247 00:24:44.380 --> 00:24:49.380 It's that one mile by one mile cube in relationship to the rest of the universe 248 00:24:49.380 --> 00:25:09.380 There's another possibility, and this is where it begins to become highly questionable, but I think it's true, and that is the part of us which makes us human is, again, one quarter of our conceptual universe, according to the four-part model of the classical model. 249 00:25:09.380 --> 00:25:13.380 Now what is the high and the low? 250 00:25:13.380 --> 00:25:17.380 The high and the low, if we talk about a high anthropology 251 00:25:17.380 --> 00:25:21.380 and a low anthropology, this is very strange, nobody would talk about this in contemporary 252 00:25:21.380 --> 00:25:25.380 terms, but a high anthropology would be one that emphasized 253 00:25:25.380 --> 00:25:29.380 the intellect aspect of the human being. A low anthropology 254 00:25:29.380 --> 00:25:33.380 would be one that emphasized those other three-quarters 255 00:25:33.380 --> 00:25:37.380 inside of the material universe. 256 00:25:37.380 --> 00:25:44.380 Phenomenology and Intellectual Objects 257 00:26:07.380 --> 00:26:21.380 praxeology, right? Are we getting it? No, whatever. Our low is the thymology. Is that 258 00:26:21.380 --> 00:26:26.380 making sense? Ah, yes. The miracles of technology. 259 00:26:26.380 --> 00:26:46.380 The interesting thing is, when Mises talks about timeology, who does he have primarily in mind? 260 00:26:46.380 --> 00:26:54.380 He has primarily Freud, of course. We would know that, because they were in the same city, they belonged to the same ethnic group, 261 00:26:54.380 --> 00:27:03.380 They spoke the same language. They were theorizing about the same thing, human beings, human freedom and human unfreedom, you know, obsession, things of that nature. 262 00:27:03.380 --> 00:27:11.380 So Freud is the low to Mises' high, as it were. That's one way of looking at it. 263 00:27:11.380 --> 00:27:23.380 But where does the classical model come in, right? Because again, not only is Mises rather obscure about his indebtedness to this classical model, but Freud is even more so, right? 264 00:27:23.380 --> 00:27:32.380 Well, this is where I became enlightened by this gentleman, and by the way I think I have enough of these, you can pass these out. 265 00:27:32.380 --> 00:27:39.380 I don't know if they'll reach everybody, I don't know if Christopher you're going to get one or not, but it's luck of the draw. 266 00:27:39.380 --> 00:27:54.380 Mr. David Bacan. It turns out, as a matter of fact, that both Freud and Mises are ultimately dependent on the classical model. 267 00:27:54.380 --> 00:28:02.380 Neither of them give it a name. It's part of the bedrock. To sort of pull a Freud on Freud is part of their unconscious. 268 00:28:02.380 --> 00:28:13.380 The subconscious basis of ideas which are later expressed in trendy, neopositivist and neoconscient terms, but it's there nonetheless. 269 00:28:13.380 --> 00:28:23.380 It's part of their culture and it's a commonality of both of them. 270 00:28:23.380 --> 00:28:30.380 So when he's talking about thymology, although it's a very unsatisfactory discussion when you just read it on the surface, 271 00:29:00.380 --> 00:29:07.140 Human view of reality. We wouldn't have the possibility of criticism or therapeutics. We 272 00:29:07.140 --> 00:29:13.500 would only have the sort of high angelic, sort of everybody's image of a medieval church 273 00:29:13.500 --> 00:29:22.620 choir view of human beings, the ideal, the truth, the intellectual human being. And there 274 00:29:22.620 --> 00:29:28.020 are some of these sort of classical anthropologists which are so platonized that they give you 275 00:29:28.020 --> 00:29:57.020 The truth of the matter is, no, human beings aren't angels. They have all sorts of deep, problematic aspects to them, having to do with the interaction between the sensitive and the intellective parts of what Aristotle would have called the psyche, but this life-soul or this life-intelligy, which has more than one part. 276 00:29:57.020 --> 00:30:13.020 So what the thymologist is doing with a therapeutic psychology is very analogous to what the praxeologist is doing with a critical libertarian politics. 277 00:30:13.020 --> 00:30:21.020 Now, I write an important premise of such a thymology would be the semi-extrinsic nature of the human mind, 278 00:30:21.020 --> 00:30:25.660 of the Human Mind, that is to say, its status as a separate entelechy, which is nonetheless 279 00:30:25.660 --> 00:30:32.300 permeable to the process of information and bonding, processes which are divorced from 280 00:30:32.300 --> 00:30:37.900 methodological individualism when they are conflated into an omnibus concept of culture. 281 00:30:37.900 --> 00:30:45.340 So if you were not confused enough up until now, I threw in a further complexity with 282 00:30:45.340 --> 00:30:50.660 the business of the semi-intrinsic nature of the human mind. 283 00:30:50.660 --> 00:30:57.460 The purpose of this is not to get so involved in phenomenology or philosophy that we lose 284 00:30:57.460 --> 00:31:04.100 the track of the sociological implications. 285 00:31:04.100 --> 00:31:11.700 I think if you go back to this clear, what's been called Aristotelian scholastic reasoning, 286 00:31:11.700 --> 00:31:16.380 you can also criticize the culture concept as not starting out with a theory of mind, 287 00:31:16.380 --> 00:31:20.020 but simply starting out with a kind of information theory. 288 00:31:20.020 --> 00:31:26.520 It's not adequate, because it really doesn't show us what in a metaphysical sense we are. 289 00:31:26.520 --> 00:31:31.480 We just have a normative sense, if we're libertarians, we want to be libertarians, if we're collectivists 290 00:31:31.480 --> 00:31:36.260 or communists, we want to be touchy-feely and all one and together or whatever. 291 00:31:36.260 --> 00:31:41.180 We want to stuff ourselves into the phone box or whatever. 292 00:31:41.180 --> 00:31:46.660 But we have to go back from culturology, we have to go back from what today passes for 293 00:31:46.660 --> 00:31:54.160 Inter-anthropology, Inter-real anthropology, which would be based on rationalism, and would define the mind before it defined culture. 294 00:31:54.160 --> 00:32:02.660 We have the horse and the cart backwards right now. We have a definition of culture, which is very clear. We don't have a definition of mind. 295 00:32:02.660 --> 00:32:12.660 So, before you have culture, which is presumably something being put into mind, you have to have a conception of mind as being something which is put in a bull. 296 00:32:12.660 --> 00:32:22.660 Again, going back to pure theory, or model construction, something which is not popular outside of economics. 297 00:32:22.660 --> 00:32:27.660 Let's look at two kinds of mind. We can imagine impermeable mind. 298 00:32:27.660 --> 00:32:34.660 We can imagine if people had minds, if you can conceptualize this in a sort of imaginary way, 299 00:32:34.660 --> 00:32:38.660 minds which were like a block of amber that you couldn't put anything into. 300 00:32:38.660 --> 00:32:40.660 That would be one possibility. 301 00:32:40.660 --> 00:32:50.660 Imagine a robot who has been programmed from birth to only do what it wants to do and never receive any sort of information from the outside. 302 00:32:50.660 --> 00:32:52.660 This is a counterfactual model. 303 00:32:52.660 --> 00:32:59.660 The other would be mined as a sort of plastic container which things can go into. 304 00:32:59.660 --> 00:33:01.660 Which of these is more realistic? 305 00:33:01.660 --> 00:33:03.660 Can anybody tell me? 306 00:33:03.660 --> 00:33:05.660 Obviously the second. 307 00:33:05.660 --> 00:33:08.660 Obviously it's not going to be. 308 00:33:08.660 --> 00:33:14.160 And these robots do not exist, right? We're constantly absorbing information and so forth. 309 00:33:14.160 --> 00:33:19.540 And in fact, I don't like extremes. I like, you know, via medias and moderate, you know, 310 00:33:19.540 --> 00:33:25.780 that sort of thing. I'm getting more irritable as I get older. But there's a third model, 311 00:33:25.780 --> 00:33:30.620 which would be a plastic box or container in which the sides have completely disappeared. 312 00:33:30.620 --> 00:33:34.780 That's called panpsychism in philosophy. It's also very popular with Buddhists, right? There's 313 00:33:34.780 --> 00:33:38.500 There's no barriers, there's no individual mind, right? 314 00:33:38.500 --> 00:33:47.700 So the semi-extrinsic mind is actually a sort of middle way between panpsychism, or no mind, 315 00:33:47.700 --> 00:33:56.580 on the one side, and this sort of amber block mind, which we're hypothesizing as a mind 316 00:33:56.580 --> 00:34:00.260 which could not be influenced by external events, right? 317 00:34:00.260 --> 00:34:09.320 So we all have the semi-extrinsic mind as the basis for what is being put into the mind. 318 00:34:09.320 --> 00:34:15.320 The next thing is to classify the things which are put into the mind and to what extent those 319 00:34:15.320 --> 00:34:22.280 things simply merge with the mind and to what extent they are still connected with the source 320 00:34:22.280 --> 00:34:24.040 of what has put it in. 321 00:34:24.040 --> 00:34:32.040 I have a whole paper on this in the working papers section of Mises, and I won't go into that. 322 00:34:32.040 --> 00:34:38.040 But the fact that the mind is semi-extrinsic, the fact that you can put things into it, 323 00:34:38.040 --> 00:34:44.040 allows it to be both socialized, which I think is good, and to be tyrannized, which is bad. 324 00:34:44.040 --> 00:34:50.040 And I think this is the justification, the fact that it has a sort of libertarian payoff, 325 00:34:50.040 --> 00:34:59.040 The theory of being able to look at tyrannization as something which has thymological or, if you will, psychological roots, 326 00:34:59.040 --> 00:35:08.040 which justifies this whole sort of elaborate end run around ontology and why all the difficult words and that sort of thing. 327 00:35:08.040 --> 00:35:17.040 And my conclusion eventually is that libertarians who fail to grasp this fundamental thymological premise are prey to errors of asociality. 328 00:35:17.040 --> 00:35:46.040 Egalitarianism, people who think that the fact that you can be bonded or have things put into your mind by parents or legitimate peers or superiors is evil, or quietism, because if you don't realize that the mind is influenceable, then why bother anyway? 329 00:35:46.040 --> 00:35:55.040 So that's it. Is everybody totally confused at this point? If so, please ask questions, because that's what I wanted to leave some time for. That's all. 330 00:36:04.040 --> 00:36:06.040 So, the ball is in your court. 331 00:36:11.040 --> 00:36:13.040 Mr. Roderick, is that right? 332 00:36:13.040 --> 00:36:29.040 When Mises talks about thymology, he also talks about history, and he often opposes, when he's got praxeology on one side, the other side in contrast is sometimes thymology or psychology before he comes up with the term thymology. Sometimes it's history. What do you see as the relationship between thymology and history? 333 00:36:43.040 --> 00:36:53.040 The situation of that historicist, Schmoller versus Menger method and slight sort of problem. 334 00:36:53.040 --> 00:37:03.040 Yes, that's definitely, the problem with this historicist is, as you know, they don't have any anthropology. 335 00:37:03.040 --> 00:37:10.040 They just have a sort of blank, you know, carte blanche that history is written upon. 336 00:37:10.040 --> 00:37:25.040 and so forth. And it gets rather towards the totally permeable mind type of model. And that, I guess, is one variety of relativism. 337 00:37:25.040 --> 00:37:38.040 And relativism, as we should be aware, is still a problem. Sometimes people aren't, especially the hermeneuticists, the Austrian hermeneuticists, aren't quite as aware of relativism as a problem. 338 00:37:38.040 --> 00:37:41.040 I think it's still a problem. It's just as much of a problem. 339 00:37:41.040 --> 00:37:48.040 If you take it out of its sort of Prussian, Austrian, sort of proto-fascist dress, 340 00:37:48.040 --> 00:37:51.040 and you dress it up in terms of modern political correctness, 341 00:37:51.040 --> 00:37:58.040 relativism and historicism is still sort of the enemy to beat at this point. 342 00:37:58.040 --> 00:38:00.040 Does that answer your question or not? I don't know. 343 00:38:00.040 --> 00:38:02.040 Did you want me to get more specific? 344 00:38:02.040 --> 00:38:06.040 I was wondering what the relationship is between history and theology, 345 00:38:06.040 --> 00:38:36.040 So often they seem like they're both at the other end of the contrast, praxeology, and sometimes Mises talks as though, as the one of those who branch of the other, or the application of the other, but you know, you've got these different passages, as soon as it's just that the themology has a historical method, as soon as it says that history has a themological method, and as soon as it sounds similar, it returns to the same thing, or that he calls it, he calls it history when it's about the past, 346 00:38:36.040 --> 00:38:42.040 Do you think there is a clear difference between exactly what those two things are? 347 00:39:06.040 --> 00:39:18.040 What's happening? There's prices, there's all sorts of evidence that choice is having sociological effects and so forth. 348 00:39:18.040 --> 00:39:29.040 Then you go below this island and you get into the abyss, you get into the area which is subject to, the subject of thymology, right? 349 00:39:29.040 --> 00:39:32.240 And there's various views with regard to this abyss. 350 00:39:32.240 --> 00:39:34.760 One is, let's not say it at all. 351 00:39:34.760 --> 00:39:38.360 I mean, it's below our dignity to talk about human beings. 352 00:39:38.360 --> 00:39:41.520 When they aren't choosing, they aren't human beings anymore. 353 00:39:41.520 --> 00:39:46.520 That's the sort of the other view, the Cartesian view, 354 00:39:46.520 --> 00:39:49.440 which is much more mentalistic than the traditional Aristotelian 355 00:39:49.440 --> 00:39:50.120 view. 356 00:39:50.120 --> 00:39:53.880 So let's not go into the abyss. 357 00:39:53.880 --> 00:39:56.760 The other is, the abyss is very confusing, 358 00:39:56.760 --> 00:40:01.680 And so we should have fuzzy concepts to deal with the abyss, right? 359 00:40:01.680 --> 00:40:04.700 And that's the hermeneutic point of view, right? 360 00:40:04.700 --> 00:40:11.580 And I think at the point at which Mises dropped out of that conversation, it was not clear 361 00:40:11.580 --> 00:40:15.000 whether he was taking the hermeneutic point of view or not, right? 362 00:40:15.000 --> 00:40:19.600 And the George Mason people have sort of pursued that hermeneutic view, right? 363 00:40:19.600 --> 00:40:23.280 The other point of view, and I'm inclining more and more towards this point of view, 364 00:40:23.280 --> 00:40:32.280 In other words, the abyss is confusing, but we need extremely rational views to sort out that confusion. 365 00:40:32.280 --> 00:40:42.280 In other words, if you look at Freud, for example, Freud was trying to use clear categorizations of very chaotic material. 366 00:40:42.280 --> 00:40:49.280 He was talking about dream material, he was talking about instincts and so forth, but he wanted to maximize the clarity of his model. 367 00:40:49.280 --> 00:41:04.280 And I tend to be in that direction, and I think that is the way to go, even if it weren't for this, what I'm calling the classical model or the aristoscholastic model, right? 368 00:41:08.280 --> 00:41:15.280 So that would imply that the material that we're dealing with is similar to the material of history, right? 369 00:41:15.280 --> 00:41:20.280 In other words, we're dealing with narrative, we're talking about non-repeatable events and so forth. 370 00:41:20.280 --> 00:41:28.280 But that the theory that we apply to it, there's still a sort of theory and data antinomy down there, 371 00:41:28.280 --> 00:41:33.280 and that the theory should be as conceptual as possible. 372 00:41:33.280 --> 00:41:42.280 So I do not buy the idea that if we have chaotic or non-conceptual material to deal with that we should drop conceptualism. 373 00:41:42.280 --> 00:41:48.280 Is that the answer? Okay, good. I don't know who was first. 374 00:41:48.280 --> 00:41:52.280 Let me suggest this as a way to distinguish between thymology and history. 375 00:41:52.280 --> 00:42:05.280 It seems like with your weak anthropology, you could also call that history in terms of just the third-person perfectly observable objective facts that are in sort of temporal succession. 376 00:42:05.280 --> 00:42:18.280 And thymology is the connective between praxeology and history. Thymology is the sort of empirical science of imputing purely full praxeological categories to the purely objective or empirical reality. 377 00:42:18.280 --> 00:42:29.280 It's how, so for instance, you know, if I go to the, if I walk over to the refrigerator to get some, if I walk over, if someone, if you observe me walking over to the refrigerator and I pull out milk, 378 00:42:29.280 --> 00:42:48.280 If we're imputing milk, then the praxeology is saying, and the thymology is saying, in this particular sequence of events, we're imputing the praxeological preferences of wanting milk, desire, and the belief, the knowledge that milk is in the refrigerator. 379 00:42:48.280 --> 00:42:51.560 So we have these abstract formal concepts, say, belief and desire, 380 00:42:51.560 --> 00:42:57.400 that we impute them with thymology, and that's the way the intrinsic mind reaches out to the extrinsic world. 381 00:42:57.400 --> 00:43:00.360 It's imputed in to the observant ends. 382 00:43:00.360 --> 00:43:09.120 And so you can see that thymology would seem like the opposite of praxeology in that it's relational rather than sort of purely formal, 383 00:43:09.120 --> 00:43:18.720 It's the bridge, and history is in opposition to praxeology in that it's purely sort of, I guess, physical, physicalistic in a way, 384 00:43:18.720 --> 00:43:23.520 while there's just a purely objective third person, so praxeology would be more first person. 385 00:43:23.520 --> 00:43:31.720 So it's not that they're the same, but they're sort of both opposed to praxeology along different axes. 386 00:43:31.720 --> 00:43:39.020 Right, yeah. In other words, yeah, both praxeology and thymology would be subjective in the good sense, right? 387 00:43:39.020 --> 00:43:49.020 Well, I don't want to say subjective in the good sense or bad sense, but subjective in the first-person sense, as you say, whereas history would be third-person narration. 388 00:43:49.020 --> 00:43:51.020 Right, yeah, that's a good way of doing it. 389 00:43:51.020 --> 00:43:56.020 And the way you could distinguish it from the hermeneutical view, at least I've understood the hermeneutical view, 390 00:43:56.020 --> 00:44:06.020 is sort of not being clear between praxeology and phymology in that they sort of take praxeology as just being sort of a mode of thought 391 00:44:06.020 --> 00:44:12.020 There's a lot that's imposable in the world. It doesn't have a sort of objective basis. 392 00:44:12.020 --> 00:44:19.020 It's just sort of like a way of thinking that's convenient or that's helpful or something like that. 393 00:44:19.020 --> 00:44:26.020 So it's just sort of merely connected, whereas I think Aristotelian or more Aristotelian inclined would see, a person would see, 394 00:44:26.020 --> 00:44:32.020 praxeology is actually, there's some praxeological description that's actually true of any particular action. 395 00:44:32.020 --> 00:44:39.020 It's actually true. It's not merely imposed. It's not merely a connection. There's something in reality itself. 396 00:44:39.020 --> 00:44:48.020 I may not get the praxeological description correct, but there is a correct one. There's a real one. 397 00:44:48.020 --> 00:44:57.020 It's very difficult. Again, you're using this subjective versus objective in terms of first-person versus third-person narratives. 398 00:44:57.020 --> 00:45:05.020 And this again is a kind of neoconscient way of thinking, you know, but it's not a bad way of thinking at all, right? 399 00:45:05.020 --> 00:45:17.020 The classical model, what I'm calling the classical model, it's not a really identifiable thing in terms of one particular thinker, right? 400 00:45:17.020 --> 00:45:32.020 tends more towards objectivism, but this is objectivism in a different sense than the objectivism of the historicism versus the praxeological subjectivity. 401 00:45:32.020 --> 00:45:40.020 It's objectivism in the sense that objectivity in this sense becomes a synonym for what is real. 402 00:45:40.020 --> 00:45:43.020 It's ontological objectivism. 403 00:45:43.020 --> 00:46:04.020 And it's taking, for example, what we consider fictive objects, like prices or ideas or categorizations, things of that nature, as being as real as the material objects of the materialists. 404 00:46:04.020 --> 00:46:09.020 So that's a different way of cutting up the pie. But what you're saying is fine. 405 00:46:09.020 --> 00:46:14.020 Israel has a distinction between epistemological and metaphysical subjectivity and objectivity. 406 00:46:14.020 --> 00:46:17.020 So, for instance, take a contract. 407 00:46:17.020 --> 00:46:23.020 A contract is metaphysically objective in that it really does exist, 408 00:46:23.020 --> 00:46:29.020 whereas it's epistemically subjective because it only exists because of people's subjective attitudes, 409 00:46:29.020 --> 00:46:34.020 whereas a tree would be, say, both epistemically and metaphysically objective. 410 00:46:34.020 --> 00:46:41.180 or pain would be something that really does exist, but it's sort of not going. 411 00:46:41.180 --> 00:46:50.180 Right, right. Also, don't forget to read the Bacan article, because he talks about very much the same sort of issues that Cyril is dealing with. 412 00:46:50.180 --> 00:46:51.180 Sorry. 413 00:46:51.180 --> 00:47:01.380 Oh, and keep in mind, I'm a layman. This is the first time I've ever heard of phymology, to be honest. 414 00:47:01.380 --> 00:47:05.380 Many Austrians have never even heard of phymology, I think. 415 00:47:05.380 --> 00:47:24.380 It almost seems, though, that the phymology informs praxeology in that the things that go on inside the internal mind are only acted upon or then subject to study of praxeology later on. 416 00:47:24.380 --> 00:47:34.380 So that void, or what's called the void by praxeologists would inform praxeology as it comes out as acts. 417 00:47:34.380 --> 00:47:39.380 That's how I try to think of it. 418 00:47:39.380 --> 00:47:43.380 Yeah, right, exactly. 419 00:47:43.380 --> 00:47:52.380 Maybe they're non-actions, right, but they still, of course, have a relationship to action. 420 00:47:52.380 --> 00:48:06.380 Murray Rothbard had an article, I think it was in JLS, but it could have been in the review of Austrian Economics, where the title was something like hermeneutics, a critique, could you summarize that and give your opinion of it? 421 00:48:06.380 --> 00:48:15.380 Yeah, I've read that article, but I'm trying to, as I remember, he was pretty virulent against hermeneutics, right? 422 00:48:15.380 --> 00:48:27.380 and so, of course, is Hoppe, right? Hoppe says even more so, right? But my point is not that... 423 00:48:27.380 --> 00:48:31.380 Hermann Huygens, of course, is just a fancy way of saying interpretation, right? 424 00:48:31.380 --> 00:48:37.380 And so my view is that if you have... well, you wanted me to summarize his point of view first, right? 425 00:48:37.380 --> 00:48:41.380 I'm not sure if I'm the person to do that. Maybe you would be a better person. 426 00:48:41.380 --> 00:48:52.980 But, yeah, again, both Rothbard and Hoppe identify hermeneutics as relativism, right, and as anti-science, right? 427 00:48:52.980 --> 00:48:59.580 And in this context, Rothbard is choosing to call what he does science. 428 00:48:59.580 --> 00:49:03.980 I'm not sure if he consistently does that, but at any rate, he does that in this particular article. 429 00:49:03.980 --> 00:49:12.980 and I'm sort of emotionally attracted to his criticism of hermeneutics with a certain proviso 430 00:49:12.980 --> 00:49:19.980 and the proviso is this, that although we don't want hermeneutics as an ideology any more than we want 431 00:49:19.980 --> 00:49:28.980 and again, I was surprised that you didn't mention this, you can see a sort of an antinomy with deep ecology here 432 00:49:28.980 --> 00:49:40.280 We don't want hermeneutics as an overarching ideology of science, but that doesn't mean 433 00:49:40.280 --> 00:49:45.580 that we don't do interpretation in the interstices between concepts. 434 00:49:45.580 --> 00:49:48.980 So that would be my only criticism of Rothbard there. 435 00:49:48.980 --> 00:49:55.820 And that's why I think, maybe what I learned at George Mason, that meaning does have meaning. 436 00:49:55.820 --> 00:50:13.820 We do do interpretation a lot and so forth, but the ideology of hermeneutics as codified by Gadamer, who was after all Heidegger's student, is going nowhere, and it is anti-science, and it is relativistic. 437 00:50:13.820 --> 00:50:19.820 Did I do justice to Rothbard? I don't know. 438 00:50:19.820 --> 00:50:29.100 I think one way to summarize Rothbard's criticism is something like reducing praxeology to 439 00:50:29.100 --> 00:50:37.560 Theology, as though they're, you know, so there's, you know, de-emphasizing the a priori and intellective side of it. 440 00:50:37.560 --> 00:50:38.060 Right, right. 441 00:50:38.060 --> 00:50:56.160 Just facts about, you know, psychology, facts about history, and so forth, and so, it wasn't, it wasn't the stress on the themology of the objection to, but simply the blurring of the boundary between praxeology and themology, which you would want it to be. 442 00:50:56.160 --> 00:51:09.160 There's also, however, the danger of some people who just want rationalism at the expense of acknowledging all the data. 443 00:51:09.160 --> 00:51:11.160 That's another thing. 444 00:51:11.160 --> 00:51:25.160 Sort of like in Dr. Block's fifth category of the Randians, the Promethean types who would just as soon dismiss all the instinctual and the sensory and the other levels. 445 00:51:25.160 --> 00:51:35.160 And that's why there is some value to the hermeneutic viewpoint. 446 00:51:35.160 --> 00:51:39.160 I don't know if you know but Roderick's actually coming out with a book on this very thing. 447 00:51:39.160 --> 00:51:44.160 He's got a slogan here that I thought y'all would be interested to share if any of you recognize what this is from. 448 00:51:44.160 --> 00:51:49.160 It's that, praxeology without thymology is empty, thymology without praxeology is blind. 449 00:51:49.160 --> 00:52:09.160 and I think that gets across what the difficulty is pretty clearly that you've got this tendency among some folks more on Mises Institute to sort of want to shy away from phymology because they see relativism in it and the people more at George Mason who have a tendency to see praxeologists having too much rationalism in it but you really can't do long without the other. 450 00:52:09.160 --> 00:52:15.160 Very good, right? Sounds familiar, somehow. 451 00:52:15.160 --> 00:52:19.160 What was the relevance of Stangler? 452 00:52:19.160 --> 00:52:29.160 Oh, okay. Again, he's not well-known anymore, but this was the man who was considered the leading German philosopher prior to Martin Heidegger. 453 00:52:29.160 --> 00:52:59.160 And he had the idea, again, people that periodically had this idea, of setting aside anthropology not as a natural science, not as one of the minute little divisions, you know, like the study of the snail garter, the study of human beings, and so forth, but as an autonomous study of half of the sciences, really, you know, anthropology being what is the human, 454 00:52:59.160 --> 00:53:06.160 and that being the central problem of science, not the study of nature, but the study of what is human. 455 00:53:06.160 --> 00:53:13.160 Before you even make that distinction, you have to admit that there is something about human beings which is not inside of nature. 456 00:53:13.160 --> 00:53:23.160 It's that fourth angel that sticks out of the universe. It doesn't make sense. It's non-intuitive, especially for us who have been taught natural science. 457 00:53:23.160 --> 00:53:30.320 So, Max Schuyler had this idea, but he got, unfortunately, he got this sort of neoconscient 458 00:53:30.320 --> 00:53:35.880 disease where you start having subjectivity within objectivity and then the model ramifies 459 00:53:35.880 --> 00:53:42.440 and ramifies and ramifies, and eventually his system became, well, you know, they criticized 460 00:53:42.440 --> 00:53:47.640 the Aristotelian scholastics for having the angels dance on the pins, but when the neoconscience 461 00:53:47.640 --> 00:53:51.040 get these ramifications of categories, they become even worse, right? 462 00:53:51.040 --> 00:54:13.040 So at some point he was sort of blown out of the water by Martin Heidegger and people in Germany which of course this was the same time that Mises was in Austria, right, focused their attention from the idea of having a philosophical category called anthropology to being a more sort of mystical Heideggerian idea. 463 00:54:13.040 --> 00:54:20.040 So if you haven't heard of him, that's the standard attitude. 464 00:54:20.040 --> 00:54:23.040 Ok, Mark, thank you very much.