I noticed that the lecture would also build as Austrian anthropology, right?
I don't know who did that, but it was a sort of interesting twist.
I don't know that there is such a thing as Austrian anthropology.
If there were, I suppose it would be more in line with people's expectations of what anthropology is, right?
So for example, if we're talking about anthropology, we're talking about ethnology and that sort of thing.
We could be talking about the present governor of California's racial roots or something like that.
I believe he's from Styria, right?
And Styrians, I believe, in turn are Germanized Goths, Germanized Slavs or something of that nature, right?
And they're similar to Slovakians or something like that, except somehow they wound up on the German side or something like that.
Or we could take the governor of California's cranial measurements
and talk about the difference between when he was eating Austrian food
and when he moved to California,
whether his brain has gotten bigger than his biceps or something like that.
And this is more or less what everybody expects
when you hear the word anthropology, right?
And you expect lots of interesting details,
you expect, you know, a trip around the world, you know,
A lot of fine, fine little distinctions about ethnology, archaeology and so forth.
And I like that stuff too, I've done it all my life in one form or another.
But in fact, that's not what I want to talk to you about today.
Actually something rather more difficult having to do with the organization of the sciences.
What do we call anthropology?
And what do we call this odd word, which occasionally crops up in Austrian literature, called thymology?
So let's focus on those.
I was originally not going to use this, but as long as it's here, we have simology, and
we have anthropology. Does this work? Okay. Can you see that? It's up? Okay. Once I start
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.
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.
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.
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?
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.
Now, the other word is thymology. Now, thymology is, in addition to praxeology, a neologism of Ludwig von Mises, right?
Now, the problem is that thymology is never precisely defined, as far as I can tell.
Now, if somebody else has found this, please inform me, you know, because I want to be open.
But it's never been precisely defined, let's say, in a one sentence definition in Mises' works.
How about this? This is my suggestion.
Thymology is the study of the human mind by human minds in human terms.
I'll repeat that.
Thymology is the study of the human mind by human minds in human terms.
If you like that, I like it.
But see what that takes you to.
Now let's go back to anthropology.
There's a number of things which strike you.
I was making the joke about Schwarzenegger.
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?
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.
Has anybody here ever been to Ely, Minnesota, where they have the premier Wolf Studies Institute of the United States?
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,
but they are the subjects of a particular science. In the same sense, according to the present organization of the natural sciences,
Anthropology is one of those sciences.
So we have lycology, which is the study of wolves.
We have anthropology, which is the study of another species amongst many, many species.
And we have other species, snail darters, right?
We have whales, you know, we have all sorts of things, snakes, so forth, right?
And they each have their own particular field of investigation, one of which is anthropology.
And this is the way it's stated, right?
We have anthropology departments all over the United States and state universities and private universities.
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.
Now, philosophical anthropology is a little bit closer to what I want to talk about today.
But philosophical anthropology was sort of the balouac or the, where I come from, it's called the rioiki, right?
The particular province of a group of thinkers in the early 20th century, Germany, about the same time as Mises was teaching in Vienna.
Especially, we're talking about Max Schaehler.
He got the idea of reorganizing philosophy and the sciences around the idea of anthropology.
Schaler was a phenomenologist, which means he was one of Husserl's disciples.
Unfortunately, for Max Schaler and for the project of a philosophical anthropology, he ran up into a bigger bull,
who was looking for the domination of the German philosophical scene at the time, a man named Martin Heidegger.
Martin Heidegger, who you're all familiar with, had it sort of in for Max Schaehler
and philosophical anthropology as a sort of dominant reorganizing paradigm sort of went the way of all flesh at that point.
There were other intrinsic problems aside from the fact that Schaehler lost out in popularity to Heidegger.
One was that Schuyler's idea of what a philosophical anthropology should be was based very largely on neo-Kantian concepts.
And who here has tried to read anything by Max Schuyler, either in German or in translation?
Is there anybody? I don't know. We have maybe one or two philosophers here.
Don't, right? It's really bad, you know?
And that in itself would have sunk the whole project, right?
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?
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.
The third idea is that we're all, like Molière's Mr. Javert, we're all anthropologists.
We've just been not informed that we were thinking about what human beings were all the time, right?
So let's look at anthropology in terms of what I'm calling the classical tradition,
but it's really a sort of perennial project that everybody is doing all the time, right?
We're all anthropologists in addition to being human beings, right?
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?
Well, Austrianism, as we know, is based, in a methodological sense, on subjectivism.
Now, when you're talking with non-economists or non-Austrians about subjectivism,
you get these strange reactions, because, again, this is a problem of language.
Subjectivism, in an Austrian sense, means choice.
It means human action, that sort of thing.
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.
But this subjectivism is not just fuzziness, right? And there's a tremendous problem with fuzziness, too.
I should add a little bit to Mark Thornton's introduction of me.
I'm originally a product, well not exactly a product, but I had some association with the hermeneutics school at George Mason.
Now my particular take on things at this point is rather different from those people.
I'm not, I don't want them to be held responsible for anything that I'm saying, right?
Which is not to say that what they're saying is not good or whatever,
But I've sort of gone 180 degrees on my view of what thymology and anthropology should be.
Partly because of the article that I'm going to give you having to do with the nature of incorporeal intelligible.
So I'll explain what that means later.
But I want you to be open to a certain amount of metaphysical speculation here.
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.
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.
Don LaVoy was a man with a tremendously clear mind in search of fuzziness.
He thought that the strict compartmentalization of concepts,
when you say this is a human artifact, this is something else,
we needed to fuzz these up a little bit with more ambiguity.
And there's a great deal to be said for that approach.
I only, on the other hand, am a very fuzzy thinker in search of clarity.
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.
Now, I started out saying what anthropology, in my view, is not. It is not a natural science. We're not inside nature.
Rather, as Mises said, we have methodological dualism.
There is the study of consciousness, there is the study of nature.
The consciousness is inside of us and the nature is outside of us.
He called the conscious aspect thymology.
Again, the study of the human mind.
He called the natural aspect the natural sciences.
He also talked about something called the psychologist fallacy.
What is the psychologist fallacy?
This is that the world is a larger view of myself.
And this is the naive version.
In other words, I am flesh, therefore the world is flesh.
And this is typical archaic thinking.
We talk about primitive people, for example.
They project what they are onto nature.
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.
You see this analyzed in things like Iliadé and Jung, right, and this is subjectivism in potentially a bad sense,
although some people want to return to this kind of naive, archaic thinking.
You know, you have people like Michael Harner and his shamanism, neo-shamanism, and so forth.
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.
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.
It's the opposite of the psychologist fallacy.
It's the alchemist fallacy.
And it's the idea that the world is that which opposes me.
So in other words, I am flesh.
Therefore, ultimate reality is metallic.
That makes sense, doesn't it?
Now that's the man in the streets,
or the woman in the streets idea of enlightenment,
of common sense.
An intelligent person is someone who
is not willing to project themselves into reality.
An intelligent person is somebody who says,
the world is alien from me.
The world is basically efficient causes.
The world is basically atoms in a void.
Again, this is the basic root psychological,
biological, if you will, appeal of materialism.
Against this, there's a third point of view,
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,
ontological meaning the sense of what is real, right?
This is what I'm calling the classical view, right? The classical view being basically the Aristotelian view.
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?
This view was modified between the time of Plotinus and Descartes in accordance with all sorts of other streams of thinking, right?
Notably, different recrudescences of Platonism, which were mixed in at one point or another.
It's an important view because it was actually sort of the bedrock upon which our hidden common sense is based, right?
In other words, the more sensible common sense, not the common sense of the man who embraces the alchemist fallacy, who is a materialist,
but the more sort of uncommon common sense that we still retain is based on this kind of Aristotelian idea.
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.
Dr. Block may want to make objections, but I would say just off the bat that three things
were going along in von Mises' mind.
Of course, with regard to praxeology, he was always very clear about what he meant.
He was always very clear as an economist.
Once we get out of the island of praxeology and into the depths of the theymology, understandably
Mises and almost everybody else becomes considerably less clear.
Mises has three things going into his mind. Again, basically the same alpha, beta, gamma
that I originally talked about with regard to the way that we conceptualize anthropology.
First of all, there's a kind of human skepticism that you see in books like Theory and History,
the epistemological foundations of economics and so forth. The second is a tendency towards
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.
The third, and this is sort of the bedrock, which was recovered to some extent by the Rothbard tendency,
was the classical model, what I'm calling the classical model,
and being deliberately vague about what the classical model is,
precisely because I want people not to be sort of herded into one category or another.
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.
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.
Okay, but can you really talk about not having an epistemology?
Well, no, you can't.
But the point of Aristotle and the people who philosophized in that particular tradition
is that ontology was not an antechamber that you first had to spend a certain amount of time in
before moving into the study of reality.
You start out by studying reality first,
and then you develop from there into an epistemological criticism of what you're doing.
Aristotle himself had a very interesting phrase.
He said, when you look at the world, you look as if you are dissecting an animal.
Again, vegetarians aren't going to like this, sorry.
You look at if you're dissecting or you're a butcher or something like that, you cut everything of the joints.
In other words, there's a natural way of dividing things up.
Now, this may sound rather childish.
Again, we're talking in highly abstract terms.
The neoconscient way of establishing autonomy
for the human species as a human science
has some sort of plausibility, because we're
talking about this dualism between the known
and the knower.
There's various versions of this,
but it's all a sort of two-part model.
There's the known, there's the knower.
There's the numinal, there's the phenomenology.
There's the conscious, there's the unconscious.
So anybody who has a sort of dichotomy or duality
has immediately sort of a consent from whoever
they're speaking to, because we all know this.
We're all sort of conscious beings speaking to somebody else
as I am now to you, whatever.
Dualism has some sort of prima facie legitimacy.
On the other hand, if you get into ontology,
and if you get into this what I'm calling the classical model,
well, what is the classical model?
The classical model coming out of De Anima and other sources
is that the world is divided into four parts.
We all know what the four parts are,
because we've played this game since we were children.
There's the mineral.
There's the nutritional or the vegetative, there's the sensitive, and there's the intellective.
Now, isn't that silly? We already knew that. I'm teaching the trivial.
In fact, these medieval people even call their basic educational system the trivium.
It's embarrassing, something that childish.
What were they doing? Were they talking about Star Trek or whatever? No, it was something else.
But the same way, with the four-part model, you can bring up all sorts of very interesting
thinkers.
I know that Rothbard referred to himself as a Thomist, but this was a universal default
model for theorizing about human beings and other parts of the universe, right?
The four-part de-anima model.
And it wasn't the property of any particular philosophical school.
You could be a Thomist, you could be a Scottist, you could be an Avicinian, you know, you could
would be a respecter of somebody like Maimonides or Ibn Gabriel or something like that.
Maimonides had a very interesting view of the four-part model, again, just to show how childish it seems,
but there's a sort of wisdom behind its childishness. He said, the world is guarded by four angels, right?
How big is each of the angels? Each of the angels is one-third of the length of the universe.
Well, think about that. It doesn't make sense, does it?
We've got one angel sticking out, you know?
When you've got one angel sticking one third of the universe out of the universe, you're in bad trouble.
But it's a way, a childish way, of making people conceptualize the way that anthropology should, in a sense, be transcendental.
In another sense, it should not be transcendental, right?
Because we're talking about consciousness and intelligence in relationship to sensory perception and in relationship to other more physical sort of things, right?
Now, the fact that the classical model embraces both that conscious element, which is again your epistemic, you know, conscience type of duality, right?
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.
I'm inspired to do this by Dr. Block. It's not as embarrassing. After those cows, I think I can write anything.
We have the high and the low. We have the strong and the weak.
Excuse me, I'm already messing up, right?
We have the strong and the weak, right?
We have, within the strong, we have the high and the low.
The strong anthropology is the model that I'm talking about.
The weak anthropology is the anthropology that we've all learned from our educational curriculum, right?
To see the human race as a particular species within a wide variety of species, right?
So you might say that from the point of view of the strong anthropology,
the human sciences are half of the conceptual space of the world, right?
From the point of view of the weak anthropology, it's just the biomass of the human species, right?
It's that one mile by one mile cube in relationship to the rest of the universe
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.
Now what is the high and the low?
The high and the low, if we talk about a high anthropology
and a low anthropology, this is very strange, nobody would talk about this in contemporary
terms, but a high anthropology would be one that emphasized
the intellect aspect of the human being. A low anthropology
would be one that emphasized those other three-quarters
inside of the material universe.
Phenomenology and Intellectual Objects
praxeology, right? Are we getting it? No, whatever. Our low is the thymology. Is that
making sense? Ah, yes. The miracles of technology.
The interesting thing is, when Mises talks about timeology, who does he have primarily in mind?
He has primarily Freud, of course. We would know that, because they were in the same city, they belonged to the same ethnic group,
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.
So Freud is the low to Mises' high, as it were. That's one way of looking at it.
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?
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.
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.
Mr. David Bacan. It turns out, as a matter of fact, that both Freud and Mises are ultimately dependent on the classical model.
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.
The subconscious basis of ideas which are later expressed in trendy, neopositivist and neoconscient terms, but it's there nonetheless.
It's part of their culture and it's a commonality of both of them.
So when he's talking about thymology, although it's a very unsatisfactory discussion when you just read it on the surface,
Human view of reality. We wouldn't have the possibility of criticism or therapeutics. We
would only have the sort of high angelic, sort of everybody's image of a medieval church
choir view of human beings, the ideal, the truth, the intellectual human being. And there
are some of these sort of classical anthropologists which are so platonized that they give you
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.
So what the thymologist is doing with a therapeutic psychology is very analogous to what the praxeologist is doing with a critical libertarian politics.
Now, I write an important premise of such a thymology would be the semi-extrinsic nature of the human mind,
of the Human Mind, that is to say, its status as a separate entelechy, which is nonetheless
permeable to the process of information and bonding, processes which are divorced from
methodological individualism when they are conflated into an omnibus concept of culture.
So if you were not confused enough up until now, I threw in a further complexity with
the business of the semi-intrinsic nature of the human mind.
The purpose of this is not to get so involved in phenomenology or philosophy that we lose
the track of the sociological implications.
I think if you go back to this clear, what's been called Aristotelian scholastic reasoning,
you can also criticize the culture concept as not starting out with a theory of mind,
but simply starting out with a kind of information theory.
It's not adequate, because it really doesn't show us what in a metaphysical sense we are.
We just have a normative sense, if we're libertarians, we want to be libertarians, if we're collectivists
or communists, we want to be touchy-feely and all one and together or whatever.
We want to stuff ourselves into the phone box or whatever.
But we have to go back from culturology, we have to go back from what today passes for
Inter-anthropology, Inter-real anthropology, which would be based on rationalism, and would define the mind before it defined culture.
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.
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.
Again, going back to pure theory, or model construction, something which is not popular outside of economics.
Let's look at two kinds of mind. We can imagine impermeable mind.
We can imagine if people had minds, if you can conceptualize this in a sort of imaginary way,
minds which were like a block of amber that you couldn't put anything into.
That would be one possibility.
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.
This is a counterfactual model.
The other would be mined as a sort of plastic container which things can go into.
Which of these is more realistic?
Can anybody tell me?
Obviously the second.
Obviously it's not going to be.
And these robots do not exist, right? We're constantly absorbing information and so forth.
And in fact, I don't like extremes. I like, you know, via medias and moderate, you know,
that sort of thing. I'm getting more irritable as I get older. But there's a third model,
which would be a plastic box or container in which the sides have completely disappeared.
That's called panpsychism in philosophy. It's also very popular with Buddhists, right? There's
There's no barriers, there's no individual mind, right?
So the semi-extrinsic mind is actually a sort of middle way between panpsychism, or no mind,
on the one side, and this sort of amber block mind, which we're hypothesizing as a mind
which could not be influenced by external events, right?
So we all have the semi-extrinsic mind as the basis for what is being put into the mind.
The next thing is to classify the things which are put into the mind and to what extent those
things simply merge with the mind and to what extent they are still connected with the source
of what has put it in.
I have a whole paper on this in the working papers section of Mises, and I won't go into that.
But the fact that the mind is semi-extrinsic, the fact that you can put things into it,
allows it to be both socialized, which I think is good, and to be tyrannized, which is bad.
And I think this is the justification, the fact that it has a sort of libertarian payoff,
The theory of being able to look at tyrannization as something which has thymological or, if you will, psychological roots,
which justifies this whole sort of elaborate end run around ontology and why all the difficult words and that sort of thing.
And my conclusion eventually is that libertarians who fail to grasp this fundamental thymological premise are prey to errors of asociality.
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?
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.
So, the ball is in your court.
Mr. Roderick, is that right?
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?
The situation of that historicist, Schmoller versus Menger method and slight sort of problem.
Yes, that's definitely, the problem with this historicist is, as you know, they don't have any anthropology.
They just have a sort of blank, you know, carte blanche that history is written upon.
and so forth. And it gets rather towards the totally permeable mind type of model. And that, I guess, is one variety of relativism.
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.
I think it's still a problem. It's just as much of a problem.
If you take it out of its sort of Prussian, Austrian, sort of proto-fascist dress,
and you dress it up in terms of modern political correctness,
relativism and historicism is still sort of the enemy to beat at this point.
Does that answer your question or not? I don't know.
Did you want me to get more specific?
I was wondering what the relationship is between history and theology,
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,
Do you think there is a clear difference between exactly what those two things are?
What's happening? There's prices, there's all sorts of evidence that choice is having sociological effects and so forth.
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?
And there's various views with regard to this abyss.
One is, let's not say it at all.
I mean, it's below our dignity to talk about human beings.
When they aren't choosing, they aren't human beings anymore.
That's the sort of the other view, the Cartesian view,
which is much more mentalistic than the traditional Aristotelian
view.
So let's not go into the abyss.
The other is, the abyss is very confusing,
And so we should have fuzzy concepts to deal with the abyss, right?
And that's the hermeneutic point of view, right?
And I think at the point at which Mises dropped out of that conversation, it was not clear
whether he was taking the hermeneutic point of view or not, right?
And the George Mason people have sort of pursued that hermeneutic view, right?
The other point of view, and I'm inclining more and more towards this point of view,
In other words, the abyss is confusing, but we need extremely rational views to sort out that confusion.
In other words, if you look at Freud, for example, Freud was trying to use clear categorizations of very chaotic material.
He was talking about dream material, he was talking about instincts and so forth, but he wanted to maximize the clarity of his model.
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?
So that would imply that the material that we're dealing with is similar to the material of history, right?
In other words, we're dealing with narrative, we're talking about non-repeatable events and so forth.
But that the theory that we apply to it, there's still a sort of theory and data antinomy down there,
and that the theory should be as conceptual as possible.
So I do not buy the idea that if we have chaotic or non-conceptual material to deal with that we should drop conceptualism.
Is that the answer? Okay, good. I don't know who was first.
Let me suggest this as a way to distinguish between thymology and history.
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.
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.
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,
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.
So we have these abstract formal concepts, say, belief and desire,
that we impute them with thymology, and that's the way the intrinsic mind reaches out to the extrinsic world.
It's imputed in to the observant ends.
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,
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,
while there's just a purely objective third person, so praxeology would be more first person.
So it's not that they're the same, but they're sort of both opposed to praxeology along different axes.
Right, yeah. In other words, yeah, both praxeology and thymology would be subjective in the good sense, right?
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.
Right, yeah, that's a good way of doing it.
And the way you could distinguish it from the hermeneutical view, at least I've understood the hermeneutical view,
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
There's a lot that's imposable in the world. It doesn't have a sort of objective basis.
It's just sort of like a way of thinking that's convenient or that's helpful or something like that.
So it's just sort of merely connected, whereas I think Aristotelian or more Aristotelian inclined would see, a person would see,
praxeology is actually, there's some praxeological description that's actually true of any particular action.
It's actually true. It's not merely imposed. It's not merely a connection. There's something in reality itself.
I may not get the praxeological description correct, but there is a correct one. There's a real one.
It's very difficult. Again, you're using this subjective versus objective in terms of first-person versus third-person narratives.
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?
The classical model, what I'm calling the classical model, it's not a really identifiable thing in terms of one particular thinker, right?
tends more towards objectivism, but this is objectivism in a different sense than the objectivism of the historicism versus the praxeological subjectivity.
It's objectivism in the sense that objectivity in this sense becomes a synonym for what is real.
It's ontological objectivism.
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.
So that's a different way of cutting up the pie. But what you're saying is fine.
Israel has a distinction between epistemological and metaphysical subjectivity and objectivity.
So, for instance, take a contract.
A contract is metaphysically objective in that it really does exist,
whereas it's epistemically subjective because it only exists because of people's subjective attitudes,
whereas a tree would be, say, both epistemically and metaphysically objective.
or pain would be something that really does exist, but it's sort of not going.
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.
Sorry.
Oh, and keep in mind, I'm a layman. This is the first time I've ever heard of phymology, to be honest.
Many Austrians have never even heard of phymology, I think.
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.
So that void, or what's called the void by praxeologists would inform praxeology as it comes out as acts.
That's how I try to think of it.
Yeah, right, exactly.
Maybe they're non-actions, right, but they still, of course, have a relationship to action.
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?
Yeah, I've read that article, but I'm trying to, as I remember, he was pretty virulent against hermeneutics, right?
and so, of course, is Hoppe, right? Hoppe says even more so, right? But my point is not that...
Hermann Huygens, of course, is just a fancy way of saying interpretation, right?
And so my view is that if you have... well, you wanted me to summarize his point of view first, right?
I'm not sure if I'm the person to do that. Maybe you would be a better person.
But, yeah, again, both Rothbard and Hoppe identify hermeneutics as relativism, right, and as anti-science, right?
And in this context, Rothbard is choosing to call what he does science.
I'm not sure if he consistently does that, but at any rate, he does that in this particular article.
and I'm sort of emotionally attracted to his criticism of hermeneutics with a certain proviso
and the proviso is this, that although we don't want hermeneutics as an ideology any more than we want
and again, I was surprised that you didn't mention this, you can see a sort of an antinomy with deep ecology here
We don't want hermeneutics as an overarching ideology of science, but that doesn't mean
that we don't do interpretation in the interstices between concepts.
So that would be my only criticism of Rothbard there.
And that's why I think, maybe what I learned at George Mason, that meaning does have meaning.
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.
Did I do justice to Rothbard? I don't know.
I think one way to summarize Rothbard's criticism is something like reducing praxeology to
Theology, as though they're, you know, so there's, you know, de-emphasizing the a priori and intellective side of it.
Right, right.
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.
There's also, however, the danger of some people who just want rationalism at the expense of acknowledging all the data.
That's another thing.
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.
And that's why there is some value to the hermeneutic viewpoint.
I don't know if you know but Roderick's actually coming out with a book on this very thing.
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.
It's that, praxeology without thymology is empty, thymology without praxeology is blind.
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.
Very good, right? Sounds familiar, somehow.
What was the relevance of Stangler?
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.
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,
and that being the central problem of science, not the study of nature, but the study of what is human.
Before you even make that distinction, you have to admit that there is something about human beings which is not inside of nature.
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.
So, Max Schuyler had this idea, but he got, unfortunately, he got this sort of neoconscient
disease where you start having subjectivity within objectivity and then the model ramifies
and ramifies and ramifies, and eventually his system became, well, you know, they criticized
the Aristotelian scholastics for having the angels dance on the pins, but when the neoconscience
get these ramifications of categories, they become even worse, right?
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.
So if you haven't heard of him, that's the standard attitude.
Ok, Mark, thank you very much.