Chapter Ǵǵ: Hayek on the Psychology of Socialism and Freedom ȂȈȈinterpretation ascribing impulses received to one or more classes. Ļis
classification is at least rudimentary theory. Ļe qualities we attribute to
experienced objects belong, actually, to the relations by which we classify
them.
Examples may help. When I hear a sound or see a patch of red, neither
simply exists as a distinct part of objective reality impressing itself on my
nervous system. Rather, my nervous system selects certain aspects of real-
ity accessible to my sense organs, classifies them, and organizes them into
my perception of the sound or the red patch. Far from playing a purely
passive role, my nervous system impresses order or character onto my per-
ceptions and thus shapes and in a way even creates them.
What aspects of reality can affect my sense organs and how its effects
shape themselves into perceptions depend on the state of those organs, of
my nervous system, and indeed of my entire body. Ļe role of the phys-
ical body is obvious. Unlike a dog, I cannot perceive certain smells or
high-pitched sounds. Unlike me, the dog cannot recognize and so cannot
perceive words in a conversation or on a printed page.
Biological processes and natural selection have presumably shaped
organisms in such ways that their perceptions possess an order corre-
sponding to whatever order may exist in the world. Organisms that fre-
quently confused hot and cold, small and large, near and far, up and down,
hunger and satiety, wolf and bush would be less likely to survive and repro-
duce than ones whose perceptions corresponded better to reality. Among
higher organisms, actions conforming to principles of logic would have
greater survival value than actions clashing with logic.
We see some possible truth, then, in Immanuel Kant’s contention
that human beings can have knowledge prior to experience. Quibbling,
we might narrow that contention down. People do not have any a pri-
ori knowledge in an articulated form. What they more plausibly have are
predispositions to behave as if they had certain knowledge and predispo-
sitions to recognize and become able to articulate it.
In Hayek’s interpretation, experience is involved in knowledge, after
all, but it is not restricted to experience obtained by the individual organ-
ism itself. Rather, it includes the experience of the species and its ances-
tors as embodied, through biology and natural selection, in each indi-
vidual’s genetic and physiological makeup. Ļe individual human being
inherits the experience of his ancestors not only through biological but
also through cultural processes, notably through language. Language
increases his capacity for discrimination in dealing with new experience.