On Reading Hayek
I've been reading Uncle Fritz's The Sensory Order today, and I keep getting struck by the same thing: no writer that I've found presents such a vexing combination of wonderful insight and utter resistance to being quoted. When I read Hayek I always feel more enlightened with practically every page, but if I try to find a particular passage where the "aha!" came and then try to extract it from its context to share with others, it just makes no sense.
It's not just that the man hadn't a pithy bone in his body, but that everything in his mind seemed to be highly interconnected and didn't lend itself well compartmentalization. His thinking style really shows through in his writing: you can tell he dealt first in murky abstractions and that he struggled to translate these into something he could communicate to others in a form they could handle without having access to his own thoughts, knowing that his observations in one area relied on those in other areas.
One can see this writ large in his entire oeuvre: you can profitably read his stuff on economics, or scientific methodology, or psychology and epistemology, or law and political theory, but each one impinges on the other to various degrees and reading them all tends to amplify your understanding of each part. There's a somewhat fractal-like organization to his entire body of ideas, which is what makes studying it awkward but immensely rewarding.
The connectedness, I think, goes hand in hand with his own self-description as a "muddler" who forgot things often and had to constantly relearn things as he went along. This made him very plodding in the pace of his thinking and work, but had the compensation of giving him more time to integrate his ideas and notice aspects of things that those with a quicker cognitive tempo would have overlooked.
It's hard for me to avoid noticing the congruencies between this sort of mind and the state of mind induced by the psychedelic experience: everything seems perpetually new and unfamiliar, you're more attuned to subtle signals that normally fly under the cognitive radar, every thought in your head seems to collide and recombine with every other, you find yourself going to reach for once-familiar concepts that have metamorphosed while you weren't looking, patterns and self-similarity seem to jump out at you everywhere, and you become acutely aware of the fact that there's just more going on inside and outside of you than you can possibly keep track of. Or such is my experience, anyway. (And I'll bet dollars to doughnuts that these similarities aren't just superficial but have some common neurological basis.)
Another interesting thing that jumps out at me is the fact that such a comprehensive interdisciplinary thinker barely had a word to say about ethics, which I don't think is at all accidental. I suspect it's because he was a moral skeptic: his epistemology is so thoroughly fallibilist that any attempt to deduce an ethics from first principles would have been a horribly unnatural act that wouldn't have sat at all comfortably within his whole philosophical system. So his system does without one and instead simply constructs an epistemic and political structure that offers maximum lattitude for "muddling through" ethical issues on a case-by-case basis, with the hope of allowing ethical truths to be discovered, in much the same way that the methodology of science creates an arena where the truth can be discovered without imposing any particular priveleged method of discovering it. Kinda clever in a way, and I find it amusing that in saying nothing about ethics he was probably shrewder in his understanding of the problem than most ethical philosophers.
If this all sounds a little like hero worship, it probably is. I don't think there's any philosopher I've benefitted more from than Hayek.