In an article entitled, The Empirics of Austrian Economics, Steven Horwitz writes:

In short, Mises was making a Kantian claim about the human mind and the way in which minds are similarly structured across humans. We all have “a set of tools for grasping reality” that comes to us from our evolutionary heritage. The commonality of those tools allows us to engage in the reflection on action and the development of that core of economics as a set of necessary insights about how humans act. This core economic knowledge is not contingent but part of the very structure of human minds and is something that we can come to know.

First, Kant died in 1804 and Darwin was born in 1809. On the Origin of Species was not published until 1859. Therefore, anything that Kant could have meant about a priori categories of understanding could not have been thought with the “tools’ of evolution. To think evolution together with Kant’s notion of the category is to fail to understand what a category of understanding was for Kant.

Second, the way in which “minds are similarly structured across humans” according to Kant are the universal, a priori, categories of understanding. These categories do not change with evolution. Any judgment that rests on an a posteriori claim is contingent and subject to change. Since a priori claims are universal and necessary, they are not subject to mutability. The “tools” Kant discusses would not evolve with evolution since they are a priori.

If Kant’s a priori categories of quantity, quality, relation and modality are obfuscated with other notions that may be included in “core economic knowledge” that is “part of the very structure of human minds” then these additional notions certainly would be contingent according to Kant. Ever since Kant, there have been many religious and secular types that have tried to add to Kant’s list of a priori categories of understanding. The universal structures that Horwitz states from Mises are “that people act purposively, that we prefer more to less and now to later, the idea of diminishing marginal utility, and perhaps the basic idea behind demand and supply curves” are values that are imputed to humans, not Kant’s essential categories that determine understanding before human ‘values’ can even become possible. To take the apodictic certainty of Kant’s categories of understanding and apply them to human values is to take a leap where Kant’s certainty will not follow. While it may be true that Mises intuitions are sensible observations they are not of the same order as Kant’s conditions for being able to know anything at all.

With regard to subjectivism, Kant had the interesting dilemma of making claims about universality AND holding that the “thing in itself” cannot be known. Since the thing in itself is noumena (νοούμενα) that originates from the Greek word nous for mind, the thing itself, as it is “in itself”, is thought from mind but the ‘what’ that thought thinks, or refers to, is unknowable for Kant. Therefore noumena, as the ‘what’, is essentially negative for Kant. We can observe phe-noumena with the senses but we can never know the ‘thing’ that our sensations tell us about. An ‘object’ is not what something ‘is’ but only an apperception. While Kant wanted to set the stage for universal knowledge as categories of understanding, which were not subjective in any sense, he also insisted that subjectivism was all that could be known as the knower only ever observes phenomena in his skin. Therefore, how could Kant know that his categories of understanding were universal as he claimed? The categories, as the conditions for understanding, could themselves only be sensational objects for the subject. The claim to universality could never be severed from the perceiving subject and therefore universality itself would merely be a forgetful form of subjectivity.

Hegel believed he resolved this issue dialectically in The Science of Logic with the Concept (begriff ; notion or idea). Marx also, working from Hegel’s method, believed he resolved Kant’s dilemma in dialectical materialism; the overthrowing of the bourgeois fetish of value for the actual value of labor. All of these modern philosophical quagmires and resulting, practical human values assumptions were rooted in the inescapable desire to ground subjectivism to universalism, mind/body, substance and appearance, real and illusory, sensible and nonsense, being and nothingness. What most often gets overlooked is that before there was any such thing as the historical codification of subjectivism, Aristotle argued eloquently against subjectivism’s origin in Physics. On one hand, Aristotle argues against the Eleatics who took the notion of the universal, the one (hen), as essential and the many (polumeres) as accidental and on the other hand, the more ancient philosophy of Hesiod and Heraclitus which thought flux, difference, change from chaos (apeiron). Aristotle’s argument prefigures the dilemma of modernity and subjectivism and offers other possibilities before concretizing historical assumptions. Additionally, post modernism also echoes in Plato and Aristotle through the thought of rhetoric, the ‘art’ of the Sophists, as antithetical to dialectic or perhaps the unaccounted for difference in universality (a Koan of the first order).

In any case, the ideas that Horwitz plays around (and from), whether praxeology or subjectivism, drive his thinking…as for many of us. This is why a more fundamental effort is required to clarify and situate this type of historical ‘seeing’ and what remains unseen. Many have undertaken this task, Heidegger perhaps chief among them. I will attempt to bring this material together in a way that demonstrates my polemic with the material as well in future essays.