The publication of Hayek’s principal work in “theoretical psychology” – The Sensory Order – was the end of a thirty-years-long endeavor, that begun in Monakow’s Zurich neurological laboratories, passed through Vienna, and London, and was concluded at the Committee of Social Thought of the University of Chicago. In my paper, I will compare the major versions of this work: the 1920 student paper, the London drafts, and the final Chicago publication. Thus we will be able to reveal the different constellations of disciplines that were summoned, each time, to answer the question: “What is mind?”.
We will be using Hayek as a common denominator that will enable us to see the differences between these intellectual worlds. While Hayek, in his travels in time and space, will be our informant, the concept of “Mind” will serve us as our magnifying glass. The mind has become an object to many different forms of knowledge: biology, psychology, philosophy, medicine, economics, and cybernetics. Therefore, studying the history of the “mind” is tantamount to the study of the fluctuating interfaces between the humanities, the life-, and the human sciences.
Finally, we will take into consideration the strange temporality of Hayek’s work. This book is read as either a fossil from the nineteenth century, or as prophecy about the world of AI – but never as a contemporary work. This curious temporality, I argue, hides the intellectual shift that took place in the time it took Hayek to bring his term paper to the shape of a published book.
