Connell Fanning and Marija Laugalyte
Do you ever feel intimidated or inferior when faced with the way other people think?
Is it because you are not aware that there are two different types of mind as the economist Frederick Hayek classified them?
One type of mind, which some can find intimidating, are what Hayek calls ‘the master of their subject’. This is the person who has at their ready command all the important ideas and facts of their area and are readily able to answer all important questions about it.
We see such people displaying their mastery of the existing state of knowledge in their area. As Hayek put it, this kind of mind “can retain the particular things [they have] read or heard, often the particular words, in which an idea has been expressed, and retain them for a long time”. They may also be highly creative, although Hayek questions whether the kind of memory involved in their grasp of their area helps creativity.
Observing such persons, however, may give us a feeling of inadequacy because we may feel that this is the standard which we ought to meet.
In contrast to the ‘master of their subject’, Hayek suggests there is another type of mind such as his own. Recognising that he lacked the memory capacity of ‘the master of the subject’, Hayek noted that what
“preserved me from developing an acute sense of inferiority in the company of those more efficient scholars was that I knew that I owed whatever worthwhile new ideas I ever had to not being able to remember whatever competent specialist is supposed to have at [their] fingertips”.
Tellingly, he continues: “whenever I saw a new light on something it was as a result of a painful effort to reconstruct an argument which [others] would effortlessly and instantly reproduce”.
Hayek, while acknowledging that he generally could not reproduce the contents of a book he has read or a lecture he has heard, also allows that the attempt to remember what a writer or speaker said would have deprived him of most of the benefit of the exposition, at least on a topic with which he was familiar:
“My gain from hearing or reading what other people thought was that it changed, as it were, the colours of my own concepts. What I heard or read did not enable me to reproduce their thought but altered my thought. I would not retain their ideas or concepts but modify the relations among my own.”
He elaborates on this way of thinking “in which one has to discover one’s path rather than being able to follow a rigidly established one” when he says:
“What my sources give me are not definite pieces of knowledge which I can put together, but some modification of an already existing structure inside of which I have to find a way by having to observe all sorts of warning posts.”
Hayek characterises this second type of mind as ‘puzzlers’ or ‘muddlers’, as this is the impression they will give talking about a subject “before they have painfully worked through to some degree of clarity”. He takes the term ‘muddler’ from Alfred North Whitehead who considered that ‘muddleheadedness’ is
“…a condition precedent to independent thought… it was because I did not remember the answers that to others may have been obvious that I was often forced to think out a solution to a problem which did not exist for those who had more orderly minds”.
Hayek explains that the constant difficulties of ‘muddlers’ may in rare instances be rewarded by a new insight and is
“due to the fact that they cannot avail themselves of the established verbal formula or arguments which leads others smoothly and quickly to the result. But being forced to find their own way of expressing an accepted idea, they sometimes discover that the conventional formula conceals gaps or unjustified tacit presuppositions. They will be forced explicitly to answer questions which have been long effectively evaded by a plausible but ambiguous turn of phrase of an implicit but illegitimate assumption.”
In contrasting the two types of mind, Hayek warns that ‘masters of their subject’
“seem also to be particularly susceptible to the opinions dominant in their environment and the intellectual fashions of their time generally. This is perhaps inevitable in persons who strove to command of the relevant knowledge of their time and who are usually inclined to believe that if an opinion is widely held there must be something in it, while the ‘muddleheads’ are much more apt stubbornly and undisturbed to go on in their own way.”
We can use this distinction to think usefully about our own way of thinking and the implications of it.
If we are the type of mind characterised as ‘master of our subject’ we can cherish and enjoy the gift of this kind of memory and make the most of it while, at the same time, recognising the danger noted by Hayek and also being tolerant of people who are ‘muddleheaded’ types of mind for the benefits they bring.
If we are the type of mind characterised as ‘muddleheaded’, we too can cherish and enjoy that we are gifted a way of thinking that we too should make the most of and about which there is no need to have any sense of inferiority, while respecting the benefits ‘masters of their subject’ offer us.
Source: F. A. Hayek. Two Types of Mind. In F. A. Hayek. The Collected Works of F. A. Hayek: The Trend of Economic Thinking: Essays on Political Economists and Economic History. Liberty Fund, Indianapolis, 1991, pages 49-55 (emphases added).
