Snap, Crackle, Popper
BRAMWELL, AUSTIN W.
Snap, Crackle, Popper What is living and what is dead in the philosophy of Karl Popper. BY AUSTIN W. BRAMWELL The late philosopher of science Karl Popper at least deserves praise for the enemies...
...Physicists, for example, do not waste their time considering every crackpot theory of relativity that some layman sends in by mail, nor do historians worry much about Holocaust deniers, nor theologians about the blizzard of pseudo-spiritual self-help books published every year...
...The reader is instead treated to recitations of the main ideas of every intellectual movement to tread across early twentieth-century Vienna...
...Of course, its very claim to openness is spurious...
...Nobody could possibly accept, even provisionally, Popper's contention that no hypothesis has any more chance of being true than any other...
...Indeed, after corresponding with E!A...
...if, on the other hand, he reviled his mother, it was because he was repressing his desire to have sex with her...
...bly overstated...
...Nor would intellectuals who might celebrate Popper have anything nice to say about the postmodernist crowd...
...One can hardly call this a ringing endorsement of progressive social planning...
...Thus far, Popper gives conservatives cause to cheer...
...No scholarly community is an all-questions-are-open-questions society...
...if, on the other hand, they failed to organize against their employers, then the employers were suppressing the class struggle...
...One might forgive Popper for these errors on the grounds that he never claimed political theory as his bailiwick...
...Accordingly, they derided notions such as God, justice, and morality as nothing but vacuous "metaphysics," and regarded only mathematics, logic, and the physical sciences as legitimate disciplines...
...As Popper pointed out, the deep explanatory power of Marxism and Freudianism turns out to be their fatal defect...
...Marx and Freud, in other words, explained mutually exclusive phenomena with exactly the same hypothesis...
...Any regime that exalts tolerance above all other virtues will end up valorizing its villains...
...According to Popper, however, we have no reason to think that tomorrow bread will not poison and arsenic will not nourish...
...Ironically, if ever there were a time when serious political, religious, and ethical inquiry were needed, it was the very decades in which the positivists were deriding such fields as "metaphysics...
...If a society adopts a stance of absolute moral skepticism, as Popper asserts that it ought, then it cannot tolerate any orthodoxy which would threaten this skepticism...
...According to Hacohen, however, The Open Society stands for socialist reform, not free-market democracy...
...Liberals in America, for example, have all but banned religion from the public schools in the name of keeping all "private" creeds out of the public square...
...on the contrary, he thought it was logically impossible to verify a scientific theory...
...We believe, for example, the hypothesis that "arsenic is poisonous" as well as the hypothesis that "bread is nourishing...
...In America, Larry Flynt is now as prominent a public voice as Daniel Patrick Moynihan...
...Furthermore, the open society does not produce the convergence of belief Popper envisioned...
...But Haco-hen hasn't done any of these things...
...Rightly critical of this "postmodernist" and "poststructural-ist" drift, Hacohen hopes that Popper's thought can resuscitate the left's faith in reason...
...And yet, Popper's political formulations have become the public philosophy of American liberalism...
...In it, he attacked totalitarianism in all of its varieties, whether Communist or fascist, and the thinkers Popper regarded as its intellectual forebears, Plato, Hegel, and Marx...
...Even this approach would have had some merit had Hacohen carefully examined Popper's philosophy, defended its central tenets while qualifying its errors, and responded to its critics...
...Because, according to Popper, no theory can ever be verified, scientists must be open to any and all conjectures, just so long as they meet the requirement of disconfirmability...
...Such blind optimism leads Hacohen to argue (ridiculously) that Popper's rationalism need not alienate those who make their careers arguing that all interpretation is arbitrary...
...Enter Karl Popper...
...That, however, is a problem for another time...
...If we were to live according to Popper's own view of what is rationally acceptable, we would be taking an enormous risk to our lives every time we consumed a slice of bread and refused a draft of arsenic...
...That The Open Society, which attacks Plato, Marx, and Hegel, has only been derided by those philosophers' scholars isn't even mentioned...
...The more conventional view holds that Popper practically defined the postwar anti-Communist consensus through his most famous work, The Open Society and Its Enemies...
...Politics should be a science experiment writ large, in which moral and political truth (if there is such a thing) is pursued through an ongoing process of testing and experimentation...
...Hayek in 1943-44 and reading The Road to Serfdom, Popper confessed—^before The Open Society had even been published—that Hayek had shown even more clearly than he could himself that "socialism itself leads directly to totalitarianism...
...Karl Popper explicitly endorsed the received view that The Open Society both defends Western liberal democracy and attacks Soviet communism...
...All inquiry into philosophic problems, they asserted, from the nature of reality to the essentials of the good life, is no more meaningful than the sentence "Blah blah blah squabam...
...As Hacohen correctly argues, The Open Society grafts Popper's philosophy of science onto the study of politics...
...While it is generous with intellectual history, it is outright stingy with biography...
...Worse, Hacohen fails to address the questions that continue to perplex Popper's students...
...on the contrary, every scholarly community regulates what can be said and under what circumstances...
...While studying for his doctorate, Popper joined the inner Kreis of the early logical positivists, led by Moritz Schlick and Rudolf Carnap...
...Unlike the posi-tivists, he did not think that science had to be empirically verifiable...
...For example, all it would take to overturn the theory of gravity would be to observe a single body which did not exert a gravitational force on some other body...
...This thesis is certainly bold, and probaAustin W Bramwell is a first-year student at Harvard University law school...
...The 1945 book argued that the real conflict in the West was not between fascism and communism, but liberal democracy and totalitarianism...
...Nevertheless, Hacohen argues, this does not mean that The Open Society rejects political radicalism altogether...
...If, according to Marx, workers organized against their employers, then workers were advancing the class struggle...
...To be sure, he did not dismiss all these disciplines as literally meaningless, and was even willing to admit that they at least had what he called "esthetic" value...
...Moreover, all rational inquirers know this, at least on some level...
...Like the posi-tivists, he wanted to distinguish science from non-science...
...On the contrary, he argues, Popper's book defends radicalism, albeit on non-Marxist grounds...
...What makes a theory scientific, in his view, was not that it could be confirmed, but that it could, in principle, be disconfirmed...
...To Popper's credit, he did attempt a serious foray into the realm of political and ethical debate: The Open Society and Its Enemies...
...Popper spent his career among thinkers who had nothing but contempt for the sort of "continental" philosophy that, in the philosopher's own words, is more "oracular" than philosophical...
...Popper's thought should be considered in light of its heady milieu, 1920s and '30s Vienna...
...Nevertheless, conservatives will do well to pay attention to it, for it will surely quiet their enthusiasm for a thinker whose conclusions are quite inimical to conservative principles...
...Given these errors in Popper's philosophy of science, it is unsurprising that Popper should turn out to be a liberal in politics...
...In rejecting the standard interpretation of The Open Society as a defense of liberal democracy, however, Hacohen rebukes not only the philosopher's conservative admirers, but also the philosopher himself...
...Premised on radical moral skepticism, it endorses an absolute moral tolerance as the chief political virtue...
...Hacohen also errs in insisting on Popper's continued intellectual relevance...
...If this is true in the realm of science, it is all the more true in the realm of politics...
...Indeed, Flynt earned a standing ovation from hundreds of students when he spoke at Yale last Febru-ary—surely more plaudits than Moyni-han himself would receive...
...Thus, in practice, the open society that Popper envisions is one of the least tolerant of regimes...
...The social parallel of a scientific community that accepted all conjectures as equally valid is a human community that disdains believers and what they believe in, one that has no patience for the pursuit of political and moral truth...
...Did Popper really vanquish the man whom many regard as the greatest philosopher of the twentieth century...
...A Jewish Viennese who fled Austria in the years before the German Anschluss, Popper spent much of his career attacking Marxists, positivists, Freudians, and totalitarians...
...In turn, many on the right have attempted to place him in the pantheon of leading twentieth-century conservatives...
...If, according to Freud, a man doted on his mother, it was because he desired to have sex with her...
...Since the 1970s, American leftists, having canonized the sententious writings of Jacques Derrida, have made a habit of dismissing the very idea of rational inquiry...
...Unfortunately, however, these errors stem directly from the flaws in his philosophy of science...
...If, for some strange reason, intellectual communities were forced to regard all questions as open questions, the process of discovery would grind to a halt...
...Hacohen, however, an avowed man of the left, does not miss the revolutionary character of his subject's ideas...
...Armed with such logical weaponry, Popper went on to demolish the pretensions of Freudian and Marxist pseudo-science...
...No religious person, however, would ever call his faith an "esthetic" preference, and Popper's superficially gracious attitude towards religion fails to mask his profound condescension...
...Even apart from these failures, Hacohen's book is disappointing...
...These thinkers sought nothing less than to upend the entire tradition of Western philosophy...
...What actually happened in the heated 1946 exchange between Popper and Wittgenstein...
...His treatment of Popper's marriage to Josephine Henninger, for example, takes up all of three pages of this six-hundred page opus...
...Although Popper found himself in heated disagreement with his positivist contemporaries, he shared their disdain towards all disciplines not counted among the "pure sciences," such as theology, politics, and ethics...
...BY AUSTIN W. BRAMWELL The late philosopher of science Karl Popper at least deserves praise for the enemies he made...
...And yet this is exactly what Popper's philosophy demands...
...Most commentators inferred this to mean fighting not only fascism but the Soviet Union and its allies...
...How did Popper's exile from Austria affect him personally and philosophically...
...Hacohen rarely tries to uncover Popper's ambitions, loves, hates, religious sentiments, or sexual attractions...
...Popper, he writes, opposed communism only because he felt faith in the Marxist "grand narrative" was impeding socialism's progress...
...In other words, Popper, though disgruntled, did not really mean to abandon plans for the radical reconstruction of society...
...Because, Popper reasoned, the theory of gravity is vulnerable to disproof by empirical evidence, it qualified as science...
...Just as Hitler and Stalin were pursuing their totalitarian visions with untold bloodshed, the positivists were hypothesizing that sentences such as "Mass murder is bad" merely expressed emotional caprice, and could not be construed as true or false...
...Now comes a book-length biography—Ka^l Popper-The Formative Years, by Duke historian Malachi Hacohen— that argues the philosopher was not a right-wing cold warrior, but a lion of the socialist left...
...How could a man devoted to the "open society" have been, as Popper reportedly was, dogmatic and overweening in his personal life...
...His own stringent logic would surely have us reject the coun-terfactual possibility that he could be construed as having anything to say to the likes of Jacques Derrida...
...That Popper's falsifiability criterion has almost no adherents left among philosophers of science also goes without notice...
...The posi-tivists' supercilious response to human atrocities deserves to go down as one of the most shameful scandals in intellectual history...
...As Popper puts it, society is a "metaphysical research program," which social planners should manipulate as they see fit...
...The important question in Popper scholarship, in the end, is whether Popper was a liberal because he was a bad philosopher of science, or whether he was a bad philosopher of science because he was a liberal...
Vol. 6 • March 2001 • No. 24
