MALACHI HAIM HACOHEN, Karl Popper. The Formative Years 1902-1945. Cambridge:
Cambridge University Press, 2000. xiii + 610 pp. $54.95;/£35.00. . ISBN 0 521 47053 6.
Reviewed by I. Grattan-Guinness, Middlesex University at Enfield,
Middlesex EN3
4SF, England
1. Introduction
The philosophy of Karl Popper (1902-1994) has gained a range of
interest and reaction far wider than that normally received by professional
philosophers; in recent times only Bertrand Russell (1872-1970) gained
comparable (probably still greater) attention. Convinced that philosophical
problems and issues came from outside philosophy itself, especially science, he
addressed a broad audience. But he also entered the professionals’ field, and
indeed attacked some major epistemological tenets held there, such as the assumption
that knowledge was accreted by the inductive accumulation and classification of
facts.
The response to Popper’s work has created interest in his life, which
was known a falling in three periods: birth and early career in Vienna,
followed by nearly a decade in New Zealand and finally a rather reclusive
life-style in Britain after the Second World War. This book, devoted to the
first two periods, is the outcome of a long research effort by the author
started well before Popper’s death and incorporating a doctorate received in
1993. His book shows the incompleteness of Popper’s autobiography of 1974,
which hitherto has been our main source.[1]
The author has used many archives, including the Popper Papers Stanford
University and available on microfilm in some other institutions. However, the
only photograph is a portrait, on the dust-jacket. Popper’s library, which has been purchased by Klagenfurt
University in Austria, seems not to have been used; maybe some annotation or
marks await the finding.
Footnotes welcomely appear as such, although the font chosen by the
publishers may be rather small for some readers. Typographical errors are rare,
although the computing cut-and paste technique is evident in a repetition on
pp. xi and 5. A separate bibliography is included; however, the items under
each author are listed by alphabetical order of titles instead of chronological
order of publication or writing, so that the progress of work cannot be
scanned. The main casualty here is Popper himself, for whom dozens of items are
listed.
2. Forming the isolated philosopher
Popper was born in Vienna to a well-placed Jewish family, the last
child after two sisters. He set on his lonely track in his late teens, when he
moved for few years into a former barracks in the suburb of Grinzing occupied
by various groups organisations. Among his contacts of that time were future
major musicians such as Hanns Eisler and Rudolf Serkin (pp. 78, 85). He took a
strong interest in music himself, composing on occasion and joining but soon
leaving Arnold Schoenberg’s society for the promotion of modern music (p. 100).
Life was held to limb by various jobs, most notably as a (trainee) carpenter.
Taking courses on several subjects in and around Vienna University, his roving
intellectual curiosity homed onto education, school reform and cognitive
psychology.
Chs. 3 and 4 provide much information on various somewhat neglected
figures influential upon Popper, such as Julius Kraft, Viktor Kraft, Karl
Polanyi, Edgar Zilsel, Karl Bühler, Heinrich Gomperz and Leonard Nelson.[2] One factor common to some of them and to Popper was
socialism, with a desire to create a less class-rigid society and provide a
better quality of education for the populus. A thesis on ‘“habit” and “lawful
experience” in education’ was written at the University’s Pedagogic Institute
under Bühler in 1927 (pp. 142-149 but missing from the bibliography), to be
followed in the following year by a University dissertation on cognitive
psychology (pp. 156-163), and then a further thesis on the foundations of
geometry (pp. 172-178) to provide qualification to teach physics and
mathematics at school.
Such a posting, duly obtained in 1930 (p. 178), was the limit of
Popper’s professional ambition at this time. (Very little information on his
teaching seems to survive.) But his philosophical horizons were widening, for
he saw his various studies as examples of two more general problems: the status
of induction in the formation of knowledge, and the demarcation between
scientific and non-scientific knowledge. Between 1930 and 1932 he gradually
grasped the full generality of these questions and convoluted his position into
a non-foundationalist epistemology, in which the assumption that (scientific)
knowledge was certain had to be abandoned. It is easy now to write such short
sentences; Popper had to struggle hard even to understand his own stance. Ch. 5
describes in great detail the twists and turns which he took in formulating his
position, which finally asserted that the key to the demarcation lay in
falsifiability, using deductive reasoning, and that it was fundamentally
opposed to inductive epistemology. Both here and elsewhere the author correctly
emphasises the central place of Kantian philosophy in Popper’s development,
including the active role of the mind and the need for metaphysics — far
removed from characterisation of Popper as a positivist which is still
regularly made.
3. Circling the Vienna Circle
Another difficulty for Popper, largely of his own making, lay in his
personal situation; even though he was living in one of the intellectual
centres of the world, he worked largely on his own. The main product was a
large manuscript on ‘the two problems of the theory of knowledge’, of which the
first volume was completed in 1932 with a second left in fragments; there was
little chance for publication (pp. 195-208).
By then Popper was known to the ‘Vienna Circle’ (hereafter ‘VC’) of
philosophers, which had formed in 1924 around Moritz Schlick (1882-1936) and
was given its name late in the decade (by Otto Neurath, to little enthusiasm
from other members).[3] Popper’s relationship with this circle, a major
feature of his early career, receives much attention here in chs. 6-7. However,
the author’s characterisation of the circle as a united team with
Wittgenstein’s Tractatus (1921, 1922) as its bible (p. 192) is
too simple, and indeed is contradicted three pages earlier. This was true for
Schlick for some time, and always so for Felix Kaufmann (who however also
adopted phenomenology) and Friedrich Waismann; but among others the adhesion
was much less marked. In particular for Popper, Rudolf Carnap (1891-1970)
rejected some of the seer’s chief pronouncements, such as the meaninglessness
of tautologies, and emphasised the
distinction between theory and metatheory (the word ‘metalogic’ in the
modern sense is his) which Wittgenstein rejected.[4]
Popper rewrote his manuscript into a shorter one called ‘Logic of
investigation. Towards the epistemology of modern science. (‘Logik der
Forschung. Zur Erkenntnistheorie der modernen Naturwissenschaft’). The developments included detailed
evaluation of the scope and limits of conventions, and examination of the role
of probability theory. The place of corroboration of theories was rather
marginalised, and the interaction of theory with experiment (where, for
example, an experiment may suggest the scientific problem in the first place)
was reduced to a one-way influence from theory.[5]
Thanks to further editing work by an uncle, the manuscript was reduced
to a length commercially suitable for Julius Springer in Vienna,[6] and appeared late in 1934 in a VC book series edited
by Philipp Frank and Schlick. Thus the book was in the Circle’s own repertoire;
and moreover it received much warm praise, especially from Carnap,[7] even though a thought experiment proposed for quantum
mechanics was soon to be shown by Einstein and others to be faulty (pp.
257-259). It sold 414 copies by 1937,[8] quite reasonable for such a volume.
However, Popper was still an outsider to the VC, because Schlick never
invited him to join. Popper explained the difficulty as due to his different
philosophy, especially over the clash between falsificationism and
verificationism and the status allowed (or denied) to metaphysics. However, the
author shows that another factor was Popper’s own personality: a clever but
arrogant and rather immature man. Popper still felt his exclusion in later
life,[9] thus compounding difficulties already in place.
4. Exile in New Zealand, 1937-1945
For all Jews and intellectuals in general, life in Central Europe was
becoming steadily more precarious. To members of the VC the situation became
especially clear when Schlick was murdered by a former student in September
1936 and the authorities did not work hard at finding the assassin of a
professor who was not even Jewish (p. 190). In 1937 Popper secured a
lectureship at the Canterbury College in the University of New Zealand, where
he remained throughout the War years. The author provides in chs. 8-9 a vivid
account of this period, which hitherto has been little known; Colin Simkin,
Popper’s former colleague there, has provided much valuable information.
This phase of Popper’s career is best known for the writing of a book
finally entitled The Open Society and Its
Enemies (hereafter ‘OS ’), a sustained attack on the the role of
philosophies underlying social determinism and the totalitarianisms of the
time. The approach was based upon a meta-epistemological analogy with the clash
between falsificationism and verificationism in science, with falsification now
generalised to criticism of theories of all kinds, even metaphysical ones.
Plato, Hegel and Marx were the main targets; the author assesses each part of
the book very carefully, and in particular sustains the criticism made after
its publication that Popper did not include a proper account of Hegel’s
positions in his attack (pp. 436-438).
Popper saw his book as his ‘war work’;[10] but also on his mind was the early part of the
century (when New Zealand had been noted for its socialist practices,
incidentally). A strong memory from his Vienna childhood was of the Dienstmädchen system. The woman worked as servant to a family for 13 days per
fortnight, from a Sunday to the following Saturday week; then the head of the
household decided whether or not she be sacked at the end of the next
fortnight. Around 1911 Popper’s father
accused their servant of stealing some money and dismissed her under this
convention; upon asking about the woman’s prospects, young Karl ‘did not
receive a satisfactory reply’, as he put it to me. He confirmed that OS had
been written to oppose that sort of system as well as the Nazis and the
Stalinists.
The author also sheds light on one of Popper’s most perplexing pieces,
allied to OS : a ‘stodgy’ (K.R. Popper)
essay on ‘the poverty of historicism’, which was started in the mid 1930s but
was completed only (shortly) after OS was finished (pp. 352-382). This spread of
time and of influence on either side of the writing of OS explains its rather
inconsistent character.
5. Exile in Britain, 1946-1994
OS
had a protracted publication
history from its completion in 1943
(pp. 450-459). After some American and British rejections it was taken by
Routledge, thanks to reader Herbert Read; parts were rewritten and readied for
publication late in 1945. Admirers in Britain, especially F.A. von Hayek and
Ernst Gombrich, already wanted Popper employed there (pp. 496-499); and a
readership was secured at the London School of Economics, which he took up in
1946 and where he was to remain for the rest of his career. This is the best
known sector of his life, ‘enjoying bad health to the ripe old age of 92’ (p.
460): explicitly not treated in this biography, the author supplies a fine
succinct summary in an epilogue with some of Popper’s influence on social
philosophy and economics assessed in ch. 10.
The very first part of Popper’s British phase involved positive
involvement with Russell and negative reaction to Ludwig Wittgenstein. It might
have borne a little more detail than is given here, as much territory in
British philosophy was marked out; three mutually different philosophers, with
Russell siding for Popper. For example, OS and Russell’s History of Western philosophy
were published within months of each other, and the famous confrontation
between Popper and Wittgenstein in 1946 in Russell’s presence (p. 523) occurred
over an anti-Wittgensteinian topic which Russell had encouraged Popper to
present.[11]
6. ‘A difficult man’
This biography is excellently objective throughout. While the author
clearly admires Popper’s philosophy (pp. 288, 551), he records the failings of
the man in many places.[12] My own
contact with Popper suggested to me that one cause, or at least epiphenomenon,
was his short height; for he exhibited more than anyone else of my acquaintance
the aggressive body and speech language to others taller than himself.
A main cause of Popper’s mediocre social skills must be his chosen isolation, from his youth. Although he seems to have recalled his father with affection, apart from anti-Zionism he did not follow him in many ways;[13] on servant girls, quite the opposite, as we saw. His mother and two elder sisters do not appear to have made substantial impact on him (pp. 62-64). At a rather young age he left home for the barracks. His wife, a school-teacher before their marriage in 1930 and up to their departure from Austria (which left her with permanent homesickness for Vienna), seems not to have influenced the content of his thought, though she advised him on topics to study and spent much time as his typist and contact with publishers and others (pp. 179-180, 460). They had no children, and may not have indulged much in the necessary preliminaries. Life was work and little else, ‘360 [sic] days a year, day and night’ (p. 222); however, periods of intense activity alternated with those of longueur and sleeplessness, a pattern sometimes held to manifest manic depression. Various acolytes emerged during his London phase, but many were struck off the roster at some stage.[14]
The author expressly denies the intention of writing a volume 2; but
any such work will benefit massively from this volume 1, which must rank among
the best of its genre. An especially nice feature is its publication by the
house which rejected OS in 1943 for its disrespect for Plato (p.
457).
7. Popper to Charles Morris, 1936
Much material remains in the Popper Archives and elsewhere to fill out
still more details of his life and career. It is appropriate to include here a
letter written on 9 September 1936 by Popper to Charles Morris (1901-1979), and
mentioned on p. 321. A philosopher in the American pragmatist tradition, Morris
was also associated with the VC and an important colleague of Carnap at Chicago
University, especially over the International Encyclopaedia of Unified Science
that Neurath was (sort-of) launching from Amsterdam.[15]
This letter must be one of the first that Popper wrote in English
(compare p. 312), and shows that his command was already not bad. He wrote this
letter right at the end of his Vienna time — consciously so, as he indicates
his hopes of emigration and hopes for advice about work possibilities in the
USA. In his reply of 10 October 1936 Morris recommended that Popper publish in
American journals (p. 321).
Popper begins by recalling meeting Morris a year earlier at the first
of the VC congresses of philosophy, held in Paris. He describes some features
of the succeeding gathering in Copenhagen, including the news of the murder of
Schlick. He also recalls some events during his recent visits to England (when,
among other contacts, he met Russell), and summarises his indeterminacy
interpretation of quantum mechanics following the failure of his thought
experiment.
The letter is transcribed from the top copy, held in the Morris Papers,
Peirce Project, Indiana University at Indianapolis; a carbon copy is kept in
the Popper Papers (file 329, 37). It is
typewritten; orthography is followed exactly, and a few penned corrections have
been silently followed. Editorial footnotes fill out some details.
September 9th, 1936,
Neukräftengasse 8,
Vienna XIII.
Dear Professor Morris,
it is nearly one year now that I have seen you the last, in Paris. I
would like to know how you are getting on. Are you now back in Chicago, and do
you see often Prof. Carnap?
I have
been in England the main part of this year, delivering there some lectures,
under them: On the Method of Soziology (London School of Economics), and a
course, On Probability (the Mathematical Department of the Imperial College of
Science).[16] Then I have been in Copenhagen, visiting there the
‘Second Congress’. I had the ocasion to speak to Nils Bohr; I was very much
impressed by his extraordinary personality.[17] I discussed with him the Problem of Interpretation of
the New Quantum Theory.
Having become clear already some times ago that I have to modify
something of my former position I explained to Prof. Bohr a standpoint -
something like a compromise - the main features of it beeing the following theses,
maintained already in my elder position: (1) Heisenbergs Formula, looked at as
to be deduced from the New Quantum Theory (viz. its deductions by Pauli, Dirac,
and others) must not be interpreted in an other way than only as an statistical
statement, saying itself nothing about ‘indeterminacy’. (2) The non-statistical
Thesis of Indeterminacy is no statement of the physical theory and has not got
the character of a ‘law of nature’. (Nevertheless - this I had to admit - it
plais a certain role in the interpretation of the theory with help of
‘classical’ concepts.) (3) It is not possible to solve the problems of
Einstein’s New Paradox by means of the so called ‘Heisenberg’scher Schnitt’.[18]
I was very happy to get Bohr’s consent to this standpoint. He encouraged
me in his kind way to a new publication on the matter I am preparing just now.[19]
During the Congress the message of Schlick’s death reached Copenhagen.
Returning to Vienna I read the newspapers there and at first I had the
impression that one must not see as political murdering in this case although
the whole athmosphere of shooting and killing which poisons the brains of the
younger generation of Central Europe certainly must held as to be responsible
of this case.
But now the situation begins to change and I am rather certain you will take an interest in the fact,
that there is now something like a press-campaign against the dead Schlick.
Especially a periodical with the charming title “Schönere Zukunft” (The Fairer
Future) representing the now dominating (so called ‘christian’) course,
published a paper the essenc of which can be formulated as: Not the murder is
guilty but the murdered.[20] The whole ‘mental’ armament of this ‘Fair Presence’
we are living in, is used to prove this thesis; Antisemitsm, as always, is
playing the main role: It was the Jewish-destructive Philosophy of Schlick
which poisoned the brains of his pupils, especially the brains of his ‘arisch’
pupils, who are not enough prepared to bear this poison. So it seems to be
something like a reaction of self-defendence that one of the pupils killed the
man who poisoned him first. Therefore: Men like Schlick must not be allowed to
teach at a Christian and German University, - they only may be allowed to teach
Jews. (As a matter of fact Schlick was not of Jewish origin but as I learn of very ancient nobility his
ancestors having been Counts, very famous in Austrian and Bohemian History.)
It is a pity, but this happening is characterising the ‘Fair Presence’
of Austria. Antisemitism and nacism are leading the fashion under Austrian
teachers unfortunally also of the school at which I am working, making it impossible for me to practise my
post. I don’t feel myself any longer to listen day by day to allusions and
affronts. I am decided to leave
this country as soon as possible. But it is rather difficult. Thirring (who is
Professor of Theoretical Physics at the University of Vienna) has tried to get
me a Rockefeller-fellowship, but he got the answer, the foundation is not in
the situation any longer to give fellowship to physicists;[21] and as a philosopher I cannot get it either.
I am prepared to go to America without a fellowship, but only if I
could get some invitations to deliver lectures there (as I did in England) or,
if possible, a temporary lectureship, perhaps as a substitute of a lecturer who
has gone abroad. Prof. Nils Bohr is willing to help me by writing letters about
me to people who could do something in this matter (and in a similar way
Einstein) - but I don’t know whom I should name him.
Have you ever read in my book?
I would be interested to hear your opinion about it. I hope to publish very
soon two papers in English.[22]
With my best regards,
Yours very sincerely,
Dr.
Karl Popper. [signed]
[1] K.R. Popper, ‘Autobiography’ in P.A. Schilpp (ed.), The Philosophy of Karl Popper, 2 vols (La Salle, Ill., 1974), 1-181; repr. as
Unended Quest (London, 1976).
[2] Among other background figures mentioned, Hugo
Dingler was a German philosopher of science and of mathematics, not a ‘Viennese
physicist’ (pp. 204, 249).
[3] The chief single source on the VC, including for this
book, is F. Stadler, Studien zum Wiener
Kreis. Ursprung, Entwicklung und Wirkung des Logischen Empirismus im Kontext.
(Frankfurt am Main, 1997); an English edition is in preparation.
[4] For more on this topic see I. Grattan-Guinness, ‘A
Retreat From Holisms: Carnap’s Logical Course, 1921-1943’, Annals of Science, 54
(1997), 407-421. Pace p. 191 of this
book, I see the decisive influence upon Carnap as Russell rather than Frege.
[5] The bearing of Popper’s philosophy upon technology
still needs further study. Apparently
during the Great War young Popper worked in a factory (p. 91); I remember him
mentioning that he had worked in one which made lifts.
[6] This is a comment on the financial situation of the
time. Carnap’s own Logische Syntax der
Sprache (Vienna, 1934) had had to
lose about 50 pages for the same reason; they soon appeared as two separate
papers but were restored to their original locations in the English translation
The Logical Syntax of Language (London, 1937).
[7] As well as a positive review, Carnap praised Popper
in various manuscript notes: for example, to Schlick in 1934 (Schlick Papers,
State Archives of North Holland, Haarlem, file 95), Morris in 1934 (Morris Papers, Peirce
Project, Indiana University at Indianapolis), Kaufmann in 1935 (Carnap Papers,
University of Pittsburgh, files 28-20-08 and -21-01), and at a Chicago research
seminar 1937-1938 (C.K. Ogden Papers, McMaster University, Hamilton, box 7).
The defence of Popper by Carl Hempel in a review of a critical paper on
probability theory by Hans Reichenbach (p. 280) is not quite correctly cited:
it was in Jahrbuch über die Fortschritte
der Mathematik, 61 (1935, publ.
1939), 979, immediately following Hempel’s warm review of the Logik. The set-theorist Erich Kamke also
wrote very positively about that book in Jahresbericht
der Deutsche Mathematiker-Vereinigung, 45
(1935), pt. 2, 91-92. Several other reviews are listed on p. 275 of this
book.
[8] Carnap Papers, file 27-60-106; for other sales
figures, see p. 275 of this book.
[9] Popper pointedly contrasted his own position around
1930 with that of his exact contemporary Herbert Feigl (compare pp. 185-186) at
the beginning of an article for a Festschrift for Feigl (‘A Theorem on Truth-Content’,
in P.K. Feyerabend and G. Maxwell (eds.), Mind,
Matter and Method (Minneapolis,
1966), 343-353).
[10] The author describes the writing of OS mainly
from 1939 onwards. In the preface to
the second edition (1959) Popper stated that the decision to write it was taken
in March 1938, after he heard that Austria had been invaded (compare pp. 326
and 347 of this book).
[11] For details see I. Grattan-Guinness, ‘Russell and
Karl Popper: Their Personal Contacts’,
Russell, new ser., 12(1992-1993),
3-18; ‘Karl Popper for and against Bertrand Russell’, Russell, new ser., 18(1998),
25-42.
[12] The title of this section of the review alludes to p.
179, and especially to an essay by one the Popperians (note 14 below): W.W.
Bartley, ‘Ein schwieriger Mensch. Eine Porträtsskizze von Sir Karl Popper’, in
E. Nordhofen (ed.), Physiognomien:
Philosophie des 20. Jahrhunderts in Portraits (Königstein, 1980), 43-69. A favourite quip at the London School
of Economics, credited to Ernst Gellner, was ‘The open society by one of its
enemies’.
[13] For example, Popper did not become a Freemason, a
movement within which his father was master of a lodge in Pressburg (p. 41);
his ‘Ansprache in der Warmholtz-Trauerfeier der L.[oge] „Humanitas”’, Der Zirkel, 40(1909-1910), 35-37, was a tribute on the death of his
predecessor. He also wrote on the possible influence of the movement upon
schools (‘Von unser neuen Generation. Deutsche Festrede, gehalten in der
Grosslogenversammlung von 24. April 1910’, Orient,
35(1910), 120-126). These times are
cited from A. Wolfstieg, Bibliographie
der freimaurerischen Literatur, 3 vols (Leipzig, 1911-1926), I, 950 and II,
348.
[14] These are ‘the ‘Popperians’, usually professional
philosophers, including Feyerabend, B. Magee, J. Agassi, I. Lakatos, J.W.N. Watkins, I. Jarvie, Bartley and
D.W. Miller (pp. 537-538). They are to be distinguished from ‘the Popperian
knights’, eminent beknighted (naturalised) British scientists and humanists who
publicly supported his philosophy (P.B. Medawar, J.C. Eccles, H. Bondi and E.
Gombrich), and of whom he appears to have been much more tolerant.
[15] See F. Rossi-Landi, Charles Morris (Rome and
Milan, 1953).
[16] [On this period, see this book, pp. 311-319.]
[17] [For a photograph taken at the Congress showing both
Popper and Bohr, see Stadler (note 3), 415.]
[18] [These are allusions to the Einstein-Podolsky-Rosen
paradox (a more successful thought experiment than Popper’s own), and to
Heisenberg’s indeterminacy principle (this book, pp. 253-259).]
[19] [No item in the Popper bibliography in Schilpp (note
1) seems to correspond.]
[20] [On this article, see this book, p. 190. A large file
on the murder is provided in Stadler (note 3), 920-961.]
[21] [A Rockefeller fellowship had enabled Feigl to move
to the USa in 1930 (compare note
9).]
[22] [Only one seems to correspond, but maybe written in
New Zealand: ‘A Set of Independent Axioms for Probability’, Mind, new ser. 47(1938), 275-277, errata on pp. 415 and 552.]