MALACHI HAIM HACOHEN, Karl Popper
-- The Formative Years, 1902-1945: Politics and Philosophy in Interwar Vienna.
Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2001. Pp. xiii + 610. ISBN
0-521-47053-6. 35.00, $54.95
(hardback).
A disturbing feature of 20th century
intellectual history is that the dominant figures of the two main European
philosophical traditions were decidedly conservative thinkers with strong
authoritarian, even totalitarian, tendencies. I refer here, of course, to
Martin Heidegger and Ludwig Wittgenstein. This point is only reinforced when an
avowedly liberal thinker like Richard Rorty explains the significance of his
own favorite figure, John Dewey, in terms of the views he shared with
Wittgenstein and Heidegger. Rorty writes as if Karl Popper had never existed.
However, as Hacohen rightly observes, had Rorty taken Popper's achievement more
seriously, perhaps we would not be saddled with the postmodern predicament,
whereby the failure of establish logical foundations for all thought opens the door
to an endless proliferation of community-based epistemic standards. Indeed, a
sign of our non-Popperian times is that the most natural way to interpret the
idea of "social epistemology" is in terms of a consensus-seeking
approach to inquiry, not, as Popper himself did, a set of mutually critical
agents.
Popper's invisibility from most standard histories of
modern philosophy is matched only by the ideological role he has played in the
history of other disciplines, especially the social sciences. In the second
half of the 20th century, Popper stood for the scientific method,
objectivity, rationality, liberalism and individualism. Within academia he
performed much the same function as his English mentor, Bertrand Russell, did
outside it. Yet, even in death, Popper remains an awkward figure to place, both
intellectually and politically. Nevertheless, Hacohen, a broadly educated
intellectual historian, does an excellent job of disentangling the
misunderstandings and myths surrounding Popper -- many promoted by the man
himself -- typically by relying on evidence from archives on both sides of the
Atlantic. However, in one important respect, the book's title is misleading,
since the epilogue provides a 30-page sketch of how one would research Popper's
four decades as presiding philosopher at the London School of Economics. While
Hacohen claims he will not do the work himself, it seems to me that it could be
easily turned over to someone else.
Hacohen's account implies some fascinating differences
between Popper's philosophical personality and that of his world-historic
rivals, Heidegger and Wittgenstein. To be sure, these were three megalomaniacs
who thought all philosophy culminated in their thought. However, by accident or
design, Heidegger and Wittgenstein were surrounded by rather impressionable
students who claimed genius for their master, thereby sparing the master the
indignity of doing so for himself. In contrast, it would seem that from his
late teens, Popper was inclined to advertise his genius, which gave him a
reputation for arrogance and petulance. Hacohen strikes just the right chord
when dealing with this matter. Popper engaged numerous contemporaries in debate
-- sometimes that seemed to be the only communication of which he was capable
-- and then insisted on being recognized for some achievement resulting from
it. This tendency especially annoyed the Vienna Circle, who first gave Popper
some serious philosophical attention by publishing The Logic of Scientific
Discovery in their book series. As the logician Tarski later put it, Popper
always had the better argument but was never the nicer person. Moreover, as
Hacohen shows repeatedly, while Popper learned from his interlocutors, he
rarely acknowledged shifts in his position, let alone credited their sources.
The potential for interpretive confusion is only compounded by Popper's
otherwise admirable tendency to craft his prose as simply possible -- a
strategy he picked up from Einstein's successful popularization of relativity
theory.
Popper's style and practice have not stood him well in
the historiography of philosophy. His dogmatic claims for his own genius were
often read as philosophical dogmatism. Yet, most of his positive views were
really negative ones in disguise: his rationalism was anti-inductivism, his
liberalism anti-authoritarianism, his individualism anti-holism, and so forth.
Consequently, Popper often presented his views as critical sketches that
presuppose acquaintance with the details and history of what is being
criticized. Failure to appreciate the profoundly dialectical character of
Popper's thought has led to his portrayal as a relatively simple-minded
thinker, such as the standard-issue "positivist" that came across to
Adorno and Habermas in the Methodenstreit of the 1960s. Moreover, it did
not help that so often Popper's adversaries were the self-declared keepers of
the dialectical tradition!
This raises a more general problem in the
interpretation of Popper's philosophical career: He seemed to be acutely aware
of the reflexive dimension of thought without managing to escape its
entanglements. An illuminating thread through Popper's philosophy would follow
his interest in the ways the form of thought undermine, or otherwise transform,
its content. Hacohen observes that Popper's youthful rejection of Marx and
Freud was based on the dogmatic attitude that Marxists and Freudians had toward
their masters' views, not the actual views themselves, with which Popper
remained in considerable sympathy for much of his life. However, once this
rejection was canonized as "the demarcation problem" in the
philosophy of science, Popper's more globally normative, perhaps even ethical,
concerns dropped out, and it became a technical matter that implied the
rejection of the content of Marx's and Freud's theories. Conversely, when
Hacohen reveals some correspondence between Popper and the man responsible for
bringing him to the LSE, Friedrich von Hayek, it becomes clear that what Popper
likes about capitalism is not its substantive fixation on free markets but the
meta-level consequences of holding such a view, namely, that it makes one more
responsive to the external world.
The deep point in all this is that certain views may
be true (e.g. Marxism) yet because of the times and places in which we live, or
the sort of person we are, believing these views as true may make ourselves and
others worse people. Indeed, this explains Popper's aversion in later life to
the quasi-religious appeals to unconditional commitment that Michael Polanyi
and Thomas Kuhn associated with normal science. (This aspect of Popper's
thought was developed in W.W. Bartley III, The Retreat to Commitment,
1962.) Unfortunately, as long as the history of philosophy continues to be
written as a set of authoritative figures who attract acolytes and spawn
canonical texts, Popper will not be given his due and the critical function of
philosophy more generally will remain muted. However, to Hacohen's great
credit, this will be much harder to do in the future.
Steve Fuller
University of Warwick