In the soft light of an antipodean afternoon, Graham Macdonald is careful to impress his academic orientation upon a visitor. Mr. Macdonald is, as he says, director of the department of philosophy and religious studies here at the University of Canterbury.
“I am not a member of the Karl Popper church,” he adds emphatically, during a conversation — one of many he’s had in recent weeks — on the growing international reputation of the academic trailblazer. Popper popularized the term “open society” in political discourse and pushed scientists in a new direction with theories that would later be hailed as a “philosophical revolution.”
Mr. Macdonald has spent much of this past year limbering up his epistemological muscle in preparation for the July 28 centennial of Karl Popper’s birth. He and others describe the Austrian-born philosopher as one of the 20th century’s most neglected scholars. Yet he does not wish to be mistaken for one of those who gaze at Popper’s work as if through a messianic mist. A striking paradox for someone who championed critical thought like few others, in the view of Mr. Macdonald, is that Popper, who died in 1994, has always attracted acolytes who uncritically accept that he was right about pretty much everything. “I’ve attended academic conferences,” the professor says with a sigh, “where criticizing Popper is regarded as a kind of heresy.”
Although he admires many aspects of Popper’s “intellectually bracing” ideas about politics and science, Mr. Macdonald insists that his own lifelong enthusiasm, which began for him as an undergraduate majoring in philosophy during the 1960s, is tempered with a “healthy dollop of skepticism.”
Even so, Mr. Macdonald feels that much of what Popper had to say “could and should be taken on board by scholars around the world.”
He may get his wish. As the organizer of one of two major academic conferences honoring Popper this month — one here at the University of Canterbury, where, during World War II, Popper produced some of his most enduring work, and the other at the University of Vienna, Popper’s alma mater — Mr. Macdonald is pleased to play a part in the renewed wave of interest in the philosopher’s ideas, even as those who knew him struggle to get a handle on the man himself. Popper’s rise in the canon, he says, is evident not only among scholars in New Zealand but also in Australia, Britain, the Middle East, and North America, and in the wider political culture as well.
“In one way or another I’m reminded of his intellectual contributions every week,” says Tom G. Palmer, a senior fellow at the Cato Institute, a libertarian think tank based in Washington, where Popper’s political writings rate highly on account of their often corrosive critiques of Communism. The end of the cold war and the upsurge of libertarian ideas on both sides of the Atlantic “appears to have been to Popper’s benefit,” says Mr. Palmer, “since he always positioned himself as antitotalitarian, “even when it wasn’t fashionable to do so.”
The National Review, a conservative magazine, recently ranked Popper’s major political work, The Open Society and Its Enemies (Routledge, 1945), sixth on a list of the 100 most important nonfiction works of the past century. In a different cultural corner, one of America’s best-known philanthropists, the Hungarian-born George Soros, was sufficiently moved by the ideas he acquired from Popper while an undergraduate at the London School of Economics and Political Science that he named his Open Society Institute after the book.
“What Soros took from Popper, I think, was this notion that we, as humans, are fallible, and along with that, so, too, are all of our institutions, our markets, our systems,” says Leonard Benardo, a manager of the institute’s main American office, in New York.
“Open society,” he says, means that societies need to be as open as possible to new ideas and fresh criticisms, whether at home or abroad, where the Soros institute has a particular interest in the countries of the former Soviet Union.
Indeed, the phrase itself is increasingly used in the geopolitical context; late last month, President George W. Bush invoked it in a speech calling for reform in the Palestinian government.
For all that, though, Mr. Macdonald says, “my impression for now is that a lot of American academics probably still find Popper hard to categorize. The professionalization and specialization of academe in the United States is not something he really recognized, since his work touched on many aspects of philosophy and other issues beyond.”
Some of the other issues figure in one of this year’s unlikeliest best sellers, Wittgenstein’s Poker (Ecco), by the British journalists David Edmonds and John Eidinow, who describe their quirky investigation into a celebrated tiff between Popper and Ludwig Wittgenstein in 1946, which took place in a tutorial room at the University of Cambridge during a meeting of Wittgenstein’s normally genteel Moral Science Club.
Popper, 13 years younger than the eminent philosopher, had arrived from London that balmy evening, he later wrote in his memoir, Unended Quest, “to provoke Wittgenstein into defending the view that there are no philosophical problems, and to fight him on this issue.” He succeeded in provoking him. The Edmonds-Eidinow book turns upon the question of whether an enraged Wittgenstein really did menace Popper with a red-hot poker, in the presence of a third great philosopher, Bertrand Russell, who, as legend has it, was moved to separate the feuding scholars.
The book ponders whether or not Popper, when taunted by Wittgenstein to give an enduring instance of a moral rule, bit back, “Not to threaten visiting lecturers with pokers.” The authors figure that he probably did, but that the enduring theme of the incident was the need of both men to enjoy Russell’s graces — and, indeed, those of the scholarly world at large. (As for the poker, it was eventually dropped on the tiles of the hearth “with a little rattle,” the book says.)
A More Enduring Legacy?
Peter Munz, who was in the tutorial room that night — and who now counts himself as the only person alive to have studied under both Popper and Wittgenstein — agrees with the writers on both counts.
But while Wittgenstein’s reputation has long since solidified in scholarly circles, the same cannot be said of the man he may, or may not, have waved a poker at. That is a pity, Mr. Munz believes, because Popper’s scientific ideas, first set forth in his 1934 Logik der Forschung, later translated as The Logic of Scientific Discovery, were not only among the most cogent to be made against Wittgenstein’s position, but also, in some respects, have better stood the test of time.
What, then, were these pre-eminent Austrian-Anglo-Jewish philosophers hectoring each other about — and why does it still matter? Until Popper, explains Mr. Munz, now an emeritus professor of history at New Zealand’s Victoria University of Wellington, scientists tended to believe that their task was to find as many examples as they could to confirm their theories, a conclusion that Wittgenstein, author of the Tractatus, appeared happy enough to go along with. Popper, on the other hand, believed that scientists ought to look for examples that are apparently inconsistent with a theory; “falsification,” he held, not “induction,” is the only credible basis for scientific inquiry. He reduced the precept to a slogan: “No number of sightings of white swans can prove the theory that all swans are white. The sighting of just one black one may disprove it.”
Whether or not they admit it, whenever and wherever scientists today find themselves looking for black swans and, seeing none, pronounce themselves reasonably sure of their theory, they are taking a deep bow in Popper’s direction, says Mr. Munz.
According to Malachi Haim Hacohen, an associate professor of European intellectual history at Duke University and author of Karl Popper: The Formative Years, 1902-1945 (Cambridge University Press, 1998), the promulgation of this idea marked a philosophical watershed. Even among those who pooh-pooh the notion that Popper somehow managed to resolve the issue of how scientific knowledge can ultimately be validated — Anthony O’Hear, director of Britain’s Royal Institute of Philosophy and author of a number of books on Popper, thinks it “quite absurd” to make the claim — few dispute the lasting trace that his argument has left on scientific research over the past quarter-century.
The Man vs. His Ideas
In 1945, Popper applied much the same principle to the realm of political philosophy, in The Open Society and Its Enemies, an exegesis on the ideas of Plato, Hegel, and Marx, all of whom Popper excoriates for their claims to “certain knowledge” about how societies ought to be organized. The late Isaiah Berlin, a biographer of Marx and a professor of philosophy at the University of Oxford, counted himself among the book’s admirers, calling it perhaps “the most scrupulous and formidable criticism of the philosophical and historical doctrines of Marxism by any living writer.”
Still, as Mr. Macdonald’s disclaimer about the Popper “church” suggests, this month’s centennial raises anew the problem that many have in disentangling the ornery reputation of Popper the man from the validity of his ideas. That appears to be the case regardless of whether the reference is to his formative years as a peripheral member of the Vienna Circle, in Europe, his early career as an associate professor of philosophy at Canterbury, or the bulk of his teaching life, which he spent at the London School of Economics and Political Science, where he remained until around the time of his death.
Mr. Munz, who will give papers at both of this month’s conferences, got to see Popper through most of those phases. He well understands, he says, the frustration that readers coming to the philosopher only recently would have in properly assessing his legacy. A die-hard Platonist in his undergraduate years, Mr. Munz first met the older man at the university library at Canterbury. Popper, who would become a lifelong friend, beckoned to him from near the stacks “and asked me if I would like for him to explain why I was wrong about Plato.” Mr. Munz chuckles at the memory. “He didn’t offer to argue the point, or for us to exchange views — just to tell me why I was wrong. I later learned that that was his style.”
In the event, Popper did convince him that Plato not only was wrong in his claim to certain knowledge about how societies should best be organized, but was a tyrant to boot. It was the beginning of what Mr. Munz describes as his own intellectual dawn, despite their lifelong differences over the subject of history.
“Popper thought that people who are honest become scientists but people who are dishonest become historians, sociologists, and so forth, because these were people who could convince others of anything they like” — especially in the realm of philosophy.
“Since he had already solved the philosophical problems, as he saw them, he didn’t really see the point in why there should be another generation of philosophers,” says Mr. Munz, laughing.
According to Alan Chalmers, a professor of the philosophy of science at Australia’s Flinders University, who attended many of Popper’s “spellbinding” seminars in London during the 1960s and still lectures on him, his one-time hero’s scholarly practices often clashed with what he preached. Although Popper emphasized the importance of criticism, he found it “very hard” to accept criticism of any sort, says Mr. Chalmers, who eventually became disillusioned with aspects of the philosopher’s style.
At the London school, recalls Mr. Munz, “people used to joke about the open society and its one enemy: Karl Popper. When people contradicted him in class, he would tell them that they had obviously not listened to what he’d said, because if they’d listened, they would know that he was right.” Each dissenter would be asked to apologize, “and if no apology was forthcoming, he would then ask the student to leave the room.”
Another problem was Popper’s apparent tendency to caricature his philosophical opponents, says Mr. Chalmers. “That’s not novel among academics, of course, but students would go on to discover time and again that the people Popper had talked about — Wittgenstein and Marx and so forth — actually held views that were much more sophisticated than what he had given them credit for.” Popper also insisted that words were “not that important” in the discussion of aspects of science and philosophy, says Mr. Chalmers, “which was fine, but woe betide those who diverged from Popper’s standard usages. He was liable to give the speaker a very hard time.”
Mr. Macdonald, who sat in on a number of Popper’s lectures in London during the 1970s, agrees. Describing the philosopher as “a powerful, lucid speaker,” he was nonetheless struck by the degree of veneration that Popper demanded — “in the way, for example, he was ushered in and ushered out again at these events, as if he were some kind of god. That atmosphere, particularly around somebody who viewed criticism as the most important value of all, struck me as being rather unhealthy.”
Why the need for such control? Insecurity, speculates Mr. Chalmers: “I’ve come to feel that Popper was extremely good at putting his finger on the pulse of important academic issues but not quite so good at the technical detail of science itself.”
Alan Musgrave, a research assistant of Popper’s from 1963 to 1965 at the London school, where, with Imre Lakatos, he edited Criticism and the Growth of Knowledge (Cambridge University Press, 1970), an influential collection of essays on the recent philosophy of science, wonders if some of Popper’s less appealing attitudes were born of a certain anger at his work’s not being sufficiently recognized by his contemporaries. “He was proud of what he achieved — rightly so, I think, but he was also very bitter.”
Would Popper have been made any happier by this month’s centennial commemorations? Mr. Macdonald glances toward the window overlooking the Canterbury campus, under whose flag the philosopher produced much of his celebrated work. These days, he says, “as I move around the university and the higher-education world, I keep meeting people who have things to say of Popper’s influence across many areas of research culture, and how important he’s been as a reference point.”
So many academics have been influenced “very much for the better” by Karl Popper, he concludes. “Even those who have since departed from the church.”
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