Rationalism and the Open Society (Part I)
A brief outline of Popperian rationality
By John Saudino
30 January 2021
Preface:
In chapter 24 of The Open Society and its Enemies Karl Popper writes that “the conflict between rationalism and irrationalism has become the most important intellectual, and perhaps even moral, issue of our time.”[1] The central role rationalism plays in Popper’s philosophy is evinced by its very designation as “Critical Rationalism”. In this article I will refer to several books and articles about and by Karl Popper and those of others who have written on rationality in order to carefully excavate the principles that underlie this rationality, a rationality that runs like an inner skeletal support structure through his entire philosophy. My task here is twofold. It is first: to crystallize a clear outline of Popper’s rationality; and second, to demonstrate the great importance of this rationality for the practice of the social sciences and for society at large. For the purposes of this article I will be forced to restrict myself to drafting a sketch of this highly complex form of rationality. I will endeavor, as I have done in the past, to ensure that my treatment will, in spite of its necessary abstraction, be well founded, and show that same respect for clarity of expression that Popper always employs and urges from others.
In the course of this work I will demonstrate the integral connections between the rationality of Popper’s scientific method and his moral and political philosophy. Throughout much of his work Popper demonstrates the myriad ways in which rationalism is connected to humanism. Also, because of the unity of science that his philosophy of science creates, it becomes possible to apply the methods of the natural sciences to the social sciences and to make them thereby far more objective. This rational approach to the social sciences paves the way for a genuine understanding and effective improvement of human society. To improve society is to relieve unnecessary suffering, something that Popper sees as a duty.[2] Fulfilling this duty by means of “piecemeal social engineering” in great contrast to both “utopian social engineering” and to laissez-faire is the way Popperian rationalism aims to defend what Popper and all lovers of freedom value most: the only social order conducive to freedom: the “Open Society”, a society that in 2020 seems to be nearly as much in danger of extinction as it was in Popper’s youth.
Introduction: The Irrationality of Popper’s day and our own: The Attack on the Open Society, i.e. “the problem situation”
A world gone mad:
Popper made the decision to write the Open Society in 1938 as a reaction to the Nazi takeover of his native Austria, which he had wisely abandoned a year earlier. Popper’s battle against the forces of irrationalism of his time was by no means a mere academic issue; members of his own family fell victim to the Holocaust. He witnessed the most culturally and technologically advanced nations in the world decline into sheer barbarism before his eyes. “Where did everything go so terribly wrong?” was the question on the lips of every thoughtful adult of the time. Popper shows that the horrible monster clutching at the throat of civilization was irrationalism, irrationalism on a colossal and catastrophic scale, and that the origins thereof lie deep in western philosophy: in part in the doctrines of its classical founders and in part in the unsolved epistemological problems it had been dealing with ever since Hume awakened Kant from his “dogmatic slumber” in the 18th century.
A detailed treatment of these problems would explode this article into a lengthy book, so I will have to be brief. I can say in a nutshell that the problems have to do loosely with two factors: the failure of earlier philosophers to reject some of the pernicious aspects of Plato’s philosophy, on the one hand, and a failure to solve the twin problems of induction[3] and demarcation,[4] on the other. The adoption of Plato’s reactionary politics and historicism[5] encouraged totalitarianism. The epistemological rabbit holes caused by faulty attempts to solve the problems of induction and demarcation combined with what Popper calls “the strain of civilization”[6] resulted in romanticism and a general cult of irrationalism. This philosophical and institutional backwardness became so lethal because it so chronically lagged behind the enormous advances of the industrial revolution. Under the reactionary tutelage of a vestigial Aristocracy, European, and especially German, philosophy, social science and ruling institutions, simply could not cope with the rapid changes that were taking place between 1815 and 1914.[7] The results were two world wars fueled by irrational totalitarian ideologies that grew directly out of the philosophical trends of the day. Popper was witness to the destruction of the open society and the advent of the closed society of fascism and Stalinism.
Popper identifies the philosophical doctrines responsible for this irrationalism and the resulting crimes as follows: Essentialism (the belief in irreducible essences defining concepts), Holism or Collectivism (the doctrine that human cognition, value and identity can only be realized in groups), Relativism (the rejection of scientific and moral objectivity), Psychologism (the conducting of social science from baseless psychological assumptions) and most of all Historicism (the irrational belief in the predictability of human history). Tribalism,[8] though not a doctrine, Popper excoriates as the primitive state of the closed society as it existed before the rational tradition that arose in ancient Greece at the time of Socrates and Pericles.[9] Behind “the strain of civilization” of Popper’s time and our own lies the urge to return to this state.[10]
In criticizing these doctrines Popper identifies the “culprits” behind them explicitly. They are some of the most famous and influential philosophers in history: Plato, Aristotle, Hume, Hegel, and Marx are the primary targets, but quite a bit of criticism is devoted to Wittgenstein as well.[11] Popper’s criticism of these philosophers is quite varied: in general it is Plato, Wittgenstein,[12] and especially Hegel for whom he has the most scorn.
Plato is portrayed as having perverted the rational egalitarian humanitarianism of his mentor, Socrates, into the “pseudo- rationalism” of “authoritarian intellectualism”.[13] It is Plato’s reactionary historicist and eugenicist urge to arrest all historical development, freeze it into an idealized original state, and create the pseudo-rationalist aristocracy of the philosopher kings that is the basis for Popper’s uniquely harsh condemnation of this seminal of all philosophers. In Popper’s analysis, Plato in his political philosophy advocates, along with Hegel, the eternal totalitarian domination of “natural masters” over “natural slaves”.[14] It is Plato’s place in history as the primogenitor of all those philosophies that advocate a return to the “closed society” of tribalism that makes him the brunt of so much vitriol from Popper.[15]
Aristotle is mostly criticized because of his science-crippling method of Aristotelian essentialism and his planting of the roots of Hegelianism.[16] The error of essentialism is also an important part of Wittgenstein’s philosophy, which is intrinsically irrational and obscurantist in Popper’s view.[17] Hume’s faulty solution to the problem of induction is what led to psychologism,[18] a destructive “methodological myth”[19] that Marx is credited with correcting, to the great benefit of social science.[20]
Popper’s evaluation of Hegel, “the father of modern historicism[21] and totalitarianism”[22] is most severe of all. In describing Hegel, Popper quotes extensively from Hegel’s contemporary Schopenhauer: “’Hegel, installed from above by the powers that be, as the certified Great Philosopher, was a flat-headed, insipid, nauseating, illiterate charlatan …The extensive field of spiritual influence with which Hegel was furnished by those in power has enabled him to achieve the intellectual corruption of a whole generation.’”[23] As Popper puts it, “Hegelianism is the renaissance of tribalism”,[24] the connection that “links Platonism with modern totalitarianism”.[25] His obscurantist jargon becomes no more than “reinforced dogmatism”.[26] We find that Hegel’s interpretation of Kant’s categories as being completely bound up in the historical process leads to collectivism and historicism,[27] the twin irrational Hegelian maladies that corrupted the otherwise rational Karl Marx.[28] In Hegel, the official state philosopher of Prussian absolutism, these poisons engender and enforce the underpinnings of a highly militant and reactionary German nationalism. This collectivist nationalism combined with Hegel’s mysticism, and “might makes right” moral positivism[29] have the combined effect of making Hegel’s philosophy the perfect precursor to fascism.
Romanticism is implicated for its connection to nationalism, aesthetic utopianism and for its mystic cult of irrationality, its exaltation of violent emotions over all else.[30]
Marx, a left Hegelian, is analyzed by Popper with a curious mixture of biting criticism and genuine adoration. Although Popper views him as a fellow humanitarian, it is its very existence as an “intellectual fifth column” in “the humanitarian camp” that makes “Marxism, so far the purest, the most developed and the most dangerous form of historicism”.[31] It is this historicism in the humanitarian camp, among the Marxists, radicals and moderates alike, that led them to be “intoxicated by an oracular philosophy”.[32]
One can say in a nutshell that Popper praised Marx as a philosopher, but, largely, because of errors stemming from the irrational influence of Hegel, partly because of later developments in Marxism, a doctrine that Popper viewed as a pseudo-science,[33] Popper comes to the following final assessment: “‘scientific’ Marxism is dead. Its feeling of social responsibility and its love of freedom must survive.”[34] In other words Marx is to be appreciated on many levels, but the irrational utopianism, historicism and the ambivalent advocacy of violence of the Marxists, for which Marx and Engels are to a degree also to blame, make the Marxists a big part of the problem situation, especially with regard to their provoking of and colossal errors in dealing with the rise of fascism.[35] Later on another irrational set of doctrines was formulated by the so-called Frankfurter Schule, a version of Marxism intertwined with Freudian psychoanalysis that played an important role in the student movements of the 1960s and 70s.[36]
In Wittgenstein, who was also something of a personal rival of Popper’s,[37] Popper does not see an underlying antecedent to the foregoing irrationality but a new and rising kind.[38] Popper devotes an entire chapter of The Open Society to an up-and-coming irrational trend of his time that he criticizes under the rubric of “the sociology of knowledge”.[39] Though Popper’s treatment of this doctrine is based mostly on the “sociologism” emanating from Hegelianism, it is clear that in later developments of this doctrine into outright relativism[40] Wittgenstein plays a big role.[41]
In France from the mid 1980s till now the so-called “linguistic turn” in philosophy inspired by Wittgenstein combined with the ideas of the poststructuralists to form a variety of irrational doctrines often lumped together under the heading of “post-modernism”. This is a set of doctrines of the “left” smuggled as a “fifth column” into “the humanitarian camp”, as it were[42], that are not only impotent to deal with the threat of the far right, but provoke it, as did the Marxism of Popper’s day, and are, in the final analysis, themselves, by way of their relativism, intrinsically authoritarian.[43]
What do all these doctrines have in common here? Each is in its own way irrational in the complex Popperian sense of the word. And it is the irrationality[44] of the prewar doctrines, writ large on the level of entire societies, that in 1938 had led the West into barbarism and put it on the brink of civilizational suicide. Popper portrays the crisis of his time as a “break” between rationalists and irrationalists. “Never before has the break been so complete. And the break in the diplomatic relations of the philosophers proved its significance when it was followed by a break in the diplomatic relations of the states.”[45] The causes of the present-day authoritarian threat are a subject that I cannot elucidate here in any detail. For now, I will have to rely on the reader’s knowledge of contemporary affairs to establish that this threat in fact exists. For the purposes of this article I maintain, by broad conjecture, that, as was the case in Popper’s time, these trends towards the destruction of the Open Society are also fundamentally caused by irrationalism.
[1] The Open Society and Its Enemies, (Later OS): Vol. I, K.R. Popper, Fifth Edition, Princeton University Press, 1966, p. 224
[2] OS, Vol. II, p. 237
[3] Induction: the logically untenable position that one can know future events and observations with certainty on the basis of what has been observed in the past.
[4]Demarcation: the problem of deciding what is and is not genuine science.
[5] Historicism: the doctrine that there are knowable laws in history that enable us to know its future development.
[6] Popper, by Bryan Magee, Fontana Paperbacks, 1973 pp. 87-89 (“The Strain of Civilization”: Brian Magee writes of it leading inexorably to “philosophies of return to the womblike security of pre-critical or tribal society”)
[7] Freedom and Organization: 1814-1914, Bertrand Russell, 1934, and 2001 by Routledge, London. Pp. 505-506
[8] Tribalism: the primitive state of pre-rational human society in which there is no distinction between nature and convention; all societal laws are accepted without question as divine dictates and all loyalty is to the clan.
[9] OS, Vol. I pp. 178-183
[10] OS, Vol. II p. 228
[11] See https://vienna-symposium.com/the-spell-of-wittgenstein-part-i/. A connection between Wittgenstein and “sociology of knowledge” was drawn there. I will elaborate on this particular form of irrationalism using chapter 23 of The Open Society that bears this name.
[12] As a contemporary of Popper, Wittgenstein is certainly not condemned as responsible for any of the trends that led to the Wars and to fascism, but rather for a new kind of irrationalism that was already taking hold in Popper’s time and had sway over the minds of otherwise highly rational and gifted thinkers.
[13] OS, Vol ll, p. 227.
[14] Ibid, p. 52.
[15] Ibid, Ch 1-8.
[16] Ibid, Ch. 11 “the Aristotelian Roots of Hegelianism”
[17] Ibid (See note 51 to Chapter 11 beginning on page 296)
[18] Psychologism: an attempt to reduce societal processes and historical events to human psychology or “human nature“.
[19]OS, Vol ll, p. 93
[20] Ibid, p. 93-94
[22] OS, Vol ll, p. 22
[23] Ibid, p. 32-33
[24] Ibid, p. 30
[25] Ibid, p. 31
[26] Ibid, p. 40
[27] Ibid p. 214
[28] Ibid, p. 224
[29] OS, Vol I. Ch. 5, and Vol. II p. 8 (Hegel’s pronouncement that “World History is a court of judgement”)
[30] OS, Vol. II, There is a general description of this tendency on pages 227-228 and an illustrative quotation from A. Keller on p. 241
[31] Ibid, p. 81
[32] Ibid, p. 233
[33] Conjectures and Refutations (Later C&R): The Growth of Scientific Knowledge, K.R. Popper, Basic Books, Publishers New York, London, 1962 Ch. 1
[34] OS, Vol ll, p. 211
[35] Ibid, pp. 158-162
[36] The Myth of the Framework: in defense of scientific rationality, (from here on M.O.T.F) Karl Popper, edited by M.A. Notturno, Routledge London and New York, 1994
[37] Unended Quest: An Intellectual Autobiography, Karl Popper, The Open Court Publishing Co., La Salle, Illinois, 1974, p. 140
[38] O.S. Vol. II, p. 297
[39] Ibid, Ch. 23 pp. 212-223
[40] Relativism: the doctrine that the discovery of objective truths is impossible
[41] Wittgenstein: A Social Theory of Knowledge, David Bloor, Columbia University Press, 1983
[42] See note 20
[43] See Popper’s critique of relativism “Addendum”
[44] Excepting, for chronological reasons, those of Wittgenstein, as mentioned above.
[45] O.S. Vol. II p.229
