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Karl Popper on Plato: An Ancient Debate Revived
| Article
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10250 |
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Section : |
MODERN THOUGHT
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| Issue
Date : |
8 / 1986 |
5,821 Words |
| Author
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John Caiazza
John Caiazzza was formerly assistant to the president of Brown
University and has written extensively on ethical and
political philosophy. |
Karl Popper is best known as a philosopher of science. Ironically, his most enduring work, however, may be as a philosopher of politics. His two books The Poverty of Historicism and The Open Society and Its Enemies are among the best known and most reprinted volumes on the philosophy of politics written in this century. His attack on Marx in the latter book drew at least one book-length defense of Marx, but his attack on Plato has drawn even more fire. In this essay, I will concentrate on Popper's attack on Plato, trying less to defend Plato than to understand the particular animus that Popper holds against Plato's philosophy. It is remarkable that The Open Society and Its Enemies revives a debate in the twentieth century that was first recorded in the fourth century B.C. Thus I will also consider this renewed debate in the context of twentieth-century politics, in terms of Popper's "scientific conventionalism."
All but three of the ten chapters that make up the first volume of The Open Society and Its Enemies are about Plato, and there probably has not been in philosophic history a more sustained and virulent attack on Plato by anybody as bright as Popper who was as determined to discredit Plato's entire mode of thought. Plato is treated as an authoritarian, racist, regressive, and logically muddled thinker, who wrote at times deviously, at times sincerely, but always with one end in view-to attack Periclean democracy and restore the oligarchy that succeeded it.
It is difficult to give the flavor of this book, which combines the aridity and exactness of a discourse on logical method with the passion and distortion of a political pamphlet. As an attack by an excellent philosopher on a great one, it may have no parallel in intellectual history. Having dealt with Plato, Popper continues in the second volume to deal with Hegel and Marx (and in passing with Aristotle and Toynbee). They too are attacked, Hegel far more ferociously than Marx, although Popper devotes ten chapters to Marx and only one to Hegel. Popper concludes the second volume with a chapter entitled "Has History Any Meaning?" His answer is "no" and he asserts further that to think otherwise about the question is a dangerous error that leads to a totalitarian frame of mind.
I have stressed Popper's vehemence in his treatment of Plato and Hegel, but, in fairness to him, it should be pointed out that he wrote The Open Society and Its Enemies at the time his native Austria was under the control of the Nazis; this may well have led him to an exaggerated view of the danger in "historicism." Moreover, both Plato and Hegel tend to see political reality in
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