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The Open Society and Its Enemies

Heraclitus

Popper puts Heraclitus as one of the first historicist thinkers. He put forward the idea of constant flux or change as the unifying rule of history and nature. This is different from things like Homer, where the gods are the writers of history, but there is disharmony, and they are all writing different parts of the story and going against each other.

The idea of the ‘chosen people’ is first introduced here, like in the Jewish literature, for example. Heraclitus was a member of the aristocracy in Ephesus, and when the revolutions in Greece started to occur in favor of democracy, they scorned the idea.

‘Everything is in flux and nothing is at rest’ is the motto of his philosophy

Popper puts forward the idea that in these ancient Greek times, the idea that everyone knows their place is quite common.

[Heraclitus says]’The mob does not care, even about the things they stumble upon; Nor can they grasp a lesson-though they think they do’

Popper believes this is where the idea about a ‘law of destiny’ comes about. He also believes it is common that in times of great social change, historicism will come about.

It often seems as if they were trying to comfort themselves for the loss of a stable world by clinging to the idea that change is ruled by an unchanging law

Every process in the world, and especially fire itself, develops according to a definite law, its ‘measure’. It is an inexorable and irresistible law, and to this extent it resembles our modern conception of natural law as well as the conception of historical or evolutionary laws of modern historicists

This failure to distinguish between legal laws or norms on the one hand and the natural laws or regularities on the other is characteristic of tribal taboos

Popper also believes that wrapped up with a lot of the ideas of destiny is the idea of mysticism, where there is this sort of hidden nature to the way things are changing. A sort of anti-rationalism. Heraclitus criticizes scientists of his day like Pythagoras.

Heraclitus has this idea that there is a special characteristic of intuition that is the special property of ‘the chosen people’ and that this contrasts a lot with the scientific view. The winners of war are also among the chosen people to Heraclitus.

For he holds that the outcome of war is always just

Popper puts the question to Heraclitus' work that if everything is always changing, then the standard of merit must also be changing. He believes that Heraclitus answers this in his doctrine of the identity of the opposites. The law of change is one neatly wrapped up in the law of opposites. Where hot things move to cold. Rich goes to poor. A path leading east is also a path leading west.

This Popper puts forward as a relativism of values that Heraclitus puts forward.

It seems as if historicist ideas easily become prominent in times of great social change

It appears to be more than a mere coincidence that Hegel, who adopted so much of Heraclitus’ thought and passed it on to all modern historicist movements, was a mouth of the reaction against the French Revolution

The learning of any things teacheth not understanding, else would it have taught Hesiod and Pythagoras, and again Xenophanes and Hekataios
- Fragments of heraclitus - John Burnett using Bywater 1877 for numbering

Heraclitus pushed the idea that you may know lots of things but not truly understand them. However, Feynman spoke about understanding in a different way, where what you are doing is not just remembering the names of things. Pythogoras put forward many original new ideas, but since there was no "learning" in the way Heraclitus defined it, then it wasn't considered real.

Plato’s Theory of Forms or ideas

The idea here is to look at Plato’s political philosophy to show how it is essentially historicist and to set up its criticism in later chapters.

Popper makes the same point about Plato as he does about Heraclitus. That he grew up in a time of great strife and that he seemed to make much of the same inclinations toward a divine law that governed the universe as a way to deal with a complex and changing world.

It picks up a common thread here on the denigration of society.

All social change is corruption or decay or degeneration

Plato, however, takes the idea that you can overcome this degeneration by the will and through knowledge of the forms.

Popper outlines a common link in some of the historicist thinking, which is naturalist imprints on their philosophy.

Not unlike the Biblical story, there is a primogenitor, a first thing that is perfect, and all things after it are a copy, not of absolute correctness.

There is also talk about some cyclic laws, corresponding more or less to the seasons of growth and decay.

Popper believed that Plato looked at his age as one of deep depravity.

so the advent of of the cosmic turning point would manifest itself in the coming of a great law-giver whose powers of reasoning and whose moral will are capable of bringing this period of political decay to a close

This idea of a lawgiver is, in many ways, messianic. There are some parallels with St. Paul and the law here.

There is an attempt in the philosophy of Plato to return to some stage of perfection before the degeneration. This is not unlike the return to heaven or to a state of being that was once perfect, like in the garden of Eden.

This is where Popper proposes that social engineering is the approach that opposes historicism.

Social engineering treats the method as the tool, as we define it.

Here, society is treated more like an organism, a living thing that is always changing.

It separates the difference between piecemeal and utopian social engineering.

The social engineering approach looks at our aims and then asks questions about whether institutions are helping us achieve these aims.

We can say that the engineer or the technology approaches institutions rationally as means that serve certain ends, and that as a technologist he judges them wholly according to their appropriateness, efficiency and simplicity.

But institutions are not just instruments, they can also be looked at as instruments.

To Plato, the Forms are not mere ideas, but more real than all other things.

There are some good explanations of the idea of the Forms and their origins. Again, you see this naturalist idea pop up where there is a father, mother, and child conception of Forms, where the father is the Forms, the mother is space and time, and the child is the degeneration of the Forms into something that is substantial.

To Plato, all things are degenerations of the original Form.

There is yet another interesting comparison to be made between the participation of things with their Form or essence. This idea is that any idea is derived from its original Form, and that it shares in its Form. It participates in its whiteness, coldness, and bedness. It's not dissimilar to the idea of divination in Christianity, where the return to some original state is looked at as this participation in the nature of God. "Sharing in the nature of God like a poker in the flame."

They participate in the sense in which children participate in their fathers possessions and gifts

What he[Plato] was looking for was knowledge, not opinion.

Plato is struck by the difficulty of discussing politics when the words and their meanings always change over time. If you can't agree on government or democracy, then what can you do with that?

Plato traces much of his thinking on the derivation of the forms from the substance of real things to Socrates. By enquiring about the nature of the world, we can come to know the forms. This is a backtracking from the sensible to the insensible forms.

Popper believes that the same type of thing has been done in certain other thinkers such as J.S. Mill in "On Liberty".

Popper defines the two terms here that he thinks describe the two different systems of thinking. These are:

  • Methodological essentialism

  • Methodological nominalism

The essentialist is looking for the true essence of things. They are looking for some hidden nature of the word.

Things have definitions, and the definitions have names, and they can be described by words.

Plato uses this thinking for such things as proofs of the soul.

The contrast is methodological nominalism. This aims to describe how something behaves or works. Looking at whether there are regularities in its behavior.

The methodological nominalism will never think a question like ‘what is energy’ or ‘what is movement’ or ‘what is an atom’ is an important question for physics but he will attach importance to a question like ‘how can the energy of the Sun be made useful’ or ‘how does a planet move’ or ‘under what condition does an atom radiate light’

And to the philosophers who tell him that before having answered ‘what is’ question he cannot hope to give exact answers to any of the how questions he will reply if it all by pointing out that he much prefers that modest degree of exactness which he can achieve by his methods to the pretentious muddle which they have achieved by theirs

Popper contends that there are many who have answered the question of the essence of things. He believes that the difference in method is necessary. Some of these thinkers are:

  • JS Mill (On Logic)
  • Karl Marx
  • M. Weber
  • G. Simmel
  • Vierkandt
  • MacIver
  • See also Husserl's Phenomenology

For further treatment of Plato’s political philosophy see

  • RHS Crossman - Plato Today
  • CM Bowra - Ancient greek literature
  • W. Fite The platonic legend
  • B. Farrington science & politics in the ancient world

Change and Rest

Popper introduces Plato's theory of society as he sees it.

Plato's theory of change and rest, particularly political revolution, builds a model that explains the theory of society in Greece.

Because of the ideas behind the forms, Plato views things that move away from the forms as evil and closer to the forms as good.

This is more generally understood as change being evil, unless it is a change towards the good. And stasis being good, unless it is stasis in evil.

Things that are unchanging share in the very nature of the forms and are in communion with the good.

Plato uses this lens to explain certain types of degenerations in society. Men degenerate into women because of a lack of virtue (lacking courage).

Lacking wisdom, you degenerate into beasts.

The idea of the forms and the idea of degeneration was, in Aristotle's view, a method in which you could have pure or rational knowledge in a world that is always changing.

This idea of degeneration follows a similar question about the true Form of the state.

He observed certain older states, like that in Sparta and in Crete, as being closer in form to the true Form of the state, as opposed to the democracies in Athens.

Plato goes back even further from Sparta and Crete, noting some of their deficiencies, and asks what came before them.

The further back you go, the closer you get to the original best state, which Plato sees as probably being some Nomadic state, led by a single 'Shepherd' who leads the sheep.

He creates a theory of rank or order in the various types of states by applying this theory of change and degeneration to the various types of government.

Noble Kingship > Timarchy/Timocracy > Oligarchy > Democracy > Tyranny.

According to Plato, internal strife, class war, fomented by self-interest and especially material or economic self -interest, is the main force of social dynamics.

We see that Plato aimed at setting out a system of historical periods, governed by a law of evolution; In other words, he aimed at a historicist theory of society. This attempt was revived by Rousseau, and was made fashionable by Comte and Mill, and by Hegel and Marx; but considering the historical evidence then available, Plato’s system of of historical periods was as good as that of any of these modern historicists.

Plato believed that the first class struggle occurs between virtue and money.

According to Popper, Plato looks at democracy with almost complete contempt.

Much of these attitudes is seen in the treatment of slaves in the states of Athens and Sparta, according to Plato. Slaves are treated almost as if they were free, and Popper believes that Athens probably came the closest to being the first state to abolish it.

Popper believes that the 6 types of government that are introduced by Plato are unimportant, because Plato himself stated that the states can occur in degrees and are not a rigid description.

The main distinction is that states can be ruled by one, a few, or the many.

Plato puts forward much of the idea of a City of God that is ruled by a philosopher King.

Plato's best state emphasizes class distinctions dramatically. It is almost a near-caste system.

The books where much of this is discussed are:

  • Republic
  • Timaeus
  • Critias

According to Popper, the castes in Plato's society are essentially just the military caste, to which belong the warriors and the educated, and the working classes.

Because of many of the ideas about degeneration and the forms, the state ruled by this leading class mustn't ever degenerate down to the level of the working classes. Even the idea of legislating for the lower classes is almost forbidden, like the state of the proles in 1984.

The attitude towards slaves is made worse in many of these pieces on political philosophy, where enslavement of barbarians is encouraged.

Do unto bar barbarians as greeks no do unto greeks

The idea of family is also criticized because family loyalties are seen as something that brings about disunion, and so the noble should view themselves as a singular ‘family.’

In fact, Popper believes that much of the attitude towards the lower classes by the ruling class is to bring about contempt for them. Because if they despise the ruling class, they will stop disuniting themselves.

Ideas of mingling among the classes are not to be had because a mingling of the classes might bring about attitudes of sympathy and thus disunion within the ruling classes, if one person despises whom the other person does not.

Regarding the origin of the ruling class, it may be mentioned that Plato speaks in the Statesman of a time, prior even to that of the best state, where ‘God himself was the shepherd of men, ruling over them exactly as man… still rules over the beasts’

Popper doesn't believe that this is the simile/parable of the good Shepherd, but rather a direct claim about the way in which the original government came about.

According to Popper, Plato believed that a man and his education should be fierce, but not too fierce. So the ideas of education include gymnastics and music. Too much of one or the other is not good. One should be both gentle and fierce.

There are additional ideas on the general militarization of the young, where they should always be shown violence and fierceness unless they become too soft.

Again, Plato stresses disunion of the ruling class over economic affairs being the cause of political strife.

Popper makes a direct criticism of O. Spengler's 'The Decline of the West' as being predominantly historicist.

Nature and convention

The idea of separation between natural laws and normative laws.

The natural law is a fact about the natural world or the universe.

A normative law is a custom or tradition that we follow for some reason.

It is the distinction between the two that Popper wishes us to get correct.

Popper goes on to show that in history there has been development towards this distinction.

He describes the starting point as naive monism where there is no distinction between these natural and normative laws; there is naive monism, which is a "oneness" of the laws of nature and society.

Popper brings about some more ideas out of this, namely that there are two different ways of looking at the laws that emphasize either the natural or the conventions.

Naive naturalism emphasizes that there is a natural law of society, and the natural laws of society are things that adhere to the laws of nature. That is, things that occur in nature without the distortion of civilization.

Naive naturalism might be best described as a "might is right" type of law.

Naive conventionalism can also be employed in the same manner.

This naive conventionalism is that the natural laws are the things that have existed. It is, by this definition, a form of conservatism where the only right thing is what has existed.

The next evolutionary step to Popper here is the idea of critical dualism. Here the idea of natural laws is held, and normative laws are also held, but the natural laws are much more strict in this sense.

Critical dualism says that normative laws can be changed by humans because they have recognized them as such.

You agree with the norms or conventions asserted by humans in the first place. But that it was a human-made assertion and not something that we discovered to be the case.

Popper introduces what is essentially a logical difference between facts and the statements of facts, which are in this case the same types of things as the normative and natural laws.

He uses the following example:

FACT: Napoleon died on St. Helena

Person A: Napoleon died on St. Helena

Person B: Person B said that Napoleon died on St. Helena

What Popper goes on to show here is that you cannot know the fact of something from the definition.

That one person said something may be considered a fact. But we can infer from what a person said the original fact.

You can reformulate this as something like "The body of someone that fits the description of Napoleon was found on St. Helena." But unless you're dealing with the actual thing here, then you can't go much further than the definitions.

That most people agree with the norm ‘Thou shalt not steal’ is a fact. But that ‘Thou shalt not steal’ is not a fact, and can never be inferred from sentences describing facts

The claim that will probably start to come about is that there is no thing that is morally right, which is not the case. Popper goes on to claim that this does not rule out the existence of rules which are "natural laws," but that by definition, we can't infer them.

It doesn't rule out the idea of religion either, for one could hold that in order to get a proper sense of what some natural law is, you need to allow religion to guide you.

The insistence that you alone make the decision about what is right or wrong does not mean that you cannot be helped by faith in the process.

He sets out that this is the view of Socrates imploring Zeus.

The doctrine of the autonomy of ethics is independent of the problem of religion, but compatible with, or perhaps even necessary for any religion which respects individual conscience
The idea of the definitions of things applies to religion here too. You may accept that your definition of God is a fact, and that definition implies other things that you ought to follow. For example, your definition of God might lead to the conclusion that he is all-loving, and a person following this ethic should believe that they ought to be loving too.

Care has to be taken, in Popper's eyes, to know that the institutions we live in are woven with normative and natural (sociological) laws.

To Popper, although institutions can be looked upon as if they were machines, this does not mean that they are machines.

The types of things that are used in the place of these natural laws are:

  • Biological naturalism
  • Ethical or juridical positivism
  • Psychological or spiritual naturalism

The ways that these natural laws come about, in the way outlined above, can mistake the person considering them.

This naive monism can be used to prove both humanitarian and totalitarian principles alike.

Biological naturalism might assert that norms themselves are contrary to nature. That there is natural inequality among men can be used to infer rigid class distinction or that we ought to have humanitarian compensation for it.

Popper believes that it is spiritual naturalism that can be used in the most diverse range of situations. It can be used to infer that the wise and just should rule or that all people should be treated as equals.

Whatever authority that we accept, it is we who accept it. We only deceive ourselves if we do not realise this simple point