The Open Society and Its Enemies (Routledge Classics)
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Read between December 24 - December 29, 2019
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If in this book harsh words are spoken about some of the greatest among the intellectual leaders of mankind, my motive is not, I hope, the wish to belittle them. It springs rather from my conviction that, if our civilization is to survive, we must break with the habit of deference to great men. Great men may make great mistakes; and as the book tries to show, some of the greatest leaders of the past supported the perennial attack on freedom and reason.
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In believing in such an ideal state which does not change, Plato deviates radically from the tenets of historicism which we found in Heraclitus.
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The things in flux, the degenerate and decaying things, are (like the state) the offspring, the children, as it were, of perfect things. And like children, they are copies of their original primogenitors. The father or original of a thing in flux is what Plato calls its ‘Form’ or its ‘Pattern’ or its ‘Idea’. As before, we must insist that the Form or Idea, in spite of its name, is no ‘idea in our mind’; it is not a phantasm, nor a dream, but a real thing. It is, indeed, more real than all the ordinary things which are in flux, and which, in spite of their apparent solidity, are doomed to ...more
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If all things are in continuous flux, then it is impossible to say anything definite about them. We can have no real knowledge of them, but, at the best, vague and delusive ‘opinions’.
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‘It was natural’, says Aristotle, ‘that Socrates should search for the essence’23, i.e. for the virtue or rationale of a thing and for the real, the unchanging or essential meanings of the terms. ‘In this connection he became the first to raise the problem of universal definitions.’
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This account of Aristotle’s corresponds closely to Plato’s own arguments proffered in the Timaeus26, and it shows that Plato’s fundamental problem was to find a scientific method of dealing with sensible things. He wanted to obtain purely rational knowledge, and not merely opinion; and since pure knowledge of sensible things could not be obtained, he insisted, as mentioned before, on obtaining at least such pure knowledge as was in some way related, and applicable, to sensible things. Knowledge of the Forms or Ideas fulfilled this demand, since the Form was related to its sensible things like ...more
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Problem (2), the theory of change and of history, will be dealt with in the next two chapters, 4 and 5, where Plato’s descriptive sociology is treated, i.e. his description and explanation of the changing social world in which he lived. Problem (3), the arresting of social change, will be dealt with in chapters 6 to 9, treating Plato’s political programme. Problem (1), that of Plato’s methodology, has with the help of Aristotle’s account of the history of Plato’s theory been briefly outlined in the present chapter.
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It was Plato’s peculiar belief that the essence of sensible things can be found in other and more real things—in their primogenitors or Forms.
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All these methodological essentialists also agreed with Plato in holding that these essences may be discovered and discerned with the help of intellectual intuition; that every essence has a name proper to it, the name after which the sensible things are called; and that it may be described in words. And a description of the essence of a thing they all called a ‘definition’.
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According to methodological essentialism, there can be three ways of knowing a thing: ‘I mean that we can know its unchanging reality or essence; and that we can know the definition of the essence; and that we can know its name. Accordingly, two questions may be formulated about any real thing …: A person may give the name and ask for the definition; or he may give the definition and ask for the name.’
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As an example of this method, Plato uses the essence of ‘even’ (as opposed to ‘odd’): ‘Number … may be a thing capable of division into equal parts. If it is so divisible, number is named “even”; and the definition of the name “even” is “a number divisible into equal parts”… And when we are given the name and asked about the definition, or when we are given the definition and asked about the name, we speak, in both...
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Change and Rest
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Nature and Convention
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It is one of the characteristics of the magical attitude of a primitive tribal or ‘closed’ society that it lives in a charmed circle1 of unchanging taboos, of laws and customs which are felt to be as inevitable as the rising of the sun, or the cycle of the seasons, or similar obvious regularities of nature. And it is only after this magical ‘closed society’ has actually broken down that a theoretical understanding of the difference between ‘nature’ and ‘society’ can develop.
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Why is it that Plato does not wish his leaders to have originality or initiative? The answer, I think, is clear. He hates change and does not want to see that re-adjustments may become necessary.
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The authoritarian will in general select those who obey, who believe, who respond to his influence. But in doing so, he is bound to select mediocrities. For he excludes those who revolt, who doubt, who dare to resist his influence. Never can an authority admit that the intellectually courageous, i.e. those who dare to defy his authority, may be the most valuable type.
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(Here we may perhaps penetrate the secret of the particular difficulty of selecting capable military leaders. The demands of military discipline enhance the difficulties discussed, and the methods of military advancement are such that those who do dare to think for themselves are usually eliminated.
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Instead of encouraging the student to devote himself to his studies for the sake of studying, instead of encouraging in him a real love for his subject and for inquiry23, he is encouraged to study for the sake of his personal career; he is led to acquire only such knowledge as is serviceable in getting him over the hurdles which he must clear for the sake of his advancement.
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Thus we see that nobody but Plato himself knew the secret of, and held the key to, true guardianship. But this can mean only one thing. The philosopher king is Plato himself, and the Republic is Plato’s own claim for kingly power—to the power which he thought his due, uniting in himself, as he did, both the claims of the philosopher and of the descendant and legitimate heir of Codrus the martyr, the last of Athens’ kings, who, according to Plato, had sacrificed himself ‘in order to preserve the kingdom for his children’.
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We cannot possess such knowledge since we have insufficient practical experience in this kind of planning, and knowledge of facts must be based upon experience.
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Powerful interests must become linked up with the success of the experiment. All this does not contribute to the rationality, or to the scientific value, of the experiment.
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My reply would be that the mechanical engineer can do all this because he has sufficient experience at his disposal, i.e. theories developed by trial and error. But this means that he can plan because he has made all kinds of mistakes already; or in other words, because he relies on experience which he has gained by applying piecemeal methods. His new machinery is the result of a great many small improvements. He usually has a model first, and only after a great number of piecemeal adjustments to its various parts does he proceed to a stage where he could draw up his final plans for the ...more
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‘What Athens produced in this decade’, he says with characteristic modesty, ‘ranks equal with one of the mightiest decades of German literature.’17
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You are, first of all, intelligence, was Socrates’ reply. It is your reason that makes you human; that enables you to be more than a mere bundle of desires and wishes; that makes you a self-sufficient individual and entitles you to claim that you are an end in yourself. Socrates’ saying ‘care for your souls’ is largely an appeal for intellectual honesty, just as the saying ‘know thyself’ is used by him to remind us of our intellectual limitations.
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Of the others—those I have come across—I feel reluctant to say much. In attacking Plato I have, as I now realize, offended and hurt many Platonists, and I am sorry for this. Still, I have been surprised by the violence of some of the reactions.
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What we usually call ‘scientific knowledge’ is, as a rule, not knowledge in this sense, but rather information regarding the various competing hypotheses and the way in which they have stood up to various tests; it is, using the language of Plato and Aristotle, information concerning the latest, and the best tested, scientific ‘opinion’.
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Thus the scientific view of the definition ‘A puppy is a young dog’ would be that it is an answer to the question ‘What shall we call a young dog?’ rather than an answer to the question ‘What is a puppy?’. (Questions like ‘What is life?’ or ‘What is gravity?’ do not play any rôle in science.) The scientific use of definitions, characterized by the approach ‘from the right to the left’, may be called its nominalist interpretation, as opposed to its Aristotelian or essentialist interpretation38
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And we can at once see from this that definitions do not play any very important part in science.
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I have tried hard to translate this gibberish from Hegel’s Philosophy of Nature4 as faithfully as possible; he writes: ‘§302. Sound is the change in the specific condition of segregation of the material parts, and in the negation of this condition;—merely an abstract or an ideal ideality, as it were, of that specification. But this change, accordingly, is itself immediately the negation of the material specific subsistence; which is, therefore, real ideality of specific gravity and cohesion, i.e.— heat. The heating up of sounding bodies, just as of beaten or rubbed ones, is the appearance of ...more
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‘Should you ever intend to dull the wits of a young man and to incapacitate his brains for any kind of thought whatever, then you cannot do better than give him Hegel to read. For these monstrous accumulations of words that annul and contradict one another drive the mind into tormenting itself with vain attempts to think anything whatever in connection with them, until finally it collapses from sheer exhaustion. Thus any ability to think is so thoroughly destroyed that the young man will ultimately mistake empty and hollow verbiage for real thought.
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‘The philosophers’, wrote Marx11 early in his career, ‘have only interpreted the world in various ways; the point however is to change it.’
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No kind of determinism, whether it be expressed as the principle of the uniformity of nature or as the law of universal causation, can be considered any longer a necessary assumption of scientific method; for physics, the most advanced of all sciences, has shown not only that it can do without such assumptions, but also that to some extent it contradicts them. Determinism is not a necessary pre-requisite of a science which can make predictions. Scientific method cannot, therefore, be said to favour the adoption of strict determinism.
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I believe that the critical theory of knowledge here sketched throws some light upon the great problems of all theories of knowledge: how it is that we know so much and so little; and how it is that we can lift ourselves slowly out of the swamp of ignorance—by our own bootstraps, as it were. We do so by working with guesses, and by improving upon our guesses, through criticism.
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This was the first danger in whose shadow Schopenhauer grew up: isolation. The second was: despair of finding the truth. This latter danger is the constant companion of every thinker who sets out from Kant’s philosophy; that is if he is a real man, a living human being, able to suffer and yearn, and not a mere rattling automaton, a mere thinking and calculating machine … Though I am reading everywhere that [owing to Kant] … a revolution has started in all fields of thought, I cannot believe that this is so as yet … But should Kant one day begin to exert a more general influence, then we shall ...more
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On the contrary, it is exhilarating: here we are, with the immensely difficult task before us of getting to know the beautiful world we live in, and ourselves; and fallible though we are we nevertheless find that our powers of understanding, surprisingly, are almost adequate for the task—more so than we ever dreamt in our wildest dreams. We really do learn from our mistakes, by trial and error. And at the same time we learn how little we know—as when, in climbing a mountain; every step upwards opens some new vista into the unknown, and new worlds unfold themselves of whose existence we knew ...more
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Thus we can learn, we can grow in knowledge, even if we can never know— that is, know for certain. Since we can learn, there is no reason for despair of reason; and since we can never know, there are no grounds here for smugness, or for conceit over the growth of our knowledge.
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It is I who must decide whether to accept the standards of any authority as (morally) good or bad.