The Open Society and Its Enemies (Routledge Classics)

by Karl Popper

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 find that this will take the form of a creeping and destructive scepticism and relativism; and only the most active and the most noble of minds … will instead experience that deep emotional shock, and that despair of truth, which was felt for example by Heinrich von Kleist … ‘Recently’, he wrote, in his moving way, ‘I have become acquainted with the philosophy of Kant; and I must tell you of a thought of which I need not be afraid that it will shake you as deeply and as painfully as it shook me:—It is impossible for us to decide whether that to which we appeal as truth is in truth the truth, or whether it merely seems to us so. If it is the latter, then all that truth to which we may attain here will be as nothing after our death, and all our efforts to produce and acquire something that might survive us must be in vain.—If the sharp point of this thought does not pierce your heart, d...