Therein lies the danger. A metaphysically ambitious philosophy leads to “medieval authoritarianism,” with its hierarchical culture of command and submission.9 Popper sees any form of transcendence as implicitly totalitarian. The recognition of something higher than the individual sets up a suprapersonal authority. If I can know what it means to be human, then I have a standard by which to judge individual behavior, and it is just such a standard, Popper argues, that is characteristic of a closed society. Long before the invention of words such as “logocentrism,” Popper denounced strong
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