The Open Society and Its Enemies (Princeton Classics)

by Karl Popper

‘pseudo-rationalism’ is the intellectual intuitionism of Plato. It is the immodest belief in one’s superior intellectual gifts, the claim to be initiated, to know with certainty, and with authority. According to Plato, opinion—even ‘true opinion’, as we can read in the Timaeus3—‘is shared by all men; but reason’ (or ‘intellectual intuition’) ‘is shared only by the gods, and by very few men’. This authoritarian intellectualism, this belief in the possession of an infallible instrument of discovery, or an infallible method, this failure to distinguish between a man’s intellectual powers and his indebtedness to others for all he can possibly know or understand,

the irrationalist will insist that ‘human nature’ is in the main not rational. Man, he holds, is more than a rational animal, and also less.

according to the irrationalist, the majority of men will always have to be tackled by an appeal to their emotions and passions rather than by an appeal to their reason.

the question whether we adopt some more or less radical form of irrationalism, or whether we adopt that minimum concession to irrationalism which I have termed ‘critical rationalism’, will deeply affect our whole attitude towards other men, and towards the problems of social life.

rationalism is closely connected with the belief in the unity of mankind. Irrationalism, which is not bound by any rules of consistency, may be combined with any kind of belief, including a belief in the brotherhood of man; but the fact that it may easily be combined with a very different belief, and especially the fact that it lends itself easily to the support of a romantic belief in the existence of an elect body, in the division of men into leaders and led, into natural masters and natural slaves, shows clearly that a moral decision is involved in the choice between it and a critical rationalism.

In the case of a scientific theory, our decision depends upon the results of experiments. If these confirm the theory, we may accept it until we find a better one. If they contradict the theory, we reject it. But in the case of a moral theory, we can only confront its consequences with our conscience.

The irrationalist insists that emotions and passions rather than reason are the mainsprings of human action. To the rationalist’s reply that, though this may be so, we should do what we can to remedy it, and should try to make reason play as large a part as it possibly can, the irrationalist would rejoin (if he condescends to a discussion) that this attitude is hopelessly unrealistic.

this attitude, which is at best one of resignation towards the irrational nature of human beings, at worst one of scorn for human reason, must lead to an appeal to violence and brutal force as the ultimate arbiter in any dispute.

The abandonment of the rationalist attitude, of the respect for reason and argument and the other fellow’s point of view, the stress upon the ‘deeper’ layers of human nature, all this must lead to the view that thought is merely a somewhat superficial manifestation of what lies within these irrational depths. It must nearly always, I believe, produce an attitude which considers the person of the thinker instead of his thought. It must produce the belief that ‘we think with our blood’, or ‘with our national heritage’, or ‘with our class’.

the decisive similarity between all these intellectually immodest views is that they do not judge a thought on its own merits. By thus abandoning reason, they split mankind into friends and foes; into the few who share in reason with the gods, and the many who don’t (as Plato says); into the few who stand near and the many who stand far; into those who speak the untranslatable language of our own emotions and passions and those whose tongue is not our tongue. Once we have done this, political equalitarianism becomes practically impossible.

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there are irrationalists who love mankind, and that not all forms of irrationalism engender criminality.

But I hold that he who teaches that not reason but love should rule opens the way for those who rule by hate.

no emotion, not even love, can replace the rule of institutions controlled by reason.

the attempt to make heaven on earth invariably produces hell. It leads to intolerance.

To sum up, mysticism attempts to rationalize the irrational, and at the same time it seeks the mystery in the wrong place; and it does so because it dreams of the collective33, and the union of the elect, since it dares not face the hard and practical tasks which those must face who realize that every individual is an end in himself.

it is, I hold, the possibility of overthrowing it, or its falsifiability, that constitutes the possibility of testing it, and therefore the scientific character of a theory;

all scientific descriptions of facts are highly selective, that they always depend upon theories.

The situation can be best described by comparison with a searchlight (the ‘searchlight theory of science’, as I usually call it in contradistinction to the ‘bucket theory of the mind’3). What the searchlight makes visible will depend upon its position, upon our way of directing it, and upon its intensity, colour, etc.; although it will, of course, also depend very largely upon the things illuminated by it. Similarly, a scientific description will depend, largely, upon our point of view, our interests, which are as a rule connected with the theory or hypothesis we wish to test; although it will also depend upon the facts described.

All this is true, most emphatically, in the case of historical description, with its ‘infinite subject matter’, as Schopenhauer6 calls it. Thus in history no less than in science, we cannot avoid a point of view; and the belief that we can must lead to self-deception and to lack of critical care.

In physics, as we have seen, the ‘point of view’ is usually presented by a physical theory which can be tested by searching for new facts. In history, the matter is not quite so simple.

To sum up, there can be no history of ‘the past as it actually did happen’; there can only be historical interpretations, and none of them final; and every generation has a right to frame its own.

But am I justified in refusing to the historicist the right to interpret history in his own way? Have I not just proclaimed that anybody has such a right? My answer to this question is that historicist interpretations are of a peculiar kind.

the historicist interpretation may be compared to a searchlight which we direct upon ourselves. It makes it difficult if not impossible to see anything of our surroundings, and it paralyses our actions.

the historicist does not recognize that it is we who select and order the facts of history, but he believes that ‘history itself’, or the ‘history of mankind’, determines, by its inherent laws, ourselves, our problems, our future, and even our point of view.

Is there a meaning in history?

in the sense in which the question of the meaning of history is asked, I answer: History has no meaning.

They speak about the history of mankind, but what they mean, and what they have learned about in school, is the history of political power.

There is no history of mankind, there is only an indefinite number of histories of all kinds of aspects of human life.

But is there really no such thing as a universal history in the sense of a concrete history of mankind? There can be none.

This dualism of facts and decisions26 is, I believe, fundamental. Facts as such have no meaning; they can gain it only through our decisions. Historicism is only one of many attempts to get over this dualism; it is born of fear, for it shrinks from realizing that we bear the ultimate responsibility even for the standards we choose.

it tries to shift our responsibility on to history, and thereby on to the play of demoniac powers beyond ourselves;

The main philosophical malady of our time is an intellectual and moral relativism, the latter being at least in part based upon the former. By relativism—or, if you like, scepticism—I mean here, briefly, the theory that the choice between competing theories is arbitrary; since either, there is no such thing as objective truth; or, if there is, no such thing as a theory which is true or at any rate (though perhaps not true) nearer to the truth than another theory; or, if there are two or more theories, no ways or means of deciding whether one of them is better than another.

Certain arguments in support of relativism arise from the question, asked in the tone of the assured sceptic who knows for certain that there is no answer: ‘What is truth?’

an assertion, proposition, statement, or belief, is true if, and only if, it corresponds to the facts.

is decisive to realize that knowing what truth means, or under what conditions a statement is called true, is not the same as, and must be clearly distinguished from, possessing a means of deciding—a criterion for deciding—whether a given statement is true or false.

there is a kernel of truth in both scepticism and relativism. The kernel of truth is just that there exists no general criterion of truth. But this does not warrant the conclusion that the choice between competing theories is arbitrary. It merely means, quite simply, that we can always err in our choice—that we can always miss the truth, or fall short of the truth;

By ‘fallibilism’ I mean here the view, or the acceptance of the fact, that we may err, and that the quest for certainty (or even the quest for high probability) is a mistaken quest. But this does not imply that the quest for truth is mistaken.

all the known historical examples of human fallibility—including all the known examples of miscarriage of justice—are examples of the advance of our knowledge.

there is another form of absolutism—a fallibilistic absolutism—which indeed rejects all this: it merely asserts that our mistakes, at least, are absolute mistakes, in the sense that if a theory deviates from the truth, it is simply false, even if the mistake made was less glaring than that in another theory.

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.

Though truth is not self-revealing (as Cartesians and Baconians thought), though certainty may be unattainable, the human situation with respect to knowledge is far from desperate. 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.

though we should seek for absolutely right or valid proposals, we should never persuade ourselves that we have definitely found them; for clearly, there cannot be a criterion of absolute rightness—even less than a criterion of absolute truth.

The deceptive argument I have in mind appeals to the discovery that other people have ideas and beliefs which differ widely from ours. Who are we to insist that ours are the right ones?

This argument has been developed in various ways; and it has been argued that our race, or our nationality, or our historical background, or our historical period, or our class interest, or our social habitat, or our language, or our personal background knowledge, is an insurmountable, or an almost insurmountable, barrier to objectivity.

indeed, we can never rid ourselves of bias.

There is, however, no need to accept the argument itself, or its relativistic conclusions.

If two parties disagree, this may mean that one is wrong, or the other, or both: this is the view of the criticist. It does not mean, as the relativist will have it, that both may be equally right.

The dualism of facts and standards is, I contend, one of the bases of the liberal tradition. For an essential part of this tradition is the recognition of the injustice that does exist in this world, and the resolve to try to help those who are its victims. This means that there is, or that there may be, a conflict, or at least a gap, between facts and standards: facts may fall short of right (or valid or true) standards—especially those social or political facts which consist in the actual acceptance and enforcement of some code of justice.

liberalism is based upon the dualism of facts and standards in the sense that it believes in searching for ever better standards, especially in the field of politics and of legislation.

this dualism of facts and standards has been rejected by some relativists who have opposed it with arguments like the following: (1) The acceptance of a proposal—and thus of a standard—is a social or political or historical fact. (2) If an accepted standard is judged by another, not yet accepted standard, and found wanting, then thi...