Translated from Verein z.F.d. Marx. Pressewesens, [Association for the Marxist Press] München 1991

Obituary for Karl Popper

A categorical call for the humility of the democratic spirit

It took several decades of philosophical research before Popper finally got everything together. He was finally able to sum up his epistemological studies by saying that science achieves its advances with the same “mode of discovery of all organisms from the amoeba to Einstein,” (IV/52) that is, the “method of trial and error elimination” (IV/51); his political-moral reflections on the “open society” (book title) could be summarized by the insight: Science owes its successes to a procedure that “applies not only to science, but also applies to politics,” (VI) in which those in charge also “try out solutions,” (VI) “look out for these mistakes, to find them, to bring them into the open, to analyze them, and to learn from them” (II/88); and as if that were not enough: “Evolution also proceeds by trial and error. Mutations may be regarded as trials.... If they lead to errors, they are eradicated.” (VII)

With one and the same formula, this man explains the way science works, democracy functions, and the origin of the species. He is so eager to equate so many various things that doubts are quite appropriate as to whether his way of understanding things has any concern with grasping their specificities. His all-explaining formula misses his objects so completely that one gets the impression that he didn’t arrive at it by dealing with them: His image of science does not bear any resemblance to an activity aiming at the objectivity of knowledge which is carried out in judgments and conclusions; nor is his conception of politics even roughly similar to the profession of democratic rulers who dictate state interests to their subjects in the binding form of laws, and who rather than give the impression that they are learning lessons or convinced of their own “fallibility,” insist on their power; the idea of identifying the unconscious process by which nature brings about a diversity of species with, of all things, a mental activity is also completely out of place and refers to Darwin quite incorrectly; without worrying about the warped relation, Popper also applies this equation in the opposite direction when he develops his idea of learning with the example of the amoeba.

Even with a generous allowance for the “possibility of error,” which Popper makes such a fuss about, this many irrelevancies having nothing to do with the topic can’t be ascribed to confusions and illusions; and they show no effort to “search for and eradicate errors.” It comes from a determination to not allow even the grossest violation of intellectual objectivity dissuade one from indulging in the intellectual need for a worldview; a need that does little to stimulate rational understanding: The search for a principle deemed reasonable or at least clear to reason which allows one to “grasp” the entire meaning of the world permits not just earthbound humans who believe in God to abstract from everything on earth and come up with a bombastic idea independent of all their experiences with the state and nature, with capital and work, with the family and intellectual life. Even a modern philosopher who thinks he has some relation to science can achieve this feat of abstraction if he properly formulates his basic belief that the world is a learning process that occasionally makes mistakes but on the whole justifies hope. He is even able to adequately express the abstract core of his worldview in the form of the little creed “I am an optimist who knows nothing about the future.” (X) He thus shows that the fixed idea that ideological thinkers have of the world is only the objectified version of an attitude that has no factual basis. And the second act, by which an abstract basic conviction becomes a comprehensive worldview, is carried out by a critical twentieth century rationalist no differently than by followers of religion. Like them, he also subsumes all objects under his fixed prejudice because he does not want to forego the great experience of being able to rediscover his meaning-giving idea in everything he comes across and see it confirmed. He even explicitly admits to this procedure when he occasionally wants to introduce his readers to the distorted world of his thinking in which he proposes, for example, to analyze “democratic social reconstruction” as an “application of the critical and rational methods of science (said learning from trial and error) to the problems of the open society.” (IIIa/21) A project whose goal is predictable – it is intended to carry out the attempt, one that has already been made many times in the history of philosophy, to “cast the ideal of rational rule into propositions” – but which announces itself in a rather twisted way.

This is because Popper is not merely naively trying to satisfy a need for meaning with his reflections without making any scientific claims. First, he claims to be familiar with the “methods of science,” and second, he is rather insistent about the scientific character of his own theoretical endeavors, although, third, he does not adhere to these methods at all, but declares them to be the meaning-giving principle of a worldview which he applies to democracy, for example, in the case just quoted. Popper construes his worldview: he assert that it is a necessity that follows from his conscientious engagement with the question of what science can and may do.

This concern deserves attention because, even among philosophers, the contrast between an ideological meaning-giving construct and science has been known for some time. At least since the emergence of the natural sciences, which have real findings to show for themselves, philosophers can no longer deny the obviously unscientific and emphatically unobjective nature of their intellectual field – an intellectual field which undertakes, for the umpteenth time in 2000 years, the failed attempt to make rational beings understand why they should obey duties rather than their own insights; which revisits the question of how one can be happy through the virtue of sacrifice again and again without a satisfying answer; which repeats over and over the same old stories about the good, the beautiful and the true which beckon as a reward, but only for those who worship them as unattainable ideals; which explores the substance of the empty abstraction of Being to the limits of what is comprehensible to us humans, which leads to the search for ultimate, irrefutable reasons for meaning, etc. The philosophers of the Enlightenment, who were inspired by the scientific achievements of other fields, loudly lamented this dreadful state of their school. They occasionally wanted to toss the books of metaphysics “to the flames,” (Hume) but responded very incorrectly to the wrong ideas of their colleagues. They did not pursue their need for certain knowledge either by criticizing the substance of the meaning-giving programs or by participating in science. Instead, they declared that they were responsible for the question of how science is possible. They did not devote themselves to the content of science, but to its method, by which they wanted to distinguish between science and metaphysics. Since then, philosophy has consisted of two departments. In addition to still explaining the meaning of life and the moral rules derived from it, epistemology has established its responsibility for the standards of scientificity, i.e. for the question of what is allowed to present itself as science and deserves recognition as such, and for countering the university spirit with recommendations to adhere to experience and the rules of logic when forming theories. This recommendation has never helped very much in objecting to unscientific activities in the universities. The accusation that the method leaves something to be desired even fits in perfectly with respect for the mindset that imparts nonsense. With the opposition between scientific “exactness,” which can only be achieved in “logical propositions” that say nothing about reality, and the “empirical sciences,” whose statements about reality always raise the question of whether they are true, epistemology has existed ever since as an institutionalized reservation with respect to the meaning-giving activities that are pursued alongside it.

The philosopher of science Popper took offense at this polemical status of epistemology in the ideological department of philosophy. He adopted an understanding of science that was no longer skeptical of the freedom to bestow meaning. But he was all the more skeptical of knowledge. Popper was thus active in both departments of philosophy. In both departments, he aspired for the unity of the subject. And it is from this exotic concern that he derived his views on science and the world. A pretty crazy philosopher. But that’s how you can become famous in a democracy.

I. The philosopher of science

1. Why knowledge is impossible

His greatest achievement in this field and, on closer inspection, his only argument consisted in refuting a conclusion that does not exist in order to deduce from this refutation the impossibility of certain knowledge:

“It is usual to call an inference ‘inductive’ if it passes from singular statements (sometimes also called ‘particular’ statements), such as accounts of the results of observations or experiments, to universal statements, such as hypotheses or theories. Now it is far from obvious, from a logical point of view, that we are justified in inferring universal statements from singular ones, no matter how numerous; for any conclusion drawn in this way may always turn out to be false: no matter how many instances of white swans we may have observed, this does not justify the conclusion that all swans are white.” (1/3)

Popper is, of course, absolutely right that his “universal statements” are not certain knowledge. To establish this, however, he could have spared himself all his deliberations. The statement is not an example of scientific knowledge and certainly not of a “theory” that leads to such knowledge. Even the subject of his statement is significantly different from the kind of objects that science deals with in its judgments. For good reason, science is careful not to dissolve a species into the universality of its individual members, because it is interested precisely in the general that makes these individuals members of this species. Its whole purpose is to determine this generality. It therefore abstracts from accidental determinations of the individual thing and retains species-specific determinations in the predicates of its judgments. The color of a swan’s feathers does not meet this criterion because it is doubtful whether it is a characteristic of the species at all. And this predicate alone does not satisfy the requirements of a scientific definition to capture what essentially constitutes its object. It is therefore quite unlikely that Popper could “observe” his example in science; an encyclopedia would discredit itself with such a definition. And it is even more improbable that there is a conclusion that “justifies” Popper’s generalization that scientific knowledge is his type of “universal statement” – Popper is also quite correct that a so-called inductive inference is not a conclusion. However, this is not because science cannot produce a universal proposition with “however many observations,” but because this “conclusion,” to use Hegel’s phrase, does not infer its result, but presupposes it. The universality of judgments, which Popper’s argument calls into doubt, does not come about through the accumulation of observations; even Popper can’t avoid presupposing the swan species when he asks the mind to engage in the silly thought experiment of observing its members as comprehensively as possible. That is why this striving for comprehensiveness in science can also quite easily be omitted. The only question is why Popper would undertake an investigation whose result he announces with the words: “Induction does not exist” (VII) and why he does not then immediately investigate the conclusions that do exist in science. This is because he is determined to draw a conclusion about science from his investigation in which science does not appear at all: “The old scientific ideal of epistemc – of absolutely certain, demonstrable knowledge – has proved to be an idol.” (I/225). This conclusion is based on two premises that Popper also did not derive from studying science. The first, that a theoretical activity which, unlike induction, deserves the name of reasoning, “does not occur” in science, he simply decrees:

“In the empirical sciences, which alone can furnish us with information about the world we live in, proofs do not occur, if we mean by ‘proof’ an argument which establishes once and for ever the truth of a theory.” (IIIb/11)

Popper quite fundamentally avoids taking into account the theoretical necessity of scientific judgments, he does not examine any arguments and does not refute any proofs – how could he, if such “proofs do not occur!” – but rather simply refuses to acknowledge that even the stupidest theorist – even him! – argues and attempts to prove the objectivity of his claims in the form of reasons and conclusions. With his “once and for ever,” which he obviously considers to be a criterion for proof, he shows that he is not even thinking of the theoretical activity of the same name, but again of his inductive conclusion which “can always be falsified.” Thus, the first premise of his conclusion is completely reduced to the second, that science in its attempt to obtain certain knowledge is committed to a procedure which does not accomplish this feat.

Where Popper gets this strange premise from – after all, the question arises as to why science, which is known for free thinking, does not choose a different procedure if it contradicts its objective? – is no secret: he is only acquainted with science in general through the theory of knowledge, in which, if in no other science, inductive conclusions actually “occur.” And this is because this discipline has been racking its brains for some time to come up with a procedure by which science can safely follow the path from experience to knowledge by means of observation, i.e., if possible without the activity of thinking, which it considers dubious. Popper does not take this theory as a theory about cognition, which he, as a famously “critical” philosopher who is convinced of the “fallibility” of theoretical efforts, would have to examine, but accepts it as a dogma recognized in his circles which he takes – and this sheds light on the level at which this gentleman thinks! – as if it were a fact. However, with the opposite intention: he uses the false manner of his epistemological ancestors to prove that objective science is possible in order to prove the impossibility of knowledge from their constructs, and with this result he sets out to fundamentally redefine the relationship between theories and their objects. While the old epistemologists were still able to confuse the question of how science proceeds with a rational concern, this is no longer possible with the modern theorist of science.

2. How science works

In the very first sentence of his “Logic of Scientific Discovery,” Popper addresses the problem of how to develop an understanding of how science works under the premise that knowledge is not possible:

“A scientist, whether theorist or experimenter, puts forward statements, or systems of statements, and tests them step by step. In the field of the empirical sciences, more particularly, he constructs hypotheses, or systems of theories, and tests them against experience by observation and experiment.” (I/3)

What Popper presents here as a test of theories would at best be superfluous for science, which draws its conclusions from experience; why should it consult the experience from which it begins again after it has finished forming a theory? And it certainly does not constitute a procedure by which theories can be tested. After all, wrong conclusions are drawn from the same experience as correct ones, so they cannot be distinguished from the latter “against experience.” To test them, one has to make the effort to understand them. Experiments also serve another purpose in science. Through them, the object that science is contemplating is separated from the disturbing influence of circumstances in order to be able to draw correct conclusions from its determinations. This, of course, is a rather unsuitable way of trying to clarify things for someone who has set out to deny the starting point of science and reinterprets it as a subsequently applied criterion of its theories in order to make it clear that objectivity is a standard external to theories. Popper explains to us what then theories are, if one separates them from the objects they refer to, in this way:

“Our theories are our inventions; but they may be merely ill-reasoned guesses, bold conjectures, hypotheses.” (IV 60)

It is of course impossible that he might infer differently than others. His “conjectures” about science are the only objective ones, even if he makes every effort to dispel the misunderstanding that science can ever regain a trace of objectivity by “testing it against experience.” Having introduced experience as the standard for objectivity in order to deny theories their objectivity, he insists that experience is fundamentally subject to the same defect that he has attached to theories:

“Whatever is ‘given’ to us is already interpreted, decoded.” (IV/139)

Why science then checks its “inventions” at all, if the “test” takes place against a standard that is not itself objective, but is based on just such inventions, remains quite unclear. It is not appropriate to doubt the “bold conjecture” that science takes place in the field of tension between a “guess” (I/278) and the application of a more than questionable criterion. With his assertion, Popper invokes real science and thus unerringly strives for the peak of scientific-theoretical stupidity, wanting to confirm an image of science with scientific insights which Popper insists are objective. Of course, this calls for a few howlers. For example, when it comes to answering the obvious question of where “theories” actually come from if they precede experience and determine it:

“Almost all philosophers assume that we gain our knowledge by looking at the outside world. I – like Kant – think that is wrong. I think it’s as clear as day that we are already born with almost all our knowledge. Almost all our knowledge is stored in our genetic DNA.” (VI)

“DNA” – this doesn’t fall into the category of theoretical fictions; it sounds indisputably objective and gives an irrefutable flavor to the message about the dubious nature of all knowledge. The same purpose is served by the constant references to famous scientists with whom one is personally acquainted. From an intimate conversation with Niels Bohr, for example, we learn that “He hoped for a long time to find a real explanation for his atomic theory, and was disappointed in this expectation.” (VII) Popper is not even embarrassed by this, although the suspicion arises that Bohr’s atomic theory is the explanation he was looking for and that someone else was “disappointed” not to have understood it. And, of course, Einstein should not be forgotten, whose scientific greatness is said to have consisted in his willingness to relentlessly subject his theory to experimental testing, although the man is known for never having done an experiment apart from thought experiments.

3. What science is allowed to do

The reference to recognized authorities, which is supposed to authenticate the assertion that science actually proceeds as Popper explains, works so well precisely because his information on the “method of science” is an all out bogus claim: What Popper deals with under the heading “Testing theories against experience” is, firstly, not aimed at testing theories. He himself insists that neither a theory’s factual agreement with experience nor its deviation from it says anything about the theory: It cannot be “verified” by “no matter how many observations” – see induction – but neither can it be “falsified” by a deviation, since science, as Popper is “ready to admit” (I/16), occasionally does quite well not to take new experiences as an occasion to throw out its previous theories, but to explain them by the “introduction of testable auxilliary hypotheses.” (IV/43) Popper thus cheerfully presents arguments that completely reduce his “testing method” to absurdity. However, he does not think that he has been refuted by these arguments, but insists that a testing method is used in science that does not lead to clarity about the question of whether the theory is correct. He likes this test precisely because it ends with this open result, and he insists on this result so much that he can only regard the effort to dispel doubts about a theory as an inadmissible attempt to evade the test:

“If we allow such immunization, then every theory becomes unfalsifiable. Thus we must exclude at least some immunizations.” (IV/42)

He thus virtually makes it a criterion of scientific theories that they may be false, that is, that they are not knowledge:

“If somebody proposed a scientific theory he should answer, as Einstein did, ask the question: ‘Under what conditions would I admit that my theory is untenable?’ In other words, what conceivable facts would I accept as refutations, or falsifications, of my theory?” (IV/41)

A rather stupid request, one might think, because what kind of “facts” are these that are “possible” even though they are theoretically ruled out? Popper demands that every theorist acknowledge, without any reason and in contradiction to the reasons he asserts in his theory, that things could be different. He does not demand that the theory be tested, but rather that the theorist’s attitude to his theory be put to the test. He is supposed to accept a skeptical reservation against his own views that is not based on anything and which Popper endows with the predicates “critical” and “rational,” although it is neither critical, because it does not raise a well-founded objection to anything, nor rational, because it does not represent any theoretical achievement at all, but only consists in the refusal to even comprehend theories. This untheoretical attitude is anything but a method to find out “where something has gone wrong.” (IV/133) It is a reason for the unobjective kind of exclusion that Popper identifies with “dogmatists” – a label that shows how objectively Popper argues: he associates people who have arguments for holding on to their knowledge with the church calling for belief in its doctrines! – and excommunicates them from the realm of science.

The reason for this exclusion has for a long time had nothing to do with the intellectual achievement known as experience – the second part of the bogus claim – which Popper introduced as a standard for theory formation. This has already been underhandedly dissolved in the claim that it is a “mere hypothesis.” The standard he wants to see applied to theories is therefore not “the facts” at all, but is determined by different views of them. If the request is then made to science to orient itself according to this standard, then theory formation is about not falling outside the framework of what fits into the existing intellectual landscape. Popper can say this even more clearly. Under the heading “The Problem of the Empirical Basis,” (I/43) he treats perception as a “subjective experiences or our feelings of conviction,” (1/44) in order to make it clear that it cannot convince him as the “empirical basis” of science. This gives him the freedom to introduce a different criterion for those “singular statements” that are to serve as a standard for science: They must be “inter-subjectively tested” (I/44) and be “recognized” by the community of researchers “by resolution, by convention” (I/71). In his eyes, whatever enjoys this universal recognition can then confidently be called a fact in which “a theory proves itself,” even if it can no longer be confused with a fact in that sense. This criterion covers everything that the association of free researchers considers to be a useful idea:

“A theory is a tool which we test by applying it, and which we judge as to its fitness by the results of its applications.” (I/108)

And Popper also explains what this “point of view of the pragmatic value of science” (II/42) means in relation to a society that is not based on knowledge, thus for which knowledge is not useful either. He sketches the image of a science that is useful for “social technology,” (IIIb/82) which does not even ask questions such as “What is the state?” or “What is credit?” (II/24), which does not pursue the “world-averse intellectual interest in the why of social phenomena,” (II/46) but instead focuses on the question of “what measures we can take if we want to achieve certain results,” (II/34) thus seeks to develop “social improvement proposals” (II/47) and unerringly links to universally recognized problems – which are not facts, but ideological interpretations of facts set by political power! – in order to consider these problems from the constructive spirit of a concern with coping with them. This kind of adaptation to reality is what Popper has in mind with his empiricism.

The overall bogus claim consists of Popper not dealing with a method of science at all, but rather justifying attitudes toward it. His “method of science” does not describe how existing science works. Nor does it provide a recipe for doing science, not even a wrong one. With its precept of skepticism, with its dialectic of boldness and modesty, with its dissolution of empirical facts into conventions by which a like-minded community of researchers fails theories but lets their constructive nonsense pass, his theory of science formulates a morality of thinking. Popper prescribes the solipsism of a community of private daydreamers as the attitude that the mind must adopt before and during all activities and demands a thorough renunciation of even the slightest tampering with reality by devoting oneself to it theoretically. Even if scientific pluralism does not come about by heeding Popper’s scientific morality, its requirement of skepticism – after all, it demands nothing other than acknowledging that other views of the matter are just as feasible, that one’s own are therefore irrelevant – fits this activity, the “competition between hypotheses,” (II/155) the juxtaposition of contradictory theories about the same subject, about which Popper is so enthusiastic. With his theory of science, he gives this democratically organized pluralism his methodological blessing by insisting – and he is right to do so – on its incompatibility with knowledge. This is only possible through the bogus claim he undertakes. The whole thing should still be recognizable as science, which is why Popper uses titles such as “Experience” and “Critique” to remind us of objective thinking, which he denies under these titles, and in the end even insists that a science that satisfies his principled command to doubt thinking can claim objectivity: “‘Knowledge’ in this sense is objective.” (IV/86)

II. The political moral philosopher

1. How skepticism justifies affirmation

When, in addition to science, Popper comments on the world at large, democracy, technology, Marxism, the Greens and the youth, the impression that he has developed other theories apart from and besides his theory of knowledge is quite wrong. With this discipline, which has allowed him to study “inductive inferences” and “problems of the basis of experience” in his research life, Popper is already fully equipped to take a competent position on all these matters – and to take sides with the right cause. Strictly speaking, he does not even need his theory of knowledge for this; the standpoint that justifies it is enough: The “Socratic saying, ‘I know that I do not know,’” (IV/36) which he professes, does not compel this man to ever shut up – this is obviously not what he means by the “intellectual modesty” (IV/36) that he preaches – but rather allows him to make the most comprehensive statements imaginable about the world and its inventory:

“We live in a beautiful world, and we have created here in the Western world the best social system that has ever existed.” (X)

Anyone expecting an explanation of the social system, or at least a list of the achievements that could lead to the unrestrained rejoicing unhampered by any skepticism, will be disappointed. Popper continues his report on the “beautiful Western world” by pointing out the problems that obviously exist in this world and the difficulties involved in eliminating them:

“And we are constantly trying to improve it (the social system), to reform it, which is anything but easy. Many reforms that offer themselves to us as hopeful, unfortunately turn out to be misguided. For it is one of the most important realizations that the consequences of our social policies are often quite different from what we intended and could have foreseen.” (X)

We are not told what is wrong with this world and what calls for improvement, nor are we told the reasons why the apparently universal desire for improvement so consistently fails. That is not even necessary. What the statement does is transform everything that could give rise to criticism – in this way, one appropriates objections without addressing their substance! – firstly, into a problem that an ideal “we” are working on solving, and secondly, explain that the problem has so far failed to be solved. It is precisely the negative aspects of the most beautiful of all worlds that justify the belief in the positive intentions that prevail within it. However, only those who, thirdly, do not even expect the realization of these intentions – let alone “insist” on it – but make their non-realizability understandable to themselves with the “insight” that in life some schemes backfire, but this, fourthly, does not mean that the good intentions do not exist, but rather insists all the more that they exist in the mode of possibility:

“The open future contains unpredictable and morally wholly different possibilities.” (X)

Popper does not base his affirmative view of reality on anything he finds in reality, but locates it in a realm of possibilities to which he opens up access as a skeptic. As a skeptic who makes ignorance into a rule and, with this point of view, ideally overrides all the necessities that apply in reality, he gives himself the freedom to consider everything conceivable. This stubborn insistence that things can turn out differently does not even lead to an affirmative reference to the “open” possibilities, but can be used to justify any nonsense that gives meaning. Namely, negatively, because nothing is ruled out if you systematically play dumb. Other meaning-givers before and especially after Popper also moved in the mode of possibility with their points of view. They acknowledged this by pointing out that their view of things was entirely due to their point of view, and by insisting that one can see things in this way if one adopts their point of view. In contrast to them, however, Popper completely refrains from specifying any particular aspect in his contribution to positive thinking which, at least the form of reasoning, could be maintained, and takes the category of possibility itself as an ideological principle. In this respect, he does not really come up with a moral concept of his own, but stands above all others and confirms that they are possible.

2. Why the realm of possibilities is democratic

The certainty of this man is astonishing. Equipped only with the abstract idea that the future is “open” – of course, society is also “open” and “full of possibilities” – he identifies democracy as his home and is even able to distinguish it from the then still really existing enemy of the system. But somehow he succeeds:

“Of course, there are always things that are not good and that need to be improved. But that’s what politicians are there for, among other things. At least in a democratic society.” (IX)

Popper could, of course, just as easily have made this solid finding about the objectives of democratic politics, gained from the attitude of problematizing and hoping, about the politicians in the evil empire. However, he does not do so, but instead adopts a rather totalitarian comparison of systems, in which democracy does not appear as a form of government to be judged, but as a standard for all other forms of government, whose unworthiness is determined by the fact that they are not democratic:

“We need only distinguish between two forms of government, viz. such as possess institutions of this kind, and all others; i.e. democracies and tyrannies.” (IIIb/150)

And he really needs nothing more for this partisan distinction than his penchant for competing worldviews presented with skepticism, because he has gained this affirmative perspective from democracy. He values it because it guarantees this kind of intellectual life:

“Science, and more especially scientific progress … needs ever more competition between hypotheses ...Ultimately, progress depends very largely on political factors; on political institutions that safeguard the freedom of thought: on democracy.” (II/154-5)

In Popper’ eyes, it is to democracy’s credit that it establishes a scientific pluralism which, by requiring tolerance toward contrary views and any type of nonsense, is commuted to making the ideas that emerge irrelevant in practice. The fact that it allows science at all speaks in its favor – which allows Popper to casually overlook the fact that the democratic state in its praxis is not guided by scientific insights and with its principle of tolerance insists on its freedom of action in principle. From the perspective, which is not at all decisive for the actions of politicians, that science is of great importance in democracy, Popper’s worldview then turns everything completely upside-down. Popper unerringly recognizes in those whose intellectual achievements have been instrumentalized by the state for its needs and the needs of its capitalists the true subjects who drive social progress forward – “Technicians and scientists are the only ones who can really help” (IX) – even if they do not exactly make a credible impression as the subjects of events:

“All technicians have a vested interest in repairing the damage caused by technology, and science-based technology is the only thing that can help us repair this damage.” (VII)

The already familiar dialectic of improvement and failure makes it unnecessary to look more closely at the question of what kind of “damage” this is and from which uses of technology, for which purposes, it arises. Especially since the harmful effects of the capitalist mode of production on people and nature can be easily overlooked if one concentrates on the truly great achievements of technology:

“Technology has liberated us, and women in particular. The washing machine, for example, and running hot and cold water, and the refrigerator...,” (IX)

... these than are the use values that Popper comes up with as evidence that a technology instrumentalized for the production of value is there to increase convenience and reduce harm! And they too, by the way, are not provided by technology, but sold by capitalists.

In Popper’s crude worldview, democracy – “only democracy” (IIIa/4) – conversely, as a power that serves, “provides an institutional framework” (IIIa/4) for the constructive spirit that is active everywhere; “an invaluable battle-ground for any reasonable reform, since it permits reform without violence” (IIIb/161) and allows “the application of reason to the questions of politics.” (IIIa/25) In order to arrive at this insight, Popper must somehow have confused the requirement of tolerance, which democracy subjects its subjects to, with a rule to which the rulers subject themselves. In any case, as proof of his outrageous assertion that democrats are amenable to reasonable requests for changes in their policies, he cites elections, the likes of which democracy has never seen. Through them, he believes, “the rulers – that is to say, the government – can be dismissed by the ruled without bloodshed.” (IIIb/161) Of course, Popper does not believe this either. With his “that is to say,” he only allows himself the little joke of equating the replacement of a government administration with the idea that the subjects could get rid of a rule they do not like, in order to save his bold hypothesis that democracy is a playground for people who want to assert reasonable or even just good intentions, at least in the form of a possibility.

Otherwise, he is well aware that democracy justifies any bloodshed when it is about its rule. After all, he justifies it himself:

“There is only one further use of violence in political quarrels which I should consider justified” – the other being “the establishment of a democracy” – “I mean the resistance, once democracy has been attained, to any attack (whether from within or without the state) against the democratic constitution.” (IIIb/140)

Popper legitimizes the violence of democracy – e.g., the “use of the atomic bomb” (IX) by the USA – not, of course, honestly from the real interests that the democratic state defends with it, but in the name of the “‘open society’ which sets free the critical powers of man” (IIIa/1), in the name of the possibilities that the positive mind imagines.

3. What people may do

This also refutes the bogus claim that Popper showcases in the practical section of his philosophy. The gesture of intervening, changing and improving dissolves into the permission to indulge in all kinds of illusions about life in a democracy; a permission that Popper expressly grants on the condition that no practical claims may follow from it. As little as Popper’s theory of knowledge is a guide to theorizing, his practical philosophy is just as uninformative about practice – neither about the real one that the democratic state establishes in its interests, nor about another one that wants to set things up more sensibly or even just differently. Popper proclaims in it his morality for living his affirmative stance on current practice, which the man brimming with “intellectual modesty” of course does not consider to be his private affair, but wants to prescribe to other people’s brains. His achievement as a political moralist is to act as the supreme guardian of virtue, to oversee the currents of the zeitgeist, to denounce every critical thought that comes his way as a “poisonous intellectual disease of our own time” (IIIb/8) and to call the police.

His greatest challenge in this respect was Marxism. He dedicated two books to combating it, which he wrote “under the impression of the First World War and the communist mythology of the imminent world revolution” (VII) and “in the darkness of the present world situation” (IIIa/viii) – in 1950, the Cold War was in full swing. From the outset, the challenge was therefore less theoretical in nature than rooted in a political situation in which the state was demanding unconditional partisanship – which the free thinker did not want to ignore. He understood the declaration of enmity by the states subscribing to democracy and market economy against the other system as his mission to preserve science and the zeitgeist from infection by the state doctrine of the enemy of the system. He re-sorted all of science according to this political situation: He discredited honorable intellectual traditions – Plato, Hegel (“the beginning … first of intellectual, and later, as one of its consequences, of moral irresponsibility,” IIIb/28) – for having influenced the intellectual well-poisoner Marx; he denounced recognized disciplines of bourgeois science – in addition to several epistemological -isms, including the philosophy of history, the sociology of knowledge and psychoanalysis – as “consequences” of the miserable attitude; leveled at intellectuals as a whole the accusation of being a “fifth column” (IIIb/96) – for partisanship for the wrong system! A fine example of how social existence determines consciousness!

The embarrassing aspect of the political task for the democratic flagship intellectual was that Marx’s accusations against the system of exploitation couldn’t be ignored because (and as long as) everyone was reminded of them in the form of the really existing alternative. The theory that justified these accusations can’t be silenced; Popper felt compelled to write a “criticism of Marxism” (IIIa/viii). In it, he takes Marx as a “prophet” who wanted to proclaim a “doctrine of historical laws” (II/VII ) with “Capital,”and his rebuttal of Marx is already finished with his skeptic’s insight that the future is “open”:

“There is no reason why we should believe that, of all sciences, social science is capable of realizing the age-old dream of revealing what the future has in store for us.” (IIIb/85)

Popper talks as a theorist of science about the theory he wants to settle accounts with, which has the advantage of not having to take its content into consideration. The fact that “Capital” is not about science but about economics does not prevent him from deriving a concept of science from it that he calls “historicism” and considers refuted: he knows namely that science consists in making predictions that can not be proven! Although Popper wrote an entire book on “The Poverty of Historicism” in which “historicists” even appear and demonstrates how “different variants” (II/20) of this species could argue and possibly “actually” argue – “method is advocated by many of the followers of historicism...” (II/57) – it can hardly be assumed that anyone anywhere has ever been so moronic as to confuse science and clairvoyance and to think “historicistically.” In this -ism, Popper quite obviously only presents the constructed counter-image to his belief in “open” possibilities, namely that “science can predict the future” because it is “predetermined.” (IIIb/84).He thus wages a mock battle against Marx in which he sets up and shoots down a straw-man.

What makes this undertaking so extensive – in his book “The Open Society and its Enemies,” Popper needs over 200 pages for it – is that it is not so easy to identify Marx’s theory with an attempt at clairvoyance. After Popper first spends 60 pages talking about the nonsensical method he attributes to Marx –

“Marxism is a purely historical theory, a theory which aims at predicting the future course of economic and power-political developments and especially of revolutions” (IIIb/82-3) –

it is time to take Marx’s theory in hand and come to “Marx's prophecy,” namely the “prediction of the emergence of a classless, i.e. socialist, society.” (IIIb/136) Since Popper sees this prophecy unfortunately only rudimentarily developed in “Capital” and for the most part “only sketched,” (IIIb/136) he feels compelled to fill in what is missing in the next 40 pages himself. And Popper not only cites the arguments that he sought in vain in Marx, he also comments on them critically! In general, “Capital” needs to be thoroughly “improved,” (IIIb/209) because Marx argued terribly badly for his prediction – “In order to make as strong a case for Marx’s theory as I can, I have altered it slightly.” (IIIb /179) Instead, he dwelled on matters that are really quite superfluous to the attempt to predict the “course of revolutions”:

“Marx’s theory of value, usually considered by Marxists as well as by anti-Marxists as a corner-stone (?) of the Marxist creed, is in my opinion one of its rather unimportant parts ...” (IIIb/170)

Especially since, without the theory of value, many things can be said again in understandable words, e.g. that the “accumulation of capital” which Marx speaks of “means” as much as the expansion of “machines,” (IIIb/180) etc....

The bourgeois thinker finds it difficult to deny the knowledge of the necessities of capitalism which unfortunately still exists and can’t be ignored (at the time), and which also criticizes – and this clearly touches Popper! – all the illusions about what is possible within this system and how much room it leaves for the humanistic desire for improvement. Popper is also happy to grant Marx this desire for improvement: Marx “had a burning desire to help the oppressed.” (IIIb/82) Unfortunately, he still has to brand him a criminal because he insisted with his theory that “it is also vain to hope that circumstances may be improved.” (IIIb/114) This hope – it doesn't matter that it is “vain”! – is what gives life meaning in a democracy and prevents people from freaking out:

“By persuading young people that they live in a bad world, you drive them to suicide and to terrorism.” (IX)

After the issue with Marx was practically settled, all other critical minds, especially “the intellectuals,” (IX) including the Greens, had to listen to such statements about response patterns peculiar to humans, especially young ones, as a reproach: From a man whose image of human nature envisages “vain hope” as the lifeblood to which humans – especially when they are not yet morally stabilized by submission to the constraints established by democracy! – have a right and which democracy grants them! The ruling democrats and their public thank Popper for this.

***

I The Logic of Scientific Discovery. New York 1966.
II The Poverty of Historicism. London 1957.
IIIa The open society and its enemies. Volume I: The Spell of Plato. Princeton 1966.
IIIb The open society and its enemies. Volume II: The High tide of prophecy: Hegel, Marx and the Aftermath. London 1947.
IV Unended Quest: An Intellectual Autobiography. London 1982.
V The Self and Its Brain (with John Eccles). Berlin 1977.
VI Interview in Die Welt, July 6, 1987.
VII Interview in Die Welt, July 8, 1987.
VIII Interview in Die Welt, July 11, 1987.
IX Interview in Die Welt, February 21, 1990.
X Lecture cited in Süddeutsche Zeitung, June 15/16, 1991.