115 of 126 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
Common Sense, Rigorously Applied, August 3, 2001
This review is from: The Open Society and Its Enemies, Vol. 1: The Spell of Plato (Paperback)
This is a paperback in two volumes: volume I subtitled "Plato", and volume II subtitled "Hegel and Marx". Each volume has a table of contents, text, addenda, truly awe-inspiring endnotes, an index of names, and of subjects. This is a review of BOTH volumes.
"If in this book harsh words are spoken about some of the greatest among the intellectual leaders of mankind, my motive is not...to belittle them. ...we must break with the habit of deference to great men. Great men may make great mistakes..." (from the intro to the 1943 edition)
Karl Popper was fighting the war in his own way. He saw what was essentially the same in Stalin and Hitler: a monstrous confidence. They may have drawn on different philosophies of the state, but it came to the same thing in the end: wholesale murder as a tool of social engineering.
But WWII is over, and we won. Moreover, the Soviet Union has collapsed, and we won again. So what is the fuss? Relax: Marxism is dead, Platonism sounds quaint, and who the hell is Hegel, anyway?
But don't rest easy just yet, free-market man! Every four years we seem to reaffirm our need for a philosopher-king. And while the historicist faith is now all tarted-up with computers, networking, and the Fable of the Bees and re-christened "emergent order", it still leaves us feeling smug and moral in doing nothing but tending our own gardens.
Popper is pithy throughout, but I only started noting things (this time around) at the penultimate chapter of the work, 24:
"... the fight against suffering must be considered a duty, while the right to care for the happiness of others must be considered a privilege confined to the close circle of their friends."(vII, p237)
[on language, and the aim of rationalism] "... to use it plainly ... as an instrument of rational communication ... rather than as a means of 'self-expression', as the vicious romantic jargon of most of our educationists has it." (p239) See also II, pp276/7 on the aims of education.
[On bullshit] "... irrationalism will use reason too, but without any feeling of obligation."(II,240)
A brilliant look at Hegelian thinking in the sociology of knowledge (II,242/3), which must be read whole, but ends: " ... their thoughts are endowed ... with 'mystical and religious faculties' not possessed by others, and who thus claim that they 'think by God's grace'. This claim with its gentle allusion to those who do not possess God's grace, this attack upon the potential spiritual unity of mankind, is, in my opinion, as pretentious, blasphemous and anti-Christian, as it believes itself to be humble, pious, and Christian."
Popper is relentlessly brilliant in moral indignation. See his pointing out that moral futurism (e.g. 'the meek shall inherit the earth') condones the abdicating of individual moral responsibility, since one need do nothing toward this certain end. His answer: "...it is certainly possible to combine an attitude of the utmost reserve and even of contempt towards worldly success in the sense of power, glory, and wealth, with the attempt to do one's best in this world, and to further the ends one has decided to adopt...for their own sake."(II, 274)
This is one of the great works of practical philosophy of the century. Awesome in scholarship, relentless in moral vision, yet as fair-minded as his own high standards dictate, Popper has produced a book that is at once an explication of important philosophers who have had a malign impact and an attempt, largely successful, to demythologize them, and to give the average reader intellectual weapons to combat their legacy. His care is, at all times, to be clear and rational. He is concerned to communicate, not to obscure. The spirit of civilization shines through this work; it exemplifies what is best in our intellectual and spiritual heritage.
A hint: read a few of the notes to convince yourself that Popper has completely mastered his material (in several languages), that he has anticipated all the main counterarguments to his positions, and that he stands ready to defend in severe philosophical jargon anything he seems too-casually to advert to in the text. Then just read the books, and dig into the notes later, when you go back to a section for some serious research.
Help other customers find the most helpful reviews
Was this review helpful to you? Yes
No
81 of 88 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
The Greatest Book of the 20th Century?, September 7, 2000
This review is from: The Open Society and Its Enemies, Vol. 1: The Spell of Plato (Paperback)
I think the title of this review is a true description of this book, but I urge you to judge for yourself. My only regret is that I did not read it many years ago when my head was turned by the siren calls of what Popper calls 'tribalism'. Even then I heard about it and had it pooh-poohed as 'old hat' by 'advanced' thinkers (self-styled!). Often misinterpreted as an attack on Plato, Marx and Hegel, it is in reality a stirring defense of democracy and liberalism, written at democracy's darkest hour. Now that Marxism has collapsed, Popper in an interview given before his death called for us now to look for the 'roads not taken', admitting that embattled western liberalism became, to a certain extent, an unquestioned dogma like its opponents. A good place to start that search is with Popper's greatest book.
Help other customers find the most helpful reviews
Was this review helpful to you? Yes
No
27 of 30 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
Portrait of the Philosopher-King as an Artist, August 21, 2006
This review is from: The Open Society and Its Enemies, Vol. 1: The Spell of Plato (Paperback)
When confronted with the rise of totalitarianism and the destruction of all that he held dear, Poper felt a single, overwhelming urge: to return to the Greeks, to the dawn of our civilization, so as to understand the root of the evil and to offer a practical way out of bestiality. His search was motivated by the insight that "this civilization has not yet fully recovered from the shock of its birth--the transition from the tribal or 'closed society', with its submission to magical forces, to the 'open society', which sets free the critical powers of man."
Heraclitus set the stage with his claim that "the cosmos, at best, is like a rubbish heap scattered at random." If "everything is in flux" and "you cannot step twice into the same river", then at least we can try to discover the historical or evolutionary laws which will enable us to prophesy the destiny of man.
Plato's claim to greatness is to have discovered such a law: that "all social change is corruption or decay or degeneration," and that the only way to break this cycle of decay is to arrest development and return to the Golden Age, where no change occurs. His belief in perfect and unchanging things, the Platonic Ideas from which all things originate, finds its expression in all fields of inquiry: be it social justice, nature and convention, wisdom and truth, or goodness and beauty.
Behind these lofty ideals, Popper uncovers a discomforting truth: Plato envisioned the ideal Greek polity as a totalitarian nightmare, where the 'race of the guardians' had to be kept pure from any miscegenation and where the role of the rulers was to breed the human cattle according to some esoteric formula (the 'Platonic Number', a number determining the True Period of the human race). Along his apology of Sparta came his endorsement of infanticide and his recommendation that children of both sexes be "brought within the sight of actual war and made to taste blood."
Popper demonstrates that these crazy ideas were not the vague mumblings of an otherwise sound philosopher: they were central tenets in Plato's philosophy, a system which has been characterized by another author as "the most savage and most profound attack upon liberal ideas which history can show."
Popper connects this extreme radicalism of the Platonic approach with its aestheticism, i.e. with "the desire to build a world which is not only a little better and more rational than ours, but which is free from all its ugliness." Plato, the Philosopher-King, can be best characterized as an artist: a man attracted to a world of pure beauty, a craftsman who tries to visualize an ideal model of his work and to copy it faithfully, and for whom "the part has to be executed for the sake of the whole, and not the whole for the sake of the part." His desire to "start from a clean canvas" or his claim to prefer "the original to the copy" find disturbing echoes in contemporary political debates. Contrary to Plato's belief, however, the canvas can never be made clean, and the copy often improves upon the original.
Let's give Popper the last word: "But there I must protest. I do not believe that human lives may be made the means for satisfying an artist's desire for self-expression. We must demand, rather, that every man should be given, if he wishes, the right to model his life himself, as far as this does not interfere too much with others. Much as I sympathize with the aesthetic impulse, I suggest that the artist might seek expression in another material."
Help other customers find the most helpful reviews
Was this review helpful to you? Yes
No
