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Plato and Popper

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  07 November 2014

G. P. Grant
G. P. Grant*
Affiliation:
Dalhousie University
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Extract

In 1945 Professor K. R. Popper published a work on political theory called The Open Society and Its Enemies. It extols the “open” as against the “closed” society and criticizes those thinkers who have supposedly advocated the closed society. The first volume is concerned with criticizing Plato, whom Popper believes to be the chief totalitarian theorist of the ancient world; the second volume with the criticism of Hegel and Marx as the chief totalitarian theorists of modern Europe. This article sets out to refute what Popper says about Plato. Space forbids a defence of Hegel, although such a defence would be valuable these days when some men choose a few political sentences from Hegel, detach them from his central philosophic position, and put him in the same category as Marx. Nevertheless, Plato is a greater genius even than Hegel, so that the refutation of Popper's position can rest on what he says about the greatest of philosophers.

Such a defence is incumbent on a philosopher in these days, when no adequate understanding of Plato can be assumed. Indeed in North America, where the fides implictta of the social scientists has been empirical and pragmatic, Popper's thesis is liable to convince; for it is in essence a justification of that pragmatic tradition against the rationalism of Plato. Men who want to believe that there is such a thing as an independent “social science” can find in Popper reasons for doing so.

Type
Research Article
Information
Canadian Journal of Economics and Political Science/Revue canadienne de economiques et science politique , Volume 20 , Issue 2 , May 1954 , pp. 185 - 194
Copyright
Copyright © Canadian Political Science Association 1954

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References

1 This article makes use of the 1949 English edition of Popper's work.

2 I have to use Professor Popper's name so often that it would seem pedantic to affix a title to it each time.

3 The Open Society, I, 149.Google Scholar

4 Ibid., I, 73. I would disagree with the interpretation of Plato as a dualist. I believe that Plato's philosophy centres on the conception of a transcendent good and thereby overcomes the dualism between universal and particular, the one and the many, soul and body, etc. In other words I accept in broad outline Plotinus' interpretation of Plato. However, to justify this would require many pages and is not necessary for this article, because Popper does not discuss Plato's metaphysics as true or false.

5 This is not the place for a detailed historical analysis of the causes of the Peloponnesian War. Suffice it to say that Popper's justification of Athenian imperialism seems to forget a large part of the history.

6 As that evidence cannot be presented here, I would refer the reader to two recent books largely concerned with the question: Dodds, E. R., The Greeks and the Irrational (Berkeley, Calif., 1951)Google Scholar, and Cornford, F. M., Principium Sapientiae (Cambridge, 1952).Google Scholar

7 The Open Society, I, 167.Google Scholar

8 I believe Popper's argument would be clearer if he used the traditional terminology which distinguishes between Plato's and Aristotle's position as to the ontological status of ideas. That is to call Plato's position “realism,” Aristotle's “conceptualism,” and his own “nominalism.” To lump Aristotle and Plato together as he does makes it impossible to distinguish the different positions the two philosophers take about human conduct, individuality, and God.

9 I must admit that I can find little evidence that modern social science is essentialist. It has always seemed to me nominalist in the extreme.

10 It is strange that if, as Popper says, Plato's chief enemy is democracy and his chief joy totalitarianism the ideally bad man is the despot and the ideally bad society despotism.

11 Popper has also mentioned this in Part I of a Symposium, “What Can Logic Do for Philosophy?” in Aristotelian Society, Supplementary Volume XXII, Logical Positivism and Ethics (London, 1948), 141–54.Google Scholar

12 The Open Society, I, the final chapter.

13 I use Popper's phrase “social engineer,” for those men taken up with political responsibility. The word, however, has a distasteful ring because the analogy between men and pieces of steel, efficiently put together into a bridge, is hardly a pleasant one. It is unfortunate that Popper uses this phrase for he obviously has a more libertarian view of personality than his metaphor would imply.

14 I must make clear that I am not referring to Christianity per se, but to one historical manifestation of it.