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Three people were engaged in this conversation: Isaiah Berlin, John Gray and myself. We met on May 6, 1988 at All Souls College, Oxford.
POPPER’S CRITIQUE OF ESSENTIALISM
BP-S There were two controversial points on which we disagreed during our last meeting. You questioned my interpretation of Popper’s essentialism[1] and then his attitude towards discussing values. Dr Gray was kind enough to read my piece on that.
IB One thing I was very shocked about were your quotations from Popper. Indeed, I was shocked at Popper. I had no idea that he objects to einquiries into meaning.
JG Yes, he does.
IB It’s a terrible thing. I can’t see how any philosopher can do without.
JG He says that anyone who talks about the meaning of words is an essentialist.
IB Is an essentialist! Well that assumes that every word pins on to an object.
JG Yes, but, for example, Austin and Wittgenstein would both be essentialists, which is absurd.
IB Yes, it’s absurd, but in general, without knowing what words mean or how people use words, I can’t even read them. It’s extraordinary, it seems to me fanatical in some curious way. It’s all directed against positivism. It’s against saying that the meaning of a proposition is the means of its verification. The meaning of a proposition is not the thing we want to know about. We want to know if it’s true or false, we understand what it means without help.
JG That’s right, without analysis.
IB Without help, too. We all know what these words mean, so there’s no point in bothering with it. I didn’t realize how far it went.
BP-S Popper interpreted essentialism in such an extreme way only in his intellectual autobiography.[2]
IB I’m really interested in his disciples in that respect. Do any of them have the appearance of saying the same thing?
JG Well, he has so few disciples left anyway …
IB Oh, you talk to [Bryan] Magee and he’ll tell you that great congresses of Popperists meet in America, in Germany, in Italy, everywhere in the world, full of Popper disciples. But they are not philosophers, perhaps.
JG No, that’s just it. Some are scientists, some are psychologists– very few philosophers.
IB I’ll tell you who was: Lakatos was. You know what Lakatos said about him?
JG No.
IB I found out the other day. He thought that The Open Society and Its Enemies should have been called The Open Society by One of Its Enemies.
JG That’s very good!
IB Lakatos was remarkable.He was a Hungarian socialist and Ccommunist. He was very Stalinist and one of the real Commissars in Hungary after 1947/48. Then in 19‘56 he quarrelled with the Communists and decided he couldn’t go on. He was a mathematician by training. He read mathematical physics and mathematical philosophy, and he became a devoted disciple of Popper. There was a tremendous breach, and then he died. I don’t know what he was in the end.
JG He considered himself a sort of critical Popperian.
IB He was a very clever man.
JG Very. His essays on Popper are cleverer than Popper. Much better.
IB But he was always a little mad. He was offered a job here, in mathematical logic.And there was a committee, attached to this College, on which I sat for some reason. He sent us a telegram saying that he went as far as Reading station for the interview, but then thought better of it and went back.
JG He died very young, didn’t he?
IB Yes, sadly. Popper said of him, “I cannot put his recommendation in higher terms than the following five words: he has changed my ideas.” More than that no man could hope to do. It was quite funny. I’m sorry, let’s go back. First of all, essentialism.
BP-S His understanding of it evolved.
IB In The Open Society it has a clear meaning. All that essentialism means is that things have an unchanging core or nature which cannot be altered by empirical forces and which determines their development, i.e. their future or whatever they have. That’s what he thinks Plato or Aristotle says.[3] And they do, he’s right on that, since they do believe in essences. Kant believed that, Leibniz believed that, and quite a lot of others.
JG Even Spinoza.
IB Spinoza believed that. Metaphysics is the study of the nature and development of entities in the world without empirical help. Well, with empirical help, but so that empirical evidence cannot be followed. So in theory, if you have a special kind of eye, a magic eye, by looking at a chicken very very steadily you would know that it must produce eggs, without ever seeing it happen.
JG Yes, it is the nature of a chicken to produce eggs.
IB The nature of a chicken is to be unable to avoid producing eggs, and you would be able to predict that it will produce eggs without anyone having ever seen an egg. That is a slight parody of it but, in a way, it’s what it comes to. Man must develop in certain ways and if he does not develop in that way then he is warped, then he is twisted, then he’s a failure of creation. That’s what it all comes to. It is monistic because you can’t have two paths which this entity is compelled metaphysically to go along.
JG So essences can’t contain inconsistencies or even complexities.
IB Exactly. They cannot. I don’t think anyone thinks they can. Essences are dialectical in Hegel. Essences do not exactly contain contradictions. They contain development, which takes the form of certain conflicts, which then result in something else. The conflicts are inevitable, the results are inevitable, the whole thing is foretold. Few people foretell it because they are too stupid, or too ignorant, or too prejudiced, or haven’t read Hegel. But, in principle …
JG So Popper’s early sense of essentialism was very clear.
IB Perfectly clear, and that’s what he denies, and that’s why all empiricists are in favour of Popper and that book of his. But there is the other sense, according to which the examination of words depends on thinking that words are in some metaphysical way attached to something in the universe, like caps attached to heads.
JG He claims that the early Wittgenstein thought that.
IB Well, the early Wittgenstein said that all words were names of atomic facts. And since the world consisted of atomic facts, if you had enough names, and the relations between the names were adjusted to the relations between the facts, then you could read off what relates to what, as if from a sheet of graph paper.
JG Popper seems to think that anyone who’s concerned about meanings must have that belief.
IB Atomic facts are simply a private invention of Russell which Wittgenstein took over. Nobody except Russell and Wittgenstein believed in atomic facts. It was a specific belief, attached to a particular metaphysical doctrine of what the world consisted of, and it was really believed only by two philosophers and their disciples at the time.
JG Wittgenstein said a funny thing, didn’t he, when he abandoned the view …
IB “My God,” he said, “I thought all words were names and they’re not.”
JG Yes, and then he said, “I’ve never given an example of an atomic fact. I thought it was a purely empirical matter.”
IB They were like little bits of stuff, tiny little things, little atoms. He said that they were indivisible, the ultimate constituents of the world. It’s very naive in a way, but Leibniz thought the same. It was an attempt to say that mathematics can be applied to the world, and if there was a language which accurately reflected the mathematical structure of reality, you could read the structure off. So it’s an old idea which comes to Russell via Leibniz, I would think.
JG Yes, of course his first book was on Leibniz.
IB Not his first book; his first book was on German Social Democracy.[4] Sorry, back to essentialism.
BP-S You questioned what I said about Popper; that he believes in the unity of method.
JG I think he does, doesn’t he?
IB Well, maybe, but I have one more question. He certainly believes in the unity of method in the sciences, that’s clear. He thinks that the Logik der Forschung, research establishing a theory in the sciences, follows a very difficult definite formula. But I’m not so sure that he applies that to the world, and certainly not to ethics.
JG No, certainly not to ethics.
IB Nor to common sense. Because they’re subjective, because they’re not science.
JG Nor to metaphysics.
IB Metaphysics is no different from fraud, so I don’t think we need to talk about that.
BP-S But how about the social sciences?
IB Well, ideally, yes. He knows it doesn’t quite work, but in principle, yes. You’re quite right. He thinks that economics and sociology are capable of being sciences. Most people do.
JG That’s where his disciple Soros disagrees with him, isn’t it? He says he’s a methodological dualist. He says his work as a financier has convinced him that there are no laws in the social sciences.
IB He’s quite right. That’s why Popper disapproved of me. The first difference I had with Popper was on what I wrote in an article entitled “History and Theory.”[5] It was the first article of the first number of a journal called “History and Theory”; the periodical is named after that article. I never wrote for it again. There I made an attempt to show that the application of scientific method to history is bound to be a failure. I don’t say that I believe everything in it, but the fundamental thesis was this: When you say about a historian, “He’s very doctrinaire,” that is a reproach. Nobody says about scientists that they are doctrinaire, because doctrines are their business. Scientists can’t operate without theories. Yet, why do you think it is said about historians, “He’s very doctrinaire?”? As a criticism. The assumption is that there is some kind of theory into which the facts can be fitted, and if some facts don’t fit, you have to do something with the facts, squeeze them or squash them, rather like Marxism. There were lots of historical theorists. Hegel was one, Spengler was one, Toynbee was one.
JG Hayek does that, too.
IB Hayek, yes, I’m sure. He believes that there is a theory. He doesn’t believe it about social science, you remember. Scientism is a heresy.
JG That’s right.
IB Hayek says that the attempt to apply the new methods of the new sciences which came to fruition in the early nineteenth century, in France particularly, is a fatal apreplication of the theory of the natural sciences to human events. That leads in the end to despotism, to tyranny and all the rest of it. That is very Hayek. That, I think, Popper doesn’t accept.
BP-S He says that the methods of the natural sciences and the social sciences are very close.
IB Very close. That’s an attempt to say truth is a science. Freud said, “Science may not be able to solve all problems, but you may be sure that what science can’t solve, nothing else will either.” That’s virtually Popper.
BP-S He says in Conjectures and Refutations that the aim of the social sciences is to trace unintended consequences.[6]
IB Well, that’s all right.
BP-S And that this is testable empirically.
IB Well, no doubt any given doctrine about the unintended consequences of factors A, B, C, D can be tested. If you are sure you have enough instances, well, then of course any general proposition can be tested. It’s undeniable that sociologists, psychologists and you and I make a large number of propositions beginning with the word “aAny” or beginning with the word “aAll,” and that all these propositions, in principle, can be tested. But it doesn’t follow that the methods of the sciences–, experiment, observation etc.–, apply to everything. Let me give you an example. When Engels said, “Iin the absence of a Napoleon, someone else would have taken his place,”[7] how do you test that?
JG You can’t.
IB Or if someone says, “A lot of what you’re doing now, if there were a genius, he would have done.” Maybe, maybe not. Anyhow, I stick to my dogmatic, narrow view of the possibility of applying the methods of the natural sciences to history. What methods occur in history is another matter. My view is quite simple–, it’s rather like Vico. Anything which the natural sciences can do, they should do. Whatever can be done – probability calculations, examinations of the effects of climate, of the weather, examination of biological factors, physiological factors, anything which you can do in natural science – should be done. You mustn’t stop, you mustn’t say it’s no good, it doesn’t apply. But, after that everything is left because …
BP-S The third basket.[8]
IB The third basket, all right. I’ll tell you another thing which I believe, and about which there is disagreement between me and others, although it’s never come out in the form of controversy. Take the analysis of the French Revolution. The first thing which the scientific historian, in that sense of scientific, would have to do would be to say, “What is common to the French Revolution and all other revolutions which we know about?” Can you examine, for example, the English Revolution, or the American Revolution, or the Russian Revolution, or the 1848 revolutions, or forty-seven47 other revolutions? And from that you would abstract something which you regard as common to all revolutions as such. This could be done. I don’t deny that you probably would get a result. There are things common to all revolutions. They occur when the previous regime was not very strong, or where indignation on the part of a large number of people is of a sufficient degree of violence,whatever. But then, after you’ve done all that, what people really want to know about the French Revolution is:, Wwhat happened then? What is unique to that revolution, not what it has in common with others. What Danton did, what Robespierre did, what happened in this situation, who was then killed then, what did they want and how was it frustrated, why didn’t this happen, why didn’t that happen? Karl Marx believed the opposite. He said that the French Revolution went wrong because they didn’t take account of enough theories. For example, they were entirely interested in politics, or they were interested ina strong political desire for liberty, not in economics, not in sociology.If they’d attended to that, the French Revolution wouldn’t have failed. Because a revolution made on the basis of strict scientific knowledge would be enabled to predict the results of certain actions. You have to take these actions, and the results follow. If you apply a match to a piece of paper, it will burn. If you know enough, you can guarantee a successful revolution.