In conversation with James Kierstead
It was, and still is, an unenviable journey. For most people it is the other side of the world, a drowsy corner of boredom and isolation and stillness and parochial concerns. But a good job is a good job, and so James Kierstead found himself packing up his life in America and trekking-out on an academic relocation to the sheepy fields of New Zealand. He was in small company. Very few colleagues of note had made that move before him – and running down the list of ex-faculty nothing jumped-off the page, none of those names, despite all they had achieved, were particularly recognisable… except for one! Someone rich in controversy from all directions:
The mixed nature of Popper’s reputation was made clear to me only a few weeks before I myself moved to New Zealand, at a dinner following an interdisciplinary seminar on ancient political thought at Stanford. When I mentioned my impending move, the conversation soon turned to New Zealand classicists and philosophers, and in this context the name of Karl Popper was one of the first to come up. Very soon the dinner table was divided: though everyone had heard of Popper, only the political scientists in attendance showed unguarded interest; the classicists were unenthusiastic, and the ancient philosophers (both of them Platonists) were openly hostile. The only person actually to praise Popper was an exchange student from China, who was actively engaged in his country’s prodemocracy movement and lauded Popper’s insistence that our future is ours for the making.
Why would classicists care about Karl Popper in the first place, let alone be “unenthusiastic”? Why on earth would those philosophers – the people you might expect to appreciate and embrace Popper the most – be “openly hostile”? And why would an exchange student (and part-time democracy activist) from an authoritarian country be so full of “praise”? Well it all comes down to an unlikely villain and an interesting kind of “war effort”.
Karl Popper’s time in New Zealand was one of exile rather than choice. Pushed out of his native Austria just before the Second World War, New Zealand was the first, and most solid, offer of safe harbour that came Popper’s way. Settling down to the otherworldly calm of Christchurch, Popper was motivated to do his bit, whatever he could, from the distance at which he then sat. It was there, watching back on the horrors unfolding in Europe, that he wrote The Open Society and Its Enemies. The Enemy was naturally totalitarianism and brutality and coercion and disenfranchisement and oppression of all varieties. But His Enemy – the person that Popper named as the divine progenitor of all this carnage – was what shocked his readers and turned so many of them off: the Greek philosopher, Plato.
It was first said by Albert North Whitehead, and it echoes still as a raging cliché around philosophy departments today, that “European philosophical tradition… consists of a series of footnotes to Plato”. A clear embellishment, it is not so much meant to be taken literally as it is to represent the titanic figure that Plato was. He did so much work, of so much significance, so early in the history of philosophy, and in such a welcoming style, that a level of profound awe is certainly appropriate. But when The Open Society was first published a feeling of near-religiosity hung in the air; and so Popper was stomping upon sacred ground.
The level of complete and fawning veneration – both inside and outside of academic circles – for Plato was hard to overstate. People like Richard Livingstone – President of Corpus Christi College, Oxford, for nearly twenty years, and Vice-Chancellor of the entire University from 1944 – were making loud and un-controversial names for themselves by saying that Plato’s Republic was not only an important text in politics or philosophy, but also “the greatest of all books on education”.
Popper wasn’t just challenging this, he was casting a wide and staining moral judgement upon men and women like Livingstone. Far from being a great book on education, Popper saw the Republic as something uniquely dangerous… on a par with Mein Kampf. So those people lining-up to praise Plato, might as well have been crowding-in to the parade grounds at Nuremburg, goose-stepping in unison, and saluting Hitler with an extended Sieg Heil!
And if that didn’t hurt sensibilities enough, there was a tone to Popper’s attack, and a twinkle in his prose, that stood well outside philosophical tradition. Kierstead picks out a few representative examples of this:
The accusation that Plato’s literary skill served only to throw a veil over “the complete absence of rational arguments”; the dismissal of one of his inferences as “a crude juggle”; even the description of the ideal of the philosopher-king as “a monument of human smallness.”
In response to this inflammatory language, Gilbert Ryle wrote back in a kind of shock and disbelief (despite his sympathy with Popper’s analysis) that would sum up many of his colleagues:
[Dr. Popper’s] comments… have a shrillness which detracts from their force. It is right that he should feel passionately. The survival of liberal ideas and liberal practices has been and still is in jeopardy. But it is bad tactics in a champion of the freedom of thought to use the blackguarding idioms characteristic of its enemies. His verdicts are, I think, just, but they would exert a greater influence if they sounded judicial.
But it wasn’t just that he sounded a little too lyrical and bombastic for the taste buds of his day – people like Ryle sniffed out something much more problematic as they saw it. Popper was writing with an unconcealed contempt and a near-belligerent hostility. He was not deliberately dicing pithy, throwaway phrases, into his work to catch eyes and draw attention. He was not playing the role of provocateur, but earnestly talking-down to Plato as might an intellectual superior.
Kierstead’s question: “So which parts of his argument stand up to scrutiny, and which do not?”
The problems start with Popper’s use of the word tribalism. A tribal society for Popper was a closed society, in contrast to his Open Society. It is the dark cave that Greek democracy and Athenian society crawled from, muddied, sick and immoral, and it was where, in Popper’s estimation, that Plato wanted us to return: “Plato was longing for the lost unity of tribal life”.
It was a hard case for many people to swallow. Before Popper, there existed an instinctive difference between those simple, raw, tribal societies, and the highly efficient, centrally planned totalitarian states that he grouped together under the tribal umbrella. What made this comprehensive grouping newly appropriate for Popper was the common diagnosis of Historicism, the idea that history is determined by certain laws, and so the future can be accurately predicted by understanding those laws. Or to quote Gilbert Ryle again, history is “not a bus but a tram.”
When he stabbed this charge into the philosophies of Hegel and Marx, no one was very shocked. Even the blood-red adherents of those philosophies smiled back at him approvingly, nodding their heads and saying out loud, yes, we are historicists, we just don’t think that historicism is a dirty word. But with Plato things didn’t seem to fit quite so neatly… and the champions of Platonic philosophy were much less interested in playing nice.
For many readers, Plato was a man interested in questions of the good life, about how we should live, and what the proper way to be a part of society was; not in grand designs about history, nor about general laws that govern all human development.
The key confusion it seems was around the question of his metaphysical Theory of Forms, the belief that the physical world around us is just an imperfect copy of the Realm of the Forms (an ideal world populated only by perfection). Popper thought that Plato carved his political philosophy directly from this foolish idea, and attributed to him the thought that all change is therefore a negative, something that takes us further away from those ideal forms, and so something that is always corrosive. And make no mistake about it, this is certainly an image of Plato The Historicist.
The trouble is that when classicists dig into relevant passages from Phaedo, they often emerge with something very different in their hands. It is not that with each step we are further away from perfection, but rather when things do get worse it is due to an increased distance from the Forms. So conversely when things noticeably improve it is because that distance to the Forms has been shortened. “Things take on certain qualities because the Forms come to be in them; when a man becomes just, for example, he comes to partake in the Form of justice.”
On this reading not all change is change in one negative direction. And so this is Plato The Anti-historicist. But Popper would bridle at all this talk about perfection and original beauty, and as far as Plato claimed to already know what the end game of history was (of what we should be trying to achieve, not only now but forever) the label still seems to have plenty of purchase. And while Popper does talk about Plato as “the embodiment of an unmitigated authoritarianism”, he is also quick to offer his enemy a few charitable excuses:
"My thesis here is that Plato's central philosophical doctrine, the so-called Theory of Forms or Ideas, cannot be properly understood except in an extra-philosophical context; more especially in the context of the critical problem situation in Greek science which developed as a result of the discovery of the irrationality of the square root of two."
"It seems likely that Plato's Theory of Forms is both in its origin and in its content closely connected with the Pythagorean theory that all things are in essence numbers. The detail of this connection and the connection between Atomism and Pythagoreanism are perhaps not so well known."
But things are about to get much, much darker! And in the eyes of many classicists, as well as many philosophers, much, much less forgivable. Popper wasn’t only saying that Plato was wrong, nor only that he was an authoritarian, but also that he was deliberately dishonest, manipulating and distorting the philosophy and character of his teacher, Socrates. The language is typically rough, and Popper is here fighting to rehabilitate the historical Socrates from his student’s “betrayal”: “the philosopher king is Plato himself, and the Republic is Plato’s own claim for kingly power.”
By assigning psychological motivation to someone thousands of years dead, Popper was clearly reaching here, but the ways in which Plato is commonly defended from this aren’t very impressive either. The first goes like this: Plato’s dialogues are so deeply complex and layered and profound and nuanced and difficult that trying to pull the actual philosophy from them is an impossible task; they are irreducible to any one thing. That this has even been entertained within serious academic circles is an embarrassment to the field! Worse, it is blatantly irrational. That something is hard or difficult or nuanced or complex does not mean that it is therefore impossible. This is a picture of well-trained adults running away from their problems rather than trying to solve them.
But this nonsense does have a slightly less ugly sister, an argument with just a bit more purchase… but only a bit. That is, the dialogues should not be understood as communicating philosophy at all. A better way to describe them for some people – prominent among them was Leo Strauss – were as dramas. As Shakespearian plays of a kind, designed to draw-out the emotions of the audience, to entertain, and to inspire, but not to philosophise. It is an argument that Kierstead has little time for:
There are plenty of ways in which the comparison with Shakespeare is misleading. For a start, a single character dominates a large number of Plato’s dialogues; this is not the case with Shakespeare’s plays. Moreover, though characters in Shakespeare often say things that are of philosophical interest, they do not engage in systematic philosophical enquiry, either on their own or with others. But systematic and cooperative philosophical enquiry does not only happen repeatedly in Plato’s works—it constitutes the lion’s share of the content of almost all of the dialogues.
Which brings us to the Mouthpiece Argument – Popper’s claim that Plato betrayed Socrates, and used him as a puppet for his own philosophy; otherwise known as the Socratic Problem. It is certainly problematic to assign the opinions of any characters to that of their author, but there is a difference here that matters. If the anti-democratic views belong to Plato as Popper claimed, then it would certainly make sense for Plato to write them as Socrates’ instead (as he did). Such authoritarianism and such dissent against the Athenian democracy would not have been able to be voiced publicly at the time… at least not as one’s own.
This is all beside the point. Whether it was Plato or Socrates or even someone else, it is all just tinkering on the fringes of an argument – as are long debates about the nature of authoritarianism, and how authoritarian Plato actually was. As Kierstead explains, even if Popper were wrong in the strength of the label, and had to backtrack on that claim of “the embodiment of an unmitigated authoritarianism”, he would still have accomplished his goal:
In particular, it strikes me that Karl Popper himself would have been quite happy with the statement that Plato, though an authoritarian and even a totalitarian, was not an extreme totalitarian. An acceptance that Plato’s philosophy bore some resemblance to fascism would have been more than he was hoping for; but he probably would not have been terribly upset with it.
If all that people got from the episode was that Plato was indeed an enemy of the Open Society, then the book was still a roaring success. And so it was! The aura of Plato was over, never to recover nor return as it was before Popper took his aim. He was brash, bombastic, loud, at times obnoxious, and he deliberately rattled the sensibilities of the day, and perhaps this was exactly what was needed. For Kierstead, and for so many others, “Popper’s most important contribution was bursting the bubble of the complacent Plato worship that had been carried out for decades”.
And it all started with that journey to the other side of the world and the new quiet life he found there. It is a heritage that New Zealand holds proudly today. They were home to Karl Popper (if only briefly) and from their shores came The Open Society and Its Enemies. But it all might have been different if the peculiar fascinations of Popper had won the day. When he was applying for university positions in New Zealand and Australia, Popper wrote to his old friend Ernst Gombrich with a profound dilemma:
You kindly advise me to prefer Otago [New Zealand] to Perth [Australia], in spite of the Cangeroos [sic]. But I think you don’t really know enough of Australia by far: the nicest animal there (and possibly the loveliest animal that exists) is the Koala bear. Cangeroos may be nice, but the opportunity of seeing a Koala bear is worth putting up with anything, and it is without reservation my strongest motive in wishing to go to Australia.
*** The Popperian Podcast #8 – James Kierstead – ‘New Zealand and the Authoritarianism of Plato’ The Popperian Podcast: The Popperian Podcast #8 – James Kierstead – ‘New Zealand and the Authoritarianism of Plato’ (libsyn.com)