O positivismo (crítico) de Popper em crítica

As for Karl Popper, some smart people thought he was one. In 1950 he gave a lecture at the University of Chicago, evidently a kind of audition for an appointment there. This prospect alarmed Leo Strauss, who had arrived on the faculty there just a year before. He wrote to Eric Voegelin, at LSU, to solicit his view of Popper, whose Chicago lecture on “social philosophy,” Strauss said,

was beneath contempt: it was the most washed-out lifeless positivism trying to whistle in the dark, linked to a complete inability to think “rationally,” although it passed itself off as “rationalism”–it was very bad. I cannot imagine that such a man ever wrote something that was worthwhile reading, and yet it appears to be a professional duty to become familiar with his production.

Voegelin replied just eight days later, with a letter that would be framed and displayed with a dedicated spotlight if there were a Museum of Academic Smackdowns. Herewith just some of the choicer parts of it (these excerpts are from Peter Emberley and Barry Cooper’s compilation of the Strauss-Voegelin correspondence, published twenty years ago as Faith and Political Philosophy):

The opportunity to speak a few deeply felt words about Karl Popper to a kindred soul is too golden to endure a long delay. This Popper has been for years, not exactly a stone against which one stumbles, but a troublesome pebble that I must continually nudge from the path, in that he is constantly pushed upon me by people who insist that his work on the “open society and its enemies” is one of the social science masterpieces of our times. This insistence persuaded me to read the work even though I would otherwise not have touched it. You are quite right that it is a vocational duty to make ourselves familiar with the ideas of such a work when they lie in our field; I would hold out against this duty the other vocational duty, not to write and publish such a work. In that Popper violated this elementary vocational duty and stole several hours of my lifetime, which I devoted in fulfilling my vocational duty, I feel completely justified in saying without reservation that this book is impudent, dilettantish crap. Every single sentence is a scandal, but it is still possible to lift out a few main annoyances.

Voegelin proceeds to do just that, in some detail, remarking along the way that “Popper is philosophically so uncultured, so fully a primitive ideological brawler, that he is not able even approximately to reproduce correctly the contents of one page of Plato.” He concludes his judgment thus:

Briefly and in sum: Popper’s book is a scandal without extenuating circumstances; in its intellectual attitude it is the typical product of a failed intellectual; spiritually one would have to use expressions like rascally, impertinent, loutish; in terms of technical competence, as a piece in the history of thought, it is dilettantish, and as a result is worthless.

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