Karl Popper (1902 – 1994) & #Spinoza [2]

Karl Popper raakte al jong teleurgesteld in het marxisme. Stalin en Hitler zag hij als één pot nat. Rotsvaste zekerheid sluit volgens Popper de geest, het levert mensen over aan totalitaire systemen. Als wetenschapsfilosoof en aanhanger van de falsificatietheorie zag hij meer in twijfel en scepsis.

In 1937 sloeg de Oostenrijks-Joodse Popper op de vlucht voor het fascisme. In Nieuw Zeeland schreef hij zijn boek The Open Society and its Enemies (dat in 1945 in twee delen werd uitgegeven). Daarin kwam hij met een fundamentele aanval op het denken van Plato, Hegel en Marx die hij van totalitair denken betichtte en waarin hij de liberale democratie bepleitte . Hij zou ermee de ineenstorting van het communisme in Oost-Europa hebben voorzien.
[Cf. en cf. cf. ook het artikel van William Gorton, "Karl Popper: Political Philosophy" Op Internet Encyclopedia of Philosophy]
 

Ik breng hierna twee citaten over Spinoza [beide delen hebben elk één citaat]: 

Zie The Open Society and its Enemies op archive.org\

[1] In The Open Society and its Enemies, Volume I, THE SPELL OF PLATO (1945) - Eindnoot 43:

[…] Field, for instance, proffers a similar criticism (in his Plato and His Contemporaries, 117): “There is no question of the city and its laws exercising any educative effect on the moral character of its citizen.” However, Green has clearly shown (in his Lectures on Political Obligation) that it is impossible for the state to enforce morality by law. He would certainly have agreed with the formula: “We want to moralize politics, and not to politicize morals.” (See end of this paragraph in the text.) Green's view is foreshadowed by Spinoza (Tract. Theol. Pol., chapter 20): “He who seeks to regulate everything by law is more likely to encourage vice than to smother it.”

 

[2] In The Open Society and its Enemies, Volume II, THE HIGH TIDE OF PROPHECY: HEGEL, MARX, AND THE AFTERMATH
In het hoofdstuk over Hegel, lezen we op p. 30: “There is nothing in Hegel's writing that has not been said better before him. There is nothing in his apologetic method that is not borrowed from his apologetic forerunners” ¹¹.

Hier eindnoot ¹¹

I have in mind not only his immediate philosophical predecessors (Herder, Fichte, Schlegel, Schelling, and especially Schleiermacher), or his ancient sources (Heraclitus, Plato, Aristotle), but especially Rousseau, Spinoza, Montesquieu, Herder, and the poet Schiller. Hegel's indebtedness to Rousseau, Montesquieu (cp. The Spirit of the Laws, XIX, 4 f.), and Herder, for his Spirit of the Nation, is obvious. His relations to Spinoza are of a different character. He adopts, or rather adapts, two important ideas of the determinist Spinoza. The first is that there is no freedom but in the rational recognition of the necessity of all things, and in the power which reason, by this recognition, may exert over the passions. This idea is developed by Hegel into an identification of reason (or 'Spirit ') with freedom, and of his teaching that freedom is the truth of necessity (Selections, 213). The second idea is Spinoza's strange moral positivism, his doctrine that might is right, an idea which he contrived to use for the fight against what he called tyranny, i.e. the attempt to wield power beyond the limits of one's actual power. Spinoza's main concern being the freedom of thought, he taught that it is impossible for a ruler to force men's thoughts (for thoughts are free), and that the attempt to achieve the impossible is tyrannical. On this doctrine, he based his support of the power of the secular state (which, he naively hoped, would not curtail the freedom of thought) as against the church. Hegel also supported the state against the church, and he paid lip-service to the demand for freedom of thought whose great political significance he realized (cp. The preface to the Phil. of Law}; but at the same time he perverted this idea, claiming that the state must decide what is true and false, and may suppress what it deems to be false (see the discussion of the Phil. of Law, § 270, in the text between notes 37 and 38, below). From Schiller, Hegel took (incidentally without acknowledgement or even indication that he was quoting) his famous dictum “The history of the world is the World's court of justice”. But this dictum (at the end of § 340 of the Phil. of Law ; cp. text to note 26) implies a good deal of Hegel's historicist political philosophy; not only his worship of success and thus of power, but also his peculiar moral positivism, and his theory of the reasonableness of history.

    The question whether Hegel was influenced by Vico seems to be still open. (Weber's German translation of the New Science was published in 1822.)

Spinoza komt dan wel niet in een ‘zelfstandig’ hoofdstuk aan de orde, maar je kunt niet zeggen dat Popper Spinoza niet aan de orde stelt. Maar wel maakt hij van hem een ‘voorloper’ van Hegel…Hoewel hij eerder in dat hoofdstuk (op p. 30) schreef: “I mean not only the appalling fact that the windbag Fichte and the charlatan Hegel are treated on a level with men like Democritus, Pascal, Descartes, Spinoza, Locke, Hume, Kant, J. S. Mill, and Bertrand Russell, and that their moral teaching is taken seriously and perhaps even considered superior to that of these other men.”

Maar hoe dan ook: "Sir Karl Popper has made a strong case for the “totalitarian” reading of Spinoza," schrijft Richard A. Cohen in Out of Control [cf. books.google]. Ik vraag me af of dat waar te maken is.