In conversation with Matteo Collodel
At some point in the mid-1960’s he turned, sudden, angry and defensive. Once a disciple of Karl Popper, Paul Feyerabend was out to do the most Popperian thing imaginable: prove Popper wrong! But it was also more than this. An intellectual disagreement that was always personal and emotion-driven. Storming out of the front door, rejecting the critical rationalism that he had once adored, Feyerabend began burning his old home to the ground; behind him a mess of intrigue, infighting, animosity, battle scars and broken relationships.
The Department of Logic and Scientific Method at the London School of Economics (LSE) began with one member of staff. It was waiting for him. Sitting patiently until the title of Professor was awarded in 1949. The new school quickly changed from a teaching department – focussed on a small cohort of honours students – to a research academy. And before long a remarkable – and strikingly famous – set of names began passing through the halls: William Bartley, John Watkins, Imre Lakatos, Joseph Agassi, Ian Jarvie, Alan Musgrave, Jerzy Giedymin, David Miller…
The man who created this lively academic world – who had attracted all that international talent – seemed a little less impressed by it all. Pulling himself from the cottage armchair and village life in Penn, Karl Popper only travelled down to his London office once a week, on Tuesdays. But it was still, unmistakably, an education in Popper’s own image:
A school in which young people could learn without boredom, and would be stimulated to pose problems and discuss them; a school in which no unwanted answers to unasked questions would have to be listened to; in which one did not study for the sake of passing examinations
It would also soon collapse inward under poor management. Popper was just not cut out for the job, preferring to work from home, and not appreciating his role as administrator. Matteo Collodel describes it like this: “his figure should have looked more like that of a workshop foreman or of the father of an intellectual family, than that of a school director.” There was a huge measure of healthy collaboration and research, but with so little time for his students a battle for Popper’s attention also formed. Political machinations walked hand-in-hand with the philosophy.
Favoured by the master, and so a regular guest at Fallowfield (Popper’s home in Penn), Paul Feyerabend spent a large amount of time beyond this battlefield. Long, exhaustive, happy days of philosophical discussion in the English countryside seemed to only break when Feyerabend would occasionally idle over to the corner of the living room, where he played with and “talked to his [Popper’s] cat”. Whatever the treatment of (and the reasonable complaints) the LSE students, Feyerabend was largely immune, with Popper taking such an interest in him as to pester him with “often unrequested advices on personal matters.”
Then it all changed. Feyerabend would soon write to one of the few people lucky enough to join him on those Fallowfield excursions, Joseph Agassi, in tones bordering on mental breakdown: “But seriously, I just cannot take academic philosophy seriously any longer – including Popperianism.” He began calling himself a “philosophical bum” someone “loitering in the halls of wisdom and knowledge” and explained that “I have started publishing on aesthetics […]. My next step will be into the philosophy of religion. Philosophy of science be damned”.
The intellectual content of this abrupt decision was likely the influence of Thomas Kuhn. Feyerabend left the University of Bristol in 1955 (a position that Popper had helped him secure) and moved to the University of California, Berkeley. He arrived in America still pushing critical rationalism to anyone that would hear him: handing out newly translated copies of Popper’s books as gifts and aggressively trying to get his old mentor a visiting professorship.
The course that Feyerabend decided to teach at Berkeley was on the scientific method, and it had only one core textbook: The Logic of Scientific Discovery. Details then get a little foggy, but at some point Feyerabend discovered an interesting neighbour in Southern California. The closer in contact he got with Thomas Kuhn and particularly Kuhn’s book The Structure of Scientific Revolutions, the more that Feyerabend seemed to leave behind his older influences and undergo a personal and intellectual mutiny.
He would eventually land on “epistemological anarchism”. It was a title that fit the man as much as his philosophy. Popper’s scientific method was famously that of conjecture and refutation: we can never hope to prove our scientific theories (conjectures) correct, so instead we should try to falsify them (refutations). What doesn’t get disproven isn’t accepted as truth, but just not discarded as false. A fairly minimalistic approach to science and knowledge, but still not enough for Feyerabend.
The answer was – just as it would be with Kuhn – buried within the history of science, with paradigm shifts and incommensurability. If you look at what the great scientists actually did and how the important breakthroughs occurred, it was by abandoning method altogether. Philosophers make rules, the rules don’t work, and so the scientists ignore them. No matter what method you can think of, the history of science shows that at some point progress was only possible, and was only achieved, by forsaking it for another. There is no formula for science, and as far as one does exist, it is, in Feyerabend’s words, “anything goes!”
The example that he uses is art, where our instincts are better tuned to the message, and where he is most comfortable having strongly considered (more than once) giving away the academic life for a musical career. The next great artistic movement – be it in music, painting, sculpture, cinema... – whatever it may be, has only one criteria that we know it must meet: it must defy everything that came before it. It must do violence to previous methods. Break the existing paradigm. Be incommensurable.
To build-out his new creative – artistic – science, Feyerabend lionised both Galileo and Einstein, but also, explicitly, gave credit to astrology, religious solutions, and all manner of superstition. He particularly liked folk medicine. In the 1950’s the Chinese communists began forcing hospitals to use traditional rather than Western medicine on their patients. According to Feyerabend – in his book Against Method – what happened next wasn’t the failure and falsification of Chinese medicine, but rather that: “Acupuncture, moxibustion, pulse diagnosis have led to new insights, new methods of treatment, new problems both for the Western and for the Chinese physician.”
Any attempt to draw a line between what is science and what is not – as Popper had done with his demarcation criteria (science requires testable theories) – was a standard that, if followed, would have forbidden knowledge of this kind. And so rules of science become only dogma, only harmful; too narrow and too stifling of what science actually needs: pluralism and unbridled creativity.
In light of this, Feyerabend’s acrimonious exit from Karl Popper and critical rationalism begins to make more sense. Feyerabend was a rhetorician. He wanted to provoke, shock and anger people towards the intellectual anarchy he admired. What he loved so much about those great scientists was not so much their theories, but their revolutionary spirit. And so it is likely no coincidence that Feyerabend got cold feet at just the moment when Popper’s fame was reaching the general public, and when people began talking of the LSE’s Department of Logic and Scientific Method as The Popperian School.
Watching his old friend using the “odd slogan” anything goes, Joseph Agassi went a step beyond a simple contrarian explanation. Agassi noted that “things changed” with Feyerabend after he witnessed “the student revolution” – a change that was “political, not intellectual”. In short, he believed that Feyerabend had been “converted to Trotskyism, from which he was never freed”. Whether or not this is true, the instinct to resist joining a formal school is something completely understandable for even the most mildly rebellious spirit.
It was something that Popper understood all too well. When the socialist leader Mario Soares came to power in Portugal in the 1970’s, he invited a small group of people that he not only admired but who had influenced his thinking, to Lisbon. Popper was on the list, and the first item on the tour guide was an excursion around the presidential palace. Popper collected his things and headed out by himself to see the grounds, only to be stopped by his official minders and told that they had to go in a group, everyone together. At which point Popper slammed his fist down on the table, and declared loudly: “I will not go in a collective!”
So perhaps abandoning the Popperian School at just the moment that it was becoming mainstream (as more and more international scholars flew-in to join the ranks) was in fact the Popperian thing to do. What came next though, was a little harder to explain. Its starts like this, with Feyerabend trying to scrub history a different colour:
Popper was my supervisor: working with him was a condition of my being paid by the British Council. I had not chosen Popper for this job, I had chosen Wittgenstein and Wittgenstein had accepted. But Wittgenstein died and Popper was the next candidate on my list. […] at the end of the year Agassi is speaking of (1953), Popper asked me to become his assistant; I said no despite the fact that I had no money and had begun selling my furniture and my books.
Matteo Collodel digs out the details here, behind both of these claims – about Wittgenstein and the rejection of Popper’s assistantship – and they are not just troublesome, but completely “implausible”. Feyerabend only met with Wittgenstein on one occasion in early 1950, a matter of weeks after Wittgenstein had been diagnosed with a terminal illness and a full two years after he resigned from his last academic position at the University of Cambridge. Just how the dying and retired Wittgenstein was going to supervise Feyerabend’s post-doctoral studies remains unanswered. It gets murkier still. By the time that Feyerabend had finished his doctoral dissertation in 1951 and was ready to begin considering post-doctoral options, Wittgenstein was long dead!
When Feyerabend submitted his application for the British Council scholarship, the name listed as his first choice for supervisor, out of all available academics in the country, was Karl Popper. So not a “condition” of his scholarship (as he claims), but a personal choice and preference. This type of loose language and revisionism of personal histories soon became the archetype for all of Feyerabend’s interactions and disputes. Including the second episode, where Feyerabend “said no” to Popper’s offer of an assistantship in 1953.
When the offer was made, the young Feyerabend was keenly engaged translating Popper’s The Open Society And Its Enemies into German for the first time. And we now know from official records – and the work of Collodel – that he quickly accepted the position, at some personal cost. Feyerabend had already taken-up an assistantship with Arthur Pap at the University of Vienna, so by accepting Popper he would have to cancel – quite unprofessionally – on Pap. Which he did! Only to then change his mind, again.
Throughout this “Feyerabend’s correspondence with Popper reads quite confused”, only handing-back Popper’s offer a few days before he was due to arrive in London, with longwinded thoughts about how he was, again, leaving it all behind to become an opera singer. What he doesn’t say is the most revealing. Feyerabend’s wife was still finishing her studies in Vienna at the time and was in obvious need of “her husband’s support”. This is almost certainly the actual reason for the rejection, because a little over a year later – once his wife was finished with her work – Feyerabend moved quickly back into Popper’s orbit at the University of Bristol.
It was Popper’s influence that got him the position, but in his autobiography – and still at war with his own history and relationship with Popper – Feyerabend instead only credits Erwin Schrodinger for the appointment. A poor or selective memory might be an excuse, but it was the least of the problems that formed between Feyerabend, Popper and other members of the School. This is Popper – at his wits end – writing to Hans Albert, asking for help dealing with his former student and friend:
Unfortunately our personal relation has been somewhat clouded by the fact that [Feyerabend] is neurotic and that his neurosis partly lies (at least that is how I would explain it) in the fact that for many years he has stolen my ideas like a raven. Usually he proceeds in the same way as many others do: he mentions me somewhere in the articles in question, sometimes even quite frequently; but not when he comes to his “own” contribution, which is then usually stolen from me. However, this “own” contribution of his is often defended against me, or I am sharply criticized for my inadequacy, which is illuminated/revealed by this contribution.
Well, I am used to it. I do not take it all too seriously. After all I have enough ideas and I can leave some of them cheaply to my students (though without being asked), even if it goes perhaps a bit too far if my own ideas are (a) stolen from me, and (b) used to attack me. […] poor Paul knows he is stealing: I often called his attention to this in a friendly way. The last time (in March in Berkeley, in 1962) he answered: “Your ideas are so original that it takes a great effort to assimilate them; and by the time one has assimilated them one thinks they are one’s own.”
It wasn’t just Popper though, the spectre of plagiarism in Feyerabend’s work was increasingly raising alarms throughout the Popperian school. Other than Albert, at various points Bartley, Agassi, Watkins and Lakatos would reach out to Feyerabend with such concerns. It was the softness and friendly outreach of Lakatos (who on Feyerabend’s suggestion addressed each other “as one Popperian to another”) that made the difference and brought forward a muddled confession: “I for one am not aware of having produced a single idea that is not already contained in the realistic tradition and especially in Professor Popper’s account of it.” This is not as hyperbolic as it seems – the language and emphasis might be different, but at all turns Feyerabend’s work continued to be, and to sound, very Popperian.
But there was something in the nature of Feyerabend that liked the role of castaway and the life of excommunication. No sooner had he admitted to the impact of Popperianism and his countless undisclosed reference points, than he was back on the offensive, talking of the Popperian School as a church or political party. Also throwing fire on his new friendship with Lakatos by constantly referring to him as “the party secretary of Popperianism”. Strangely though, he always seemed genuinely shocked by the animosity that such comments garnered.
Feyerabend’s wasn’t the only acrimonious fracture from within the Popperian School. And much of this was the fault of Popper who had developed an idea of interpersonal conduct that failed his students badly. Due to their working relationships, he thought that criticism should be a private, not public, event. He felt hurt when people didn’t follow this standard, but worse it meant that Popper would often move forward with his philosophy without ever making public acknowledgement of the research of those around him. By not criticising his students in open air, their ideas were left to suffocate in darkness. Couple this with Popper’s “absent-mindedness in organizational matters”, his “workaholism”, his “idiosyncrasy”, and what Agassi called his “famous immense sense of persecution”, and it is possible to see that their broken relationship had more to it than just Feyerabend’s strange behaviour.
The nastiness of Feyerabend’s increasing attacks on Popper was something he self-excused as due to my writing style, and a part of the infuriating tactic whereby he would constantly insist not to be taken seriously. Just how an audience is supposed to understand and filter his words, and discover what he actually is serious about, is never offered. Here Feyerabend is a pre-echo of the relativist movement that he would later entertain.
John Watkins, perhaps the most loyal of all Popper’s students, offers this reflection on those messy years: “there ought to have been a Popperian critical tradition and not a Popperian School”. Always the bridge builder, Watkins kept in touch with Feyerabend throughout it all, and at some point towards the end of the 1960’s he recommended that Feyerabend read John Stuart Mill, particularly On Liberty. It took two years before he got around to it, but he would eventually write back to Watkins in a hot flush, saying that he was “more enthousiastic [sic!] than [he] ha[d] been about anything for a long time. […] Mill is really quite something”.
Feyerabend, the man in love with scientific genius, and the exploits of great minds, had a new hero… and a new bible!
*** The Popperian Podcast #2 – Matteo Collodel – ‘Karl Popper vs. Paul Feyerabend’ (The Popperian Podcast: The Popperian Podcast #2 – Matteo Collodel – ‘Karl Popper vs. Paul Feyerabend’ (libsyn.com)).