In conversation with Robin Attfield

 

A man famous for his enemies as well as his problems, it was a local squirrel that put the most fear into Karl Popper’s later years.

A notorious and paranoid over-editor of his work, Karl Popper would often sit on his finished books, waiting sometimes decades before committing them to publication, correcting ever more slight details in prose and reason. A change of sorts came over Popper as he aged, a new found nostalgia for the classics. His last book was a series of essays and thoughts on pre-Socratic philosophy. And just as with all his other works, The World of Parmenides had to wait for its author’s patience to slowly wear thin.

Placed inside a simple yellow folder on a windowsill above Popper’s writing desk, the manuscript swelled at one point to nearly 1200 pages. Until a lazy day in early spring when the elderly philosopher and his wife returned home and noticed a large squirrel balancing over the open window. In search of nesting materials it had pilfered its way throughout the house, and now was proudly holding the yellow folder in its mouth. Clearly not expecting disaster of this kind, Popper hadn’t made any other copies of the unpublished book.

To the horror of husband and wife, the squirrel quickly backed out of the window and ran across the garden, dragging the heavy folder behind it. And the chase was on: an overburdened squirrel leading a couple of senior citizens (both deep into their retirement years) in a race across the back garden. As luck would have it, all those slight edits and extra thoughts and footnotes and amendments paid off. The folder finally proved too heavy for the squirrel as it tried to carry it up a tree. Picking up the errant pages of his book as they blew across the lawn, Popper finally conceded to himself that it was time to submit the draft to a third party editor, and then to publication.

With it suddenly much easier to persuade Popper to take a step back, Arne Petersen took over the job, and the volume was finally published in 1998. “Which is how we come to have the book, The World of Parmenides” and how Robin Attfield got his hands on it…

When you find something as significant as what Popper did, an uncomfortable – or perhaps pleasant (depending on the nature of your ego) – thought automatically follows: someone else must have discovered this previously! David Deutsch often talks about human history in terms of “mini Enlightenments”. All those moments when our not-too-distant ancestors made rapid progress, and developed new knowledge of the world. These mini Enlightenments all failed for one reason or another, but to achieve what they did – even if only briefly – they must have understood the basics of epistemology and the scientific method… they must have understood what Popper later would!

The European Enlightenment is the one that stuck, and the one that we are all the beneficiaries of today. And here, Popper famously wrote, was his method in action – specifically in the work of Kepler and Galileo. “What is less well known” writes Attfield, “is that already in 1963 Popper claimed to have discovered this method in use… also at the outset of the ancient Greek Enlightenment.”

Born in 570 BCE in the Greek city of Colophon, the Persian invasion of Asia Minor (545 BCE) soon forced him to flee westward across the Mediterranean – at the time a “long and perilous journey”. Here, in Elea on the southern coast of Naples, Xenophanes settled-in to a new life – one that would considerably overlap with the “famous son of Elea, Parmenides”.

Both Plato and Aristotle would later credit Xenophanes as the founder of the Eleatic school, a school whose prize member was Parmenides. Of the surviving fragments of Xenophanes’ work, we know that he wrote in poetic hexameters, something that Parmenides would also choose to do. In fact the number of similarities between the two men often led people to deliberately muddle the differences in their philosophies and arguments, as to better align them with each other.

Despite all of this, while the legacy of Parmenides survived and floated quickly to the ether of philosophical tradition and admiration, Xenophanes was more commonly denigrated as a “‘wandering poet and theologian’ rather than a philosopher”, “a mere rhapsode”, “a minstrel”. Slandered and “lied about” for millennia, it was the unlikely figure of Karl Popper that changed things. Reviving an interest in the pre-Socratics, Popper put on the hat of historical detective and swam back into the depths of those original texts, slowly rehabilitating the image of Xenophanes.

The first, and weakest of the smears against his character came from Heraclitus, who – furious that his theory of logos wasn’t being taken seriously by those around him – built and published a list of the ignorant. Among the prominent names were Hesiod, Pythagoras, Hecataeus, and of course Xenophanes. Rather than hold this against him (as it has been done), Popper explains otherwise: all this shows was that Xenophanes was considered important enough during his lifetime to be mentioned.

A more serious and lasting attack came from Aristotle, who latched-on to a fragment of Xenophanes’ writing, and a single word in particular:

At our feet we can see how the Earth with her uppermost limit borders on air; with her lowest, she reaches down to Apeiron.

The common translation of Apeiron is infinity, and so it was natural for people – after his time – to think that Xenophanes was insisting on a kind of infinite depth to our planet. To back this up, Aristotle also claimed to have found in Xenophanes’ writing – though it has since been lost – the belief that the Sun never actually sets due to the infinite size of the Earth; rather it is created new each day. Popper shoots back at this last point with the observation that as someone who travelled the oceans and watched the sun set – as Xenophanes did – it is unlikely that his constant observations allowed him to think such a thing.

But the two points are connected, and it is with that word Apeiron and with the “gross departures from common sense” of other scholars that Popper is most animated. The mistake is made by a loss of context, and a lack of understanding of Xenophanes’ fellow Ionian cosmologists, particularly the work of Anaximenes and Anaximander. This is how Popper explains things, and re-shines Xenophanes’ claim as an “intelligent conjecture”:

The standard translation of ‘apeiron’ is ‘infinity’, and this is what gave rise to the belief that Xenophanes held that the Earth has infinite extension, because it supposedly ‘reaches down to infinity’. But another meaning is both possible and appropriate, in view of the fact that Anaximenes’ Ionian predecessor Anaximander held that the origin of all things is ‘the apeiron’, or the unbounded, or, as it is usually translated, ‘the indeterminate’. So Xenophanes’ couplet could well be saying that the lower side of the Earth stretches down to this all-encompassing but unfathomed substance, ‘the apeiron’, the unknown fluid put forward by the predecessor of his predecessor and the teacher of his teacher, Anaximander.

The distinctiveness of the philosophy, and the reason why Popper was so impressed, becomes a little more obvious from here out. This is Popper’s translation of perhaps the most famous surviving section of Xenophanes’ work (written, of course, as a hexameter):

The Ethiops say that their gods are flat-nosed and black,

While the Thracians say that theirs have blue eyes and red hair.

Yet if cattle or horses or lions had hands and could draw

And could sculpture like men, then the horses would draw their gods  

Like horses, and the cattle like cattle, and each would then shape

Bodies of gods in the likeness, each kind, of its own.

With different eyes to most people, what Popper saw here was something much more profound than an argument against anthropomorphism (which it was) or an argument against theology (which it was not). This was the first example (extant) in the world of thought and philosophy of Popper himself, and of his epistemology. The error that Xenophanes is drawing attention to here is that of using piecemeal local information, and experience, to create theories that apply beyond it.

It was important – Xenophanes claimed – to reject the notion of Homeric gods, with divinity and heaven as flawed and limited and naive as we are. Rather, if we are to accept the existence of gods, then we must also accept that they don’t have the same problems with knowledge that we do (otherwise they wouldn’t be gods at all, but just our fellow travellers, and so nothing worth revering). Truth is independent of human minds. What Xenophanes is poking at here is the place we find ourselves in, at all times: struggling, and always failing, to get past our perceptions and opinions.

And this struggle, as well as Xenophanes’ account of the gods, says something very important about truth itself: that it does exist! That it should be pursued, that it can be found… it’s just that there is no way of knowing what it is, even if we by chance had it. If you think that this leap, from ruminating about the description of gods to Popper’s critical rationalism, is tangential, then perhaps the next hexameter will ease things:

But as for certain truth, no man has known it,

Nor will he know it; neither of the gods

Nor yet of all the things of which I speak.

And even if by chance he were to utter

The perfect truth, he would himself not know it;

For all is but a woven web of guesses.

Here we have a clearer affirmation of Xenophanes’ realism (that truth exists, and that it is independent of human beings), but we also have something much more – something that must have excited Popper as he stumbled across it during translation: “For all is but a woven web of guesses.”

… A woven web of guesses!

As Robin Attfield goes on to show, from the original ancient Greek, the word δóκοs might just as easily be translated to conjectures as it is to guesses. A term central to Popper’s understanding of knowledge, and also in the title of his famous book Conjectures and Refutations. So within the work of Xenophanes is the important claim that there is a difference between subjective certainty and objective truth, and it is this bridge which can never be fully crossed because, according to Popper “we can never, or hardly ever, be really sure we are not mistaken; our reasons are never fully sufficient”. But there is again, also, something more, something incredibly prescient considering the time in which it was said.

The difficulty of discovering truth has always been a central problem within philosophy, but just how we go about doing so, just how we solve this problem, is a prize held only by Popper. Though considering what we have just read, perhaps not!

The big moment in Popper’s academic life, was his solution to this question of knowledge. Before Popper the world of philosophy was awash with all sorts of wrong ideas about how we can know anything. The best minds went searching for answers in reductionism, seeking a true foundation from which all other knowledge could be constructed. Others believed that the answer could be found with empiricism or inductivism, with knowledge provided to us by our senses. Many people continued to believe that truth was simply revealed to us through authorities. Then came Karl Popper and soon the whole landscape was torn-down – and in its place, those simple sounding words conjecture and refutation. We guess and then we criticise, and then guess again at something better. It may not sound all that elegant, but there is just no other way around it!

It is an answer that upset people… it still often does. But perhaps only because they hadn’t been properly warmed-up to the idea through Xenophanes. Strange then that he is still often regarded as an advocate of philosophical scepticism (those who deny the very possibility of knowledge); an impression that Popper was particularly keen to address. It is one thing to claim that objective truth can never be discovered, it is another to then say that our hopes to improve things are doomed and not worth the effort. It is clear – again from Popper’s translation – that Xenophanes did not think this way, but instead championed the search and the struggle for knowledge:

The gods did not reveal, from the beginning,

All things to the mortals; but in the course of time,

Through seeking they may get to know things better.

Later Xenophanes speaks in a way that rounds much of this together, and shines a little more light on that problematic word: truth. Just like so much of language, it is often automatic, used to convey a fast and universal meaning; not an instrument of philosophical accuracy and nuance. Instead of truth, what we should be saying – according to Popper – is something like “approximation to objective truth” or “closeness to truth” or “affinity with truth”. A constant reminder of where we find ourselves in the universe. Or, it can be said like this (Xenophanes):

Let us conjecture that these things are like the truth.

Impressed as he is by the quality of the work and the translation, Attfield has a pressing question, one that many readers will likely have as well: sure, Popper is clearly excited by what he has found here in the pre-Socratic world, but is it true that “Xenophanes was really committed to the methodology of conjectures and refutations”? Or is Popper himself making that earlier error of extrapolating local information to situations where it no longer applies? Is Popper a victim of motivated reasoning, picking through ancient writings, and finding only what he wants to find?

Calling Xenophanes “the founder of epistemology”, Popper sets a high bar here, especially when considering that a lot hangs on very little. Or specifically, a lot hangs on fragments upon fragments of much larger, and now lost, works. There is also the problem of Parmenides, who was certainly a rationalist in the Popperian tradition, and someone who had Xenophanes as a direct teacher and mentor. Again though, that previous error comes back at us. It would be a mistake to attribute the beliefs of a student to those of his teacher.

As Attfield rightly points out from that earlier quote and interpretation, “Much turns on what Xenophanes would have counted as ‘getting to know things better’”. Popper might be right, and Xenophanes was referring to an unending process of conjectures and refutations, but he might just as well have seen this as too restrictive. And so made the Millian or Baconian error of believing “that ‘getting to know things better’ can sometimes be achieved through inductions based on experience”. Indeed Attfield holds up a passage to show that Xenophanes was not averse to thinking that knowledge could be extracted from experience:

If God never had chosen to make the light-yellow honey,

Many a man would think of figs as being much sweeter.

Popper keenly noticed this section of writing as well, and felt the need to address its implications. He does so like this: the phrase “much sweeter” should be understood as “much sweeter than figs appear to him now, because the comparison with honey reduces the impact of the sweetness of figs”. Rather than deriving knowledge from experience, this becomes a process of correcting or criticising knowledge through experience. So maybe it would be more accurate to describe Xenophanes (as Popper later does) as using the method of “critical empiricism”.

Flavour it as you like, or as you can bear, but it is also plausible to find hints of inductivism within the writing of Xenophanes, particularly when it comes to the accumulation of sensory data. Attfield believes that, if only he had been exposed to the idea of abduction (a type of logical inference which seeks likely conclusions from observations) Xenophanes would have eaten it up, and of course disappointed Popper. In fact, “his own reasoning about the gods appears to instantiate such a methodology.”

And so leaving things on the appropriate tone, Attfield asks another important question: “Is Popper's Study of Xenophanes Strictly Popperian?”

Both Xenophanes and Popper died at the age of 92, and it was only the latter’s death that brought an overdue end to the editing process and allowed his last book to be published. And as fortunate as we are to still have access to the writing of Xenophanes, the same should also be said for this final work of Karl Popper. Because of course this might never have happened. Lost in the legality of his will and testament, or in the confusion or the sorrow, The World of Parmenides might never have reached an audience beyond its long-suffering author… that is, had it not been for the curiosity, the persistence, and the burglary of a single squirrel.

 

*** The Popperian Podcast #4 – Robin Attfield – ‘Pre-echoes of Popper - Xenophanes and Parmenides’ The Popperian Podcast: The Popperian Podcast #4 – Robin Attfield – ‘Pre-echoes of Popper - Xenophanes and Parmenides’ (libsyn.com)