Karl Popper's philosophy (in/and my life)
15 July 2017 [link youtube]
If this is your first time on the channel, you should probably check out the playlists section, to get a sense of the diversity of what goes on here: https://www.youtube.com/user/HeiJinZhengZhi/playlists
And if you want to talk to me, the comments section is on Patreon:
https://www.patreon.com/a_bas_le_ciel
Youtube Automatic Transcription
philosophy of Karl Popper had a big
impact of my life I think today most people associate Karl Popper with philosophy of science philosophy of scientific method but he was also known in his own time and some stent hated in his own time for being a critic of Marxism for being a public philosopher who rejected communism and not in a shallow sense not just dealing with the historical reality of what communist governments had done but digging into the philosophical underpinnings of Karl Marx Hegel etc and showing in a very meaningful sense that communism was rotten to the core that it was bad not only in practice but also in principle that it wasn't merely a theory that was poorly implemented in the world but was a deeply flawed theory to the Kin line and the book I'm thinking of by Karl Popper especially here is the poverty of historicism and a very strange and awkward title and by contrast I think today more people probably read karl popper's books with the uplifting and catchy title dealing with the nature of scientific progress scientific thinking versus pseudoscience cope offer I don't know we kind of write easy-to-understand anecdotes about Einstein and how Einstein theorized about the position of the moon bending to light the Sun during an eclipse little anecdotes from the philosophy of science that he picks up and makes seem kind of provocative and profound but that is not the site of karl popper's work that mattered to me at all what really managed me was the critique that starts by dealing with Plato and ends by dealing with Karl Marx but Hegel in between in the fathering of historicism and I'll always remember the bookshelf I was standing at the way I discovered that book was most straightforward peculiar way to find a little philosophy I was standing in front of the bookshelf in the library it wasn't what I was looking for that wasn't research I was doing and I saw the two volumes of the poverty of historicism sitting on the show and the title alone even though it is such a strange title it immediately seemed clear to me that this would deal with philosophy of Hegel which does a great link and I could immediately imagine even though it's such a strange title how does it relate to quite a few different things I've been reading and researching in the years leading up to that so I'm recalling this now without going back and looking at the book again these videos are not really about textbook philosophy they're about the significance that this console aussi has had in my own life I can also say I'm reminded of a pair of filmmakers who made the intentional decision not to go back and reread a certain short story was actually a short story by Edgar Allan Poe when they decide to make a film about it the filmmakers would have a film based on their memories of the short stories the story that read at school children rather than be based on the the source text you know they're going to make a film based on their their imperfect memories in effect so in that same way too I can say that these videos are really about the aspects of the flaws that stayed with me and it mattered to me I'm not presenting this is a book review and not competing with Wikipedia to give you a kind of objective survey of what this philosophy is or why it matters and in some ways as I said before I think this is the kind of reflection that YouTube is a medium is very well suited to and conversely I do think it's a bit hollow when people make some kind of grandiose claim that philosophy of Aristotle was tremendously meaningful to them but they seem to be unable to back that up with any particulars because the philosophy of Aristotle actually impacts how you vote anything about your politics you know what you're doing whether CLE with your life now as an adult does it really change how you think and feel and behave politically personally or otherwise years now after after Aristotle those are the kinds of reflections I would like to see on YouTube myself why did the philosophy of crophopper mean so much to me well I considered off the bat when I first saw what Karl Popper had to say about Plato so was the ancient Greek philosopher Plato his critique of Plato as criticism the mr. Fisher Plato it was such a contrast to all the attempts to make Plato seem mysterious and impressive and profound that I've been dealing with in the classroom in my own life in general you know there really was a very different school of thought even on mainstream television in the old days up but I saw it in the classroom I saw it on television I saw it on everywhere I went in Western culture of taking simple and down-to-earth things and making them seem mysterious and impressive where it seems like the mean purpose in teaching Plato was not understand what he had to say or why he said it but was just to try to dazzle the audience with some sense that this is overwhelming or inspiring and of course in many cases not a large part of Plato's philosophy is pretty pretty down-to-earth and still reads off the page in a down-to-earth way today when I read karl popper's critique of Plato so for example his criticism of what Plato has to say about the nature of justice these were all questions I had asked myself that I had asked sort of out loud and looking at my textbook and the dissent I even asked my professor and that seemingly nobody had any good answers to why was it that in my own classroom Plato was introduced you know as being integrally about justice Plato's Republic as being the question of what is the meaning of justice and then absolutely no attention was paid to the definition of justice that Plato presents within that book there were all these really strange contradictions in sort of how plato was glamorized for a university student and the reality of what Plato had to say and how he said it and the same is true of course when I was looking at velocity of Hegel there was this huge gap between the reality of what he was what he had to say and even how we was saying it and the way in which Hegel was being glorified especially at that time now you know so this is I was in university after 1989 1989 those you don't remember is the fall of the Berlin Wall and I think for a few decades after 1989 instead of people really admitting the extent to which Marxism had ended in failure a lot of energy within academia was going back into trying to leave allies Marxism and revalorisé philosophy of Hegel as if to hold on to whatever they thought was good or redeemable of lasting value and intellectual legacy of Marxism despite the fact that the collapse of Soviet Union wearing such important questions about how Western academia had come to this point of regarding you know Karl Marx and Hegel of being of such a paramount importance anyway so now I don't know what's happened since then I mean I do not have a sense of you know the further crumbling of the Marxist edifice of in academia you know since say the year 2003 but I was in some ways you know in western academia at a time when they were failing to face up to how flawed their own teaching of philosophy had been especially in terms of of Murph's and Hegel so if anything I was I was inside acting in a time when a lot of professors who had taught Marx in exactly the same way for decades before 1989 they had adjusted what they were teaching but they had only made it more abstract more vague more grandiose Morgul they were reaching further you know to try to make Hegel seem meaningful and important to a new generation of students and again in looking at Karl Popper you know so here in this one book it's one book in two volumes party of historicism I saw this down to earth in touch with reality meaningful critique of Plato it was such a contrast to the evasive and I think intentionally misleading nonsense I've countered that thus far you know in Plato in at all levels you know terms of purity articles women really strange in a fuss Kotori approach of not not admitting what this texted though and why people are talking about and then again in volume two when you're looking at philosophy of Hegel closet chrome Marx it just seemed that in Karl Popper I was looking at somebody who was willing to acknowledge what the text said what the author's intention really was and that was then asking a meaningful and down-to-earth sense what does what does this mean in our lives now you know um wasn't trying to bedazzle an audience of students wasn't trying to convince you this was the most important thing the was the contrat limit is the most important book of its century or anything of the kind was willing to deal with kind of the good in the better Karl Popper too many people were sort of shocked but many people were simply shot that he dared to criticize socialism itself communism itself Marxism itself but one of the very simple things you would say says it within that book and he said individuals he said I'm not debating the vague claim to help the poor you know the general ethical claim that communists and left-wingers make that they want to help poor people he said the point is we have to move beyond using that as an excuse for everything that's wrong with the philosophy or as an excuse for everything that's wrong with their politics and we have to acknowledge that all kinds of other philosophies including the Catholic Church have made this claim or still make this claim that they help the poor that they care about the poor that they want to improve the lives of the poor and downtrodden but there's just no dotted line connecting these kinds of claims and you know the justifications for you know either specific regimes like Soviet Union or you know the specific obtuse reinterpretation of karl marx was already being reinterpreted in a very strange way by Lenin then on on and on by Stennett Stalin and two other other promised regimes manaphy um and there's no justification to bend out before for the core tenets of and beliefs of Marxism in the first place now the reality is I was raised in a family and I was raised in a political and social context that was so left wing that I was very much expected to become a socialist or communist of some kind and if not I mean you know it's not really true to say rebelled against that because I grew up you know after 1989 after the fall of the Berlin Wall you know there was this broad awareness on the left-wing that what they were doing wasn't working I had to change they needed new ideas and new directions but nobody knew what to do with that impulse so you know it just wasn't cased at that time when I was in university I'll say I remember year 2019 99 year 2000 it's not the case that there was a left-wing establishment responding me with shock and horror although my own father was genuinely shocked and horrified when he saw me reading up on the sign of just hell how less people it's just to actually see the books to see that was reading part of the source and he gave me his you know decades-old denunciation of why call poppers a reactionary and an enemy of the people or enemy of the working man or whatever the case might be that was real you know those were real political cross currents you know going on around me um you know one of my own professors I remember he was a labor union organizer far left-wing he was actually invited to take over the leadership of the NDP the left-wing party in Canada he had been a lifelong socialist or something like that but I remember that particular professor whenever you sit down to talk to him he was at that time in doing research on the automotive industry and labor unions this kind of stuff there was definitely this sense of all of the political aspirations and all of the intellectual pretensions of the left-wing having been deflated and this open question of what next but I got to tell you what Karl Popper did for me was give me the confidence to look at the Canon of Western philosophy and say okay so everyone's asking what next let's swing cagillion ISM is not it if I should be going back to Hegel it's not going to be going back to Plato it's not going to be going back to immanuel kant's it's not going to be going back to Lenin or Stalin or all these other things at that time it seems unbelievable now there were people who called themselves Hegelian feminists there were people who were making all these attempts to reinvigorate either the philosophy of Hegel as a left-wing political platform or the philosophy of Marx or both there was all this stuff going on and reading Karl Popper it gave me a sense of confidence in my own sanity because when I read even just sticking with that example of Plato why was it that when I read Plato I was asking all these obvious questions that seemingly nobody was even allowed to ask and that none of the academic literature was answering and then you know beyond that gave me a sense of confidence in asking those broader questions you know what was the future of parisa politics in Canada or what have you and say it's not this the future of progressive politics in Canada was not going to be going back and making a bunch of excuses for the political philosophy of the recent past
impact of my life I think today most people associate Karl Popper with philosophy of science philosophy of scientific method but he was also known in his own time and some stent hated in his own time for being a critic of Marxism for being a public philosopher who rejected communism and not in a shallow sense not just dealing with the historical reality of what communist governments had done but digging into the philosophical underpinnings of Karl Marx Hegel etc and showing in a very meaningful sense that communism was rotten to the core that it was bad not only in practice but also in principle that it wasn't merely a theory that was poorly implemented in the world but was a deeply flawed theory to the Kin line and the book I'm thinking of by Karl Popper especially here is the poverty of historicism and a very strange and awkward title and by contrast I think today more people probably read karl popper's books with the uplifting and catchy title dealing with the nature of scientific progress scientific thinking versus pseudoscience cope offer I don't know we kind of write easy-to-understand anecdotes about Einstein and how Einstein theorized about the position of the moon bending to light the Sun during an eclipse little anecdotes from the philosophy of science that he picks up and makes seem kind of provocative and profound but that is not the site of karl popper's work that mattered to me at all what really managed me was the critique that starts by dealing with Plato and ends by dealing with Karl Marx but Hegel in between in the fathering of historicism and I'll always remember the bookshelf I was standing at the way I discovered that book was most straightforward peculiar way to find a little philosophy I was standing in front of the bookshelf in the library it wasn't what I was looking for that wasn't research I was doing and I saw the two volumes of the poverty of historicism sitting on the show and the title alone even though it is such a strange title it immediately seemed clear to me that this would deal with philosophy of Hegel which does a great link and I could immediately imagine even though it's such a strange title how does it relate to quite a few different things I've been reading and researching in the years leading up to that so I'm recalling this now without going back and looking at the book again these videos are not really about textbook philosophy they're about the significance that this console aussi has had in my own life I can also say I'm reminded of a pair of filmmakers who made the intentional decision not to go back and reread a certain short story was actually a short story by Edgar Allan Poe when they decide to make a film about it the filmmakers would have a film based on their memories of the short stories the story that read at school children rather than be based on the the source text you know they're going to make a film based on their their imperfect memories in effect so in that same way too I can say that these videos are really about the aspects of the flaws that stayed with me and it mattered to me I'm not presenting this is a book review and not competing with Wikipedia to give you a kind of objective survey of what this philosophy is or why it matters and in some ways as I said before I think this is the kind of reflection that YouTube is a medium is very well suited to and conversely I do think it's a bit hollow when people make some kind of grandiose claim that philosophy of Aristotle was tremendously meaningful to them but they seem to be unable to back that up with any particulars because the philosophy of Aristotle actually impacts how you vote anything about your politics you know what you're doing whether CLE with your life now as an adult does it really change how you think and feel and behave politically personally or otherwise years now after after Aristotle those are the kinds of reflections I would like to see on YouTube myself why did the philosophy of crophopper mean so much to me well I considered off the bat when I first saw what Karl Popper had to say about Plato so was the ancient Greek philosopher Plato his critique of Plato as criticism the mr. Fisher Plato it was such a contrast to all the attempts to make Plato seem mysterious and impressive and profound that I've been dealing with in the classroom in my own life in general you know there really was a very different school of thought even on mainstream television in the old days up but I saw it in the classroom I saw it on television I saw it on everywhere I went in Western culture of taking simple and down-to-earth things and making them seem mysterious and impressive where it seems like the mean purpose in teaching Plato was not understand what he had to say or why he said it but was just to try to dazzle the audience with some sense that this is overwhelming or inspiring and of course in many cases not a large part of Plato's philosophy is pretty pretty down-to-earth and still reads off the page in a down-to-earth way today when I read karl popper's critique of Plato so for example his criticism of what Plato has to say about the nature of justice these were all questions I had asked myself that I had asked sort of out loud and looking at my textbook and the dissent I even asked my professor and that seemingly nobody had any good answers to why was it that in my own classroom Plato was introduced you know as being integrally about justice Plato's Republic as being the question of what is the meaning of justice and then absolutely no attention was paid to the definition of justice that Plato presents within that book there were all these really strange contradictions in sort of how plato was glamorized for a university student and the reality of what Plato had to say and how he said it and the same is true of course when I was looking at velocity of Hegel there was this huge gap between the reality of what he was what he had to say and even how we was saying it and the way in which Hegel was being glorified especially at that time now you know so this is I was in university after 1989 1989 those you don't remember is the fall of the Berlin Wall and I think for a few decades after 1989 instead of people really admitting the extent to which Marxism had ended in failure a lot of energy within academia was going back into trying to leave allies Marxism and revalorisé philosophy of Hegel as if to hold on to whatever they thought was good or redeemable of lasting value and intellectual legacy of Marxism despite the fact that the collapse of Soviet Union wearing such important questions about how Western academia had come to this point of regarding you know Karl Marx and Hegel of being of such a paramount importance anyway so now I don't know what's happened since then I mean I do not have a sense of you know the further crumbling of the Marxist edifice of in academia you know since say the year 2003 but I was in some ways you know in western academia at a time when they were failing to face up to how flawed their own teaching of philosophy had been especially in terms of of Murph's and Hegel so if anything I was I was inside acting in a time when a lot of professors who had taught Marx in exactly the same way for decades before 1989 they had adjusted what they were teaching but they had only made it more abstract more vague more grandiose Morgul they were reaching further you know to try to make Hegel seem meaningful and important to a new generation of students and again in looking at Karl Popper you know so here in this one book it's one book in two volumes party of historicism I saw this down to earth in touch with reality meaningful critique of Plato it was such a contrast to the evasive and I think intentionally misleading nonsense I've countered that thus far you know in Plato in at all levels you know terms of purity articles women really strange in a fuss Kotori approach of not not admitting what this texted though and why people are talking about and then again in volume two when you're looking at philosophy of Hegel closet chrome Marx it just seemed that in Karl Popper I was looking at somebody who was willing to acknowledge what the text said what the author's intention really was and that was then asking a meaningful and down-to-earth sense what does what does this mean in our lives now you know um wasn't trying to bedazzle an audience of students wasn't trying to convince you this was the most important thing the was the contrat limit is the most important book of its century or anything of the kind was willing to deal with kind of the good in the better Karl Popper too many people were sort of shocked but many people were simply shot that he dared to criticize socialism itself communism itself Marxism itself but one of the very simple things you would say says it within that book and he said individuals he said I'm not debating the vague claim to help the poor you know the general ethical claim that communists and left-wingers make that they want to help poor people he said the point is we have to move beyond using that as an excuse for everything that's wrong with the philosophy or as an excuse for everything that's wrong with their politics and we have to acknowledge that all kinds of other philosophies including the Catholic Church have made this claim or still make this claim that they help the poor that they care about the poor that they want to improve the lives of the poor and downtrodden but there's just no dotted line connecting these kinds of claims and you know the justifications for you know either specific regimes like Soviet Union or you know the specific obtuse reinterpretation of karl marx was already being reinterpreted in a very strange way by Lenin then on on and on by Stennett Stalin and two other other promised regimes manaphy um and there's no justification to bend out before for the core tenets of and beliefs of Marxism in the first place now the reality is I was raised in a family and I was raised in a political and social context that was so left wing that I was very much expected to become a socialist or communist of some kind and if not I mean you know it's not really true to say rebelled against that because I grew up you know after 1989 after the fall of the Berlin Wall you know there was this broad awareness on the left-wing that what they were doing wasn't working I had to change they needed new ideas and new directions but nobody knew what to do with that impulse so you know it just wasn't cased at that time when I was in university I'll say I remember year 2019 99 year 2000 it's not the case that there was a left-wing establishment responding me with shock and horror although my own father was genuinely shocked and horrified when he saw me reading up on the sign of just hell how less people it's just to actually see the books to see that was reading part of the source and he gave me his you know decades-old denunciation of why call poppers a reactionary and an enemy of the people or enemy of the working man or whatever the case might be that was real you know those were real political cross currents you know going on around me um you know one of my own professors I remember he was a labor union organizer far left-wing he was actually invited to take over the leadership of the NDP the left-wing party in Canada he had been a lifelong socialist or something like that but I remember that particular professor whenever you sit down to talk to him he was at that time in doing research on the automotive industry and labor unions this kind of stuff there was definitely this sense of all of the political aspirations and all of the intellectual pretensions of the left-wing having been deflated and this open question of what next but I got to tell you what Karl Popper did for me was give me the confidence to look at the Canon of Western philosophy and say okay so everyone's asking what next let's swing cagillion ISM is not it if I should be going back to Hegel it's not going to be going back to Plato it's not going to be going back to immanuel kant's it's not going to be going back to Lenin or Stalin or all these other things at that time it seems unbelievable now there were people who called themselves Hegelian feminists there were people who were making all these attempts to reinvigorate either the philosophy of Hegel as a left-wing political platform or the philosophy of Marx or both there was all this stuff going on and reading Karl Popper it gave me a sense of confidence in my own sanity because when I read even just sticking with that example of Plato why was it that when I read Plato I was asking all these obvious questions that seemingly nobody was even allowed to ask and that none of the academic literature was answering and then you know beyond that gave me a sense of confidence in asking those broader questions you know what was the future of parisa politics in Canada or what have you and say it's not this the future of progressive politics in Canada was not going to be going back and making a bunch of excuses for the political philosophy of the recent past