Brief Excursion Through the "Dangerous" Land of the "Intellectuals"

Sir Karl Raimund Popper, one of the Titans of 20th c. High Culture thought, and Generalistic enough to have made significant contributions to the philosophy of science and the history of philosophy, is notable in these spaces for his massive The Open Society and Its Enemies. It's usually found in two volumes: 1.) The Spell of Plato, and 2.) The High Tide of Prophecy: Hegel, Marx and the Aftermath. 


Written during what is commonly called "World War II" it's still a bombshell of a book, and, while famous, seems to me criminally under-read (because fat and difficult?), and worse: unheeded. NB the Wiki link I have there for the book(s) and the presence of Leo Strauss and his typically baroque critique of Popper. Ironic: Strauss is the Godfather (and I mean that in at least two common semantic senses) of the Neo-Conservatives. Listen to the ministers in the George W. Bush cabal about why they went into Iraq. Bush's cabinet and ministers were loaded with Neo-Cons, and they got the U.S. into a $3,000,000,000 Iraq "war" - untold death on both "sides" - that will, I think, prove almost fruitless, and possibly to have made the overall situation worse. And Strauss and his cabal (more on them is some future rant) illustrate Popper's thesis (based on my reading): it has always been socially and politically dangerous to follow great intellectuals as if they had the One True Key to reading history, a path to some teleological breakthrough (AKA "historicism" in the Academy) that would lead to things like "The End of History," the "end of ideology," finally, the utopia in which things turn out - as one prominent American fascist popularly put it, "the way things ought to be."


There seems a horrific irony to Straussians and their dismissal of Popper (and they don't like the idea of an open society, from what I can tell) and what happened under the reign of King George the Turd.


I have gone on too long about Popper's massive volume, and really haven't said much, except that he has a crucial point we should heed in our thinking on political matters. There is much room for discussion around Popper's thesis, and I hope to address some particular aspects later. Suffice: intellectuals and their ideas have had some massively unpleasant consequences when played out in what we so laffingly call "the real world."


Anyone want the Amazon link to Popper's book(s) for more info, etc? They're here and here. Or better yet: be (unfortunately) the first person in seven years to check out one of these volumes from your local public library!
_____________________________

An elaboration from a slightly different angle: Ian Buruma, on "Why Is Intellectualism Met With Suspicion In the U.S."

+++++++++++++++++++++++++++


This talk about famous philosophers, their weighty tomes, their extraordinary erudition, etc, reminds me of a golden passage in William James's Eight Lectures On Pragmatism. He's been discussing his idea of the role of individual philosophers and their basic personal temperaments that give rise to massive systems of thought (and is it possible that their systems - whether "tough-minded" and empirical, or "tender-minded" and rationalistic, are merely extreme examples of...autobiography?), and that, for us more slightly down-to-earth types trying to make our way in the absurd dense thicket of philosophical thought, we are correct when we read, say, Hegel, and think foremost, "What an odd egg this Hegel is for writing such a dense book of ideas such as this!" 


The idea applies to all the Great thinkers, probably.

Here's William James, addressing a large popular crowd in 1906, at the Lowell Institute in Boston, in his talk, "The Present Dilemma in Philosophy":

"Few people have definitely articulated philosophies of their own. But almost every one has his own peculiar sense of a certain total character in the universe, and of the inadequacy fully to match it of the peculiar systems that he knows. They don't just cover his world. One will be too dapper, another too pedantic, a third too much of a job-lot of opinions, a fourth too morbid, and a fifth too artificial, or what not. At any rate he and we know off-hand that such philosophies are out of plumb and out of key and out of 'whack,' and have no business to speak up in the universe's name. Plato, Locke, Spinoza, Mill, Caird, Hegel - I prudently avoid names nearer home! - I am sure that to many of you, my hearers, these names are little more than reminders of as many curious personal ways of falling short. It would be an obvious absurdity if such ways of taking the universe were actually true."
 ----------------------------------------------

After the 20th century worldwide bloodbath, well-grounded thinkers might want to ground themselves further, if they haven't already, in Popper and James. They complement each other. I mention them here in the spirit of a basic plea for more sanity on Earth, and to remind philosophers and/or intellectuals in all possible social standings: your ideas have consequences, your articulations reverberate and ripple outward and what you do and say MATTERS.