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What I Learned from Karl Popper, in Pursuit of Truth Ed. Paul Levinson

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What I Learned from Karl Popper, in Pursuit of Truth Ed. Paul Levinson E. H. Gombrich, (with Paul Levinson) What I learned from Karl Popper, In Pursuit of Truth ed. Paul Levinson, Atlantic Highlands NJ, Humanities Press, and Brighton, Harvester Press, 1982, pp.203-20 [Trapp no.1982G.1] What I Learned from Karl Popper: An Interview with E. H. Gombrich interview conducted by Paul Levinson I met with Sir Ernst Gombrich in New York City on October 14, 1979, to discuss how his thinking about art and related topics had benefited from his long friendship with Karl Popper, and his exposure to Popper's ideas. We sat in the apartment of the late Dr. Marianne Kris, which, with its walls hung with paintings and etchings, and its location overlooking Central Park, provided good points of reference for two of the main subjects of our conversation—art and the natural world. What follows is a more or less verbatim transcript of the interview, revised only slightly for style and not at all for content, and with section titles added by me later.—P.L. PL: Why don't we start by looking at this question: Karl Popper is known primarily as a philosopher of science, and as a social philosopher, and more recently as a philosopher of biology. How does someone such as yourself, whose expertise and whose life's work has been in the area of art and aesthetics, find Popper's work of so much value? EHG: Well, I think we must start at the other end—we have been friends for very, very many years, and very close friends. We met first in '36 in London, but I had also fleetingly met him in Vienna too, and I knew of his work while I was studying in Vienna. And it so happens that my father, who was a lawyer, was apprenticed to his father, who was a lawyer, so the families had always known of each other. I have always had philosophical interests, and therefore it is not so surprising that when Popper came to London and we spent a good deal of time together, we also talked of philosophy. That is really one aspect of the matter. The other aspect is that aesthetics is not really one of my main interests—I see myself much more as a historian than as a critic or aesthetician. And a historian, of course, is inevitably concerned with the problems of knowledge, of doubt, of theories, of the way theories are guided by questions and all these matters. So that Popper's ideas were not all that strange to me. You may remember that I contributed to the Schilpp volume ["The Logic of Vanity Fair," in The Philosophy of Karl Popper, ed. P. A. Schilpp (LaSalle, Ill.: Open Court, 1974), pp. 925-957], and I mention there that I attended Hayek's seminar [at the London School of Economics] when Karl Popper read his paper on the poverty of historicism, which naturally interested me very much because I had been very skeptical of the sort of Hegelian approach to the history of art. And we talked a good deal about that too, but we talked of many other things as well. You mentioned, incidentally, that Popper is mainly known as a philosopher of science, which is true; but after all, his book The Open Society [The Open Society and Its Enemies (London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1945)], is largely also a work of scholarship about the ancient world, so he is also a historian. Art History and Historicism PL: Well, let's talk a bit about Popper's and your view of history. You mentioned your disagreement with Hegel, and of course Popper is well known for his disagreement with Hegel. EHG: Yes. PL: And yet there is some similarity, perhaps superficial, between Popper's and Hegel's works—even Popper's view of Worlds 1, 2, and 3 bears a certain resemblance to Hegel's three-part system—so what would be the main area of Hegel's work that you so strongly disagreed with? Was it the historicism issue—the idea that there are "moving spirits" throughout history? EHG: Yes, that is one of the main points. But Hegel is, after all, an "ontologist," if one could use this term—I mean he really believed that he knew about the plans of the "Absolute," the way the Absolute evolved in history, and he thought that he himself was something like the mouthpiece of the Absolute. So there's a great deal of difference—I mean, the number "three" is not a monopoly of either Hegel or Popper, and I don't think the similarity is very great. It is true that Popper's idea of World 3, as he has said himself, bears some superficial resemblance to the Objective Spirit. Of course nobody who has been brought up in these traditions of German idealism can have escaped problems of this kind, which also may have directed Popper's thought— though Popper was a very keen student of Kant, and spent a great deal of time in his early years, as you may know from his "Autobiography" [in The Philosophy of Karl Popper, ed. Schilpp, pp. 3-1811, on Kant. And Kant felt that the German school of idealists had betrayed him. He specifically repudiated Fichte, and I am sure he would have done the same with Hegel—which doesn't mean that Hegel owed nothing to Kant, but that Hegel had, in a way, betrayed the main thrust of Kant's philosophy by presenting a kind ,of "gnostic" philosophy, an idea of knowledge which Kant always rejected. So I think that is one of the main points—apart from the point that anybody who reads German and is condemned to reading Hegel will soon find that this is no pleasure. PL: But Kant is no pleasure either, from what I understand! EHG: Kant is no pleasure; but Kant, one finds, struggles with his formulation. One sometimes feels if he had allowed himself to write in Latin it would have been easier than German, which was at that time a rather unformed language for metaphysical formulations. Hegel used this kind of language often—I think one can't deny it—to impress rather than to enlighten. PL: But doesn't Popper himself occasionally indulge in ad hominem criticism of Hegel in The Open Society and Its Enemies? EHG: Yes, I agree with you. He was a pompous fellow, Hegel, and he invites this kind of ridicule. But this is no argument, I quite agree: he might have been a pompous fellow and still be a good philosopher—and that is undeniable. Popper himself, I think, writes somewhere that he meant his criticism of Hegel as a kind of "scherzo" in between the criticism of the two more serious thinkers. He didn't take Hegel seriously. PL: So Hegel was sort of the "decoration" in the Open Society? EHG: Well, yes—it was a kind of more light-hearted attack, because he thought that Plato and Marx were the more worthy opponents. PL: And yet as an art historian, you described yourself towards the end of The Sense of Order [Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 1979, p. 2151 as saying that when it comes to issues of overwhelming style, or even the spirit of an age, you're a "sceptic with an uneasy conscience." So even as someone who is against Hegel, you recognize that there are certain styles in art and in society, for example the Impressionism at the end of the nineteenth century. EHG: Well, nobody can overlook this—it would be difficult, wouldn't it? PL: How would your view, then, differ from Hegel's on those dominant styles and themes that you do find in history? EHG: Well, Hegel thought the whole history of all these branches of human culture can be logically deduced from the exact place from which they start at any point; that every age has an essence which expresses itself in these various fields—of law, of religion, of art, of society, of ethics—and that in a way if you dig deep enough in art you will find the same spirit expressed as you would find in law or in religion. This is a sort of unitary idea of the age—"unitary" is perhaps a little too weak, one almost might use the term "totalitarian"—a total view of every age, in which everything hangs together logically, because it is the unfolding of the Spirit. It's a logical process in Hegel—it's what's known as the dialectic, as you know. But I don't believe that. I am an individualist. I believe that no doubt people are influenced by each other, and there are such things as movements, and there are such things as the logic of the situation, of inventions, of group formation, which accounts for similarities of what various people do. But I wouldn't say that there is ever a logical necessity of one thing deriving from another in the way in which Hegel tried to demonstrate. PL: Yes, I remember there was a place in Objective Knowledge [London: Oxford University Press, 1972, pp. 125-126] where Popper says that he insists on the fact that the individual really always is free to assert him or herself against what any sort of societal trend might be. EHG: Yes, within limits of course. I mean it would be very hard to imagine that an Egyptian—an ancient Egyptian—listening to our conversation could have joined in, because he wouldn't know what we are talking about.
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