Plato and Popper

Author(s): G. P. Grant
Source: The Canadian Journal of Economics and Political Science / Revue canadienne
d'Economique et de Science politique, Vol. 20, No. 2 (May, 1954), pp. 185-194
Published by: Blackwell Publishing on behalf of Canadian Economics Association
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PLATO AND POPPER

G. P. GRANT

Dalhousie University
IN 1945 Professor K. R. Popper published a work on political theory called

The Open Society and Its Enemies.' It extols the "open" as against the "closed"
society and criticizes those thinkers who have supposedly advocated the closed
society. The first volume is concerned with criticizing Plato, whom Popper
believes to be the chief totalitarian theorist of the ancient world; the second
volume with the criticism of Hegel and Marx as the chief totalitarian theorists
of modern Europe. This article sets out to refute what Popper2 says about
Plato. Space forbids a defence of Hegel, although such a defence would be
valuable these days when some men choose a few political sentences from
Hegel, detach themf from his central philosophic position, and put him in the
same category as Marx. Nevertheless, Plato is a greater genius even than Hegel,
so that the refutation of Popper's position can rest on what he says about the
greatest of philosophers.
Such a defence is incumbent on a philosopher in these days, when no
adequate understanding of Plato can be assumed. Indeed in North America,
where the fides implicita of the social scientists has been empirical and pragmatic,
Popper's thesis is liable to convince; for it is in essence a justification of that
pragmatic tradition against the rationalism of Plato. Men who want to believe
that there is such a thing as an independent "social science" can find in Popper
reasons for doing so.
I
Popper contrasts those whose principle of political action is "piecemeal social
engineering" with those who advocate "Utopian social engineering." This distinction means that the "piecemeal social engineer" is concerned with improving certain aspects of society without establishing general laws about
society; while the "Utopian social engineer" first makes general laws about
social development and then infers the particularity of action from these laws.
In this sense the Utopian social engineer is an "historicist." These general laws
become chains binding men's minds, so that they are no longer free to manipulate society for their own ends. Therefore, the Utopian becomes the basic
totalitarian, who believes in the closed society; while the piecemeal social
engineer is the democrat who believes in the open society. The closed society
is for Popper that in which the grounds for action are found in taboo or uncriticized dogma; the open society is that in which the grounds for action are
always under the control of the critical faculty of man.
Plato is represented as the archetype of the totalitarian in the classical
world. The determining motive behind his philosophy was his hatred of
1This article makes use of the 1949 English edition of Popper's work.
2I have to use Professor Popper's name so often that it would seem pedantic to affix a
title to it each time.
185
Vol. XX, no. 2, May, 1954

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Athenian democracy. He lived in a period when the closed tribal society of

Greece was threatened by the new open democracy developing in Athens. The
stress of that period so frightened him that his deepest desire was to return
to the safety of the tribal community. His political theories-indeed all his
philosophy-are merely an attempt to justify the ancient society so that men
will be persuaded to turn back to it. His theory of ideas, that is, his belief in
a transcendent reality upon which the world of our senses depends, is just an
extrapolation by his metaphysical imagining so that the changeless tribal
society can be held up in its glory against the free democracy of Athens.
Popper writes: "It seems to be a consistent and hardly refutable interpretation
of the material to present Plato as a totalitarian party politician, unsuccessful
in his immediate and practical undertakings, but in the long run only too
successful in his propaganda for the arrest and overthrow of a civilization
which he hates."3 Or again, after describing the dualist character of Plato's
philosophy, Popper writes: "And this whole dualistic philosophy originated, as
I believe, in the sociological domain, from the contrasts between a stable
society, and a society in the process of revolution."4 All Plato's praise of the
rational life is just a pretense, behind which he masks his deep hatred of the
free play of human reason in democracy.
It is necessary first to point out that if Popper's statements about sociological
determination are taken seriously, it is impossible to philosophize at all. Just
as the Freudian says that men believe in God because they are dominated by
the father image and so refuses to discuss the truth or falsity of the statement
"God exists": so Popper concentrates his attack on the doctrine of ideas by
saying it was motivated by social tension and he is therefore spared the tiresome job of discussing its validity. I might myself pick up this two-edged
sword and refuse to discuss the truth of Popper's thesis, and content myself
with embroideries on the theme that his book was motivated by his hankering
after the bourgeois society of Europe and the instability of his life as a refugee.
It would be ruder to use such methods about a living man than about one
dead twenty-four hundred years, but the principle is the same. Popper cannot
deny the freedom of Plato's intellect and expect us to accept the objectivity
of his own conclusions. From Marx to Mannheim, the sociologists have been
denying the possibility of metaphysical knowledge by asserting the principle
of sociological determinacy. If they do not want us to accept this principle
simply on faith, they need philosophy to establish it. The impossibility of
philosophy is always being proved by philosophy.
With that as preliminary, I would hold that Popper's misinterpretation arises
from taking what is secondary in Plato and making it primary. Popper thinks
that Plato's chief interest is in political means. I would say his chief interest
is in the question of ends, and his chief point about that is that man's end
cannot be found in political life. What else can the transcendent Good of the
3The Open Society, I, 149.
4Ibid., I, 73. I would disagree with the interpretationof Plato as a dualist. I believe that
Plato's philosophy centres on the conception of a transcendent good and thereby overcomes
the dualism between universal and particular, the one and the many, soul and body, etc.
In other words I accept in broad outline Plotinus' interpretation of Plato. However, to
justify this would require many pages and is not necessary for this article, because Popper
does not discuss Plato's metaphysics as true or false.

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Republic and the transcendent One of the Parmenides mean but that? I would
maintain that Plato understood that political methods can only be judged in
their dependence upon man's proper end. Indeed, if Plato's primary interest
was politics, why was it that in the classical world men with such utterly different approaches to politics as Julian, Plotinus, Origen, and Augustine could
all accept the Platonic philosophy as true? This was possible surely because
they found in Plato not chiefly a political programme, but answers to questions
which they considered took precedence over political philosophy.
To justify and illustrate my interpretation of Plato, it is necessary to present
an alternative analysis of Plato's part in Greek history, to replace Popper's
cops-and-robbers thesis of 1848 democrats and absolutists. In doing this I
hope never to imply that my historical causes have caught the soaring freedom
of Plato's intellect. The generality of my analysis must also be excused by the
limits of an article.
Plato came of a family which for generations had helped to shape Athens in
its glory. Yet he reached maturity just as the results of the Peloponnesian War
became catastrophically clear both for Athens and its enemies. Plato believed
that disaster had been brought on and prolonged by the folly of both sides.5
Also, in the domestic political struggle of Athens, both parties, oligarchs and
democrats, were responsible for the policies that dragged Athens to disaster.
It was, after all, the party of democracy which had chiefly advocated imperialism and held Athens to the policy of fighting the other Greek states to the
death. It was the party of democracy which had been guilty of appalling
atrocities against the people of its own empire in the name of imperial power.
By Plato's lifetime the leaders of democracy were in no sense men of Pericles'
calibre. On the other hand, Plato makes clear in his famous letter how contemptuous he was of the crimes of the oligarchic party when it came to power.
He reminds us in his dialogues that the chief political action of Socrates' life
had been a refusal to be involved with the crimes of the oligarchs. Plato was
surely right in his affirmation that Athens had been ruined by class war at
home and by expansionist ambitions abroad. The very tragedy of the political
circumstances forced on him the question of life's meaning beyond politics.
The chief fact that was to take Plato beyond the question of political means
was the trial and death of Socrates. Just as it would be impossible to conceive
Paul's letters if Jesus had not borne the crucifixion in the way He did, so the
Platonic dialogues are dominated by the memory of Socrates' bearing of his
affliction. The Word had been made flesh for Plato. The tragic words at the
end of the Phaedo ring out in their austerity. What dilemma is more likely to
drive a man to thought about the purpose of politics than the execution of a
saint by the democrats?
The central factor in Plato's historical situation (indeed the one Popper
misses entirely) was, however, that Greek polytheism had lost all claims to
intellectual respectability, largely because of fifth-century science and philosophy. This polytheism had in general provided the principles of private and
public action for the Greeks. But the science which had destroyed these mytho5This is not the place for a detailed historical analysis of the causes of the Peloponnesian
War. Suffice it to say that Popper's justification of Athenian imperialism seems to forget a
large part of the history.

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logical grounds for action was unable to replace them. Yet as men are both
rational and active, clarity about the principles of conduct is the crucial issue of
life. This was the situation which Socrates and Plato were concerned to meet.
Men's inability to reconcile the traditional polytheism with philosophic and
scientific reason surely appears in all the records of the day.6 The confusion
in the minds of educated Greeks is brilliantly described in the characters of
the Republic. Thrasymachus believes that education will lead to a selfinterested cynicism. Glaucon and Adeimantus accept this cynicism with part
of their minds and yet want Socrates to show them that it is not true. Popper
claims that figures such as Thrasymachus are just bogies whom Plato created
to scare men back to the old certainties. Of course, whether Thrasymachus is
a bogey or a real exemplar of a certain state of the soul cannot be answered
by an appeal to historical evidence, but to the present. Is the man whose only
principle is a denial of principle a figment of the philosopher's imagination?
I can only say that Popper's experience in the twentieth century must have
been very different from my own. Also, if Plato's descriptions of unprincipled
men are just bogies to scare men back to the old certainties, why does Plato
continually bring in traditionalists and expose the inadequacies of their principles? Why, if Plato desired a return to the old mythologies, did he write
with such clarity about the distinction between myth and truth?
If Popper says there was no deep confusion in Greece about the grounds of
right action, then he must show where men found such clarity before the
Platonic philosophy. Popper puts forward Protagoras as having provided that
clarity. Where in the records of Protagoras does he find it? Indeed, Protagoras
made clearer than previously the negative side of morality, that is, the idea of
man's responsibility, but he said nothing about the positive side, namely, what
are the principles of right action.
This is the centre of Popper's misinterpretation. He criticizes Plato's philosophy, while avoiding this question which is central to Plato. Of course the
doctrine of ideas will seem arbitrary imagining, if it is cut off from the question it is posited to solve. It is impossible to write a fair history of the New
Deal without mentioning that there was an economic depression in 1932. In
the light of the order in which the dialogues were written, how can one doubt
that the role of reason in the practical life is Plato's chief question? The first
dialogues are concerned with defining such concepts as goodness, holiness,
desire, and such. The middle dialogues (of which the Republic is the fullest)
take the problem farther by showing that the only possibility of such definition
is to postulate the doctrine of ideas. The last dialogues then attempt to relate
that doctrine to the current knowledge of mathematics and astronomy, cosmology and theology.
I give two illustrations of Popper's failure to understand that the operation
of the practical reason is the central question with which Plato is concerned.
First, in trying to show that Socrates was a democrat and Plato a totalitarian
he writes: "Socrates seems to have kept away from metaphysical theories as
6As that evidence cannot be presented here, I would refer the reader to two recent books
largely concerned with the question: E. R. Dodds, The Greeks and the Irrational (Berkeley,
Calif., 1951), and F. M. Cornford, Principium Sapientiae (Cambridge, 1952).

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189

much as he could. His appeal was a moral appeal, and his theory of individuality (or of the soul if this word is preferred) is, I think, a moral and not a
metaphysical doctrine."7 What does Popper mean by this distinction between
moral and metaphysical? For morality to exist, reason must play the fundamental role in human conduct. What then is metaphysics but an attempt to
show systematically how that is possible and to show how reason's operation
there is related to the human activities of science and art? What then can a
moral appeal, detached from a metaphysical doctrine, be, but an appeal to
irrationalism? Does he accuse Socrates of being simply an emotional preacher
and not a philosopher at all? It is surely true that Socrates was chiefly concerned with definition and particularly the definition of moral terminology.
How can such definition be carried out without metaphysics? As Popper
cannot show how that is possible, his distinction between moral and metaphysical must be considered meaningless.
As a second illustration I take what Popper writes about the doctrine of
ideas in his chapter on Aristotle. It is only here that he discusses the truth or
falsity of the doctrine. Popper advocates a nominalism against what he calls
the "essentialism" of Plato and Aristotle.8 That is, he takes the position that
general ideas are no more than convenient ways of relating phenomena. He
points out that modern natural science is "nominalist" and that its successes
are due to that "nominalism."He says that social science has been "essentialist"
and if it desires success must become "nominalist."9 But in his discussion
Popper never recognizes that the case for "essentialism" in Plato does not rest
chiefly on an analysis of reason in science, but on reason in the practical life.
Plato continually returns to the point that unless one gives ideas a realistic
status morality cannot be said to exist. This is surely true. If moral concepts
such as duty, justice, freedom, are simply empirical, then how can we say that
one action is better than another? For those who distrust Plato, the argument
on this point has been brilliantly given in Kant's Groundwork of the Metaphysic of Morals. Popper can only make his appeal for nominalism stick if he
can show how nominalism and morality can be reconciled. As he does not
attempt this, his defence of nominalism must be either a denial of man's moral
nature or a lack of interest in it.
Because Popper fails to recognize that Plato is concerned with the end of
life and that his strictures about political means are only subsidiary, he is
willing to accuse Plato of historicism. The fact is that Plato would entirely
agree with Popper's attack on historicism. In his last chapter, Popper shows
with clarity the absurdity of attempts such as that of Toynbee to formulate
laws about history. Plato would agree with this criticism. He implied that the
7The Open Society, I, 167.
81 believe Popper's argument would be clearer if he used the traditional terminology
which distinguishes between Plato's and Aristotle's position as to the ontological status of
ideas. That is to call Plato's position "realism," Aristotle's
"conceptualism," and his own
"nominalism."To lump Aristotle and Plato together as he does makes it impossible to
distinguish the different positions the two philosophers take about human conduct, individuality, and God.
9I must admit that I can find little evidence that modern social science is essentialist. It
has always seemed to me nominalist in the extreme.

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form of the historical judgment is so unclear that no laws of history are possible. His account of reason in the practical life has nothing to do with the
pretentious nonsense of Spengler or Toynbee. Indeed, Popper is much more
of an historicist than Plato, because Plato certainly would never have accounted for another man's thought in terms of sociological determination.
Why then does Popper accuse Plato of the Mumbo Jumbo of historicism?
Popper singles out as evidence that passage in the Republic which describes
the fall of the ideal state from perfection to despotism. But this interpretation
of the passage takes it out of its place in the Republic as a whole. To answer
the question "What is justice?" Plato has been led to describe the ideally good
man and to show that justice can only be defined in relation to the highest
Good. After describing the journey of the soul towards this ever-transcendent
Good, he proceeds to the passage about the fall of the ideal state. He does
this to show the ideally bad man and the ideally bad society in contrast to
perfection.10 What Plato repeatedly makes clear, for instance, in the last
paragraph of the ninth book, is that the best state and the worst state are only
described as regulative ideals for conduct. They are meant as standards of
ethical attraction and repulsion but can never exist in this world. The fall of
the ideal state is then in no sense meant as a description of empirical history.
Man's finitude always means that he must use analogies from time and space
in his attempt to describe the non-temporal. But that does not mean that Plato
thought that the Kingdom of Heaven is of this world. If I were to look for
weakness in the Platonic philosophy, it would not be historicism, but the exact
opposite, a tendency at certain places to underestimate the importance of the
historical process.
II
It must now be asked what Popper says positively about right conduct. For
if he condemns Plato's philosophy he must either show that he has an alternative and more consistent account of morality or else rest in an entire scepticism.
Sections of Popper's book, for example his attempted justification of nominalism, might lead the reader to believe that he is just such a sceptic. For if, as
nominalism holds, all ideas are either empirical or tautologous, then we have
no principles which can be the basis for right action. If Popper kept consistently to this position the grounds of his attack on Plato would be clear and
so also the point at which to take up the defence of Plato. Negatively, such a
defence would involve asking Popper what can possibly be meant by morality
in such a position and asking him to face the consequence of denying the
existence of morality. Positively, it would involve the systematic exposition of
Plato's metaphysics-particularly a careful analysis of what Plato meant by
mind in its practical function.
However, it is untrue to say that Popper consistently holds this scepticism.
He uses again and again concepts such as "freedom," "meaning," "good," "evil."
For any communication to be possible these words must come before the
court of reason. He attacks those "who undermine man's faith in reason," so
10It is strange that if, as Popper says, Plato's chief enemy is democracy and his chief joy
totalitarianismthe ideally bad man is the despot and the ideally bad society despotism.

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191

presumably he does not want to assert a scepticism about reason at the most
crucial point in man's life, conduct. The problem then is to try to understand
what Popper does mean by his use of ethical language and how that language
can be given any communicable meaning if he believes nominalism to be an
adequate theory. This is made difficult because he has so little to say on the
matter.
The only clue I can find as to what Popper does mean is in his last chapter
where he speaks about "the dualism of facts and decisions."'1 But to understand what Popper means by this, some definition or account of "fact" is first
necessary, and that he does not give us. What are these facts which we know
independently of theory and decision? The question is particularly cogent as
Popper is writing about the facts of the social scientist. Is Popper's dualism
between fact and decision itself a fact? If it is a fact, then how does he know
it to be a fact? If it is not a fact and he is a nominalist, how does he know this
dualism to be true?
Yet without expatiating on the difficulties of this dualism any further and
simply accepting it at a common-sense level, the basic question of existence
still remains. How should a man make a decision and what role does reason
play therein? Popper's statement that we make decisions differently from the
way we gather facts may be true but it does not tell us how we make them. It
is purely negative. It, therefore, presents no alternative answer to the problem
of morality. It is Popper's ambiguity at this point which leaves his criticism of
Plato up in the air.
It is perhaps profitable to ask why Popper is so ambiguous about this central
issue. In doing so, of course, one leaves philosophy and indulges in that psychological analysis that Popper has used in dealing with Plato. Popper's ambiguity
seems to arise because he takes for granted that the problem of moral certitude
is not a difficult one. And he assumes this because he believes that the truths
of morality are somehow immediately intelligible to all men of good will. The
basic thesis of his book is that all sensible men have sufficient clarity about
ends to get on with the job of realizing those ends, without spending their
time thinking about what the job is. "Let's get on with it" would indeed be a
proper sub-title to this book. When Popper ridicules Plato as the first professor,
and for saying that man's end is in eternity not in time, he but makes explicit
the smile on the business man's lips when he speaks of philosophy. Why waste
our time on metaphysics when we all know what is worth doing?
Popper's scorn for the contemplative life can be seen in his appeal to
Christianity as against the metaphysicians.l2 It is particularly interesting that
he uses Karl Barth as the exemplar of Christian thought. For Barth's theology
is entirely based on the idea of revelation and is taken up with the total corruption of the human intellect. Popper's praise of Barth is but another illustration of the strange contemporary alliance between those who doubt the
capacity of human reason in the name of scepticism (probably scientific in
origin) and those who denigrate its capacity in the name of revealed religion.
11Popperhas also mentioned this in Part I of a Symposium, "What Can Logic Do for
Philosophy?"in Aristotelian Society, Supplementary Volume XXII, Logical Positivism and
Ethics (London, 1948), 141-54.
12The Open Society, I, the final chapter.

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It is only necessary to study the thought of Ockham to see how ancient this
strange alliance is. For in Ockham can be seen how philosophic nominalism,
unable to face the question of practical certainty, solves it by the arbitrary
hypothesis of revelation. The will detached from the intellect (as it must be
in nominalism) can seek certainty only through such arbitrary hypotheses.
And, after all, are not Popper's given moral certainties and Barth's revelation
really the same thing-undigested lumps in the intellectual stomach placed by
the thinker outside the rigour of his thought? With clarity about practical
questions reached in this arbitrary way, systematic thought becomes an unnecessary activity.
The interesting fact historically is that these two anti-rationalist traditionsthat of the liberal sceptic and the Protestant revelationist-should originally
have come from two such opposite views of man. The Protestant dependence
upon revelation arose from a great pessimism about human nature. The immediately apprehended values of the liberal originate in a great optimism. Yet
Popper's use of these very different traditions is probably the reason why he
is so widely admired by social scientists in North America. For, after all, is
not the dominating tradition in North America a Protestantism which has been
transformed by pragmatic technology and liberal aspirations? The Protestant
boy from the farm who was emancipated at the university by pragmatic social
science and a few vague criticisms of dogma, and then became a professor or a
Liberal civil servant almost inevitably finds Popper a forward-looking thinker.
To repeat, Popper does not attempt to meet Plato's philosophy with an
alternative. He is simply denying the need of consistent thought as the basis
for right political action. The truth or falsity of Popper's case depends then on
whether society can really do without the contemplative, or whether a chief
end of all political organization must not be the encouragement of contemplation among the social engineers. Coleridge once said: "Whatever the world
may opine, he who hath not much meditated upon God, the human mind,
and the summum bonum, may possibly make a thriving earth-worm, but will
most indubitably make a blundering patriot and a sorry statesman." Popper
considers this statement false and Plato considered it true, and there lies the
difference between them. This statement must now be considered.
III
The action of social engineers has always been partially hit or miss.13
Nevertheless, the pragmatism of rulers has been limited by some assumed
agreement about principles. That agreement has, of course, been only partially
explicit and has rested largely on the acceptance of tradition. The chief
instrument of tradition in the West has been a revealed religion, changing in
its long history, yet nevertheless providing a source of clarity for the engineers.
But all traditions, even when based on revealed religion, are full of gross
inconsistencies. As these inconsistencies are exposed to the minds of an in13I use Popper's phrase "social engineer," for those men taken up with political responsibility. The word, however, has a distasteful ring because the analogy between men and
pieces of steel, efficiently put together into a bridge, is hardly a pleasant one. It is unfortunate that Popper uses this phrase for he obviously has a more libertarian view of
personalitythan his metaphorwould imply.

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creasing number of the social engineers, the tradition necessarily loses its
authority. The break-down occurs slowly in traditions as fused with wisdom
as European Christianity; quickly with obvious irrationalisms like Marxism.
The inconsistencies and lack of clarity in traditional Christianity have become
so evident to so many social engineers that it can no longer be the operative
principle of political action. Many men, such as Niebuhr, try to persuade us
to the old authority, but its weaknesses have been so exposed as to make a
return impossible.14
In such a time as ours when the weaknesses of our tradition have been so
radically exposed, men not only revolt against its inconsistencies, but against
much of its truth as well. Having lost one ground of practical certainty, they
look desperately around for another. All kinds of partial principles are imported from the sciences which appear to the unthoughtful to supply frameworks for action. In that confusion many deny that principle is possible at all.
Cynics like Sorel would have us replace one irrationality by another.
When traditional loyalties no longer hold the most intelligent, will not
political activity grow increasingly chaotic unless a sufficient number of those
responsible give themselves to systematic thought about the final purpose of
their engineering? The less complex the decision for which the social engineer
is called upon the less need has he of systematic thought. Psychiatrists do not
need the same theoretical clarity as the Minister of Justice. As the tradition
disintegrates, the worst tragedies will occur where great responsibility operates
in metaphysical confusion.
To rely on the rulers' natural intuition rather than on the reaching out to
universal principles is to assume that the rulers will know automatically what
is worth doing and see in a proper hierarchy the manifold finite ends that are
open to them. This immediate vision is evidently not achieved by any effort
of attention, but in some inevitable way. To those who hold this view it must be
simply an accident that this innate good practice appears in some societies and
not in others. It also assumes the complete unimportance of theory. But is the
relation of theory to practice quite so innocent? Take the case of Bentham.
Who can deny his fine achievements-particularly when they are seen against
the rule of landlords and clerics which had dominated Europe so long and
which faced the industrial revolution in greed and obscurantism and impotence.
Yet Bentham's theory now stares us in the face as the principle under which
many of the worst crimes of the twentieth century have been committed.
The use of inadequate theory for decent practical ends is also evident today
in much of the work of the psychological engineers. They say with Popper: let
us not worry about "essentialist" definitions of man, let us get on with the
job of adjusting people. That is, they explicitly assume a nominalism. But in
practice they are defining man and that definition often seems to contradict
our traditional ideas of freedom. It certainly contradicts the theory which
underlies the work of another class of engineers-the lawyers. How is the
argument between them and the lawyers to be worked out if there is not some
appeal to principles, and how is that possible without metaphysics?
14I must make clear that I am not referring to Christianity per se, but to' one historical
manifestationof it.

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The final justification of the life of philosophy among the social engineers
cannot simply be its efficiency for their craft. In our period of disintegration
authentic despair presents itself to men. More and more would define consciousness as anguish. The existentialists have shown that scepticism is not an
intellectual game to be played in the study as the positivists do, but a possibility which, if accepted, makes existence an absurd joke. Even in North
America where the expanding economy has filled our social engineers with
animal faith the beast of nothingness slowly appears. The liberal psychologists may tell us that despair is unhealthy or abnormal, but their words are
empty because they can give us no reason for what they say. No natural or
animal faith can meet such free despair. It can only be met, if at all, by that
free faith which is the consequence of reason.
Lord Keynes once remarked that in the early years of the century he and
his friends held the illusion that the destruction in detail of the Western
tradition would leave it in general alive to uphold them. Popper seems still to
live in that early illusion of Keynes. He thinks he can hold on to the good
practice of the Western reformers while attacking its groundwork. In denying
the possibility of metaphysics, he denies that existence can be known to be
meaningful and yet he exhorts men to find the activities of piecemeal reform
meaningful. Why should we? Perhaps social reform is as meaningless as all
other activities. Is he simply, like the preachers, telling us to have faith without
giving any reason?
With despair a real and present experience, the life of philosophy must
become the possibility of existence for the free man. This is what Plato knew
so well. He laid down the principles of rational faith. And in the light of those
principles his limitations do not seem important. His tendency towards theocratic means, his failure to estimate properly the finite world, these limitations
can be judged by the very principles he lays down. In so far as Plato was a
fifth-century Athenian, we cannot expect him to have entirely transcended the
limitations of that position, any more than we expect Jesus Christ not to have
been a Palestine peasant. To say this, however, is quite different from implying
that his rationalism was just an epiphenomenon of that position-a turning
back to the darkness of myth and taboo. It was just because he could not fall
back on that or on the dogma of natural good feeling that he was impelled
to discover why existence was meaningful and consciousness more than a
blight. He saw that without such knowledge existence must be anguish and
impotence. All this is surely true today. Only after finding such knowledge do
men have the light to go out and, piecemeal, change the world.