PopperVsHegel

ThoughtStorms Wiki

Apparent similarities between Popper and Hegel

Both concerned with progress, development of knowledge over time

Both have an "argument" model of this development over time : Hegel's dialectic, Popper's conjectures and refutations

But Popper is the more Optimistic. (OptimisticAndPessimisticEpistemology)

Hegel at first seems to offer an optimistic response to Kant : What we are changes throughout history. Our limits are not deducable, because we evolve over time. (I guess this is what his fans respond to.)

However, on second glance, Hegel the philosopher seems to want to have his cake and eat it. He puts philosophy back in charge by coming up with a theory of history as philosophy. History itself is to be deduced, as a kind of logic. The dialectic models the future as contained in the contradictions of the past, thesis spawns anti-thesis, spawns synthesis.

Hence there's a stark contrast between Hegel's history, whose dynamics are evolving under endogenous forces, and therefore deducable by reason. And Popper's, open to exogenous forces that range from the will of great men, to nature, to asteroids, to genetic mutation, and which is beyond the scope of deduction (ConjectureIsBlind) and can therefore only to be known a posteriori, through observation.

Hegel's is the false promise. As though we've been released from the cell where Kant imprisoned us, only to be held hostage on a barge on the river of history. Sure the phenomenal view changes, but outside of our control.

Popper's is the more optimistic view, because here our capacity to change is outside the straightjacket of philosophical deducability; a freedom due to a non-deterministic world.

Counter

Although, of course, Hegel as an idealist, doesn't believe in anything outside spirit for exogenous influences to come from.

What about Marx? Shouldn't his turning Hegel on his head have resulted in an empirical, non-deterministic, (non-predictive) exogenous methodology? It's possible that he meant to (see Joe Faith's analysis : but http://computing.unn.ac.uk/staff/CGJF1/thesis.html#download) but) in practice, much Marxism as practiced stressed the Hegelian endogenous theory which led to a belief in a deterministic history; and which is criticised in Popper's TheOpenSociety and It's Enemies