For this reason, according to Popper, we cannot prove our theories to be true. Moreover, what makes a theory scientific is not that it can be proved at all, but that it can be tested against reality and shown to be potentially false. In other words, a falsifiable theory is not a theory that is false, but one that can only be shown to be false by observation.
Theories that are untestable (for example, that we each have an invisible spirit guide, or that God created the universe) are not part of the natural sciences. This does not mean that they are worthless, only that they are not the kinds of theories that the sciences deal with.
The idea of falsifiability does not mean we are unjustified in having a belief in theories that cannot be falsified. Beliefs that stand up to repeated testing, and that resist our attempts at falsification, can be taken to be reliable. But even the best theories are always open to the possibility that a new result will show them to be false.
Popper’s work has not been without its critics. Some scientists claim that he presents an idealized view of how they go about their work, and that science is practiced very differently from how Popper suggests. Nevertheless, his idea of falsifiability is still used in distinguishing between scientific and non-scientific claims, and Popper remains perhaps the most important philosopher of science of the 20th century.
Experiments can show that certain phenomena reliably follow others in nature. But Popper claims that no experiment can ever verify a theory, or even show that it is probable.
KARL POPPER
Karl Popper was born in Vienna, Austria, in 1902. He studied philosophy at the University of Vienna, after which he spent six years as a schoolteacher. It was during this time that he published The Logic of Scientific Discovery, which established him as one of the foremost philosophers of science. In 1937, he emigrated to New Zealand, where he lived until the end of World War II, and where he wrote his study of totalitarianism, The Open Society and Its Enemies. In 1946, he moved to England to teach, first at the London School of Economics, then at the University of London. He was knighted in 1965, and remained in England for the rest of his life. Although he retired in 1969, he continued to write and publish until his death in 1994.
Key works
1934 The Logic of Scientific Discovery
1945 The Open Society and Its Enemies
1957 The Poverty of Historicism
1963 Conjectures and Refutations: The Growth of Scientific Knowledge
See also: Socrates • Aristotle • Francis Bacon • David Hume • Rudolf Carnap • Thomas Kuhn • Paul Feyerabend
IN CONTEXT
BRANCH
Ethics
APPROACH
Frankfurt School
BEFORE
1st century CE Saint Paul writes about being a “fool for Christ.”
500–1450 The idea of the “holy fool”, who represents an alternative view of the world, becomes popular throughout Medieval Europe.
20th century The global rise of differing forms of mass-media communication raises new ethical questions.
AFTER
1994 Portuguese neuroscientist Antonio Damasio publishes Descartes’ Error: Emotion, Reason, and the Human Brain.
21st century Slavoj Žižek explores the political, social, and ethical dimensions of popular culture.
The idea of the holy fool has a long tradition in the West, dating all the way back to Saint Paul’s letter to the Corinthians in which he asks his followers to be “fools for Christ’s sake.” Throughout the Middle Ages this idea was developed into the popular cultural figure of the saint or sage who was foolish or lacked intelligence, but who was morally good or pure.
In his book Minima Moralia, the German philosopher Theodor Adorno calls into question this long tradition. He is suspicious of attempts to (as he puts it) “absolve and beatify the blockhead”, and wants to make the case that goodness involves our entire being, both our feeling and our understanding.
The problem with the idea of the holy fool, Adorno says, is that it divides us into different parts, and in doing so makes us incapable of acting judiciously at all. In reality, judgement is measured by the extent to which we manage to make feeling and understanding cohere. Adorno’s view implies that evil acts are not just failures of feeling, but also failures of intelligence and understanding.
Adorno was a member of the Frankfurt School, a group of philosophers who were interested in the development of capitalism. He condemned forms of mass communication such as television and radio, claiming that these have led to the erosion of both intelligence and feeling, and to a decline in the ability to make moral choices and judgements. If we choose to switch off our brains by watching blockbuster movies (insofar as we can choose at all, given the prevailing cultural conditions in which we live), for Adorno, this is a moral choice. Popular culture, he believes, not only makes us stupid; it also makes us unable to act morally.
Essential emotions
Adorno believes that the opposite error to that of imagining that there might be such a thing as a holy fool is imagining that we can judge on intelligence alone, without emotion. This might happen in a court of law; judges have been known to instruct the jury to put all emotion to one side, so that they can come to a cool and measured decision. But in Adorno’s view, we can no more make wise judgements by abandoning emotion than we can by abandoning intelligence.
When the last trace of emotion has been driven out of our thinking, Adorno writes, we are left with nothing to think about, and the idea that intelligence might benefit “from the decay of the emotions” is simply mistaken. For this reason Adorno believes that the sciences, which are a form of knowledge that do not make reference to our emotions, have, like popular culture, had a dehumanizing effect upon us.
Unexpectedly, it may in fact be the sciences that will ultimately demonstrate the wisdom of Adorno’s central concerns about the severing of intelligence and feeling. Since the 1990s, scientists such as Antonio Damasio have studied emotions and the brain, providing increasing evidence of the many mechanisms by which emotions guide decision-making. So if we are to judge wisely or even to judge at all, we must employ both emotion and intelligence.
"The power of judgement is measured by the cohesion of self."
Theodor Adorno
Lighthearted television is inherently dangerous, says Adorno, because it distorts the world and imbues us with stereotypes and biases that we begin to take on as our own.
THEODOR ADORNO
Born in 1903 in Frankfurt, Theodor Adorno’s two passions from an early age were philosophy and music; his mother and aunt were both accomplished musicians. At university Adorno studied musicology and philosophy, graduating in 1924. He had ambitions to be a composer, but setbacks in his musical career led him increasingly toward philosophy. One area in which Adorno’s interests converged was in his criticism of the industry surrounding popular culture, demonstrated in his notorious essay On Jazz, published in 1936.
In 1938, during the rise of Nazism in Germany, Adorno emigrated to New York, and then moved to Los Angeles, where he taught at the University of California. He returned to Germany after the end of World War II, and took up a professorship at Frankfurt. Adorno died at the age of 66 while on holiday in Switzerland in 1969.
Key works
1949 Philosophy of New Music
1951 Minima Moralia
1966 Negative Dialectics
1970 Aesthetic Theory
See also: René Descartes • Georg Hegel • Karl Marx • Slavoj Žižek
IN CONTEXT
BRANCH
Ethics
APPROACH
Existentialism
BEFORE
4th century BCE Aristotle asks the question “How should we live?”
1840S Søren Kierkegaard writes Either/Or, exploring the role played by choice in shaping our lives.
1920S Martin Heidegger says that what is important is our relationship with our own existence.
AFTER
1949 Sartre’s friend and companion, Simone de Beauvoir, publishes The Second Sex, which applies Sartre’s ideas to the question of the relationship between men and women.
Since ancient times, the question of what it is to be human and what makes us so distinct from all other types of being has been one of the main preoccupations of philosophers. Their approach to the question assumes that there is such a thing as human nature, or an essence of what it is to be human. It also tends to assume that this human nature is fixed across time and space. In other words, it assumes that there is a universal essence of what it is to be human, and that this essence can be found in every single human that has ever existed, or will ever exist. According to this view, all human beings, regardless of their circumstances, possess the same fundamental qualities and are guided by the same basic values. For Sartre, however, thinking about human nature in this way risks missing what is most important about human beings, and that is our freedom.
To clarify what he means by this, Sartre gives the following illustration. He asks us to imagine a paper-knife—the kind of knife that might be used to open an envelope. This knife has been made by a craftsman who has had the idea of creating such a tool, and who had a clear understanding of what is required of a paper-knife. It needs to be sharp enough to cut through paper, but not so sharp as to be dangerous. It needs to be easy to wield, made of an appropriate substance—metal, bamboo, or wood, perhaps, but not butter, wax, or feathers—and fashioned to function efficiently. Sartre says that it is inconceivable for a paper-knife to exist without its maker knowing what it is going to be used for. Therefore the essence of a paper-knife—or all of the things that make it a paper-knife and not a steak knife or a paper aeroplane—comes before the existence of any particular paper-knife.
Humans, of course, are not paper-knives. For Sartre, there is no preordained plan that makes us the kind of beings that we are. We are not made for any particular purpose. We exist, but not because of our purpose or essence like a paper-knife does; our existence precedes our essence.
Defining ourselves
This is where we begin to see the connection between Sartre’s claim that “existence precedes essence” and his atheism. Sartre points out that religious approaches to the question of human nature often work by means of an analogy with human craftsmanship—that human nature in the mind of God is analogous to the nature of the paper-knife in the mind of the craftsman who makes it. Even many non-religious theories of human nature, Sartre claims, still have their roots in religious ways of thinking, because they continue to insist that essence comes before existence, or that we are made for a specific purpose. In claiming that existence comes before essence, Sartre is setting out a position that he believes is more consistent with his atheism. There is no universal, fixed human nature, he declares, because no God exists who could ordain such a nature.
Here Sartre is relying on a very specific definition of human nature, identifying the nature of something with its purpose. He is rejecting the concept of what philosophers call teleology in human nature—that it is something that we can think about in terms of the purpose of human existence. Nevertheless, there is a sense in which Sartre is offering a theory of human nature, by claiming that we are the kinds of beings who are compelled to assign a purpose to our lives. With no divine power to prescribe that purpose, we must define ourselves.
Defining ourselves, however, is not just a matter of being able to say what we are as human beings. Instead, it is a matter of shaping ourselves into whatever kind of being we choose to become. This is what makes us, at root, different from all the other kinds of being in the world—we can become whatever we choose to make of ourselves. A rock is simply a rock; a cauliflower is simply a cauliflower; and a mouse is simply a mouse. But human beings possess the ability to actively shape themselves.
Because Sartre’s philosophy releases us from the constraint of a human nature that is preordained, it is also one of freedom. We are free to choose how to shape ourselves, although we do have to accept some limitations. No amount of willing myself to grow wings, for example, will ever cause that to happen. But even within the range of realistic choices we have, we often find that we are constrained and simply make decisions based upon habit, or because of the way in which we have become accustomed to see ourselves.
Sartre wants us to break free of habitual ways of thinking, telling us to face up to the implications of living in a world in which nothing is preordained. To avoid falling into unconscious patterns of behavior, he believes we must continually face up to choices about how to act.
The use or purpose of a tool, such as a pair of scissors, dictates its form. Humans, according to Sartre, have no specific purpose, so are free to shape themselves.
"First of all man exists, turns up, appears on the scene, and only afterwards defines himself."
Jean-Paul Sartre
Responsible freedom
By making choices, we are also creating a template for how we think a human life ought to be. If I decide to become a philosopher, then I am not just deciding for myself. I am implicitly saying that being a philosopher is a worthwhile activity. This means that freedom is the greatest responsibility of all. We are not just responsible for the impact that our choices have upon ourselves, but also for their impact on the whole of mankind. And, with no external principles or rules to justify our actions, we have no excuses to hide behind for the choices that we make. For this reason, Sartre declares that we are “condemned to be free.”
Sartre’s philosophy of linking freedom with responsibility has been labelled as pessimistic, but he refutes that charge. Indeed, he states that it is the most optimistic philosophy possible, because despite bearing responsibility for the impact of our actions upon others, we are able to choose to exercise sole control over how we fashion our world and ourselves.
Sartre’s ideas were particularly influential on the writings of his companion and fellow philosopher Simone de Beauvoir, but they also had a marked impact on French cultural and daily life. Young people especially were thrilled by his call to use their freedom to fashion their existence. He inspired them to challenge the traditionalist, authoritarian attitudes that prevailed in France in the 1950s and 1960s. Sartre is cited as a key influence on the streets protests in Paris in May 1968, which helped to bring down the conservative government and herald a more liberal climate throughout France.
Engagement with political issues was an important part of Sartre’s life. His constantly changing affiliations, as well as his perpetual movement between politics, philosophy, and literature, are themselves perhaps testament to a life lived in the light of the idea that existence precedes essence.
"As far as men go, it is not what they are that interests me, but what they can become."
Jean-Paul Sartre
Sartre’s idea that we are free to shape our own lives influenced the students that took to the streets of Paris in May 1968 to protest against the draconian powers of the university authorities.
JEAN-PAUL SARTRE
Born in Paris, Sartre was just 15 months old when his father died. Brought up by his mother and grandfather, he proved a gifted student, and gained entry to the prestigious École Normale Supérieure. There he met his lifelong
companion and fellow philosopher Simone de Beauvoir. After graduation, he worked as a teacher and was appointed Professor of Philosophy at the University of Le Havre in 1931.
During World War II, Sartre was drafted into the army and briefly imprisoned. After his release in 1941, he joined the resistance movement.
After 1945, Sartre’s writing became increasingly political and he founded the literary and political journal Modern Times. He was offered, but declined, the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1964. Such was his influence and popularity that more than 50,000 people attended his funeral in 1980.
Key works
1938 Nausea
1943 Being and Nothingness
1946 Existentialism and Humanism
1960 Critique of Dialectical Reason
See also: Aristotle • Søren Kierkegaard • Martin Heidegger • Simone de Beauvoir • Albert Camus
IN CONTEXT
The Philosophy Book Page 34