Free Life, the Journal of the Libertarian Alliance

It was Paul Feyerabend who gave me back the idea that science might be a worthwhile activity, and that philosophy might be of help to it. That revelation came not long after I had dropped out of postgraduate physics research. I had become demoralized by the conviction that scientific research was a routinized affair of detecting correlations among data. In the world of physics that I had briefly entered, experimentalists and theorists knew little of each other's work. Among the theorists, the journeymen could barely discern the grand ideas behind the work of the great names in their own field, and none of them had anything to do with philosophers. To be a successful scientist it seemed that you had to be content to remain within the limits of your own field, able to push ahead with it on its own terms: wider reflection and synthesis might become possible late in a successful career. It seemed that science was not the field for me. (I confess I also showed little aptitude for it.)

If at that time I had read the contemporary work of Feyerabend, I would have found that he would have none of that. for him, philosophy and science were in close and violent relationship: philosophy playing the policeman, science the crook who persistently broke out of gaol. Science perpetually broke the rules that philosophy discovered in its past practice and prescribed for its future.

My view of the hermetic isolation of the specialisms was an interpretation of other philosophers as well as of my own experience. For the Oxford philosophers, the autonomy of each science was standard doctrine. Wittgenstein, who had so much to say about psychology and mathematics, had nothing interesting to say about physics. Popper wasn't much help: for him, scientific theories seemed to have a logic and a structure to dissect, but not much in the way of significance, of a point.

After I had left physics, I read Thomas Kuhn, and he shook my depressing system of ideas a little. His contrast between revolutionary and normal science was well calculated to bolster my cynicism about science. Obviously as a student I had encountered great swathes of the normal, puzzle-solving variety. And if the revolutions in science were not to be understood as driven from within but as transitions between incommensurable world-views, those advances might be due to transactions with the wider world of metaphysical, religious, political and economic concerns. That could restore the wider relevance of science.

Still there was something lacking. Kuhn did not set me alight. He didn't seem to drive his points home. His clumsy prose was not powerful enough to overcome my suspicion of the relativism that he never quite owned up to.

As a postgraduate student, I had encountered Feyerabend's technical work, and, as far as I knew, he was just another perfectly respectable philosopher of science. I came to respect him for his opinions in the recondite area of the interpretation of quantum mechanics. His arguments against Popper had seemed the most cogent things I had read in that field. At that time I wasn't aware of the political dimensions of his thinking.

The Feyerabend I discovered later, in the Seventies, was different. No one could have accused him of writing weak prose. True, there were big problems with him. He seemed to offer even more temptations to relativism. He was a trendy, considerably more advanced in years than the student radicals whose cause he espoused. His politics were rainbow-coalition. He postured on the dust-jacket of his Science in a Free Society above a horoscope, and wearing what a decade before had been called a Liverpool cap. He preached an inchoate brand of philosophical iconoclasm. It always seemed that three-quarters of his argument lay elsewhere, in the recondite sources of the footnotes that outweighed his fragmented text.

But the prose kicked. He had points. He provided ample food for thought, even if you never got round to following up the footnotes.

Feyerabend said, for example, that every rule of method of the philosophers had been broken at some time or other in the history of science. He claimed that we could not know in advance what principles would be successful in the struggle to win knowledge. He used the slogan 'Anything goes'. He declared himself an epistemological, though not a political, anarchist.

I was open to some of these ideas. I wanted to go to California, sit in on Feyerabend's lectures at Berkeley, and inveigle myself into his circle. In fact that was just one of the numerous universities with which he took jobs at that time, in a strange frenzy of global part-timing. Though I never did return to philosophy or to scientific research, the dreary set of prejudices I'd built up had been blown away and replaced with more vivid and stimulating ideas.

Feyerabend worked on, notorious among philosophers, reviled in the occasional Nature editorial, unknown in the wider intellectual world. Before he died in 1994 he completed Killing Time, the brief memoir reviewed here. The title is Feyerabend's judgement on his life, a life spent "defacing paper" when he could have been lying in the sun and watching TV. I came to it wanting to know Feyerabend's final position on a number of philosophical questions. I wanted to know the real reasons for his hatred of Popper, among all philosophers the arch-villain on whom he pours scorn. I wanted to know how he felt about individual liberty, and the varied fortunes of those "liberal" causes with which he had identified himself.

None of these questions is answered in Killing Time. A book can reveal that it is by a dying man by its passion and urgency; or merely by the fact that it is in sad want of revision. Feyerabend's last testament is all too clearly a first draft. Many of its sentences are just slightly off-key and wildly aimed, each raising a question as to which of several meanings it is intended to have. It is a tragedy for us that he left the writing of this book until he was too ill to make it a better one.

We never learn just what lies behind Feyerabend's Popper-hatred; I suspect that there is an interesting story there for others to tell. It is not, I'm sure, to do with intellectual disagreement alone: Feyerabend's loves and hates cut across philosophical positions. His friendship with his LSE colleague Imre Lakatos, for example, was a stormy one because of their profound disagreements, but it was firm and lifelong.

He genuinely admired Popper and wanted to form a movement around Popper's philosophy. Eventually he became disillusioned. "What has Popper done over and above Duhem? " he wrote on one of his last postcards. "Nothing." [p 130]

All we learn about the development of Feyerabend's ideas is that at earlier times he falls for the claims of rationalism, at later times he doesn't; at earlier times he's an idiot - at later times he isn't.

The character portrayed is that of a perverse and cocky egotist. Yet for all that, I find it an attractive one. For one thing, I share some of his failings. Feyerabend has a very bad memory for most of the events of his life, and I find that highly sympathetic. But he has a very good memory for singers: he himself could have made a career as a tenor, and the pages are dotted with mentions of singers and performances, mostly Central European, from decades ago.

I learn from another review of this book [1] that Feyerabend's epistemological anarchism is "a precursor of post-modernism". Certainly he can be blank enough about his own past motivations and feelings to delight any post-modernist. But rather than any philosophical stance, this is, as he would readily have agreed, just past obtuseness and present forgetfulness. In Vienna in March 1938 he witnesses the Anschluss without any political emotion. He was only 14 at the time: but the moral blankness continued:

For me the German occupation and the war that followed were an inconvenience, not a moral problem, and my reactions came from accidental moods and circumstances, not from a well-defined outlook. [p 38]

Sent to France and then the Russian Front with the Wehrmacht, he has no particular view on the events around him. He sees a German infantryman casually toss a grenade into a cellarful of civilians, but it is the disgust of a comrade, not his own, that he reports. He describes an act of gallantry that earned him the Iron Cross as mere idiocy. This is certainly false modesty, but it is also more: it somehow ties in with his wider views, but his words are not well enough focused to make his position clear. Does he purport to think that all heroism is idiocy? Or just heroism in the German cause at that time? We can't tell. And in either case, why should we then accept his implied invitation to despise the officers who, when the retreat was under way, fled to hospitals in the rear with minor injuries? Would it not have been "idiocy" to refrain from that sort of thing?

Feyerabend makes similarly cynical remarks about his feats in the academic world. He doesn't refrain from mentioning them, and we are left in no doubt of his brilliance; yet they are also all condemned as part of the activities that in the end he denounced: the activities of rationalism, dominating the academy and trying to bully the world outside into accepting its hegemony. This is consistent with the ending of Part 2 of his Science in a Free Society, where he toys with the idea of becoming an entertainer, abandoning philosophy being the logical consequence of his views. But the toying was evidently no more than that, since he continued writing and arguing to the end.

Another trait that is linked at a deep level with his view of the world is his willingness to entertain (I do not say espouse) multiple contradictory views. He detests many things, but he is never shocked by them, and you can rarely tell his view of something by the tone in which he discusses it. This reaches a sublime apogee in his tall story about the defences that he offered to criticisms of his major work - which he calls a collage - Against Method.

Reading the reviews I faced illiteracy pure and simple for the first time. I didn't realize it right away. Having forgotten the details of my collage and being too lazy to check, I often took the critics at their word. So when a reviewer wrote "Feyerabend says X" and then attacked X, I assumed that I had indeed said X and tried to defend it. Yet in many cases I had not said X but its opposite. Didn't I care about what I had written? Yes and no. I certainly didn't feel the religious fervour some writers apply to their products; as far as I was concerned, AM was just a book, not holy writ. Moreover, I could be easily convinced of the merits of almost any view. Written texts, my own included, often seemed ambiguous to me - they meant one thing, they meant another.

Feyerabend paints a picture of the sciences as only a small corner of intellectual activity, with no claim to dominate others, such as history, poetry, and literature; and he depicts all of these as only a small corner of the activity of the human mind, as represented in activities such as myth-making, religion and craft work. For example, we exalt the theoretical knowledge - or just the notions - of the scientist above the practical knowledge of craft workers. But according to Feyerabend, developments in, say, the atomic theory have at times hindered the development of craft knowledge.

Myth-making and magical ritual, he says, have enabled those who live in traditional societies to get along and make sense of their lives; the intrusions of alien Western systems of thought have destroyed these givers of meaning and disrupted societies.

Feyerabend never argued for the overthrow of Western science and rationalism. For him, at the time of Science in a Free Society, a free society is one in which all traditions, including the scientific, have equal access to power, rather than one in which all individuals do so. Let those who wish to live by modern science and technology do so; let those who wish to live by other traditions do so.

There is a lot for libertarians to agree with there. Out went state domination of intellectual production and exchange, for tax-funded support for state educational curricula, for propaganda against magic and astrology, for suppression of creationism; and equally, for colonialist adventures, for bullying of homosexuals and ethnic minorities, and so on.

But it's obvious that the idea of freedom for traditions is often in conflict with freedom for individuals. Traditions that are to be respected include, around the world, the warlike, the slave-holding, the female-circumcising, the woman-suppressing, the theocratic, the would-be world-dominating, ... In fact, the vast majority of traditions that have ever existed are denied legitimacy by Feyerabend's doctrine, since they have not respected other traditions. He might have condemned them, even at the time of Science in a Free Society; but he certainly had little to say about the failings of any culture except that of the modern West.

Further, it's clear that affording "equal access to power" to even the relatively benign traditions to be found around his southern California base is going to mean plenty of affirmative action, quotas, positive discrimination, and compensatory welfare benefits. Feyerabend had no beef against taxation as such, only the agenda for which it is earmarked by the present-day consensus.

It's not clear, either, that in this regime "science" would be removed farther from the centre of power, which he declares as one of his desiderata at the beginning of Science in a Free Society. The devotees of science think it is presently a poor relation of other concerns, such as the arts, sports and humanities. If it were to get full recognition as an officially licensed "tradition", then, considering that nearly everyone in our society pays lip service to it, it might command a still larger levy on that bottomless public purse than it does today.

I don't know whether libertarian considerations like these played any part in Feyerabend's abandonment of the all-embracing toleration suggested by the formulation of "equal access for all traditions". In Killing Time he writes of the later development of his opinions:

Other armchair views did not fare so well. I am referring to my 'relativism', to the idea that cultures are more or less closed entities with their own criteria and procedures, that they are intrinsically valuable and should not be interfered with. ... Considering how much cultures have learned from each other and how ingeniously they have transformed the material thus assembled, I have come to the conclusion that every culture is potentially all cultures and that special cultural features are changeable manifestations of a single human nature. This conclusion has important political consequences. It means that cultural peculiarities are not sacrosanct. There is no such thing as a "culturally authentic" suppression, or a "culturally authentic" murder. There is only suppression and murder, and both should be treated as such, with determination if necessary. [p 151f]

... we must open ourselves to change before trying to change others. In other words, we must pay attention to the wishes, the opinions, the habits, the suggestions of the people about to be interfered with, and we must obtain our information by way of extended personal contacts, not from a distance, not by trying to be "objective', not by consorting with so-called leaders. [p 152]

Feyerabend attracted the wrath of science devotees, but his aim was not to deny the excellence of science but to show wherein it consists and how greatly it differs from the naive standards of excellence proposed by rationalists. In Killing Time he pays tribute to science in passing as he denounces the beliefs of his Popperian days:

I assumed that "rational" standards, when applied rigorously and without exceptions, can lead to a practice that is as mobile, rich, stimulating, and technologically effective as the sciences we already have, accept, and praise. [p. 90]

His studies were grounded on deep and wide reading in a field that he never ceased to love. He always emphasized the distinction between theory embalmed as a frozen logical structure of propositions - the logicist view of science of the Poppers and the Hempels and Nagels - and the view of it as protean, historical, an instrument to be used or misused, its meanings always shifting. The influence of Wittgenstein is evident (he had been enrolled to begin postgraduate study with him at the time of Wittgenstein's death). Yet it is entirely consistent with his principled perverseness that he published a review of Wittgenstein's Philosophical Investigations that moved in the opposite direction, reducing that garden of forking paths to a neat list of numbered theses. He now says of this "paper monster":

After Feyerabend, no purported rules of method seem safe. The principle of falsifiability is of strictly limited application. I think it was the physicist David Bohm who said that it took 2,500 years of discussion to bring atomic theory to the point where it could be tested. Anyway, a theory is too costly, too much in need of cherishing, to be discarded lightly; like an expensive machine, it can't be tossed away because it can't do every job that can be imagined for it.

Famously, it was the supposed unfalsifiability of the theories of Freud and Marx that aroused the suspicion of the young Karl Popper; yet bookshelves groan under the weight of empirical studies that purport to refute both doctrines. And all the great philosophical, theological and moral theses have been the battlegrounds of fierce debates in which arguments purporting to refute or confirm were deployed. The principle was offered as a criterion of demarcation between the sciences and other fields of thought: yet what is the interest of such a demarcation if the metaphysics of one millennium is the scientific theory of another, and the scientific revolution of one century is the unchallengeable framework for research of the next?

Arriving at the LSE in 1952, Feyerabend came under the influence of Popper. He condemns his younger self for deploying the criterion of falsifiability destructively:

It had been fun to heap scorn on venerable traditions by showing that they were 'cognitively meaningless'. It was even more exhilarating to criticize respectable scientific theories by raising the magic wand of falsifiability.

I am less interested in whether it was admirable than in how it was possible: I can't imagine anything looking like a halfway-interesting scientific theory that can't easily have tests dreamed up for it. The principle of falsifiability seems to me to be a toy gun.

In consonance with Feyerabend's ideas, even the principle of non-contradiction has been discarded - or so heavily transformed as to be as good as discarded - for certain purposes in physics. Quantum mechanics is an instrumentalist theory, according to its standard ("Copenhagen") interpretation. It does not seek to provide a space-time description of phenomena that is unified and consistent. Feyerabend did not view this as an atavism to be combated with the aid of a philosophical principle, such as "critical realism"; nor as a trait that is admirable because of the dictates of some philosophical prejudice in favour of instrumentalism; nor as one that is known by some mathematical sleight of hand to be unshakeable; but as a position that is inescapable because it has survived long and fierce assaults - because it has emerged strengthened from the combat of scientists of the calibre of Bohr and Einstein.

Feyerabend's most famous and outrageous one-liner was the slogan "Anything goes". But this was not a counter-principle of method. It was not even his own claim. It was the conclusion that he claimed any honest methodologist would be forced to when he compared the history of science with his own favoured rules. In particular places at particular times, certain rules have been found to foster progress. At other places and times, it becomes necessary to contradict those rules. It was their elevation to timeless truths to which Feyerabend objected. Philosophers have their work cut out to show he was wrong.

Killing Time is a dying whisper, to be attended to by those who are already hooked on Feyerabend. Go to the writings from the days of health, in which the ideas tumble over one another, to get a sense of the real Feyerabend. But if you are one of those libertarians who seek relief from the strain of perpetual toleration in pompous denunciations of deviancy from scientific rules of method, derived from first principles, be warned: you'll never feel the same about "scientific method".

Feyerabend, Paul K., Against Method: Outline of an Anarchistic Theory of Knowledge, 3rd edn. 1993.

Feyerabend, Paul K., 'On a recent critique of complementarity', Philosophy of Science, Part I: vol 35, no. 4, p. 309, Dec. 1968; Part II: vol. 36, no. 1, p. 82, March 1969.

Feyerabend, Paul K., 'Philosophy: world and underworld', in The Oxford Companion to the History of Philosophy, ed. Ted Honderich, Oxford University Press, 1995.

Feyerabend, Paul K., 'Science, history of the philosophy of', in The Oxford Companion to the History of Philosophy, ed. Ted Honderich, Oxford University Press, 1995.