Bartley on Lakatos and Popper

In 1985 Colin Simkin put me in touch with Bill Bartley who was the official biographer for Karl Popper. Simkin became a close friend of Popper in Christchurch in 1937 or 1938 and they kept in touch until Popper died in 1994. Simkin was such a good friend that he was allowed to smoke while he walked with Popper in the garden. Other people, even including Alfred Tarski (like Simkin, a chain smoker) were not allowed to smoke in the same room with Popper, not even a lecture theatre.

Simkin moved to a chair of Economics in Sydney and by good fortune he lived a very short distance from my place so it was easy to meet regularly for the last decade of his life.

Bartley and I exchanged some letters and I have decided to reproduce some interesting parts. The first concerns the relationship between Popper, Lakatos, Kuhn and Feyerabend.

Dec 13 1985

As to Lakatos: I’ll tell you more than you want to know about Lakatos when I come to Australia in 1987 (I’ve been invited to give the General Address at a meeting to be held then, being organized through Knud Haakonssen (at Canberra) and Greg Lindsay). It was all politics, and this is manifest not only from my own memories, but from the 15 boxes of his correspondence that are on display at the LSE Archive (the other )45 boxes or so are locked away for another 13 years or so because they are so hot). I think it can be documented that there was an active agreement among Lakatos, Feyerabend, and Kuhn to stage a kind of publicity stunt for their own work that would steal Popper’s thunder and cloud the situation. Lakatos was quite explicit about his aims: he wanted to become a “world-historical personality” – notice the Hegelian terminology. I will eventually write about all this, but meanwhile please keep these remarks confidential, because one must be delicate in talking about living persons.

Bartley did not make the trip as planned, so I did not get to hear more about Lakatos.

The following extract relate to Bartley’s appraisal of the comparative achievement of Popper, Hayek and himself. In view of the importance that I ascribed to Bartley’s exegesis of non-justificationism and its revolutionary implications (especially in explaining Popper’s achievement) I grouped them as major thinkers and he wanted to keep his own work in perspective compared to theirs.

He then went to expain an aspect of Popper’s ability that make him very unpopular among thinkers who have very few original thoughts

May 25 1986

A few words about how things actually stand. And these are said confidentially. I do think that my old work on rationality revolutionizes epistemology and theory of rationality and does generalize Popper’s work in an exceptionally important way. I’d love more recognition for that, and I’d like it if my work eventually had some more impact and made the areas it touches more interesting. But this – although it makes a undamental contribution to the theory of liberalism (in the European sense) does not put me in the same league as Popper and Hayek. There is perhaps a sense in which I am in the same league as Hayek: I don’t doubt that I am every bit as “original” as he is, and in many ways we have the same sort of minds. But our achievements don’t compare. He has written fourteen quite important books, plus a number of historical studies (of which most people don’t even know) that would alone secure him an important niche. Moreover he was one of the main antagonists in the very important practical and theoretical battles of the thirties, and is one of the most influential people in the world today. And you should add to this a generosity of spirit and truly noble character that I don’t have at all.
As to Popper, there is simply no comparison. I have bad one really important idea and a lot of middling ideas. But he has enriched everything he has touched, and he has touched almost every area of human thought. He has many human faults, but is also a true genius, one of the towering intellects of all time. Moreover, you don’t fully get this from his writings – here he differs from Hayek: everything that Hayek has to say he has written – Popper creates constantly, and effortlessly, as he talks, and the world would be a greatly richer place intellectually had a tape-recorder been running at his side for the past seventy years. It is this – and this I haven’t yet  published – which accounts, really accounts, for the great hostility to him.

Such richness calls up intense envy in anyone who has intellectual ambitions (and you should read Helmut Shoeck’s book Envy to understand how these things work; Shoeck is one of the few sociologists who has seen how things are in “society”). I think you can perhaps get a glimpse of Popper’s effect (if you haven’t met him or met him only briefly) if you have seen the play Amadeus (or even the movie, although the movie does not do it so well). There is a scene where Mozart is to be presented to Joseph II, and the court musician, Kapellrneister, or whatever, Salieri, produces a little march to welcome Mozart to the audience chamber. Mozart enters, and after the presentation turns to Salieri and says something like: “That is a very nice little march you have composed for me. May I try it?” Mozart sits down at the harpsichord, plays back Salieri’s march perfectly, looks up, and says: “Let’s try it a little faster.” He then plays it twice as fast, but reaches a chord and pauses, saying: “Well, that’s not quite right, is it?” He then starts to -improvize, and as you watch – or listen – something that was competent and ordinary is transformed into something of the most  exquisite beauty and originality. While Salieri writhes in pain and envy. This is the only portrayal on stage of which I know (and one of the few in literature) of true transformation, of World 3 creation, and of the ambition and envy that accompany it. Popper has this same effect – both in his conversation and in his writing.