ON HISTORICAL UNDERSTANDING
Nor does the u·niqueness or individuality of a sequence of events
in time make it an historical event. Else all the unique events 'studied
by geology, astronomy, biology, and psychology must be considered his–
torical, too. And if they are, it is clear that we cannot make a beginning
towards understanding them without causal laws. It sometimes appears
that in human history we are more interested in individual and non–
repetitive events than in the natural sciences. But this is a result of a
terminological habit of identifying science with abstract theoretical laws
already formulated in textbooks instead of with scientific procedures
which are concerned with particular cases. The determination of a
particular case may sometimes be decisive in invalidating or confirmir:g
an abstract law. All events are unique: the events studied by the his–
torian are influenced by more events than those studied by the natural
scientist.
Perhaps the phrase
"the
historical method" means different things
to different people, and the sense in which it is used varies with contexts.
If
Popper thinks he is using the historical method in interpreting the
ideas of Plato and Hegel and Marx the less we have of it the better.
Whatever is valid in his criticisms-denunciations would be more ac–
curate--of Plato has already been said in Warner Fite's
The Platonic
Legend,
a study which itself suffers from one-sidedness. To this Popper
adds the epithet of "totalitarian party-politician" in a vein reminiscent
of Bukharin's reference to Plato as "a man of outspoken Black Hundred
tendencies." Popper reads the texts like a prosecuting attorney intent on
a conviction. He distorts the allegory of the metals in Book III of the
Republic
to prove that Plato advocated an hereditary caste system and
ignores the significance of the Myth of Erin Book X in which Plato's
ironic commentary on the effects of living in the Republic reinforces
suggestions made elsewhere that the Republic was not offered as a
cookbook of political recipes.
Of Hegel, he writes: "Thus the formula of the Fascist brew is in all
countries the same: Hegel plus a dash of 19th century materialism."
This should
be
news to Franco, Salsazar, and Dollfuss. It would have
been news to the Nazi party philosophers who drew their inspiration
from Houston Chamberlain. It was the Race, they deified, not the
State, and Race conceived in mystical, not materialistic, terms. Popper's
remarks on Hegel are as objective as the Nazi estimates of the Old
Testament patriarchs.
What shall we say of an historical evaluation which applies to a
figure in the past a contemporary rubric which has other antecedents,
235
