Paul Feyerabend

In the last months of the war, retreating with the German army before the Russian advance, Paul Feyerabend took three bullets; one lodged in his spine. He was twenty-one, temporarily paralysed from the waist down, and he would walk with a stick and live with the pain for the next fifty years. What he came out of the war wanting was not philosophy — it was opera. He trained his voice seriously and kept singing all his life, tried stagecraft, drifted through history and sociology into physics and astronomy in Vienna. When a scholarship took him to England, the plan was to study under Wittgenstein; Wittgenstein died before he arrived, and he landed with Karl Popper instead. The philosophy of science got him at second choice, twice removed.

Popper’s seminar taught the great rationalist programme: science advances by conjecture and refutation, and there is a logic to it — a method that separates science from everything else. Feyerabend absorbed it so well that Popper wanted him as his assistant. He turned the job down; by his own cheerful account, he did not want to become anybody’s follower. He ended up at Berkeley, and then spent the career dismantling, piece by published piece, the programme his teacher had built.

The demolition tool was history. Take any rule that is supposed to govern good science — test against the record, and ask: had this rule been enforced, what would have died? The famous chapters of Against Method (1975) run the test on Galileo. Galileo won not by following method but by breaking it: propaganda and rhetoric, writing in Italian instead of Latin, reinterpreting plain observation to fit his theory, championing a telescope whose optics nobody could yet vouch for, riding out mountains of counter-evidence. Had the methodologists had their way, the earth would have stayed still. And the result generalises: every methodological rule, however reasonable, has been productively violated at some actual turning point in science.

From which follows the most misread sentence in twentieth-century philosophy: “the only principle that does not inhibit progress is: anything goes.” It is not advice, and it is not his programme. It is the verdict of history, handed to the rationalist who insists on one rule for all cases — your principle, Feyerabend is saying, is the only one your own evidence leaves standing. There are standards; there are always standards. They just cannot be fixed in advance, one for every context. He preferred “flippant Dadaist” to “serious anarchist” as a label, and Against Method itself began as half of a duel: his friend and sparring partner Imre Lakatos was to write the rationalist reply. Lakatos died before either half was finished, and Feyerabend published his own as “a long and rather personal letter to Imre” — the joke and the grief both still in it.

Late in the career he pushed further: science is one tradition among many, with real achievements and its own standards, but its privileged seat is a political arrangement, not an epistemological necessity. For this, Nature named him “the worst enemy of science.” He wore the title lightly — his Berkeley lectures were packed, and he liked science fine. What he fought was its coronation: a monopoly of ideas, he held, is as dangerous as a monopoly of power.

Where does he stop? Deliberately, at the demolition line. He refused to put a new method where the old one fell — building a replacement, he suspected, is how monopolies restart — and what to make of the opened ground he left to others. The better ending is the one his life wrote: fifty years of pain, and the funniest, most alive philosophy of his century; a demolisher whose unfinished last book, Conquest of Abundance, defends the sheer richness of the world against every abstraction that would thin it. He tore down the rules for the same reason he sang. Reality, he thought, is bigger than any score.

This post is part of the conversations series. See also the reference entry on Paul Feyerabend.

Photo: Erwin Bosman / Unsplash