Resistance

GERMAR RUDOLF, RESISTANCE IS OBLIGATORYthe brain. There is hardly anything left of Kant’s “a priori” knowledge.It was precisely at this point that Karl Popper made his entrance. Asphysicist, mathematician and philosopher he had the required basicknowledge to transform and combine the insights gained by the naturalsciences into a solid new theory of knowledge (epistemology). He begandeveloping this new theory of knowledge in the 1930s.Concerning the genesis of science, Popper explained: 73“Among the Babylonians and the Greeks and also among theMaoris of New Zealand – indeed, it would seem, among all peopleswho invent cosmological myths – tales are told which deal with thebeginning of things, and which try to understand or explain thestructure of the Universe in terms of the story of its origin. Thesestories become traditional and are preserved in special schools. Thetradition is often in the keeping of some separate or chosen class,the priests or medicine men, who guard it jealously. The storieschange only little by little – mainly through inaccuracies in handingthem on, through misunderstandings and sometimes through the accretionof new myths, invented by prophets or poets.Now what is new in Greek philosophy, what is newly added to allthis, seems to me to consist not so much in the replacement of themyths by something more ‘scientific,’ as in a new attitude towardsthe myths. That their character then begins to change seems to me tobe merely a consequence of this new attitude.The new attitude I have in mind is the critical attitude. In theplace of a dogmatic handing on of the doctrine (in which the wholeinterest lies in the preservation of the authentic tradition) we find acritical discussion of the doctrine. Some people begin to ask questionsabout it; they doubt the trustworthiness of the doctrine; itstruth.Doubt and criticism certainly existed before this stage. What isnew, however, is that doubt and criticism now become, in their turn,part of the tradition of the school. A tradition of a higher order replacesthe traditional preservation of the dogma: in the place of traditionaltheory – in place of the myth – we find the tradition of criticizingtheories (which at first themselves are hardly more thanmyths). It is only in the course of this critical discussion that observationis called in as a witness.”7362Karl Popper, Objective Knowledge, op. cit. (note 67), pp. 347f.