The fascist appeal to ‘human nature’ is to our passions, to our collectivist mystical needs, to ‘man the unknown’. Adopting Hegel’s words just quoted… - Karl Popper

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The fascist appeal to ‘human nature’ is to our passions, to our collectivist mystical needs, to ‘man the unknown’. Adopting Hegel’s words just quoted, this appeal may be called the cunning of the revolt against reason. But the height of this cunning is reached by Hegel in this boldest dialectical twist of his. While paying lip-service to rationalism, while talking more loudly about ‘reason’ than any man before or after him, he ends up in irrationalism; in an apotheosis not only of passion, but of brutal force: ‘It is’, Hegel writes, ‘the absolute interest of Reason that this Moral Whole’ (i.e. the State) ‘should exist; and herein lies the justification and merit of heroes, the founders of States — however cruel they may have been … Such men may treat other great and even sacred interests inconsiderately … But so mighty a form must trample down many an innocent flower; it must crush to pieces many an object on its path.

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About Karl Popper

Sir Karl Raimund Popper (28 July 1902 – 17 September 1994) was an Austrian-British philosopher, academic and social commentator. One of the 20th century's most influential philosophers of science, Popper is known for his rejection of the classical inductivist views on the scientific method in favour of empirical falsification. According to Popper, a theory in the empirical sciences can never be proven, but it can be falsified, meaning that it can (and should) be scrutinised with decisive experiments. Popper was opposed to the classical justificationist account of knowledge, which he replaced with critical rationalism, namely "the first non-justificational philosophy of criticism in the history of philosophy".

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Native Name: Karl Raimund Popper
Alternative Names: Karl Raimund Popper Sir Karl Raimund, Sir Popper Sir Karl Raimund Popper
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Additional quotes by Karl Popper

...if God had wanted to put everything into the world from the beginning, He would have created a universe without change, without organisms and evolution, and without man and man's experience of change. But He seems to have thought that a live universe with events unexpected even by Himself would be more interesting than a dead one.

It is often asserted that discussion is only possible between people who have a common language and accept common basic assumptions. I think that this is a mistake. All that is needed is a readiness to learn from one's partner in the discussion, which includes a genuine wish to understand what he intends to say. If this readiness is there, the discussion will be the more fruitful the more the partner's backgrounds differ.

Science can be viewed from various standpoints, not only from that of epistemology; for example, we can look at it as a biological or as a sociological phenomenon. As such it might be described as a tool, or an instrument, comparable perhaps to some of our industrial machinery. Science may be described as a means of production - as the last word in ‘roundabout production.

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