My Encounter with Philosophical Anarchist Paul Feyerabend
Feyerabend says washing dishes for his wife, physicist Grazia Borrini, is his “favorite activity,” but Borrini says he washes dishes only “once in a blue moon.” Whom should I believe, the philosopher or the physicist? Credit: Grazia Borrini-Feyerabend.
August 6, 2023. As things get crazier, philosopher Paul Feyerabend makes more sense. Below is an updated version of a piece I wrote after meeting him in 1992. Consider reading this after checking out my profiles of Karl Popper and Thomas Kuhn. –John Horgan
All philosophical skeptics risk self-contradiction. Karl Popper, in his interview with me, pounds the table and insists he is not dogmatic. Thomas Kuhn twists himself in knots trying to say exactly what he means when he says unambiguous communication is impossible.
One way to sidestep these traps is to embrace--even revel in--paradox, irony and rhetorical excess. That is the strategy of Paul Feyerabend, who calls himself not a skeptic but an “epistemological anarchist.” His first book, Against Method, argues that philosophy cannot provide a rationale for science, since there is no rationale to explain. He derides Popper's emphasis on falsification as "a tiny puff of hot air in the positivistic teacup," and he proposes that Kuhn's model of science applies to organized crime. Feyerabend sums up his anti-credo with the phrase "anything goes."
Feyerabend is often reduced to outrageous sound bites. He likens science to voodoo, witchcraft and astrology, and he sympathizes with religious fundamentalists who want creationism taught in schools. Intellectuals’ “zeal for objectivity,” he says, makes them “criminals, not the liberators of mankind."
In 1992, I call former colleagues at the University of California at Berkeley, from which Feyerabend recently retired, but no one knows where he is. Skimming Isis, a history of science journal, I come upon an essay by Feyerabend, which displays his talent for one-liners. "Prayer may not be very efficient when compared to celestial mechanics,” he writes, “but it surely holds its own vis-a-vis some parts of economics." The editor of Isis gives me an address for Feyerabend near Zurich, Switzerland.
I mail Feyerabend a fawning interview request, and to my delight he writes back: he is visiting New York City soon, staying with a former student, maybe we can meet at her place. He says I should also interview his wife, physicist Grazia Borrini, whose work is much more interesting than his. He encloses a photograph of himself engaged in his “favorite activity, washing dishes for my wife."
I arrive at the luxurious Manhattan apartment of Feyerabend’s former student, who wisely abandoned philosophy for real estate. She greets me at the door and leads me into her kitchen, where Feyerabend and Borrini sit at a table sipping wine. Only when he stands crookedly to greet me do I remember that Feyerabend was shot in the back during World War II.
He has the angular features and manic charm of a leprechaun. He declaims, sneers, wheedles and whispers--depending on his point or plot--while whirling his hands like a conductor. Self-deprecation spices his hubris. He calls himself "lazy" and "a bigmouth." When I ask his "position" on a certain point, he winces. "I have no position!" he cries. "If you have a position, it is always something screwed down." He twists an invisible screwdriver into the table. "I have opinions that I defend rather vigorously, and then I find out how silly they are, and I give them up!"
Watching this performance with an indulgent smile is Borrini, whose manner is as serene as Feyerabend's is agitated. She took his class at Berkeley in 1983, and they married six years later. Borrini enters the conversation sporadically--for example, when I ask why Feyerabend infuriates scientists.
"I have no idea," he says, the picture of innocence.
Borrini says she was infuriated when another physicist first told her about Feyerabend's views. "Someone was taking away from me the keys of the universe," she says. When she read his books, she realized his perspective is far more subtle than critics claim. "This is what I think you should want to write about," Borrini tells me, "the great misunderstanding."
"Oh, forget it, he's not my press agent," Feyerabend says.
Born and raised in Vienna, Feyerabend loved the arts and sciences. In his teens, he envisioned becoming an opera singer and astronomer. “I would spend my afternoons practicing singing, and my evenings on the stage, and then late at night I would observe the stars,” he says dreamily.
World War II interrupted his plans. In 1942, when Feyerabend turned 18, he enlisted in an officers’ school for the German army. He ended up in charge of 3,000 men on the Russian front. While fighting against (actually fleeing from) the Russians in 1945, he was shot in the lower back. "I couldn't get up," Feyerabend recalls, "and I still remember this vision: 'Ah, I shall be in a wheelchair rolling up and down between rows of books.’"
He recovered the ability to walk with the help of a cane. Studying at the University of Vienna after the war, he vacillated between physics and history and settled on philosophy. His talent for defending absurd positions fostered his suspicion that rhetoric trumps truth. "Truth itself is a rhetorical term," Feyerabend asserts. Jutting out his chin he intones, "'I am searching for the truth.' Oh boy, what a great person."
After studying under Popper in London in the 1950s, Feyerabend moved to Berkeley, where he befriended Kuhn. Like Kuhn, Feyerabend denies that he is anti-science. His insistence that there is no scientific method is pro-science. Science’s only method is “opportunism,” he says. “You need a toolbox full of different kinds of tools. Not only a hammer and pins and nothing else." This is what he means by his much-maligned phrase "anything goes" (and not, as his critics often claim, that all theories are equally valid or invalid). Restricting science to a particular methodology--such as Popper's falsification scheme or Kuhn's “normal science”--would destroy it.
On the other hand, Feyerabend objects to the claim that science is superior to other modes of knowledge. He hates the tendency of western states to foist science’s products--whether the theory of evolution or nuclear power plants--on people against their will. "There is separation between state and church," he says, "but none between state and science!"
Science "provides fascinating stories about the universe, about the ingredients, about the development, about how life came about, and all this stuff," Feyerabend says. But the public, whose taxes pay for research, should be free to reject theories and technologies.
"Of course I go to extremes,” Feyerabend says, “but not to the extremes people accuse me of, namely, throw out science. Throw out the idea science is first. That's all right." After all, scientists often disagree among themselves. "People should not take it for granted when a scientist says, 'Everybody has to follow this way.'"
If he is not anti-science, I ask, why does he call intellectuals “criminals” in his Who’s Who entry?
"I thought so for a long time," Feyerabend says, "but last year I crossed it out, because there are lots of good intellectuals." He turns to his wife. "I mean, you are an intellectual."
"No, I am a physicist," she replies.
Feyerabend shrugs. "What does it mean, 'intellectual'? It means people who think about things longer than other people, perhaps. But many of them just ran over other people, saying, 'We have figured it out.'"
Feyerabend launches into a rant against the western concept of “progress.” Hunter-gatherers in Africa "survive in surroundings where any western person would come in and die after a few days," he points out. "Now you might say people in [our] society live much longer, but the question is what is the quality of life, and that has not been decided."
Hunter-gatherers may be happy, I say, but they are ignorant. Isn't knowledge better than ignorance? "What's so great about knowledge?" Feyerabend replies. The hunter-gatherers “are good to each other. They don't beat each other down." They also know far more about their environments, such as the properties of local plants, than so-called experts. "So to say these people are ignorant is just... This is ignorance!"
I bring up Feyerabend’s defense of creationism. Doesn’t he worry about aiding and abetting religious conservatives who attack science? "Science has been used to say some people have a low intelligence quotient," he growls. "So everything is used in many different ways. Science can be used to beat down all sorts of other people."
But shouldn't children be taught the difference between scientific theories and religious myths? "Of course. I would say that science is very popular nowadays," he replies. "But then I have also to let the other side get in as much evidence as possible, because the other side is always given a short presentation."
I unload my gotcha question: Isn't there something contradictory about using rational arguments to attack rationality? Feyerabend is unperturbed. "Well, they are just tools, and tools can be used in any way you see fit," he says mildly. "They can't blame me that I use them."
Feyerabend seems bored by my attempts to trip him up. He regains his enthusiasm while talking about a book on which he’s working, The Conquest of Abundance. It addresses all the ways in which humans cope with the enormous natural diversity, or "abundance," of reality.
"First of all, the perceptual system cuts down this abundance, or you couldn't survive." Religion, science, politics and philosophy seek to compress reality still further. These attempts to conquer abundance, ironically, spawn new complexities, divisions, conflicts. "Lots of people have been killed, in political wars. I mean, certain opinions are not liked." Feyerabend, I realize, is talking about our quest to find The Answer, the secret to the riddle of reality.
The Answer will forever remain beyond our grasp, according to Feyerabend. He ridicules the belief of some scientists that they can reduce reality to a single explanation, such as string theory. "Let them have their belief, if it gives them joy. Let them also give talks about that. 'We touch the infinite!' And some people say"--bored voice--"‘Ya ya, he says he touches the infinite.' And some people say"--thrilled voice--"'Ya ya! He says he touches the infinite!' But to tell the little children in school, 'Now that is what the truth is,' that is going much too far."
All our descriptions of reality fall far short, Feyerabend says. "You think that this one-day fly, this little bit of nothing, a human being--according to today's cosmology!--can figure it all out? This to me seems so crazy! It cannot possibly be true! What they figured out is one particular response to their actions, and this response gives this universe, and the reality that is behind this is laughing! 'Ha ha! They think they have found me out!'"
All our knowledge is expressed in language, which stems from “dealing with things, chairs, and a few instruments. And just on this tiny earth!" Feyerabend pauses, lost in a kind of exaltation. "God is emanations, you know? And they come down and become more and more material. And down, down at the last emanation, you can see a little trace of it and guess at it."
Surprised by this outburst, I ask Feyerabend if he is religious. "I'm not sure," he murmurs, looking genuinely puzzled. Raised Catholic, he became an adamant atheist. "And now my philosophy has taken a completely different shape. It can't just be that the universe--Boom!--you know, and develops. It just doesn't make any sense."
As I prepare to leave, Feyerabend asks if I am married. Yes, I say, adding that I just took my wife out to dinner to celebrate her birthday. How did the dinner go? Feyerabend asks. Fine, I reply. "You're not drifting apart? It wasn't the last birthday you will ever celebrate with her?"
Borrini glares at him. "Why should it be?"
"I don't know!" Feyerabend exclaims, throwing up his hands. "Because it happens!" He turns back to me. "How long have you been married?" Three years, I say. "Ah, just the beginning. The bad things will come. Just wait 10 years." [See Postscript.] Now you really sound like a philosopher, I say. Feyerabend laughs. He confesses that he was married and divorced three times before he met Borrini. "Now for the first time I am so happy to be married." He beams at Borrini, and she beams back.
I tell Borrini that her husband told me in a letter that his “favorite activity” is washing dishes for her.
Borrini snorts. "Once in a blue moon," she says.
"What do you mean, once in a blue moon!" Feyerabend cries. "Every day I wash dishes!"
"Once in a blue moon," Borrini repeats firmly. I decide to believe the physicist rather than the philosopher.
Just over a year after my meeting with Feyerabend, The New York Times reports, to my dismay, that the "anti-science philosopher" succumbed to brain cancer. I call Borrini in Zurich to offer my condolences. She is distraught. Paul complained of headaches, and a few months later he was dead.
Recalling Feyerabend's excoriation of the medical profession, I cannot resist asking: Did he seek medical treatment for his tumor? Of course, she replies. He had "total confidence" in his doctors and was willing to accept any treatment they recommended; the tumor was simply detected too late for anything to be done.
Beneath Feyerabend's rhetorical antics lurked a deadly serious theme: our compulsion to understand and control the world can culminate in tyranny. Feyerabend attacked science not because he actually believed it is no more valid than astrology or Christianity. Quite the contrary. He attacked science because he recognized--and was horrified by--science's overwhelming superiority to other modes of knowledge.
Feyerabend’s objections to science were primarily moral and political. He feared that science, precisely because of its enormous power, might become a totalitarian force that crushes rival modes of knowledge in ways that limit our creativity and freedom. I’ve become more sympathetic to this idea, and to Feyerabend’s insistence that science can never capture reality, in the decades since we met. Science, it seems to me, is especially dangerous when it tells us what we are, can be and should be. Feyerabend once wrote:
Human life is guided by many ideas. Truth is one of them. Freedom and mental independence are others. If Truth, as conceived by some ideologists, conflicts with freedom, then we have a choice. We may abandon freedom. But we may also abandon Truth.
[Postscript: Feyerabend turned out to be prescient. My wife and I split up in 2009.]
Further Reading:
Thomas Kuhn’s Skepticism Went Too Far
My Controversial Diatribe Against “Skeptics”
What’s the Point of the Humanities?
Advice to Aspiring Science Writers: Remember Marx
Conservation of Ignorance: A New Law of Nature
Also, I like to think Feyerabend would have appreciated Mind-Body Problems and My Quantum Experiment. In both books, I knock the notion that there is a single, “true” way for us to look at reality, and at ourselves.