A Caravan in the Clouds

Abstract

Karl Popper concludes his classic The Open Society and Its Enemies with a passionate denunciation of the "immoral philosophy" of "histori cism" (Popper 1971: 259). "Historicism, in Popper's view, was a kind of sin, a form of hubris. It arrogates to itself a God's-eye view of the events of the past in assuming that we could both discover nontrivial universal laws in history and then marshal them in the construction of a "scientific" discipline called "history." Instead, Popper argues that since no set of historical records dictates "one way only" of reading those records, the discipline of history only reflects a single "point of view." The discipline of history consists then of "general interpretations" (Popper 1971: 266) of "crystallizations of points of view"?but not universal laws (Popper 1971: 267). Doing history is then a kind of art, consisting in making more or less fitting proposals about the most appropriate way to read the facts of the past. A good part of what I want to say about Donald A. Nielsen's Three Faces of God is an attempt to bring out his "points of view." An even greater part of this review, however, takes its rise from addi tional cautions which Popper urges on us in the same work. To wit, immedi ately on the heels of his warning against the wickedness of God's-eye view "historicism," Popper argues just as vigorously that his objections to historicism do not mean that all points of view, all interpretations of a given set of facts, are "of equal merit" (Popper 1971:266). Some interpreta tions will maintain greater faith with the "accepted records" than others; some will comprehend more facts than competing interpretations; some will need less "tweaking"?fewer secondary elaborating hypotheses in order to fit with the facts. In general, I feel that while Nielsen's book seems generally true to many facts?both in terms of encompassing a vast number of them