Dialektik bei Popper und Albert

Die Lösung des Rätsels der "Dialektik" muss genauso wie das der "Ra­tionalität" im abstrak­testen Sinne genommen auf demjenigen Felde gesucht werden, wel­ches Kant, Popper und neu­erdings die Theoretiker der Artificial Intelligence sich angewöhnt ha­ben, unter dem Titel "Prob­lem­lö­severhalten" abzuhandeln.

"Ein jedes Problem besteht erstlich aus der Quästion der Aufgabe, zweitens der Auflösung, und drittens dem Beweis, dass das Verlangte durch die letztere ge­leistet werde." (Kant XI:322)

Denn was ist dialektische Ra­tio­na­lität anderes, als durch die Anwendung einer rationalen Me­thode, im weitesten Sinne ge­nom­men, von einer Formulierung eines Problemzustands zu einer anderen, einsichtsreicheren zu ge­langen? Diese Idee auf diesem Abstrak­tionsni­veau ist bei He­gel und Marx wie bei Popper zu iden­tifizieren. Man kann sich aber wahrlich wacker streiten über die Formen, wie diese Idee kon­kret zu realisieren sei.

Doch Popper gibt uns zumindest eine Kurz­argumentation. [1])

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[1]) "Hegel was a Platonist (or rather a Neo-Platonist) of sorts and, like Plato, a Heraclitean of sorts. He was a Platonist whose world of Ideas was changing, evolving. Plato’s ‘Forms’ or ‘Ideas’ we­re objective, and had nothing to do with conscious ideas in a subjective mind; they inhabitated a di­vine, an unchanging, heavenly world (super-lunar in Aristotle’s sense). By contrast Hegel’s Ideas, li­ke those of Plotinus, were conscious phenomena: thoughts thinking themselves and inhabitating so­me kind of consciousness, some kind of mind or ‘Spirit’; and together with this ‘Spirit’ they were changing or evolving. The fact that Hegel’s ‘objective Spirit’ and ‘Absolute Spirit’ are subject to change is the only point in which his Spirits are more similar to my ‘third world’ than is Plato’s world of Ideas (or Bolzano’s world of ‘statements in themselves’). The most important differences between He­gel’s ‘Objective Spirit’ and ‘Absolute Spirit’ and my ‘third world’ are these: (1) According to Hegel, though the Objective Spirit (comprising artistic creation) and Absolute Spirit (comprising philo­so­phy) both consist of human productions, man is not creative. It is the hypostasized Objective Spi­rit, it is the divine self-consciousness of the Universe, that moves man: ‘individuals ... are instruments’, instruments of the Spirit of the Epoch, and their work, their ‘substantial business’, is ‘prepared and appointed independently of them’. Thus what I have called the autonomy of the third world, and its feed-back effect, becomes with Hegel omnipotent: it is only one of the aspects of his system in which his theological background manifests itself. As against this I assert that the individual creative ele­ment, the relation of give-and-take between a man and his work, is of the greatest importance. In Hegel this degenerates into the doctrine that the great man is something like a medium in which the Spirit of The Epoch expresses itself. (2) In spite of a certain superficial similarity between He­gel’s dialectic and my evolutionary schema P1 > TT > EE > P2 there is a fundamental difference. My schema works through error-elimination, and on the scientific level through conscious criticism under the regulative idea of the search for truth. Criticism, of course, consists in the search for con­tradictions and in their elimination: the difficulty created by the demand for their elimination constitutes the new problem (P2). Thus the elimination of error leads to the objective growth of our knowledge - of knowledge in the objective sense. It leads to the growth of objective verisi­mi­litude: it makes possible the approximation to (absolute) truth. Hegel, on the other hand, is a rela­ti­vist. He does not see our task as the search for contradiction, with the aim of eliminating them, for he thinks that contradictions are as good as (or better than) non-contradictory theoretical systems: they provide the mechanism by which the Spirit propels itself. Thus rational criticism plays no part in the Hegelian automatism, no more than does human creativity. (3) While Plato lets his hyposta­sized Ideas inhabit some divine heaven, Hegel personalizes his Spirit into some divine consci­ous­ness: the Ideas inhabit it as human ideas inhabit some human consciousness. His doctrine is, through­out, that the Spirit is not only conscious, but a self. As against this, my third world has no si­mi­larity whatever to human consciousness; they are totally different from conscious ideas or from thoughts in the subjective sense." (Popper 1973a:125f)