Not this, Not that: The Mystical Pluralism of Paul Feyerabend
- deepstateconscious
- Jul 29
- 12 min read
‘The world we live in contains an abundance of things, events, processes. There are trees, dogs, sunrises; there are clouds, thunderstorms, divorces; there is justice, beauty, love; there are the lives of people, gods, cities, of the entire universe. It is impossible to enumerate and describe in detail all the incidents that happen to an individual in the course of a single boring day.’
Paul Feyerabend1
According to Wikipedia, Paul Karl Feyerabend ‘was an Austrian philosopher best known for his work in philosophy of science.’ In this field, he was considered ‘one of the most important in the 20th-century … ranked as the 8th-most significant’.2 I am aware of these facts, but I quote the free encyclopedia to leave a sense of ambiguity, as I’m not sure any of this was core to Feyerabend’s conception of himself. At the conclusion of his illustrious career he wrote that he ‘forgot almost everything … like a dream upon waking.’3
This fluid nature of identity, as something undefined, something that exists prior to the labels the world applies to us, is central to the theme I’ll be exploring here. Whilst Feyerabend’s writing on philosophy of science has been placed under many microscopes—drawing both acclamation and ire—there is a less explored, always subtle mysticism to both his work and person, which has escaped such thorough examination.4
This mystical sentiment is, I feel, reflected in this essay’s opening quotation. It invites the reader to step back from thinking about or figuring out the world, into a place of pure recognition that it is. Just to notice that there are such strange things as ‘clouds’ and ‘dogs’, and to see the mundane as magical—the overwhelming abundance contained in each and every ‘single boring day’.
We find similar sentiment in Zen inspired poets, such as the 17th century’s Matsuo Basho. As the story goes, Basho eschewed the cleverness of his companions at a haiku competition, in order to draw his reader’s attention to a place of pure, unfiltered perception:
‘Peaceful pond
Frog jumps in
Plop!’5
The book I have taken Feyerabend’s quotation from, Farewell to Reason, is anything but a collection of Zen sayings. Rather, it is a detailed and often difficult to read (for me, at least) discourse on philosophy. Reading Feyerabend can, at times, feel like the effort of wading through the proverbial swamp. As an (extreme) example from Against Method:
‘Another example of modem physics is quite instructive, for it might have led to an entirely different development of our knowledge concerning the microcosm. Ehrenfest proved a theorem according to which the classical electron theory of Lorentz taken in conjunction with the equipartition theorem excludes induced magnetism. The reasoning is exceedingly simple; according to the equipartition theorem, the probability of a given motion is proportional to exp (-U/Rn, where Uis the energy of the motion. Now the rate of work of an electron moving in a constant magnetic field B is, according to Lorentz, W= Q(E + VxB). V, where Q is the charge of the moving particle, V its velocity and E the electric field. This magnitude reduces to QEV, which means that the energy and, therefore, the probability remains unaffected by a magnetic field. (Given the proper context, this result strongly supports the ideas and experimental findings of the late Felix Ehrenhaft.)’6
How did you get on with that?
This dense, mentally tiring material, however, enhances the effect of the occasional contrastingly spacious passages: whether they come as an observation of nature, or a joke about Karl Popper’s cat.7 In this sense, Feyerabend’s prose acts as a kind of Zen koan, where the mind clenches ever tighter around concepts, only to find sudden release into a pure witnessing of the world.8
I am positively certain Feyerabend wasn’t being in any way deliberate in structuring his prose this way. He wasn’t trying to be Zen! His writing surely mirrors his own internal movement between intense intellectual focus and expansive escape.
In his autobiography, Killing Time, Feyerabend describes his early life in 1920s Austria. He possessed a quality of observing life, without being fully engaged in it, and his recollections lack self-judgement in a way that is profoundly honest. Occasionally, this manifests darkly, as when he writes of the suicide of his aunt that:
‘I was not upset; I was not puzzled either. I took it for granted that the world was a strange place filled with impenetrable events.’9
And on the violence of the 1930s and 40s:
‘The dead bodies and the blood-spattered streets I saw in Vienna during the civil war of 1934 and the events of the Nazi period affected me or, rather, failed to affect me in exactly the same way.’10
During the Second World War, when Feyerabend learned of the death of his mother by suicide, he shocked his fellow soldiers by simply returning to the diagram of the Lorentz transformations he had been working on. He recalls feeling ‘absolutely nothing’, and it being commented on how ‘cold and unmoved’ he looked throughout her funeral.11
A psychologist might make much hay with this; seeing depersonalisation disorder playing out. A therapist may wonder whether this emotional numbing results from finding the world to be an unsafe place, and whether that in turn arises from some deep-seated trauma. No doubt today it could also be seen as a form of neurodiversity.
A mystic, however, might see something deeper playing out: something that does not necessarily exclude psychological explanations, but instead transcends them.
The Hindu philosophy of Advaita Vedanta has a concept called sākṣī—the witnessing consciousness that doesn’t identify with that which it witnesses. A place from where we can perceive reality with viveka—discrimination: in a direct way, free from the clutter of the concepts we impose. Those on a mystical path may spend many years attempting to cultivate this state, to embody vairāgya—dispassion: emotional calm in the midst of turbulent events. Ultimately, cultivating sākṣī is seen as coming home to our shared essential nature.
Feyerabend seems to have either been born with a natural disposition towards sākṣī, or developed one very early on in life. Detachment, for Feyerabend, did not equate to dispassion, however. He possessed what in Vedanta is called jijñāsā—desire to know: a burning curiosity about the nature of reality. This gives rise to vicāra—sustained, intense inquiry. Whilst in Advaita this might be directed inwards, to know the knower, Feyerabend poured his attention into science and philosophy. He did this with a laser-like focus that shut out the events of the world around him. Oblivious to both the gravity and peril of the occasion: when Hitler invaded Austria, he asked his father to turn the radio announcements off as ‘the noise interfered with my reading.’12
This combination of sākṣī and vicāra, is, I would contend, the essential aspect of Feyerabend’s philosophy. Advaita observes that humans tend toward adhyāsa—superimposition: we become attached to our thoughts, identify with the things we believe. This identification is both cognitive and emotional, giving rise to stringent intellectual defenses as well as impassioned sentimental ones. Because of avidyā—ignorance, we lack viveka—the discrimination to distinguish between our thoughts and our self. Ahaṃkāra—the I-maker, then claims the opinion as ‘me’, and so any attack on it is felt as a direct assault. This then triggers abhiniveśa—self preservation, and we then defend the opinion by any means necessary!
Through a natural inclination to Sākṣī, Feyerabend seems to have been able to avoid this pull. Whatever he conceived of his identity as being, it wasn’t rooted in his career, his intellect or an image of himself as the great philosopher. It also wasn’t rooted in his opinions and beliefs regarding science or method. In Vedanta this is the concept of upādhi—imposition, such as when a red flower is placed next to a crystal, making the crystal appear red due to its proximity. The redness is the upādhi of the crystal. For the scientist or philosopher, the theories they adopt become theirs.
We can see Feyerabend triggering the abhiniveśa—self preservation instinct in people around him. This earned him the moniker ‘the worst enemy of science’,13 for his assertion that science is simply one tradition amongst many, not inherently superior to voodoo or astrology. An example can be found in Killing Time, where describing a lecture, he writes:
‘One gentleman who looked like a professor accused me of trying to return to the Middle Ages. "What do you know about the Middle Ages?" I asked. "Do you know the work of Buridan, or of Oresme? How many lines of St. Thomas have you read?" He left in a rage, slamming the door behind him.’14
Freedom is both a compelling and threatening quality.
Feyerabend recognised that the ‘abundant’ world can’t be conquered by the stories we tell about it: the theories we use to explain it. In the Conquest of Abundance he writes:
‘The world we inhabit is abundant beyond our wildest imagination. There are trees, dreams, sunrises; there are thunderstorms, shadows, rivers; there are wars, flea bites, love affairs; there are the lives of people, of animals, of plants; there are the structures of languages… Objects and events, rich and complex beyond our wildest dreams, surround us constantly. Yet we manage to reduce this richness to a few manageable items.’15
A ‘few manageable items’ are the concepts, theories or paradigms we create to cope with this complexity; but, of course, the map is not the territory.
This is relatable to the Vedantic concept of neti neti—not this, not that. Neti neti negates all our ideas and concepts about ourselves and the world we live in, ultimately pointing back to sākṣī as the ground of being.
Feyerabend recognises that people get stuck in paradigms, or ‘mental sets’, as he refers to them in this passage from Against Method:
‘In all these cases the perceived image depends on 'mental sets' that can be changed at will, without the help of drugs, hypnosis, reconditioning. But mental sets may become frozen by illness, as a result of one's upbringing in a certain culture, or because of physiological determinants not in our control. (Not every change of language is accompanied by perceptual changes.) Our attitude towards other races, or towards people of a different cultural background, often depends on 'frozen' sets of the second kind: having learned to 'read' faces in a standard way we make standard judgements and are led astray.’16
He presents various examples of incommensurability, people occupying different perspectives and talking past each other, from the history of science. Aristotle and Galileo having a fundamentally different understanding of what motion is; or Tycho Brahe and Johannes Kepler seeing a fundamentally different thing when observing the dawn (where Brahe saw a moving sun, Kepler saw a rotating earth).17 Feyerabend also employs examples from the history of art, or optical illusions that require a Gestalt switch to fully see. Here we have the famous example of the duck-rabbit illusion:18
Feyerabend contends that science is this way, with scientists being trained to see either a duck or a rabbit, but never to move between the two. In other words: never to embrace pluralism.
He does not propose one singular solution to this (that would be another duck or rabbit), but rather advocates an anything goes: methodological anarchism. He recommends proliferation: employing more than one theory at the same time in order to see them all more clearly. This may extend to immersion in an alien culture (literal aliens would be best of all) or embracing a mythical understanding of the world. Sometimes pure reason might be the way to go, whilst at others progress might come from getting drunk.
Advaita Vedanta adds something to this list: an approach of vicāra jñāna—self-inquiry. Looking back into the centre of one’s self to find the part of us that is beyond identification with paradigms: the sākṣī—witnessing consciousness. This may indeed be the master key in cultivating an ability to step out of absorption by concepts, and into freedom.
My own philosophical underpinnings are formed of the vicāra jñāna—self-inquiry practice of Advaita Vedanta, juxtaposed with Feyerabend’s methodological pluralism. It is my contention that both add to each other; Advaita to Feyerabend in the way I have discussed, and Feyerabend to Advaita in drawing out its worldly applications. Far from the otherworldly, transcendent spiritual philosophy it is usually seen as, advaita becomes the thing that allows us to transcend our paradigms, meet both the duck and the rabbit and embrace the ‘undiluted madness’ that are other people’s opinions.19
There may also exist tensions and contradictions between Feyerabend’s philosophy and advaita vedanta, which I will explore in a further essay. To round off this one, I will pick up once more on the theme of understanding Feyerabend’s life as a mystical journey.
As I have discussed, his early life could be said to have been dominated by a strong sense of impersonal awareness, sākṣī, and intense desire to know truth, jijñāsā. His inability to feel anything over the death of his mother, or react to the dead bodies lying on the streets of Vienna indicate that absorption in Sākṣī came at the cost of karuṇā—compassion. Vedanta talks of sākṣī needing to be balanced by karuṇā, and one without the other being akin to a bird with one wing. Feyerabend’s life could be seen in terms of the journey towards that balance.
Whilst his self-reported emotional coldness is psychologically intriguing, it was not universally the case. Feyerabend was not a psychopath. He also writes that as a child he ‘burst into tears … over Uncle Tom's Cabin’, and ‘liberating’ his Aunt Agnes chickens upon discovering their fate:
‘Occasionally I went into the chicken coop, closed the gate, and addressed the inmates—excellent preparation for my later profession. One morning Aunt Agnes decided to have chicken for dinner. She locked the kitchen door to keep me away; I grew anxious, smashed the windowpane, and found her with a dead chicken and a lot of blood on her hands. I liberated the remaining birds, fled to the hills, and watched as Aunt Agnes tried to reassemble her flock.’20
It is striking that the man who felt nothing at his mother’s funeral, could also feel so strongly about the fate of fowl and fictional characters. It is also a noted trait of neurodivergent people, that they can sometimes relate more strongly to animals than people. Indeed, Feyerabend describes in later life ‘the more solid layers of my character dissolving’ through a relationship with his dog, Spund, who he described as a close friend who would pick up on his emotional state immediately.21
The awakening of karuṇā can come about through bhakti—devotional love. For Feyerabend, this arose in the last decade of his life, with his Iṣṭa—beloved: his wife, Grazia Borrini Feyerabend. Paul Feyerabend said that Grazia ‘turned me from an icy egotist into a friend, a companion, a husband’, and acknowledged that ‘at long last I have learned what it means to love somebody.’22
This journey into love extended to reconciling with his deceased parents through dreams. In one, he thanked his father for his care, patience and love; and apologised for being ‘such a selfish bastard’. He writes that as he told him he loved him: ‘I felt that I indeed loved him and had always loved him.’ This represents a profound integration simultaneously on a personal, psychological and spiritual level.23
In the final passage of his autobiography Feyerabend wrote:
‘These may be the last days. We are taking them one at a time. My latest paralysis was the result of some bleeding inside the brain. My concern is that after my departure something remains of me, not papers, not final philosophical declarations, but love … Whatever happens now, our small family can live forever—Grazina, me, and our love. That is what I would like to happen, not intellectual survival but the survival of love.’24
Paul Feyerabend passed away two weeks later, whilst holding hands with his wife.
Thank you for reading this essay. It is the first of what I hope will be many exploring the philosophy of Paul Karl Feyerabend. I am very happy to receive correspondence and feedback, the more scathing and outraged the better!
Endnotes
1. Farewell to Reason, by Paul Feyerabend.
2. See the Wikipedia article on Feyerabend. There is always the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy, if you prefer.
3. Killing Time, The Autobiography of Paul Feyerabend, by Paul Feyerabend.
4. It has not entirely escaped examination. See Ian James Kidd, Feyerabend, Pseudo-Dionysius, and the Ineffable and Eric C. Martin, Late Feyerabend on materialism, mysticism, and religion as examples.
5. An account of the story is available at American Literature. I have used the rendering found in Zen Made Easy, by Tim Freke.
6. Against Method, by Paul Feyerabend.
Farewell to Reason, by Paul Feyerabend.
7. ‘It is true that I listened to Popper’s lectures, sat in his seminar, occasionally visited him and talked to his cat.’ Farewell to Reason, by Paul Feyerabend.
8. An example would be the Stone Mind story. A teacher points to a large rock and asks his student whether it is inside or outside the mind. The student replies ‘According to Buddhist philosophy, all things are mental phenomenon, therefore I conclude the stone is inside mind, to which the teacher replies ‘Your head must feel very heavy carrying that large stone around.’
The student was not necessarily wrong, rather he was stuck inside a conceptual understanding, stuck in a paradigm. The teacher used humour, silliness and indifference to truth to jolt him out of this.
10. Ibid.
11. Ibid.
12. Ibid.
13. ‘Then the scientists got into the act. Some praised my plea for a less dogmatic approach, others regarded me as "the worst enemy of science" (Nature 1987). And why? Because I had said that approaches not tied to scientific institutions might have some value.’ Ibid.
15. Conquest of Abundance: A Tale of Abstraction versus the Richness of Being, by Paul Feyerabend.
16. Against Method, by Paul Feyerabend.
17. Against Method and Farewell to Reason, both by Paul Feyerabend.
18. The duck-rabbit illusion was first as a way to explain paradigm shifts by Thomas Kuhn in The Structure of Scientific Revolutions.
19. ‘Even our most basic assumptions, our most solid beliefs, and our most conclusive arguments can be changed—improved, or defused, or shown to be irrelevant—by a comparison with what at first looks like undiluted madness’. Farewell to Reason, by Paul Feyerabend.
21. Ibid.
22. Ibid.
23. Ibid.
24. Ibid.
