Quell’idiota di Imre Lakatos

Imre Lakatos: Eulogized in England, Unforgiven in Hungary – When Reason Goes on Holiday: Philosophers in Politics – Neven Sesardic

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Punti chiave: Non certo un “resistente” per la patria – Contributo per una scuola dottrinaria – Marxista dogmatico fuori tempo massimi –  Informatore per i regime –  Un pericolo pubblico dalla disumanità esemplare, praticamente uno psicopatico – Marxista da barzelletta – Il doppio standard crispetto al caso Heidegger – 

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Imre Lakatos is one of the most important philosophers of science of the twentieth century…Currently, the greatest recognition in the philosophy of science bears his name: the Lakatos Award….

Note:CHI È

LSE: Economical with the Truth?

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he in fact firmly rejected a suggestion that members of his secret seminars should engage in anti-fascist resistance (Long 2002, 265).

Note:RIFIUTO DELLA RESISTENZA

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Lakatos worked for the Ministry of Education between 1945 and 1948, and was an active writer supporting the hard Party line against the liberal factions to be demolished by [Hungarian Prime Minister Matyas] Rakosi. During the 1947–1948 academic year, Lakatos dedicated himself to helping destroy the distinguished Eötvös College, targeted by the Communists because of its resistance to transforming itself into an indoctrination tool like the recently established Györffy College. .

Note:IL RIFORMATORE EDUCATIVO?

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Before his destructive actions at Eötvös College, Lakatos was one of the leaders of a student group, Debrecen University Circle, which not only demanded the dismissal of “reactionary” professors but also established a “screening committee” aiming to “cleanse the student body of fascists and reactionaries who had wormed their way into the ranks” (Bandy 2009, 59–61).

Note:UNO STUDENTE CASINISTA E INDOTTRINATO

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A secret police document kept in the Historical Archives of the State Security Services says that Gábor Kovács (Lakatos’s codename as an informer) “gave us valuable information about [György Lukács’ circle]” (Bandy undated, 5). According to the philosopher Agnes Heller, Lukács was aware that Lakatos was helping the Party build an ideological case against him

Note:INFORMATORE

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he was a political prisoner simply because he was more Stalinist than many of the leaders of the Hungarian Communist Party.

Note:SUPERSTALINISTA

Murder by Suicide

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his role in the suicide in 1944 of a young woman named Éva Izsák…During World War II Lakatos joined the Communist Party and became the unofficial leader of a small underground cell in Nagyvárad. One of the cell members was a nineteen-year-old Jewish woman, Éva Izsák. She, like many other members, was in hiding and had false papers. It was feared she was a particular security risk for the whole group—…This problem had to be addressed and there was no doubt about who should be in charge: Imre Lipsitz (Lakatos’s original surname)…The best way out was for Éva Izsák to commit suicide. The proposal was supported by an argument couched by the future LSE professor in terms of Marxist dialectics which the other members found so compelling that they all immediately voted for it—including Éva’s own boyfriend!…Lakatos was such a dominating influence on the minds of other group members that they were ready to obey all his instructions unconditionally. In some respects the atmosphere resembled that of a sect like Jim Jones’s infamous People’s Temple community in Jonestown….

Note:OMBRA

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Lakatos’s extreme manipulativeness, unscrupulousness, lack of concern for other people, and rigid loyalty to a totalitarian ideology make a combination that is, if not unique, certainly quite rare.

Note:UN PERICOLO PUBBLICO

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it was actually Bernard Williams, the preeminent British moral philosopher, who once described Lakatos as “a kind of a thug.”

Note:UN TEPPISTA

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he was “evil” (Joseph Agassi, philosopher and colleague), that he was “an impossible infantile monster, completely unable to understand other people” (a former girlfriend), that he was “not fully human,” that “his drives and his mind are in place, but the rest missing” (a mathematician colleague), that “people did not matter to him,” that he was “a truly Satanic figure” and that “it was scary to see him in action” (a historian colleague), that he was “diabolic” (philosopher Agnes Heller), that he was seen as “an evil spirit” and “demonic” (Endre Ságvári a Communist activist), that he was “diabolic” in his “total disregard for people” (István Márkus, a journal editor), that he was “like the devil . . . absolutely inhuman . . . that he had no human feelings for anyone . . . and that he would trample on anyone to get ahead” (András Nagy, professor of economics), that he was “a Satanic figure” (an editor Zoltán Zsámboki), that he was “unbelievably unscrupulous” (Péter Németh, a literary historian), that he “met the criteria for Antisocial Personality Disorder in the current DSM IV” (Long 2002, 294). All in all, a lot of the evidence points to the possibility that Lakatos was a psychopath, which is indeed how he was described by Dr. Klára Majerszky

Note:ACCUSE UNANIMI… PSICOPATICO

Sticking with the Superego

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he kept the true Stalinist faith until 1956

Note:FEDELE ALLA LINEA

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in a 1971 letter to the psychologist Paul Meehl, Lakatos says that the Communist Party was his last superego and that it was only in 1956 that he finally got rid of that superego…This is embarrassingly late…

Note:1956

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as Solzhenitsyn said, Marxism in the Soviet Union “has fallen to such a low point that it has become a joke, an object of contempt . . . and that no serious person, not even university and high-school students, can talk about Marxism without a smile or a sneer”

Note:MARXISTA QUANDO IL MARXISMO ERA UNA BARZELLETTA

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Lakatos, who was then already a lecturer at the London School of Economics, was still collaborating with the Hungarian secret police (see Bandy 2009, 304).

Note:1962

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A striking contrast: Lakatos’s real-life actions that caused loss of life and immense human suffering have barely produced a yawn among philosophers; meanwhile, in another case, top scholars in the profession have issued strident condemnations and repeatedly expressed disbelief and shock over what one old and disillusioned man had written in the last year of his life in his private diary, which was published seventy years after his death (see pp. 188–193).

LAKATOS E HEDEGGER… UNO STRANO CONTRASTO