Paul Feyerabend – *Against Method* (1975)
This text is a preview of History of the Reception of Hegel, volume II, to be published in 2026 by Reflexivity Press.
What Feyerabend Actually Claims
Paul Feyerabend (1924-1994) was the provocateur of the guild. His Against Method (1975), subtitled Outline of an Anarchistic Theory of Knowledge, was often misunderstood – as if he were claiming that all methods are equally good or that science is irrational.
That is not what he means. His actual thesis is: in the history of science, every methodological rule has at some point been successfully violated. Galileo, Darwin, Einstein – all of them broke rules that their contemporaries considered indispensable. From this it follows that there is no universal method that determines a priori what good science is.
“Anything goes” does not mean: everything is equally true. It means: no rule is sacrosanct a priori. Evaluation must happen case by case, concretely, in relation to the object.
The Sympathy for Hegel
Feyerabend mentions Hegel repeatedly – and favorably. He values Hegel’s distinction between “Understanding” (Verstand, which thinks in fixed categories) and “Reason” (Vernunft, which grasps the movement of the concept). The “rationalism” of philosophers of science, Feyerabend argues, is thinking of the Understanding – abstract, unhistorical, remote from life. Actual science is more reasonable, because it is more flexible, more concrete, more appropriate to its object.
What Feyerabend Sees Correctly – and Where He Falls Short
Feyerabend has an important point: method must adapt to its object, not the other way around. This is a deeply Hegelian insight. Hegel consistently criticizes “external reflection” – applying a ready-made standard to an object that carries its own standard within itself.
But Feyerabend does not draw the full consequence from this. He emphasizes freedom from methodological constraints but says little about what then guides method positively. If not just any method is equally good – what then distinguishes the better from the worse one?
Hegel’s answer would be: method is not arbitrary, because the object itself brings its own standard along. The “success” of a method shows itself in whether it opens up its object – and this is not an arbitrary decision but manifests itself in the process of truth. Method develops together with its object; it is neither fixed a priori nor arbitrary.
Even “Superseded” Methods Can Contain Moments of Truth
An important point that Feyerabend gestures toward but does not systematically develop: paradigm shifts often prematurely discard insights of the old paradigm that are later rediscovered.
Shamanic rituals do not work through magic – but they do work: through stress reduction, the building of trust, the activation of self-healing. The white coat does not heal, but it contributes to healing. The more expensive placebo works better than the cheap one. “Mechanistic” medicine discarded the “holistic” aspects of traditional healing practices and is now rediscovering them as “psychosomatics.”
This is not an argument against paradigm shifts but for their dialectical structure: preserving, overcoming, raising to a higher level. Even what seems “superseded” can contain moments of truth that are recovered in later integrations.
What Distinguishes Science from Other Truth Practices
The decisive question remains: if there is no fixed method, what then distinguishes science from other truth practices?
The answer lies not in any particular method but in knowledge of the method: reflection on method, and hence its controlled, reflective application. Both the farmer and the meteorologist observe the weather. But the meteorologist knows why he measures what he measures; he can justify, criticize, and improve his method.
This is science as “reason raised to a higher power” – it makes explicit what other practices do implicitly. It is not the only truth practice, but it is the one most clearly conscious of itself.
Feyerabend’s radical pluralism remained an outsider position in the West. In the East, by contrast, a quite different philosophy of science developed – one that sought to combine dialectics and natural science. East German (GDR) philosophy of science was not a monolithic bloc but a battlefield between dogmatists and thinkers who took Hegel seriously.
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