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Allan, J --- "Against the Idols of the Age" [2004] OtaLawRw 16; (2004) 10 Otago Law Review 695

Against the Idols of the Age

(By David Stove, edited with an introduction by Roger Kimball, Transaction Publishers, 1999)

Reading David Stove is immensely enjoyable. What other philosopher do you know of who is funny? Yes, funny?

But it is otherwise with the “Kantian questions”, “How is p possible?” and “How is p possible given q?” Some people simply adore these questions: Nozick is so much an enthusiast for them that he would have philosophers ask (near enough) no other kind. But such questions have one disadvantage: it is not at all clear what they mean. When a philosopher asks, not “Is p possible given q?,” but “How is p possible given q?,” what does he mean?

In some cases we know what he means only too well, and to our shame, he means: “Well, of course, p is not possible given q, but you surely don’t expect me to give up either p or q on that account! (Stove, p,. 101)

Finally, as to superficiality. Well, the history of Western science has been, since about 1600, almost entirely a success-story. This is hard luck for Popperites and other bohemian enemies of success [namely, Lakatos, Kuhn and Feyerabend], but that is how it is. But not only have we learnt much. We have learnt something even more important: how to learn. This is a unique achievement to the West, and is the secret of its peculiar dynamism: the Moslem, Buddhist, Marxist, astrologer, etc., are as far as ever from learning it. But the odd thing is that, once you have learnt how to learn, there is hardly anything to it. Almost any drongo (if an Australianism can be permitted) can do “normal science”. (Stove, p. 30)

The completeness of Nozick’s composition is remarkable: he touches somewhere in the book, however lightly, almost every note on the keyboard of American decadence. Gandhi is there. The necessary deference to feminism is there. The necessary reproof to “racism” is there. Carlos Castaneda is there, referred to as though he were a thinker, which he is not; he is not referred to as the writer of best- sellers which encourage the taking of hallucinogenic drugs, which he is. Drugs of course are there, and in no unfavourable light: drugs may have their place, Nozick thinks, in “the treatment for philosophical parochialism.” Has he left anything out? Is there anyone in post-Vietnam America who needs to be placated, whom he has not placated? This was obviously a worry, and there is a nervous catch-all reference to “children’s rights, the treatment of animals, domination, and ecological awareness.” But nothing human is perfect, and Nozick, for all his care, has forgotten the homosexuals. No doubt this omission will be repaired in a second edition. (Stove, p. 95, internal footnotes omitted)

Kant’s idea, of course, is that it is experience, and even (whatever he may say) human experience, that “constitutes” nature. If this is not madness, and more specifically the self-importance of the human species run mad, it will do until the real things comes along. Kant had the “how-is-so-and-so-possible” construction absolutely on the brain. It was his way of expressing, day in and day out, that

“wonder” in which philosophy really does begin: namely, pretending to wonder

— that is, asking what appear to be questions but are not so. And the beauty of this Kantian tactic is that it is always available: you can ask “How is p possible?” whatever p may be, and whatever the context. In this way you not only never have to stop talking but can always be sure of sounding like an uncommonly deep thinker. (Stove, pp. 103-104)

And yet there is something a little mysterious in the distribution of fame and shame, because you or I could hardly add to our reputations by asking “How are poached eggs possible?,” or “How is excruciating philosophical pretentiousness possible?,” although it would take a sharp man to say why these questions are any worse than Nozick’s. (Stove, pp. 104-105)

My main reason for this is not the public record of psychologists for fraud or susceptibility to fraud, or of educationists for unswerving obedience to the winds of fashion; although this record is sufficient in itself to justify a hearty scepticism towards their reports. My main reason is quite a general principle: that a person’s testimony should carry no weight or little weight with you, if you are sure or nearly sure that his testimony would have been the same whatever had actually happened. (Stove, p. 131)

He is virtually forgotten now, and always deserved to be. But, as the following quotation will show, he was at any rate a good enough philosopher to let a cat out of a bag: a service more useful than any which most of us manage to perform.

(Stove, p. 176)

To do the nineteenth-century idealists justice, we need an example which is long and obscure, and one in which the Gem [type of argument] is mixed up with other things. We need, in a word, a German Gem. (Stove, p. 177)

And here’s one last example, chosen from many, many possibilities, of why

David Stove is such an entertaining, biting and refreshing philosopher to read. Marxism is the best known example [of anthropocentrism]. It pretended, and still pretends, to be a philosophy. Yet it has only ever been really interested in one thing: the economic well-being, for the next few centuries, of a particular species of terrestrial mammal. How helpful, even towards that end, Marxism has proved to be, it cannot now be necessary to state. But a point of view so extremely narrow and practical has, in any case, almost nothing to do with philosophy. And when this point of view is occupied exclusively and too long, it creates an atmosphere unbearably fetid, like that of dog-kennels, rabbit-warrens, and other over-occupied homes of land mammals. A long course of reading in Marxism is enough to make anyone, or at least any philosopher, sick of the smell of man. The best antidote is

to read something odorless, like astronomy. (Stove, pp. 197-198)

The reader should not get the idea that Stove, as refreshing as such clearly expressed opinions no doubt are, is all attack dog. No, he is evidently a very smart man with a thorough knowledge of logic and, more particularly, the logic of a good —and bad — argument. The first three chapters of this book, where Stove takes on those like Kuhn and Popper, are simply outstanding. If you have the slightest doubt that there is an external, causal world out there which you can know exists and which imposes constraints on all of us humans — constraints that exist regardless of how we have been “socially constructed” and regardless of the power relationships between rich and poor or men and women — you must read these opening chapters. They are lumped together under the heading of “The Cult of Irrationalism in Science” and believers in antifoundationalism, to use the jargon, should beware. As that first section of the book makes clear, when Stove is good he is very, very good. And when he is not, he’s neither awful nor bad, though the third and final section of the book, on Darwinism, is by a long way the weakest. A metaphor, such as “the selfish gene”, is meant by no one to indicate that genes really are purposeful entities deliberately seeking to fulfil their self-interested desires. Rather, the metaphor is meant to imply that evolution and natural selection — a random process, not a conscious one — operate way down at the level of the gene. Stove tends to make too much of metaphors here and seems, to me, to be less than convincing at times. However, it is well worth reading the bad with the good when it comes from the pen of Stove because he applies such a powerful solvent to accepted dogmas. This is particularly so in the book’s second section, “Idols Contemporary and Perennial”.

Roger Kimball, in the Introduction to this book, does a good job telling the reader who David Stove was (an Australian philosopher at Sydney University who died in 1994) and why Kimball put together this selection of some of Stove’s writings. Stove had a specialist reputation for his critique of idealism in philosophy, and something of a wider, if cult, following for his works aimed at the educated layman. Kimball worked hard to put this book together (see the Acknowledgements from p. xxxiii) because he thought Stove deserved a wider audience.

I agree.

James Allan, Faculty of Law,

University of Otago.