Against the Idols of the Age.(Review)

Against the Idols of the Age, by David Stove, edited with an introduction by Roger Kimball; Transaction Publishers, 1999, US$40.

SATIRE CAN be a formidable intellectual weapon, but it is rare to find it in the world of formal philosophical writing. In this anthology of the late David Stove's philosophical essays, satire sharpens every argument. Stove's targets were not just philosophers. The vilified include Charles Darwin and his followers, cultural theorists, Marxists, relativists and feminists as well as Plato, Berkeley, Kant, Hegel, Popper, Kuhn, Lakatos, Feyerabend and many others. In an age which prides itself on being "transgressive", Stove shows up as the true iconoclast, attacking political, intellectual and cultural orthodoxies. Some of Stove's more important themes include his attacks on irrationalism, idealism, postmodernism and a range of conspiracy arguments (including neo-Darwinian arguments) which encourage a sense of human powerlessness.

Roger Kimball has drawn on the full breadth of Stove's published work for this volume. There are essays here from Anything Goes: The Origins of the Cult of Scientific Irrationalism, The Plato Cult and Other Philosophical Follies, Darwinian Fairytales and Cricket Versus Republicanism. Readers of Stove's previous books will be delighted to meet again Stove's trenchant combination of scathing wit and intelligence; while for others, this well-selected anthology provides an excellent introduction to Stove's work.

Stove writes to both enlighten and outrage. Since he belongs to a rare and all-too-small tradition of true eccentrics, there is probably no person on earth who would agree with all of his opinions and many who would disagree with most of them. Whether you agree or disagree with his conclusions, however, his witty, razor-sharp arguments are a delight to read. What other philosopher, for example, would compare the success of a Kantian argument to the rabbit's success in over-running Australia? Some phrases are written with an ear for the horrified protest they will provoke: as when he describes the late 1960s as "those five fell years for Western civilisation!" Other passages reveal his relish for the absurd and his talent for exposing it:

 
   We ... can now neither remember or imagine the confidence which Western 
   civilisation had for two hundred years invested in the finality of 
   Newtonian physics, but it is scarcely possible to exaggerate it. The shock 
   of disillusion, when it came, was correspondingly great. To philosophers 
   like Popper, the moral was obvious: such excessive confidence in a 
   scientific theory must never be allowed to build up again. The most 
   "irrefutable" of all such theories has turned out to be not irrefutable at 
   all: very well then, Popper will say, like the fox in the fable, that 
   irrefutability, even if our theories could achieve it, would be a bad thing 
   anyway. The parallel would be complete if the fox, having concluded that 
   neither he nor anyone else could ever succeed in tasting grapes, should 
   nevertheless proceed to write many large books about the progress of 
   viticulture. 

Philosophical pretentiousness is in unsafe company with Stove.

Stove's withering analysis of idealism from Berkeley through to present-day postmodern versions exposes both the intellectual poverty of its chief argument and its "Calvinist" or (as he puts it elsewhere) its "sadomasochistic" appeal. He notes the ubiquitous presence of the argument that "We can know things only as they are known to us, THEREFORE We cannot know things as they are in themselves", and its efficacy in establishing idealism. He then goes on to wonder whether a realisation that "We can eat oysters only insofar as they are brought under ... physiological and chemical conditions ... THEREFORE We cannot eat oysters as they are in themselves" would have established gastronomic idealism. Why has an argument no better than the one about the oysters deceived so many, he asks? The appeal of this family of arguments (which he designates as "Gem" arguments) stretches far beyond idealist philosophy. In modern humanities departments, Stove notes, these arguments have gained almost universal acceptance: