Maverick Philosopher

A Mistake Many Make

They think that what is not immediately intelligible to them is unintelligible, period, or perhaps even a product of willful obfuscation.

The Australian positivist, David Stove, somewhere takes umbrage at a passage from Heidegger and pronounces it gibberish, when the passage is not gibberish at all. The miserable Stove, unwilling to to do his homework, and with no understanding of Heidegger's intellectual antecedents, dismisses as gibberish what is not immediately intelligible to his shallow positivist pate.  He is a trenchant polemicist in some of his writing, so I am simply responding in kind.

I need to find that passage.

But let me say something good about old Stove: he was one formidable opponent of the scourge of political correctness.

There are some interesting materials for and against the curmudgeon in my Stove category.

De mortuis nil nisi bonum? De mortuis bonum et malum.

Remarks on David Stove's The Plato Cult

The following is excerpted from a November 2004 entry on my first weblog.  I like Stove's political conservatism but I don't much cotton to his positivism. The original entry of 2004 is prefaced with a polemical screed in which I denounce Stove as an anti-philosopher, and with some justice. But nowadays I direct my polemic only against my political enemies, holding, as I have for quite a few years now, that polemic has no place in philosophy proper.  

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My focus will be on The Plato Cult (Basil Blackwell, 1991), and for now mainly the preface thereto. Stove tells us that "the few pages of this preface will be sufficient to make clear what my view is, and even, I believe, to justify it." (p. vii) His view is "best called positivistic." (ibid.) The "basic proposition of Positivism" is that "there is something fearfully wrong with typical philosophical theories." (p. xi, italics in original) Stove claims to "prove" this thesis. (ibid.) From Stove’s perspective, "what a spectacle of nightmare-irrationality is the history of philosophy!" (p. xi)

We are all familiar with A. N. Whitehead’s remark that "The safest general characterization of the European philosophical tradition is that it consists of a series of footnotes to Plato." (Process and Reality, p. 39). Whitehead meant this in praise of Plato. For Stove, however, Plato, Plotinus, Augustine, Berkeley, and a host of other philosophers deemed great, are "dangerous lunatics." (p. 184) They espouse views that cannot be taken seriously by any sane person. Let us consider what Stove has to say about Berkeley:

Berkeley held that there are no physical objects: that there was no right hand behind his ideas of his left hand, no wig behind his ideas of his wig, and so on. Indeed, he said, there is nothing at all behind any of our ideas of physical objects, except the will of God that we should have those ideas when we do. Yet Berkeley was a physical object himself, after all – born of a certain woman, author of certain printed books, and so forth – and he knew it. (p. ix)

Stove’s misunderstanding is so deep that it takes the breath away. Berkeley did not hold that there are no physical objects; what he gave us was a theory of their ontological constitution. That there are physical objects is self-evident, a datum, a starting point; what they are, and how they exist, however, are questions open to dispute. To deny the existence of physical objects would of course be lunacy. But to give an analysis of them in terms of ideas, an analysis that identifies them with clusters of coherent ideas, is not a lunatic project. It is no more a lunatic endeavor than that of analyzing thoughts (and mental states generally) in terms of brain states.

Suppose we explore this comparison a bit. It is prima facie reasonable to hold that our thoughts are identical with complex states of our brains. (I don’t think that this is true, and I think that  there are formidable arguments to the contrary, but the reasonable and the true are two, not one.) Accordingly, my thinking about Stove is a state of my brain. Suppose a philosopher propounds the following theory: Every (token) mental state is numerically identical to some (token) brain state. Someone who holds such a token-token identity theory is obviously not denying the existence of mental states; what he is doing is presupposing their existence and giving us a theory of what they are in ultimate reality. What he is saying is that these mental states of which we are introspectively aware are really just brain states; they are not states of an immaterial thinking substance.  (One could of course argue that this identity theory is unstable and, given a few pokes, topples over into eliminativism about the mental; to discuss this instability, however, is beyond the scope of this entry.)

Now if the project of reducing the mental to the physical avoids lunacy, then the same goes for the reduction in the opposite direction. If it is not ‘loony’ to say that the perceiving of a coffee cup is a state of my brain, why is it ‘loony’ to say that the coffee cup perceived is a bundle or cluster of ideas (to be precise: accusatives of mental acts)? Either both of these views belong in the lunatic asylum or neither do.

Note also that if one cannot analyze the physical in terms of the mental, or the mental in terms of the physical, on pain of going insane, then one also cannot analyze the universal in terms of the particular, or the particular in terms of the universal. And yet philosophers do this all the time without seeming to lose their grip on reality.

Take the obvious fact that things have properties. These two tomatoes are both (the same shade of) red. That things have properties is a datum; what properties are, however, and how they exist, is not a datum but a problem. It appears that our two tomatoes have something in common, namely, their being red. This suggests that redness is a universal, an entity repeated in each of the tomatoes. Some philosophers resist this suggestion by maintaining that, although both tomatoes are red, each has its own redness. They then analyze the seeming commonality of redness in some other way, say, as deriving from a mental act of abstraction, r in terms of trope resemblance-classes.

Metaphysical reductions (of the mental to the physical, the physical to the mental, the universal to the particular, the particular to the universal, the modal to the non-modal, the normative to the non-normative, etc.) seem to be as meaningful as scientific reductions. The identification of lightning with an atmospheric electrical discharge; of a puddle of water with a collection of H20 molecules; of a light beam with a stream of photons – none of these identifications are intended by their proponents as lunatic denials of the phenomena to be reduced. There are of course interesting questions about when identifications collapse into eliminations; but the point here is that no denial of existence is intended.

Philosophers, like scientists, are not in the business of denying obvious facts; they are out to understand them. The project of understanding aims at the reality behind the appearance. Stove cannot seem to wrap his mind around this simple notion.

I may have more to say about Stove later. He is dangerous enough to be worth taking apart piece by piece. One good thing about him, though: he is politically conservative. (I left the political tone of this last paragraph in place to give you a flavor of the original.)

David Stove Pays Tribute to David Armstrong and Comments on the Malignancy of the Left

Excerpt:

But, while David has never aspired to put the world right by philosophy, the world for its part has not been equally willing to let him and philosophy alone in return. Quite the reverse. His tenure of the Chair turned out to coincide with an enormous attack on philosophy, and on humanistic learning in general: an attack which has proved to be almost as successful as it was unprecedented.

This attack was begun, as everyone knows, by Marxists, in support of North Vietnam’s attempt to extend the blessings of communism to the south. The resulting Marxisation of the Faculty of Arts was by no means as complete as the resulting Marxisation of South Vietnam. But the wound inflicted on humanistic learning was a very severe one all the same. You could properly compare it to a person’s suffering third-degree burns to 35 per cent of his body.

After the defeat of America in Vietnam, the attack was renewed, amplified, and intensified, by feminists. Their attack has proved far more devastating than that of the Marxists. Lenin once said, “If we go, we shall slam the door on an empty house”; and how well this pleasant promise has been kept by the Russian Marxists, all the world now knows. It is in exactly the same spirit of insane malignancy that feminists have waged their war on humanistic learning; and their degree of success has fallen not much short of Lenin’s. Of the many hundreds of courses offered to Arts undergraduates in this university, what proportion, I wonder, are now not made culturally-destructive, as well as intellectually null, by feminist malignancy and madness? One-third? I would love to believe that the figure is so high. But I cannot believe it.

David did all that he could have done, given the limits set by his position and his personality, to repel this attack. Of course he failed; but then, no one could have succeeded. What he did achieve was a certain amount of damage-limitation. Even this was confined to the philosophy-section of the front. On the Faculty of Arts as a whole, David has had no influence at all—to put it mildly. In fact, when he spoke at a meeting of the Faculty, even on subjects unrelated to the attack, you could always have cut the atmosphere with a knife. It is a curious matter, this: the various ways inferior people have, of indirectly acknowledging the superiority of others, even where no such acknowledgment is at all intended by the inferior, or expected by the superior.

By the end of 1972, the situation in the philosophy department had become so bad that the splitting of the department into two was the only way in which philosophy at this university could be kept alive at all. In this development, David was the leading spirit, as his position and personality made it natural he should be. Of course he did not do it on his own. Pat Trifonoff’s intelligence and character made her an important agent in it. Keith Campbell’s adhesion to our side, after some hesitation, was a critical moment. But while I and certain others were only casting about for some avenue of escape, David never gave up. He battled on, and battled on again, and always exacted the best terms, however bad, that could be got from the enemies of philosophy.

The result of the split was far more happy than could have been rationally predicted at the time. In fact it was a fitting reward for David’s courage and tenacity. For the first twenty years of the new Department of Traditional and Modern Philosophy have been fertile in good philosophy, to a degree unparalleled in any similar period in this or any other Australian university. The department has also enjoyed a rare freedom from internal disharmony. As I have often said, it is the best club in the world, and to be or have been a member of it is a pleasure as well as a privilege.

There will certainly be no adequate official acknowledgment, from anyone inside the university, of what is owed to David. What could someone like the present Vice-Chancellor possibly care about the survival of humanistic learning, or even know about philosophy, or history, or literature? Anyone who did would never have got a Vice-Chancellor’s job in the first place. If there is any acknowledgment forthcoming from the Faculty of Arts, David will be able to estimate the sincerity of it well enough. It will be a case of people, who smiled as they watched him nearly drowning in the boiling surf of 1967–72, telling him how glad they were when, against all probability, he managed to make it to the beach.

But anyone who does know and care about philosophy, or does care about the survival of humanistic learning, will feel towards him something like the degree of gratitude which they ought to feel.

Kimball on Stove on Race

Roger Kimball, Who Was David Stove? Excerpt:

Stove’s essay “Racial and Other Antagonisms” is similarly emollient. He begins by noting that some degree of friction is the common if not the inevitable result when “two races of people have been in contact for long.” Only in the twentieth century, however, has such antagonism been described as a form of “prejudice.” Why? Earlier ages had the concept, and the word. Part of the reason, Stove suggests, is that by christening racial animosity “racial prejudice” we transform it into an intellectual fault, i.e., a false or irrational belief that might be cured by education—and this, Stove observes, “is a distinctly cheering thing to imply.” Alas, while it is certainly true that racial antagonism is often accompanied by false or irrational beliefs about the other race, it is by no means clear that it depends upon them. And if it doesn’t, education will be little more than liberal window dressing.

Stove’s essay on race is full of discomfiting observations. He defines “racism”—a neologism so recent, he points out, that it was not in the OED in 1971—as the belief that “some human races are inferior to others in certain respects, and that it is sometimes proper to make such differences the basis of our behaviour towards people.” Although this proposition is constantly declared to be false, Stove says, “everyone knows it is true, just as everyone knows it is true that people differ in age, sex, health, etc., and that it is sometimes proper to make these differences the basis of our behaviour towards them.” For example,

if you are recruiting potential basketball champions, you would be mad not to be more interested in American Negroes than in Vietnamese… . Any rational person, recruiting an army, will be more interested in Germans than in Italians. If what you want in people is aptitude for forming stable family-ties, you will prefer Italians or Chinese to American Negroes. Pronounced mathematical ability is more likely to occur in an Indian or a Hungarian than in an Australian Aboriginal. If you are recruiting workers, and you value docility above every other trait in a worker, you should prefer Chinese to white Americans. And so on.

Stove readily admitted that some of these traits may be culturally rather than genetically determined. But he went on to observe that “they are still traits which are statistically associated with race, well enough, to make race a rational guide in such areas of policy as recruitment or immigration.” As I say, David Stove would not have been made to feel welcome at many American colleges or universities.

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It can't be racist if it's true. Now what Stove says above is true, except when he says that "everyone knows it is true." There are people who sincerely believe it to be false.  But surely most of us know that it is true even if we won't admit it publicly. In any case, what Stove says above is true, and it can't be racist if its true, whence it follows that Stove violates ordinary usage when he defines 'racism' as he does.  And that is a foolish thing to do. Meaning is tied to use, and only a linguistic Don Quixote tilts against the windmills of prevalent usage. To shift metaphors, some words and phrases are just not candidates for semantic rehabilitation.

Stove needs a different word.  Whatever word that is, it won't be 'racism.'  'Racism' is currently used to label an attitude of irrational hatred of members of a race not one's own precisely because they are members of a race not one's own.

It is obvious that one's acceptance of the Stovian truths does not entail that he bears any racial animosity to anyone.

I have just engaged in some clear thinking and truth-telling. But what's the point in a world becoming stupider and crazier by the day?

Related articles

Why the Left Can't Let Go of Racism

Kimball on the Philistinism of the Nagel Bashers

A good article, except for Roger Kimball's excessive admiration for the positivist David Stove who is himself a philistine, or to employ a neologism of mine, a 'philosophistine.'

See here which concludes:

4. The trouble with Stove is that he is a positivist, an anti-philosopher, someone with no inkling of what philosophy is about. He is very intelligent in a superficial sort of way, witty, erudite, a pleasure to read, and I am sure it would have been great fun to have a beer with him. But he is what I call a philosophistine. A philistine is someone with no appreciation of the fine arts; a philosophistine is one with no appreciation of philosophy. People like Stove and Paul Edwards and Rudolf Carnap just lack the faculty for philosophy, a faculty that is distinct from logical acumen.

5. My tone is harsh.  What justifies it?  The even harsher tone this two-bit positivist assumes in discussing great philosophers who will be read long after he is forgotten, great philosophers he must misunderstand because he cannot attain their level.

My harshness further justified here.

The notion that Stove was the greatest philosopher of the 20th century is risible.

It puzzles me why conservatives as opposed to libertarians should so admire this anti-metaphysical religion-basher.  You don't have to be a theist to be a conservative, but a conservative who doesn't respect religion is no conservative at all.  Here is what R. J. Stove says about his father:

Diagnosed with esophageal cancer, and convinced beyond all reason that his announcement of this diagnosis to Mum had brought about her stroke, Dad simply unraveled. So, to a lesser extent, did those watching him.

All Dad's elaborate atheist religion, with its sacred texts, its martyrs, its church militant; all his ostentatious tough- mindedness; all his intellectual machinery; all these things turned to dust. Convinced for decades of his stoicism, he now unwittingly demonstrated the truth of Clive James's cruel remark: "we would like to think we are stoic...but would prefer a version that didn't hurt."

Already an alcoholic, he now made a regular practice of threatening violence to himself and others. In hospital he wept like a child (I had never before seen him weep). He denounced the nurses for their insufficient knowledge of Socrates and Descartes. From time to time he wandered around the ward naked, in the pit of confused despair. The last time I visited him I found him, to my complete amazement, reading a small bedside Gideon Bible. I voiced surprise at this. He fixed on me the largest, most protuberant, most frightened, and most frightening pair of eyes I have ever seen: "I'll try anything now."

(Years later, I discovered—and was absolutely pole-axed by —the following passage in Bernard Shaw's Too True To Be Good, in which an old pagan, very obviously speaking for Shaw himself, sums up what I am convinced was Dad's attitude near the end. The passage runs: "The science to which I pinned my faith is bankrupt. Its counsels, which should have established the millennium, led, instead, directly to the suicide of Europe. I believed them once. In their name I helped to destroy the faith of millions of worshipers in the temples of a thousand creeds. And now look at me and witness the great tragedy of an atheist who has lost his faith.")

Eventually, through that gift for eloquence which seldom entirely deserted him, Dad convinced a psychiatrist that he should be released from the enforced hospital confinement which he had needed to endure ever since his threats had caused him to be scheduled. The psychiatrist defied the relevant magistrate's orders, and released my father.

Within twenty-four hours Dad had hanged himself in his own garden.

This was in June 1994. I cannot hope to convey the horror of this event. It dealt a mortal blow to the whole atheistic house of cards which constituted my own outlook. 

Whittaker Chambers on Beethoven

Whittaker Chambers (Witness, p. 19) on the Third Movement of Beethoven's Ninth Symphony:

. . . that music was the moment at which Beethoven finally passed beyond the suffering of his life on earth and reached for the hand of God, as God reaches for the hand of Adam in Michaelangelo's vison of the creation.

Well, either the adagio movement of the 9th or the late piano sonatas, in particular, Opus 109, Opus 110, and Opus 111. To my ear, those late compositions are unsurpassed in depth and beauty.

In these and a few other compositions of the great composers we achieve a glimpse of what music is capable of.  Just as one will never appreciate the possibilities of genuine philosophy by reading hacks such as Ayn Rand or positivist philistines (philosophistines?) such as David Stove, one will never appreciate the possibilities of great music and its power of speaking to what is deepest in us if one listens only to contemporary popular music.

David Stove on the Logos

Commenting on philosophy's alleged "deep affinity with lunacy," Australian positivist David Stove writes,

That the world is, or embodies, or is ruled by, or was created by, a sentence-like entity, a ‘logos’, is an idea almost as old as Western philosophy itself. Where the Bible says ‘The Word was made flesh’, biblical scholars safely conclude at once that some philosopher [Stove’s emphasis] has meddled with the text (and not so as to improve it). Talking-To-Itself is what Hegel thought the universe is doing, or rather, is. In my own hearing, Professor John Anderson maintained, while awake, what with G. E. Moore was no more than a nightmare he once had, that tables and chairs and all the rest are propositions. So it has always gone on. In fact St John’s Gospel, when it says’In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God’, sums up pretty accurately one of the most perennial, as well as most lunatic, strands in philosophy. (The passage is also of interest as proving that two statements can be consistent without either being intelligible.) (From The Plato Cult and Other Philosophical Follies, Basil Blackwell 1991, p. 32.)

A few comments are in order.

Greco on Stroud on Moore on the External World with a Shot at Stove

John Greco (How to Reid Moore) finds Barry Stroud's interpretation of G. E. Moore's proof of an external world implausible:

According to him [Stroud], the question as to whether we know anything about the external world can be taken in an internal or an external sense. In the internal sense, the question can be answered from “within” one’s current knowledge —- hence one can answer it by pointing out some things that one knows, such as that here is a hand. In the external sense, however, the question is put in a “detached” and “philosophical” way.

If we have the feeling that Moore nevertheless fails to answer the philosophical question about our knowledge of external things, as we do, it is because we understand that question as requiring a certain withdrawal or detachment from the whole body of our knowledge of the world. We recognize that when I ask in that detached philosophical way whether I know that there are external things, I am not supposed to be allowed to appeal to other things I think I know about external things in order to help me settle the question.5

According to Stroud, Moore’s proof is a perfectly good one in response to the internal question, but fails miserably in response to the external or “philosophical” question. In fact, Stroud argues, Moore’s failure to respond to the philosophical question is so obvious that it cries out for an explanation -- hence Malcolm’s and Ambroses’s ordinary language interpretations. Stroud offers a different explanation for Moore’s failure to address the philosophical question: “He [i.e. Moore] resists, or more probably does not even feel, the pressure towards the philosophical project as it is understood by the philosophers he discusses.”6 Or again, “we are left with the conclusion that Moore really did not understand the philosopher’s assertions in any way other than the everyday ‘internal’ way he seems to have understood them.”7 The problem with this interpretation, of course, is that it makes Moore out to be an idiot. Is it really possible that Moore, the great Cambridge philosopher, did not understand that other philosophers were raising a philosophical question? (bolding added)