David Stove and the Heirs of the Western Tradition *

Rick O’Brien

(See also Judy Stove’s reply to this article)

I want to tell you a little about a man I knew quite well for the last decade of his life: David Charles Stove. Stove – few, other than his wife, his closer friends and his colleagues, called him David – was an Australian philosopher of the mid to late 1900s.

He spent almost all his career lecturing in and producing analytic philosophy, of the rigorous, ‘no-bullshit’ Australian variety, at the University of Sydney – although it would be fair to say he occupied the ‘Über’ end of the anti-connerie spectrum. By the time I when an undergraduate met him in the mid-1980s he was an Associate Professor. Stove retired a few years later, entirely worn-out by the travails of academia and its politics.

There was very much to this man born in Moree, NSW in 1927. He followed rugby league and cricket as avidly as he admired the music of Bach, Purcell, Handel and Vivaldi. He also grew very impressive roses, and, his son Robert tells us#, had a fine bass voice and played the trumpet well. Stove grew up in working-class Newcastle, NSW, attending the same state high school as the ‘immortal’ Australian rugby league player, Clive Churchill. Both were prodigiously talented, though in somewhat different ways.

(Stove told me once that Churchill – as well as being astonishingly gifted at sport – was good looking and thus had girls magnetically drawn to him; but was otherwise as ‘dumb as dog-dirt’. Not a pair of inconveniences I suspect Stove ever had to negotiate).

I found out recently that, as well as being School Captain, Stove too excelled in sport. It is not reported if he had also been dux; though it is likely he won a scholarship in order to gain entry to the University of Sydney – an uncommon eventuality for regional high- school students in the 1940s, even very bright ones.

It is there he fell in with philosophy. This though is not really a discussion of his work in philosophy – induction and probability, the philosophy of science, and Hume scholarship – rather than of his teaching, his non-academic papers, and his impact on students.

As has been observed by many, Stove was in fact a man not of but out of his time. In sundry ways he would have been better suited to the nineteenth century than the twentieth; or perhaps now, as a Ramsay Centre link antidote, to the twenty-first century.

Beyond his professional focus, and most prominently and famously, D C Stove was a political conservative; widely regarded not just as reactionary, but as a sexist. He thought women were on the whole intellectually inferior to men, and had evolved thus, he once informed me, because of the need to invest so many of their resources in reproduction and child-rearing. It’s OK, I can feel the bristling.

He was in two ways also a ‘racist’ – a neologism of the 1960s and early ‘70s that he believed, in reality, applied to most if not all rational human beings – those ways being: First, through his conviction he conveyed to me that on average white people including Jews were intellectually superior to other races (a claim I hear some east Asians make for themselves, these days); And second, in that ‘racial antagonisms’, as he called them, were inevitable and so creeds and peoples should as far as practicable be kept apart. (And so much for the hundreds of millions of mixed-race folk in our world.)

It is this latter sensitivity though that tempered his attitude to broaching racial and ethnic tensions more specifically: he was most concerned not to antagonise or exacerbate any ill-feeling between particular groups, either openly or publicly; and he would counsel others to take a prudent approach on such matters.

Stove was nevertheless dismissive of any charitable efforts directed toward (eg.) starving or war-torn Africans. I bet you made a donation to Live-Aid, he probed at me rhetorically in mid-1985, about a concert event now far better known for one, stunning, 20-minute performance by the band Queen – not among David’s favoured ensembles – than for the many millions it raised to tackle the Ethiopian famine of the time. I can’t recall us ever discussing apartheid and Nelson Mandela. Maybe he just thought I was a lost cause.

Last, to complete the bigot’s trifecta, Stove was (speaking of queens) a homophobe. I recall in particular him broaching his suspicions concerning two of his colleagues, and him conveying sincere distaste if not a wave of disgust; as if the concept of an offence against the order of nature had been crafted to assuage the feelings of men like David.

I never ventured to raise with him the heterosexual penchant for oral and anal sex; nor do I recall canvassing lesbianism. But it was homosexual men in particular who drew Stove’s ire, a sentiment he made clear in response to a question I raised in open discussion following a paper he presented on Conservatism, in which he compared modern-day liberties for gay people with freedom for drug-dealers and their ilk.^

(I should add though that my sense of David’s feelings on homosexuality is they were closer to antipathy than to outright contempt; and that it would have been entirely out of character for him to convey to any person directly his views about their sexuality.)

Still, I realise what some – maybe many – will now be thinking. How could I bear even conversing with such a man, let alone count him as a friend? Well here’s the thing about Homo sapiens: we’re complex, multi-faceted creatures. We put the sapiens in Homo.

Stove was a mentor to many talented philosophy students; including more than a few women (although not, as far as he knew, any queers). He was a prude, but also a man of propriety, and generous with his time and encouragement – mark easy, comment hard – especially if you were bright (and, typically, white). Undergraduates though he would refer to as ‘Mister’ or ‘Miss’; gender-neutral pronouns not then being in vogue.

He smoked roll-your-owns and drank Coopers pale ale and flagon sherry to excess; starting with a short glass of amontillado, as I recall, at around 5pm, lecturing or not.

His jacket – in tan tweed – was a decade old hand-me-down from the conservative Australian foreign policy expert, Owen Harries. They knew each other through the pages of the (partly CIA-funded) magazine, Quadrant, for which Stove wrote many articles.

Most notoriously, the journal in May 1986 published Stove’s, A Farewell to Arts: Marxism, Semiotics and Feminism, link which commences thus:

The Faculty of Arts at the University of Sydney is a disaster-area, and not of the merely passive kind, like a bombed building, or an area that has been flooded. It is the active kind, like a badly- leaking nuclear reactor, or an outbreak of foot-and-mouth disease in cattle. A little further he goes on:

Of course the disaster is not confined to Sydney University. Far from that, it is common to the Arts faculties of most Western universities. So far as there still survives anything of value from the Western tradition of humanistic studies, it is in spite of most of the people in the universities who are the heirs of that tradition.

And to give you a feel for his views about one of his favourite targets, feminism, if not of women in general, there’s this from later in the same piece:

Then there is feminism. If one looked just at "the women's movement" itself, who could possibly resist the conclusion that women are intellectually inferior to men? The feminists have yet to produce a single piece of writing, devoted to their cause, which any rational creature could attach importance to. All this was 35 years ago. Imagine what he’d think now of not just Sydney University’s Arts Faculty but the Anglophone university systems more or less entire. And how the Wokerati would respond to his academic, indeed even physical, presence: surely a matter of ‘cancelling’ with extreme prejudice.

Back though in the 1980s, and doubtless earlier, it was his disregard for the decorum of appearance that first attracted undergraduate students. Stove’s jacket – I only ever saw him wear the one – bore the inevitable leather elbow patches. Yet like a barrel-aged hipster he rarely shaved (and never closely), and wore his scuffed old shoes lace-less. His shirts were pitted with micro-burns from the hot ash toppling from the tip of his hand- rolled cigarettes. He drove, as I recall, a pint-sized Daihatsu Charade.

David was an unconventional conservative. James Franklin in the Australian Dictionary of Biography link describes him as ‘Witty, irreverent, and principled…[but] of pessimistic temperament, finding no consolation in religion or hopes for political progress’. All true.

Intellectually precise, indeed unashamedly pedantic, he was an enemy of cant and pomposity; an expression of his parsimonious, neo-positivist approach to philosophy. Yet he looked like an ageing, care-worn version of the young Marxist he’d started out as in the Sydney Push of the 1940s. Like many ex-lefties, though, he’d sailed right past democratic socialism and social democracy and liberalism to the outer reaches of conservative politics, defaulting along the way to the reactionary social values I’ve noted.

But beyond all that, Stove was gut-clutchingly funny.

A short and balding man with a modest pot belly, his voice had a gentle yet gravelly timbre and his eyes twinkled cheekily. His papers given to Sydney University’s student philosophy club – the Russellian Society, of which I was briefly President – were legend. Just about everyone would be gasping in outrage at him one minute and then a moment later howling their fun bits off. Stove always filled the room.

A summary of papers he presented to the Russellian Society in the time I was a member give a sense of the flavour of his pitch to this mixed academic and student audience: • Cole Porter and Karl Popper or, The Jazz Age in the Philosophy of Science (the funniest, among stiff competition) • Why You Should Be a Conservative (for even moderate lefties, the most irritating) • The Intellectual Capacity of Women (definitely the most inflammatory) • Racial and Other Antagonisms (a close second); and • What is Wrong with Our Thoughts? (The most intellectually compelling.)

(All of these have since found their way to broader audiences, whether by being published in other journals or as chapters in one or other of Stove’s books.)

This oeuvre he delivered with a carefully crafted and well-calibrated capacity to rile, at will, the ever-vigilant sensibilities of the Arts Faculty bien pensant. I recall my eye-rolling, 4 head-shaking, amusement at his response after the French bombing and sinking of the Rainbow Warrior in Auckland Harbour in July 1985. Remember, the then French President, François Mitterrand, and his government were notionally Socialist:

‘Vive la France’, Stove enjoined with a provocative smile, ‘vive!’

He was like many conservatives then an unabashed fan of the Reaganite ‘peace through superior firepower’ doctrine of the 1980s. One which (as it turns out) ultimately worked – at least tangentially – by the West outspending a fundamentally weak Soviet economy. This presented yet another point of irritation for the Left (as if any more were required), that pre-disposed so many among them against David. But not, I should add, all of them.

After retiring at sixty he continued writing. He kept up contact with his closer friends and some former colleagues, often by way of a postcard from his outer western Sydney locale, Mulgoa, or a short handwritten note accompanying a draft or a copy of a piece he’d written. I have retained a buff folder of ‘Stove stuff’ to this day.

Diagnosed with oesophageal cancer at 66, David died a few months later in 1994 at his own hand (his wife of 35 years Jess having had a serious stroke only a short while earlier). Yet his fame outlived him. Indeed it grew in the years after his passing, partly as a result of him being ‘discovered’ – if I may deploy the ironic motif of Imre Lakatos link, one of his Four Modern Irrationalists link – by the American social commentator, Roger Kimball.

Kimball, whose attention was drawn to Stove by another ex-leftie, Keith Windschuttle, wrote an article link in the New Criterion of March 1997 – Who was David Stove? – that helped enhance the appreciation and standing of David outside both Australia and the non-academic world. Kimball subsequently edited a collection of Stove’s ‘most provocative and acute essays’, Against the Idols of the Age, link in 1999. In Defending Common Sense, a 2000 review of the book in the Partisan Review link, Scott Campbell led off with the challenging proposition that:

…’the greatest philosopher of the twentieth century… may have been a somewhat obscure and conservative Australian’. And that, if he wasn’t, ‘Stove was certainly the funniest and most dazzling defender of common sense’. Campbell went on with an astute summary of Stove’s output and effect:

… (He) was an essayist, polemicist, and wit of the highest order, rather like a super-intelligent H. L. Mencken. A heavyweight admirer [Prof Michael Levin] was once led to write that “Reading Stove is like watching Fred Astaire dance. You don’t wish you were Fred Astaire, you are just glad to have been around to see him in action.”

All this ventilation was of course due not just to Stove’s own intellectual merits but also to the devotion of his editors; with the number of Stovian works published in the late 1990s comprising something of a renaissance in the appreciation of David’s intellectual productivity and of his better qualities.

Dead white men indeed. He speaks softly from the grave.

What are we to say now about a man like Stove? He was a white, heterosexual, male elitist. Sure. But he was also a gentleman. He never strove to cause offence – at least not face to face – and I never heard him raise his voice. David was also in one sense hostile to hyper-masculinity: he had the scholars’ distaste for macho bravado. Of all the cricketers he admired, the one he least liked as a person, he once told me, was the great Australian fast bowler, Dennis Lillee – all moustachioed, snorting machismo. His intellectual biographer, James Franklin, in his obituary of Stove published in June 1994 link, wrote:

David Stove's skill in philosophical polemic made him a figure the Left loved to hate, and an object of apprehension even among his own camp… The high point of outrage was…'A Farewell to Arts', in which he…attacked the professional competence of several named colleagues. The reaction — 'the old boy's gone too far this time'— was not uncommon among his friends as well as enemies… Too true. Yet for me the paragraphs in the obit that resonate most soundly are these:

If average students found him unexciting, the better ones delighted in him. His students were, on the whole, less concerned than his colleagues by the extremity of some of his opinions. He showed that the range of what could reasonably be thought was wider than one had imagined. He gave permission, so to speak, to think outside the mainstream – if reasons for doing so could be found. Through his encouragement a generation of students found their own voice. His tolerance of views other than his own (if well argued) was more genuine than that of many thinkers who proclaimed tolerance as a principle.

There is a lot about Franklin’s reminiscences that is spot on. But in my view it is the last two paragraphs I cite that merit special reflection for the heirs of the western tradition. I know of at least one internationally-recognised feminist philosopher – she holds a chair in an august British academic institution – who as an undergraduate student was almost as admiring of David Stove as I was, and just as appreciative of his intellectual support and encouragement. I wonder how she remembers him now?

On the Western tradition, Stove said to me once of Kant (one of several great figures in the history of western philosophy the influence of whose ideas he found particularly 6 galling), that the major philosophers are in effect still with us – we speak of them in the present tense. Even, or perhaps especially, those with whom we may disagree. And so it is with some lesser but still important thinkers, like David Charles Stove.

Afterthought There’s a wider and deeper point that merits exploration here. As I mentioned earlier, we human beings are complex creatures. As well as being a husband and a father and a man out of his time (with zero sartorial inclinations), David Stove was all of the following: i. (7) A profound bigot ii. (5) A provocative, conservative polemicist iii. (9) A (relatively) privileged white man iv. (10) A social and sexual prude v. (8) A man with deep musical, sporting and natural interests vi. (6) A polite and charming gentleman and friend vii. (4) An inspiring and supportive teacher viii. (1) An extremely witty and thought-provoking writer ix. (2) A hard-working and productive scholar; and x. (3) An intellectually-rigorous philosopher

In what order and with what weight should we rate these ten clusters of qualities? Why start at the top – as we are inclined to do in these days of insidious (and in my view philosophically misconceived) identity politics and perceived micro-aggressions – even if one were, for example, a lesbian of colour? Why would that be any better than the bias it displaced – starting from the bottom?

For what it’s worth I’ve numbered the set in my unweighted order (italicised in brackets). In so doing I confirmed in my mind that the qualities listed at vi. to x. are on the whole far more important than those from i. to v.

Stove’s overall legacy is for others and history to judge. But imagine if you were intent on starting from ‘profound bigot’ and working your way down, which folk you would then expunge from history. Pretty well all the Greek, Roman and religious writers of the last 2.5 millennia; plus, for starters: Chopin; TS Eliot; Hume; Picasso; Locke; and Heidegger.

The deep sin of anti-Semitism would alone extirpate a plethora of the cultural greats – Chopin, TS Eliot, Hume, and arguably Heidegger – from the annals of the last several hundred years; never mind racists more broadly; or sexists (Picasso, among many, many others); or homophobes (too numerous to count); or religious bigots (Locke, inter alia).

If we don’t want to ditch all those, why ditch Stove? Where and how would it all stop? 7

* I would like to thank Prof James Franklin for his helpful comments on earlier drafts of this piece, and for the offer of it being hosted on the David Stove webpage. # David Stove and Music, R J Stove, at https://web.maths.unsw.edu.au/~jim/davidstove.html

^ NB I happily concede though that others who knew David Stove do or will think otherwise about his views and may well have direct experiences regarding those that differ markedly from my own.