Book review: Idolizing the Idea: A Critical History of Modern Philosophy

[Extract] Idolatry is the worship of false gods. According to Wayne Cristaudo’s magnificent disquisition on the subject, modern philosophy is idolatrous. It repeatedly raises up false gods with baleful consequences. Cristaudo’s command of technical philosophy is dazzling. He writes lucidly and beautifully about the most abstruse and difficult works in the Western philosophical canon. Part of his success in doing this is because he writes as an outsider. While he has published numerous books on philosophical and religious ideas, he is by profession a political scientist – and it shows. Cristaudo is aware not only of the subtleties of arcane philosophical arguments but also of their social consequences and how abstruse philosophical arguments have shaped the background assumptions of modern political ideologies. Many of the worst episodes in modern history have attracted intellectual admirers. The intellectual appetite for cruelty and brutality runs deep. Modern philosophy has contributed to this. Often it has done so innocently but nonetheless in a palpable way. For it pushes human cognition in a particular direction. Cristaudo calls this drive ‘idea-ism’. Idea-ism and its accompanying idolatry is not a synonym for the liking of ideas. Rather it is a distinct mode of thinking. To understand this cognitive style, let’s go back to the origins of systematic human thought – to mythology. As the French anthropologist Claude Lévi-Strauss detailed in numerous works, mythological thought has a bifurcated and dualistic structure. It is organized as a set of oppositions, contrasts and differences. In itself, this is a more or less neutral phenomenon. However, the manner in which these dualisms is handled is not neutral. In the case of much of modern philosophy, the natural dualism of the mind is treated in ways that encourage either polarization or triumphalism