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The Indefensible Stanley Fish

Judith Shulevitz
Posted Monday, Dec. 27, 1999, at 12:28 PM ET

To readers of British fiction, Stanley Fish, the new dean of arts and sciences at the University of Illinois in Chicago and the second-most-famous English professor in America--after Harvard's Henry Louis Gates Jr.--is indistinguishable from Morris Zapp. Everyone knows that the character in David Lodge's trilogy Changing Places, Small World, and Nice Work, the most popular campus novels since Kingsley Amis' Lucky Jim, was based on Fish, Lodge's good friend. Zapp, a jetsetting, starfucking, and intellectually luminous American deconstructionist whose charm lies in his gleeful disregard for scholarly convention, aspires to become the highest-paid English professor in the world. What's wrong with that? he asks.

To readers of American newspapers, however, particularly the Wall Street Journal editorial page, Fish is the symbol of how the left is wrecking American universities. Fish's sin, according to his journalistic critics, is moral relativism. He is the founder of "reader-response" criticism, which holds that texts don't have intrinsic meaning--meaning is a byproduct of the encounter between reader and text. He advocates campus speech codes, the ultimate in political correctness. He defends the cultural-studies journal Social Text and the field of "science studies," even after they were humiliated through a brilliant prank by physicist Alan Sokal. And yes, he is one of the highest-paid English professors around. He currently gets $230,000 a year from the University of Illinois. This, it is felt, does not reflect an amusing brashness. It reflects a lack of principle.

An implicit answer to these and other criticisms can be found in Fish's latest book, The Trouble With Principle (Harvard University Press, $24.95). It opens with a scene from a movie--Sam Peckinpah's western The Wild Bunch. Outlaws Ernest Borgnine and William Holden are discussing a friend who has betrayed them by becoming a railroad detective. Why would their friend do a thing like that? Borgnine asks. Holden explains: The friend gave his word to the railroad. So what? Borgnine replies: "It isn't giving your word that's important; it's who you give your word to."

Most people would agree with Holden that a code of honor is worth at least paying lip service to. The combative Fish sides with Borgnine. "The trouble with principle," he writes, "is, first, it does not exist, and second, that nowadays many bad things are done in its name." None of the ideals a liberal society is supposed to be based on, Fish argues--fairness, impartiality, reasonableness--is ever truly neutral or principled. They all mask a political agenda. If all disputes over abstract ideals are, as Fish says, attempts to exploit an elevated moral language for partisan advantage, then to hell with his critics and their faith in chimera such as free speech and scientific objectivity! To hell with conservatives and their absolute values! To hell with liberals and their cherished notion of tolerance, since the people who benefit from it (such as fundamentalists and supremacists) would punch a liberal silly if they found one in a dark alley. The only beliefs that matter, says Fish, are the ones that matter directly to you. In the case of Stanley Fish, those are "my convictions and commitments."

Before you dismiss Fish as either a danger to democratic values or a pugilistic idiot, you have to know three more things about him. First, he's a remarkable scholar. As a young man in the 1960s, he single-handedly dragged his chosen specialty, John Milton studies, into the modern era. The field was mired in a stale debate over whether Paradise Lost is flawed because it contradicts itself--Satan is an appealing character, even though Milton appears to side with God, etc. Fish took Milton's contradictions to be a dramatization of the theological paradoxes of his day, rather than mere literary error.

Second, Fish is a political realist, not a head-in-the-clouds theorist. He is receiving such a princely sum from the University of Illinois not just because he's famous--or notorious--but because he was the chief architect of two of the most well-thought-of (though controversial) American academic programs in the 1980s and '90s, Johns Hopkins University's Humanities Center and Duke University's English department. His success as an administrator rested on two insights that are now commonplace: first, that the academic star system could be used to create departments with high-profile brand names, and second, that the longing of academic couples to live in the same place represents an administrative opportunity, not a headache. Fish built both the Humanities Center and Duke's English department by hiring celebrity couples and finding room for both, rather than wooing one member of the couple and banishing the other to a lesser department, or condemning husband and wife to a commuter marriage. That both departments are now falling apart can be chalked up either to his considerable skill at maintaining allies or to his cynical lack of concern with long-term stability.

Third, it is not as easy as it seems to lump Fish with the progressives and utopianists who dominate the cultural and intellectual left. The Trouble With Principle, with its typically Fishy mix of transgressiveness and realism, demonstrates the distance between him and them. The book's best essay by far is an attack on multiculturalism. In it, Fish argues that multiculturalism is a logical impossibility. His brief goes like this: There are two kinds of multiculturalism, "weak" (or "boutique") "multiculturalism" and "strong multiculturalism." "Weak multiculturalism," says Fish, is a watery tolerance for cultural diversity. Weak multiculturalists hold that the differences between people are trivial, because there are certain central values--tolerance, respecting the dignity of individual rights, etc--that supersede everything else. Weak multiculturalists do not tolerate practices, such as polygamy or female circumcision, that offend those values. Strong multiculturalists recognize that some differences are irreconcilable, but say you must put up with them. In the end, Fish argues, both multiculturalisms are really uniculturalism. Weak multiculturalists simply impose their Western, liberal values on everyone else. Strong multiculturalists, if they follow their argument to its extremes, end up having to support some other culture whose basic principles violate their own--thereby elevating the values of that culture above their own.

If there are no rules for living peacefully in an ethnically mixed society, what do we do now? Why, says Fish, we do what we have always done, since we have never really practiced multiculturalism. We improvise. We engage in something Fish calls, borrowing the phrase from a philosopher named Charles Taylor, "inspired adhoccery." We decide what to do on a case-by-case basis. When it makes sense to offer a major in Hindi studies, we offer a major in Hindi studies. When animal sacrifices become sufficiently offensive, we outlaw them. This, he adds, is not a recommendation. It is how we do things already, and the sooner we admit that, the better we'll get at it.

This may be well and good for multiculturalism, but Fish has bigger targets in mind. The most troubling essay in the book is called "Mission Impossible." Here Fish claims that there is no such thing as liberalism, since liberalism's only way of dealing with those who don't agree with it is forcibly to exclude them, mostly by calling them mad. It's an old argument, but Fish makes it new by going back to the source--John Locke--and showing that in order to arrive at the principle of separation of church and state (the bedrock of liberal polity ), Locke had to define religion as an internal process, each man's war "upon his own lusts and vices." In so doing, says Fish, Locke defines religion away, or at least all religions with strong beliefs and problematic forms of public worship. Locke does acknowledge that in some rare cases churches must be suppressed, but, he says, that's not a problem--we'll know which ones to suppress because they will be condemned "by the judgment of all mankind." Right there, says Fish, Locke undoes his own argument, since "the judgment of all mankind" requires a reigning consensus that doesn't exist. If it did, Locke wouldn't have had to invent liberalism. Liberals, rather than practicing tolerance, have by acts of intellectual (and real) violence elevated their own ideas of what will and won't do to the status of that which is universally right.

The philosophy Fish is practicing here bears some resemblance to pragmatism, a turn-of-the-century American doctrine that has recently been revived and wedded to European postmodernism. Modern pragmatism is a powerful brew of relativism--the idea that all truths are situational--and the optimistic belief that things work themselves out in the end. But Fish is not an upbeat pragmatist. His vision of society is far darker, for instance, than that of the leading American pragmatist, Richard Rorty, who holds that no idea is truly bad as long as it leads to other ideas. "Mission Impossible" is the essay in which Fish's scariest side emerges in clear view. The only thinker who is really honest about the implausibility of the liberal state, says Fish, is Hobbes:

[B]ecause the equality of right and ability breeds "equality of hope in the attaining of our Ends," and because each man's ends are naturally to be preferred to his rival's, the two will inevitably "become enemies," and in the absence of a neutral arbiter "they will endeavor to destroy or subdue one another."

And there Fish more or less stops. (Well, actually, he goes on to argue in a similar fashion against the logical plausibility of free speech, academic freedom, and blind justice.) Maddeningly, he leads us to the center of the Hobbesian maze, then refuses to extricate us. If life is a war of all against all, what guarantee do we have that adhoccery will work, no matter how inspired? None, of course--at which point Fish generally cackles and says that since he's a pragmatist, he believes that his ideas about the world are just that, ideas without consequences. There is, he says, "no straight line from these propositions to the solution of any real-life problem; they are of no help and do no work except the non-directing work of telling you that you are on your own."

In other words, Fish isn't the unprincipled relativist he's accused of being. He's something worse. He's a fatalist. But then, so were the pre-Socratics, several Roman philosophers, and Machiavelli. Culturebox certainly can't tell you whether Fish is right or wrong. On the other hand, Fish never claimed to be right. In fact, he once quipped that, now that objectivity is dead, it is no longer necessary to be right. You just have to be interesting. Which he is.

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Judith Shulevitz is a former culture editor of Slate. She is writing a book about the Sabbath.
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Highlights from the Fray:


All it takes to be a "danger to democratic values" is for a minority (or single individual) to come to a more valid conclusion on an issue than the majority holds (like Galileo, for example).

It may be valuable to distinguish "democracy," a mechanism for group decision-making, from "democratic values," a belief system which holds that that mechanism must always be optimal.

"Most people would agree ... that a code of honor is worth at least paying lip service to." Wow. The contrast between the inherent pragmatism of this statement and the author's intent to express an unpragmatic sentiment makes my mental eyes cross! "Most peoples" agreement would pretty much have to be "lip service," since codes of honor are codes of action, not of expression! The fact that you can construct a syntactically correct sentence doesn't mean it will automatically describe a valid state of being.

Fish appears to be challenging the self-contradictory foundations of our most absurd beliefs about our world. If folks find his ideas unsettling, this would tend to indicate that he has valid points.

You don't have to like reality, you just have to live with it. You can kid yourself about it, but that only gives you internal comfort, not a real grasp or advantage.

--dloke

(To reply, click here.)


Shulevitz on Fish:

In order to arrive at the principle of separation of church and state (the bedrock of liberal piety) Locke had to redefine religion as an internal process each man's war "upon his own lusts and vices." In so doing, says Fish, Locke defines religion away, or at least all religions with strong beliefs.

Allan Bloom discussing A Theory of Justice by John Rawls (from "Justice: John Rawls versus the Tradition of Political Philosophy"):

Our experience shows that pluralism of religious belief works just fine. We need not worry, for only a few fanatics who constitute a clear and present danger need be restrained. But Rawls does not know what faith is. He looks at the believers around us, not knowing that religion has been utterly transformed, partly as a direct result of the criticism of the contract theorists, partly as a result of the liberal society of which they were the inspirers. The kind of men who fought the wars of religion could not be asked to give up the quest for salvation for a peace they despised; they had to be made to disappear.

--Edward Brynes

(To reply, click here.)


It sounds as though Fish's attack on various doctrines stems in part from the position that if a doctrine does not work 100% of the time it is not valid. But nothing works 100% of the time, and many doctrines are valid. Even the most profound insights of science are valid over only their applicable range, and it is a tenet of science that all insights are subject to replacement by even more profound insights. But, even though Einstein replaced Newton, you can send a spacecraft to the moon using only Newton.

By the same token, it is entirely valid to hold that freedom of speech for everyone is in the long run essential to a civilized society, and to press that doctrine on everyone, even though the exact definition of freedom of speech may be fuzzy around the edges and not quite absolute, and everyone may not agree where the boundaries lie.

--Alan Naftalin

(To reply, click here.)

(12/28)


Stanley Fish has half a point to make when claiming, for example, that hiring practices are rarely an exercise in total objectivity and meritocracy. Such decisions made by flesh and blood human beings will indeed be flawed. Subconsciously, if not even consciously, factors such as class, race, gender, etc. may play a disturbing and invalid role. Nonetheless, Fish pushes his argument to the point of absurdity. He wrongly concludes that we should give up the struggle and abandon ourselves to Nihilism. The real answer, of course, is that human beings must learn to confront their prejudices and overcome them.

Stanley Fish is merely building a career around the fact that prudential judgment, and not a hard-science absolutism, underpins our decision making. He is something of a con man who exaggerates his main points to deceive us regarding their ultimate value.

--David Thomson

(To reply, click here.)


It's sad and paradoxical, as Judith hints, that Fish opposes all current values, but nevertheless justifies--with his method and style--those very values: Make yourself interesting, get the PR, rake in the money, and, if it works, end up deluding yourself that your own cynicism has led you to the truth.

--Peter Isackson

(To reply, click here.)


Not to detract from an otherwise thoughtful article, but Stanley Fish is second-most-famous English professor in America to ... Henry Louis Gates Jr.? An admirable mind, but is not Harold Bloom not only the "most famous," but "most" erudite, provocative, catholic, not to mention annoying, scholar we have? (And he has managed, with no concession to any ideology or school, to become a best-selling author? And he dares speak such heresies as: The Pentatuch was written by Bathsheba, as a cosmic joke! Or: There is only one truly original genius in the history of American religion--Joseph Smith!) Wow! Is there someone else who has done more than that?

I am not a worshipper at the shrine, but I can't imagine a better candidate for the above honor.

--Joseph Byrd

(To reply, click here.)


Perhaps others can perceive the debate over Fish as merely an abstract intellectual exercise of no real importance to the real world. I am not one of these people. Deconstructionism asserts that human beings cannot achieve reasonable certitude in their decision making. The underpinnings of this epistemology destroy any hope of building a democratic society. The result is that we must ultimately rely on pure brute force. One possesses power not because of the ability to persuade others---but you can kick the crap out of them!

--David Thomson

(To reply, click here.)


Dear David Thomson,

You imply that he's "wrong," apparently, because he's left with a normative problem. Namely, once he has brought values into doubt by claiming that they are subjective, he can't argue that anything is good or bad anymore--he can't say that murder is bad, for example, and he can't even say that his own arguments are "good" or "important" or "worth listening to." Some people, therefore, make the argument that a person like Fish must be wrong.

But think about it--isn't that just fundamentally illogical? Aren't you saying, "If Fish's argument leads to a result that in my subjective opinion has negative consequences, he must be wrong"? Does that really follow? I mean, I freely admit it, if there are no values that seems bad to me. But so what if it does? Does that mean there are values?

Anyway, this is hardly a new point. It's the hottest question in the current "postmodernism" fiasco and--a point that escapes virtually everyone now mired in said fiasco--it's also at least a few thousand years old.

Pyrrho, along with other Greek thinkers now referred to as "the Sceptics," said that we should seek to live in a state of "ataraxia," which means roughly "ambivalence," without the negative connotation. That is, because Pyrrho believed that we do not have objective access to values--or anything else--we are left in a world in which we simply are unable to decide what's right and what's wrong, what we should do, etc. That may sound bizarre or terrible to you, but I would suggest that that's because you (and, admittedly, a majority of other people, since not so many people would agree with me and Pyrrho) just do not have a very mature outlook about the human predicament.

Another point here, and one that again seems to have been overlooked by nearly everyone, is that the core substantive message of the Sceptics, first uttered at least 2300 years ago, is part and parcel of the message of Existentialism. Pyrrho and the Existentialists do the same thing--to borrow from Sartre, they both seek to "work out a coherent atheism" (see Sartre's Existentialism is a Humanism). Although Fish certainly uses different lingo and, on the surface, sets for himself a different task, I don't really see him as doing anything different.

You might also note a strong affinity here with ancient Buddhism--the Buddha taught that desire leads to suffering, and therefore that the path to heaven is to extinguish desire (and not just in the Protestant sense of not having dirty thoughts--he meant even the desire to know things, to do right, etc.). That's a provocative possibility, because Pyrrho is believed to have travelled with Alexander the Great in his campaign to India and may well have been influenced by Indian religious figures at a time only a few hundred years after the Buddha's death.

The point of all this is that you make it sound like Stanley Fish represents some new and seriously dangerous evil that has been hatched out only in the last few generations. He doesn't; my view (which admittedly not everyone would accept) would be that in substance he's not any different and no more dangerous than Sceptics who lived millennia ago. Those influential men didn't believe in values either, and yet the world goes on.

Anyway, writing this has caused me distantly to leave my cozy nest of ataraxia, to which I now long to return. You can have the last word if you like, and I will not respond.

--CS in Washington

(To reply, click here.)


Dear CS,

I find your casual statement that life always seems to continue regardless of value choices to be both morally flawed and disingenuous. It overlooks the destruction caused by evil ideas leaving much death and suffering. Pragmatically, your views have been taken to their logical conclusion: We should offer no resistance to the threat of Armageddon.

--David Thomson

(To reply, click here.)


A while ago I posted two quotes, one from Shulevitz on Fish, one from Allan Bloom on John Rawls' A Theory of Justice. Perhaps this combo, with no explanatory comment, seemed arcane. After reading what everyone else has posted, I think my argument is worth expanding.

Fish's statements about liberalism repeat almost exactly Bloom's comments on Rawls, who cannot imagine a religion that is anything other than inward contemplation. Supposedly "radical" Fish ends up repeating supposedly "conservative" Bloom.

Liberalism can cope with living perfectly well as liberals don't try to construct an ideal society. Used pragmatically, liberalism can provide useful answers. If Fish had a choice, in some multi-dimensional world, between teaching at Moscow University in 1936 and teaching at the U of Illinois in 1999, there would be no doubt of his choice--Illinois. Fish is not ready to give up the freedom to say what he wants to say. He concludes that the only way out of the liberal dilemma is "ad-hoccery" but it's his ad-hoccery, not mine or yours. Nothing original about this; it's saying we must create our own values (Nietzche).

When liberals try to design a perfect society, they get into trouble. Rawls' book is full of unstated assumptions, which Bloom exposes one by one. (The Soviets were trying to construct an ideal society, too).

It's easy to expose inconsistencies in traditional beliefs. But that does not mean the beliefs are worthless. The social value of institutions like private property or restricted sexual behavior is pretty clear even if they can't be logically defended. The purpose of the institutions is not to form a logical system but to enable productive and orderly social life. They arise not as a result of reasoning, but grow slowly over generations. Perhaps someday Fish will consider this and just as he has rediscovered Bloom and Nietzche he will rediscover Friedrich Hayek.

--Edward Brynes

(To reply, click here.)

(12/30)

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