Customer Reviews

The Trouble with Principle

5 star:		(5)
4 star:		(5)
3 star:		(3)
2 star:		(3)
1 star:		(2)

 

 

It has been about three months since I've read this book and I am still calling it to mind on a regular basis. Like some reviewers below, I give this book a high rating while admitting that Fish's views are unpalatable, infuriating, and troubling, as often as not.

Fish's central thesis here is that there are no such things as neutral principles - those completely objective, a priori dicta, formula, and abstract ideas to base our 'neutral' theories on. From my experience with this book (and I think you will have the same experience), not only was Fish saying something quite differnt (less radical?!) than what his critics pretend he was saying, but I found myself in more agreement with Fish than I thought I would (or wanted to be!).

To make it brief: Fish is saying that whereas intellectuals like to think that we derive theories from neutral principles ("We value freedom, liberty and individual autonomy; therefore we shall create a policy of free-markets."), it is usually the opposite that takes place: we figure out what our ideology is and THEN we quest for the 'neutral principles' that will justify it. ("I believe in the free-market; the free-market emphasises liberty, freedom, and individual autonomy, so I will use those to justify my preferences.") More directly, the neutral principles, Fish writes, are not _a priori_ but _a posteriori_. Actually his most revealing example (towards the end of the book, as I recall) was that of christians struggling to 'justify' creation science by using, of all things, the postmodern criticism that science (or evolution, at least) is simply ideology masked as empiricism. These christian thinkers even CITE POSTMODERN THEORIESTS AS AUTHORITIES. This is fishy (excuse the pun) becuase, as Fish writes, there is no way these christian thinkers would have aligned themselves with the post-modern argument (that they usually criticize) unless they found the argument, not true, but useful. That is, whereas christians might believe in objectivity of facts as a general principle, they don't really mean that. They'll gladly switch to the postmodern 'relativist' argument if it suits their needs.

He's not ONLY bashing the christins or the right wing in this book (his criticism is dispersed over all ideology). Rather, through 'deconstruction', he is trying to show that ALL general principles are constructed in the service of conclusions ALREADY REACHED. I do not take it that far as I think that in science and law, for instance, where the rules are already somewhat 'set', one can reach conclusions not ideological by nature, therefore I found myself disagreeing with Fish's assessment of the first amendment as ideologically laden.

Still, I found the book a warm antidote to some of the problems in this petty world I sometimes call crackademia. Particularly, I can vividly recall not being able to control my laughter (signifying agreement with Fish) in, of all places, my university library, during a chapter where Fish criticizes academic philosophers. Philosophers, he says, think that in order for morality, epistemology, of what have us, to work, there needs to be a coherent, internally consistent system or theory (and it is the philosophers job to argue for one). Therefore, moral philosophers are baffled because morality (as it is in the real world) doesn't seem to follow one system, any system. The philosopher wants a sound argument for a cogent system, looking at human action as somehow extracted from this system. The philosopehr wants first principles (without those, we can't act). Fish's response? "Open your eyes, look at the world, and realize, dear philosopher, that people survive without your philosophic systems and first principles." The philosophers job, then, is not to concoct general principles or argue for systems that nobody will use anyway, but to actually look at behavior, action, and things as they are in the real world, not the fake one philosophers gleefully construct for themselves. The chapter is the last one called "On Truth and Toilets" and is alone worth the price of the book!

To end, while I do not agree with Fish's ideas as applied as extremely as he applies them, I think there is much more truth to what Fish says than critics let on. Fish does not say that judgment is impossible; he only says that neutral judgment (an oxymoron) is impossible. We judge from where we are; our first person subjective viewpoint. Nor is Fish a nihilist. If the world is not objective, FIsh is not saying it is nihililstic, but _intersubjective_. Basically, may the best first-person argument win. Whether Fish seems like your cup of tea or makes your stomach churn, you will not come away from this book unchanged or unscathed.

As always, Fish's gadfly polemic will compel and madden at the same time. Fish is a stringent anti-foundationalist, challenging the ethical presumption that we can base our public policy and discourse on neutral principals upon which every person can agree. No, says Fish, these principles are little more than obfuscations of deeper, unstated agendas. Fish explores his thesis in creative deconstructions of such unquestioned notions as "academic freedom," "freedom of speech," and the "cultural canon."

The book suffers somewhat from the repetitive nature of the study (after all, Fish is basically restating the same thesis over and over again). It is as if Fish is playing a rhetorical fugue, creating new variations in each chapter on the same theme. The song doesn't always sound as compelling from chapter to chapter, but the balance of the book is worthwhile and provocative. The best chapter of the book, chapter 1, explores multi-culturalism and affirmative action in compelling fashion. Fish does well to reorient the debate so as to demonstrate how the very concept of principal robs Fish (and I presume, others who agree with Fish's politics) of the ability to include historical particularity as a factor in public policy. Thus, even Fish's deconstruction of principals is a political act, Fish's way of removing an obstacle to the furtherance of his undeniable agenda.

The implication of Fish's thesis is that western culture consists of a complex mixture of competing agendas, stories, and ethical values that cannot cohere through simple appeals to foundational principles ("freedom of individual self-expression," "speech," "religion," ad nauseaum). Even if we give up the notion that there are neutral principals, this only underlines the communally-conditioned principals that distinguish Christian, secularist, Muslim, and Jew. What we have now is not a principal-less society but a society of competing principals rooted in competing conceptions of reality. Fish is much more descriptive than prescriptive in his assessment. In the end, Fish seems to imply that there is no real prescription, only the mushrooming of rhetoric as agendas clash in the public sphere.

There's no question but that reading Stanley Fish is always an enjoyable experience. Just as in _There's No Such Thing as Free Speech (And It's A Good Thing Too)_, Fish's skills as a polemicist are, as most of the reviewers here have noted, considerable: he possesses wit, insight, a grasp of history, a command of details, clear and incisive logic, and a gift for demolishing bad arguments.

To a certain extent, _The Trouble With Principle_ repeats the arguments of _There's No Such Thing as Free Speech_, particularly Fish's critique of free-speech absolutism and of the conservative critique of affirmative action. Both these books are less sustained arguments than collections of individual pieces dealing with common concerns and taking a common approach.

This approach is, I must add, somewhat less original that Fish seems to think it is. His argument has two basic points:

1. Ethical principles like "fairness" and "equality" are not self-sufficient, but are used in specific contexts in order to gain certain ends, and skillful rhetoricians pick them up and put them down depending on whether or not they will be likely to obtain those desired ends in a given context;

2. What ends one seeks emerge, ultimately, from some desire or motivation that is not subject to rational argument because it is not held for rational reasons.

Now, this is really nothing except consequentialism; if we desire, for example, the greatest happiness of the greatest number, then sometimes treating everybody equally is going to do that and sometimes making special allowances for particular groups is going to do that.

Whether or not one seeks the greatest happiness of the greatest number is not, of course, up for debate, or, if it is - as Fish points out - then it is only up for debate because something else is not. You can't make an argument without at least one premise and at least one procedural rule. This isn't consequentialism but simply a restatement of the is-ought problem - ethical positions have to start, not even with axioms, but with intuitions that are not, themselves, in discourse.

The paradox of Fish is that he makes this argument very clearly, understanding its implications, and also argues that articulating this changes nothing; we will all continue to do our rhetorical work the same way. Yet the thrust of the particular arguments that Fish makes seem to deny this. He argues that the conservative critique of affirmative action as discriminatory elevates "non-discrimination" from a sometimes useful tool to a deontological (my word) principle that prevents desirable consequences from coming about. Yet why make this argument except as a means of convincing readers to fix their attention _on_ consequences rather than on principles? Unless "we should bring about good consequences" is itself an instrumental and only contextually useful principle - and then the question is, in what contexts would it _not_ be useful?

My biggest disappointment was Fish's slight account of moral change, in which he seems to imply that people only change their minds as a result of a total re-orientation of the personality, an event that is unpredictable. Maybe this applies to the absolute fundamental moral intuitions we hold, but people change their minds in discourse - that is, as a result of arguments and evidence - all the time. It would be interesting to have a more thorough account of that sort of change, which, admittedly, might (or might not) only be possible when important emotional interests are not at stake (I am, for example, willing to be talked into supporting this or that tax policy). In fact, Fish's whole project seems to presuppose the idea that people will change their minds as a result of something as ordinary as, say, reading a book. Wayne Booth's _Modern Dogma and the Rhetoric of Assent_ is very interesting on this issue.

But you should definitely read Fish's book, mainly because it is a peach. The introduction, in which Fish bemusedly surveys the rhetoric of the modern right (caught, as always, between the assumption that basically everybody agrees and the claiming of underdog status against a fearsome array of college professors and federal judges) is particularly clever.

Fish's book is extremely cogent for those who would try to argue for their moral ground devoid of moral ground. Fish effectively illustrates that unless one chooses a set of absolutes on which to base judgments, all that is left is pragmatism or self-delusion. I personally am a Christian and believe in absolutes, which is why I stated that Fish was wrong. But he's right-on in his analysis of current liberal thinking.

One reviewer stated that Fish was not serious about his ideas and that he was simply trying to shake things up--to write a controversial book, essentially. I don't think so. I think Fish has uncovered the inconsistent thinking underlying modern liberalism and paraded it. Don't be surprised if a lot of liberals won't take him seriously when he proves that they have no "higher authority" on which to make the moral distinctions they do. He's stepping on toes. But one should honestly question whether the feet should be there.

Another reviewer said that Fish mistaked the liberal basis of belief, calling it "the view from nowhere." I think that reviewer was not thinking through liberal belief enough. Calling liberalism "a view from the battlefields of human strife and hatred" is a view from nowhere. It implies no absolutes, merely pragmatism. The same reviewer also stated that instead of Fish's pragmatism, we should sort out differences in principle "using tests like equity and conceptions of justice and of the self." This is exactly what Fish takes the entire book to disprove, showing that such notions are themselves the neutral principles which are empty of the content which is supposed to be making the distinctions and solving the conflicts. What happens when one person thinks that another's conception of reason and theirs are mutually exclusive? There is no reconciling the two through what one side or the other thinks is reason. The same applies to principles like justice, equity, fairness, freedom, etc. This same reviewer goes on to state that affirmative action arguments can be bolstered through arguments of "'equal' moral weight" as the "equality" argument. But to ascribe moral weight to the argument is exactly what Fish is arguing that you cannot do. If there is no absolute moral high ground from which to pass judgment, one's judgment about what carries moral weight holds no more "moral weight" than anyone else's. I think the reviewer needs to take a closer look at Fish's arguments against reasoning from nowhere.

I would recommend The Trouble With Principle as a thought-provoking book. But I would not recommend it as correct (despite my lengthy defense of it). Fish is correct ONLY if there are no absolutes--an assumption which he makes at the outset of the book. Unless one is willing to concede an absolute basis on which they make their decisions, there can be nothing but pragmatism.

Stanley Fish's The Trouble With Principle is one of the more robust communitarian rants to come along. Indeed, Fish's talents as a polemicist are quite clear in each chapter. However, the trouble with polemicists is that they are long on barbs, wit and literary allusions but short on cogent argument. While Fish's rants against procedural liberalism will no doubt influence many (that's what good polemicists do, after all), a close look at his line of reasoning will show the flaws which accompany his and most other communitarian critiques of liberalism. First, there is the claim that liberalism is devoid of any moral or political joie de vivre, which can only be reinjected into our civic/political life if we all bite the bullet, so to speak, and become Hobbesians (Hobbes is one of Fish's heroes in the book). Liberalism is, to the contrary, an historical development designed to address the nasty things we have tended to do to each other in the name of our various causes and strong loyalties(that is, in the pursuit of our individual conceptions of the good). Liberalism is not a "view from nowhere" (Fish picks up Nagel's line here), but rather a view from the battlefields of human strife and hatred. Second, Fish would have much less "trouble with principle" if he simply viewed principles as what they are - general rules of moral conduct that often clash with other general rules of moral conduct. This is a pragmatic rather than a Platonic or a priori conception of "principle." Unwittingly, Fish takes up the definition of principle held by the enemies of his own moral convictions (some of which are good ones). People like Clarence Thomas, Ward Connerly and Pat Buchanan get to use principles in the way that Fish suggests because they have a rather jejune understanding about how we in fact derive our principles (historically and genealogically). Rather than problematize principles, as Fish does, we should recognize that we need them, only that sometimes these handy and efficient little guides of behavior come into conflict. When they do it takes us grown-ups some time to sort through which principle(s) will win out. We do this by using tests like equity and conceptions of justice and of the self. This is done only through protracted argumentation and high rhetoric, the kind which helps us to really understand how we can best do justice to our common humanity in the face of moral crisis. Oh, and did I mention that Fish thinks the notion of "common humanity" is, well, all wet? Fish might do well to consider that the principle of non-discrimination need not be problematized because it is used by enemies of affirmative action in naughty and illegitimate ways. A better approach would be to keep the principle and introduce others which have "equal" moral weight(like those which attend Aristotelian restorative justice). Ah, the trouble with polemicists. Anyway, I'll give Fish's book three stars just for the sheer joy derived from witnessing mischief in the making.

If I recall correctly, Voltaire once suggested that we should cherish those who seek the truth but beware of those who find it. This seems to be Fish's attitude toward "principle." He is not opposed to it, per se. Rather, he opposes what he views to be abuses of "principle" when invoked to validate a given position, especially one to which he is opposed. In the Prologue, he observes that "bad things are now being done in the name of neutral principles, and I hope it is clear by now that it is no paradox to say that bad things are being done by something that doesn't exist." For Fish, a "neutral principle" is one favored by liberal theorists whose claim is that "abstractions like fairness, impartiality, mutual respect, and reasonableness can be defined in ways not hostage to any partisan agenda."

The argument of his book, therefore, is that political realism "can be a resource for politics, not for politics in the rarefied sense named by chimeras like fairness and mutual respect but for politics as it has always been practiced, and practiced honorably, in the wards and boroughs of ancient Rome, seventeenth-century London, and twentieth-century Chicago."

The first section of his book sets out the aforementioned "argument" against neutral principle and for politics. The second section focuses on the "arena" of First Amendment jurisprudence within which neutral principles are most active. In the third section, Fish concentrates on the religion clause of the First Amendment, explaining why " the dream of liberal neutrality" encounters so many difficulties when subjected to a discourse "that refuses to be confined within the precincts of the private." In the fourth and final section, Fish shares a number of "general speculations" and then a few of his personal beliefs. The title of the Epilogue ("How the Right Hijacked the Magic Words") correctly indicates Fish's concern that liberals and progressives have lost control of "the vocabulary of America's civil religion" to their traditional opponents, the conservatives. According to Fish, this is a lamentable but undeniable political reality.

I was curious to know what others have said about this book. Although I have not read all of the reviews, those I have read seem to fall within two predictable categories: readers who share Fish's concerns and convictions praise the book; those who do not tend to dismiss it as misguided polemics. Why do I rate it so highly? There are three basic reasons. First, it is very well written. Second, the power of Fish's assertions has forced me to re-examine my own convictions (eg about "the vocabulary of civil religion" and the larger issue of how any terms are defined). Third, Fish has directed me to a number of other books and articles which were previously unknown to me. He thus helps to broaden and deepen my frame-of-reference. I am eager to explore all of these sources.

Dante reserved the seventh (and worst) ring in Hell for those who, in a moral crisis, maintained their neutrality. Perhaps this is what Fish had in mind when he observes (in the Prologue): "Taking sides, weapon in hand, is not a sign of zealotry or partisanship; it is the sign of morality; and it is the morality of taking sides, of frank and vigorous political action, that is celebrated (not urged; it is inevitable) in the pages that follow." Fish need have no fear of that seventh ring.

First and most importantly, no one should presume to have refuted antifoundationalism without confronting the challenge Fish lays down in these pages.

Since they are putatively on opposite sides of the academic and culture wars, it is striking how closely the position Stanley Fish takes in this book resembles that of Peter Kreeft in his "A Refutation of Moral Relativism: Interviews With an Absolutist": lurking behind enlightenment precepts such as open-mindedness, neutrality, impartiality, fairness, tolerance, diversity, and so on, each sees a more uncompromising, definite, and substantive set of values. You may say you are for free speech and equal opportunity for all, but when it comes down to hard cases, there are forms of speech and opportunity you would quash. For Fish, this means these frequently invoked principles have merely verbal status; for Kreeft, this means we need to forsake the enlightenment's empty promises and make sure we pick God's values. (Kreeft will be glad to tell you which ones those are.)

Fish and Kreeft reduce the enlightenment to rhetoric and differ only in their conception of what lies at the bottom: for Fish, it is rhetoric (a.k.a. politics) all the way down; for Kreeft, there is an exclusive discourse that belongs and resolves to God. Unsurprisingly, Kreeft's views correspond with this Godly Archimedean point at every turn. How convenient!

One last similarity is that both books are repetitive, but Fish's argument gains cogency from the repetition because of the way in which he presents challenges from a wide variety of thinkers and across a number of illustrative cases. Where Kreeft offers unshakeable certainty about his conclusions, Fish offers erudition, completeness, and spectacularly clear prose that other academics and philosophers would do well to mimic.

Fish's book on principle, where he dismantles the fanciful notions of "neutral zones" and "non-position positions" of argumentation, is a truly engaging work, like most of his books have been. You can't quite function fully as an American intellectual unless you engage with his thinking at some level, even if it is to disagree. He's often misrepresented in certain circles as "just another academic nutjob," but nothing could be more foolishly dismissive. Think he's a right-winger? Think again -- he supports affirmative action. Think he's a lockstep-leftist? Hold on: he is not a strong pro-abortion guy. Is he an enlightenment liberal? A closet commie, or a neocon? He must at least be a multiculturalist! No -- at least, not the way many academics often are. Is he anti-religion? Anti-Christianity? The answers to these and many questions may surprise you. This is what makes his thinking so much fun, and so fascinating to explore -- in other words, he's about the precise opposite of most academic worker bees.

Any "intellectual" book that opens with a long allusion to "The Wild Bunch" has got to have something going for it. And this one does: Fish moves calmly and with marvellous irony through pop culture, serious philosophy, current case law, classical literature, and questions of faith and knowledge. Sometimes the best irony is when there isn't any. With chapter titles like "Truth and Toilets" and "Beliefs about Belief," you know there's something here, if not for everyone, then at least for a lot of us. For example, the essay "Putting Theory in its Place" uses a (deliberately skewered) quotation from Meatloaf -- "two out of four ain't so good" -- to respond to one speculator's suggestion that Fish was "in favor of affirmative action, abortion rights, and equal treatment of gays and lesbians, and he generally opposes university speech codes." What I like most about this is that he manages to ascribe to Meatloaf, in the middle of all this, the modifying phrase "great singer." Who else is willing to do that? Academics love to hide behind obfuscation, crippling and encrypting their expression with impenetrable jargon, perhaps (apparently) deathly afraid to make any actual assertion whatsoever, lest they be deemed by their peers as either stupid, or, worse yet, actually believing in something instead of holding a "neutral position" or principle.

I studied with Professor Fish (along with eight or nine other PhD students) at Duke in his last Milton seminar there before he left for Chicago. I have to say he's got the sharpest mind I've ever worked with, and he refuses to be pinned down to party lines on either right or left. He just plain thinks -- and thinks well. Nothing escapes critique (or even appreciation!) when merited. This doesn't mean I agree with everything he says, but I've yet to encounter anyone who causes me to enagage with ideas like he does. I have my own students read a variety of his works and they are almost always stimulated, challenged, and startled by his arguments. His texts, more than any other, invigorate classroom discussion among bright students, no matter what they bring to the table individually. A great read for anyone wanting to engage with a great mind that isn't utterly enslaved to the same old thing (whatever that may be...)

The trouble with this text,of course, is that Fish's thought that all thought is culturally and subjectively driven, etc., is that his thought that this is so is also culturally, historically, socially and subjectively driven. This is taken into account, and I must say he defends it as well as he possibly can when this -seems- to happen to be so. It is very similar to the moral relativists, though, who take a moral stance that there is none. This is fascinating reading in circles.

If we believed this book, we would have to support conservative regents who decided to remove Stanley Fish from his position in the University of Illinois because they disagreed with his politics -- since we would reject the neutral principles of academic freedom and free speech.

If we believed this book, we would also have to support politicians who committed election fraud to get these conservative regents appointed -- since we would reject the neutral principles of fairness and honesty in elections. (That is what Fish means when he says that one of his political models is "twentieth century Chicago.")

Fish is not serious about his ideas. He obviously began by deciding that he could be "subversive" and controversial by attacking principles that everyone agrees on. Then he came up with ad hoc arguments to justify his positions. That is why he has wasted his considerable talents writing books filled with flashy paradoxes that lack intellectual substance.

Fish says he is sorry that conservatives have taken the moral high ground by using seemingly neutral principles to their advantage -- but postmodernists like Fish are to blame.

Decades ago, liberalism had the moral high ground, because the public associated it with idealists like Martin Luther King, who had strong principles. Today, the public associates liberalism with postmodernists like Stanley Fish, who want to undermine all principles, and whose theories can justify actions that are morally contemptible.