I am going to hazard a guess that the reader who
finds postmodern theorists too subtle, or obscure, or maybe just too various,
for him to be willing to make any general statements about them, will be
willing to make one such statement: that they commonly count on somebody else
to do the work.
Certainly that's true of the theorists taken up in
this blog. Barbara Herrnstein
Smith, as we have just seen (Post 240), tells us that rationality in students
will be taken care of by their "behavioral tendencies" and
"recurrent inclinations."
If it is not (and anybody not spectacularly blind to what goes on in our
classrooms will see that it is not) then those people teaching Freshman
Composition and Elementary Logic will take care of it.
Stanley Fish, mentor to
Smith and many others, tells us that rationality will be taken care of by
"the linguistic competence" that "every speaker shares," an
pays no attention to the acquisition of that competence. That will be taken care of by the same
lower-level teachers.
There is no place for
teachers in postmodern theory. In
all the assiduous undermining of foundations, of notions of reality, of
transcendence, of a necessary ground, of necessity itself, there seems not to
have been a thought as to what that destruction might imply for the activity of
teaching — showing other people how to reach their goals.
The human being pictured in postmodern theory is a
creature without desires or goals.
He, even when he is placed (as by Stanley Fish) in a local community, is
some non-human knower whose claims to knowledge are justifiable or
unjustifiable. If a claim is based
on access to reality (said to be the claim of traditional foundationalists)to
Fish the claim is going to be unjustifiable, since nobody can have such
access. Human beings have access
only to representations and interpretations, which will vary according to (or
be contingent upon) time, place, culture, gender, political need, place in a
power relationship, and so on.
Giving a goal to that human being changes all
that. In a world where everything
is contingent (the world of Fish's local communities) suddenly a few things
become necessary. To attain A a
student has to meet conditions B, C, and D. Teachers help him recognize the conditions and meet
them. "To build a bridge that
won't fall down you must put your piers no further than X feet
apart." Disagreements among
teachers are settled by appeal to the world (or whatever) that sets the
conditions. That, in the sense of
"what's appealed to," is their foundation and, if you want to call it
that, their reality. But all it is
is a set of resistances to the attainment of the goal, resistances to the will.
With teachers the terms "necessity" and
"reality" have to refer to something that for the student will name
constraints on his will. If the
teacher is to reach her goal (helping
the student reach his goal) they
can't be dismissed. Whether you
call them "real" or "apparent" they are still there, and
whether you call them "representations" or "interpretations"
you still have access to them.
Doubt about access to the constraint of gravity is removed by jumping
out a window.
Recognition of those constraints on the will cautions
us about our use of the word "foundation." It can mean "what nature rests on" or "what
men appeal to" (see Post 239).
The first is what Stanley Fish, looking through Richard Rorty's eyes at
preceding philosophers, saw "lying in ruins around us." The second is what teachers (and
debaters and politicians and anybody in disagreement) see when they want to
settle an argument. If it is lying
in ruins they have lost the rules of language and logic, the most efficient
settler of arguments in the history of human, and particularly Western,
intercourse. Teachers, the people
we are concerned about here, can no longer set straight an objecting student.
To a teacher, logic is not anything "imposed
from the outside," as by positivists. It's a tool you take up in order to accomplish something the
surest way, by checking and testing.
It's been lying at hand for many years and if you don't take it up, or
can't put your hand on it, or lose trust in it, your movements, mainly
movements of the mind, are going to be very uncertain and inefficient. Teachers want their students to move surely
and efficiently. No, better, they
want them to want to move, want their
minds to move, surely and
efficiently. They want something
deep inside the student to say, "In this task I resolve to think
logically." The teacher's
question has nothing to do with reality, or the world, or even philosophy. It's simply, "Are you holding to
your resolution? Are you checking
and testing? Are you using this tool?"
If, on either side of the disagreement between
foundationalists and anti-foundationalists, you don't observe the distinction
between a tool and a metaphysic you are going to generate exasperation. Include
"epistemic norms" (the category that includes logic) in the list of
things you see destroyed (as Barbara Herrnstein Smith and Robert Scholes do) and
you become a tank that makes helpless every rifleman in the teaching
trench. Think, rifleman, that your
norms depend on the existence of some underlying "reality" and you
throw yourself under the treads.
If that describes what happened in any of our recent
wars in academia then the formula for peace in the academic world seems clear: nobody
gets to carry a gun until he shows he can distnguish between a tool and a metaphysic.
Note: I have taken Barbara Herrnstein Smith to be
speaking for a broad range of anti-foundationalists and particularly for
Stanley Fish, who has praised her work.
Fish has complained several times that misunderstanding of his theory
has led to needless fear that it will lead to lawless subjectivism ("Not
to worry," is his famous advice) and since his "interpretive
communities" do seem sometimes close to the "community of educated
gentlemen" I do not fear at all, and indeed count on, I obviously face
some questions that need to be answered.
I will try to do that in a future post.
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