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Socrates,
facing death, asked his friends to punish his sons for him if they thought they
knew something when they didn't.
And that, it occurred to me after I began to understand their work, is
what Jacques Derrida and other French postmodernists were doing, punishing us
academic followers of Socrates for thinking our knowledge was more solid than
it was. Because the language we
expressed it in wasn't as solid as we thought it was. So there they were, friends of Socrates, and therefore
friends of ours. Though hard to
understand and hell to keep company with, they had an undeniable attraction.
Easier
to understand and with a more admissible attraction were the American
postmodernists like Stanley Fish.
He was bound to appeal to academic traditionalists like me because,
though I was slow to discover it, we shared a common foundation. That's a wonderful thing to find when
everybody you know is either a foundationalist or an anti-foundationalist, and
firing across the gap.
What
Fish made his ultimate appeal to — his supporting ground, his settler of
disagreements, his final philosopher, his supreme court, that is, his
foundation — was a group of human beings.
He called his group an "interpretive community," I called mine
"educated gentlemen."
Neither one of us felt a need to appeal past them to anything deeper,
like a "reality." There
we were, philosophical friends.
And
sure enough, just as in daily life, one attraction opens your eyes to
others. In the Derrideans
deconstructing philosophical work I could see 1940s semanticists dissecting
propaganda releases. It was all
rhetorical analysis, showing what the orator or sophist was up to, with Derrida
just operating at a higher level, on more imposing figures. He wasn't going as far beyond the New
Critics as his young admirers thought he was, but he was going a distance that
can be admired.
Eyes
opened, I could see something more in Stanley Fish, something that would let us
take him with us right into the heart of the Socratic enterprise. He put the response of the reader ahead
of literary form, ahead of biography, ahead of history. The student who tested everybody
by what they taught him about the good life was free to dismiss scholars and
critics. This postmodernist was
not just licensing the student of the sixties, he was liberating the follower
of Socrates.
Ah,
another claim for liberation.
Meaning another vagueness.
To avoid the vagueness let's look closely into one of today's
classrooms. A Milton course. We've got a student who, following
Socrates, is making the usual measurement: "How much does this contribute
to the good life?" He reads Comus and gets nothing. It's a turkey, a bore. Too much high-minded instruction, too
much spectacle and pageantry, too elegant. The scholar his teacher refers him to does what historical
scholars customarily do for ignorant minds: fills them with knowledge of time
and place. The times
expected elegance, the occasion called for high-minded instruction (the sponsor
of the play wanted his participating children to learn the classical virtues),
and the aristocratic audience loved pageantry. The critic his teacher refers him to tells him that he must
understand that this is a masque, a genre in which you always get
spectacle. But the student
inspired by Socrates and fortified by Stanley Fish says, "I live in
different times, I'm not a child, I'm not an aristocrat, and masques do nothing
for me." He is the
five-year-old speaking to his parents in the old New Yorker cartoon:
"I say it's spinach and I say the hell with it."
There's
not much philosophical weight there, as in most cases there won't be, but look
what happens when that student comes to Paradise
Lost. He sees Christ portrayed
as a military leader and throws the book across the room. The knowledgeable academics his teacher
refers him to tell him that before he judges anything, from a corkscrew to a
cathedral, he ought to ask what it's for. Paradise Lost
is an epic, and epics display heroic warfare. So, now that he's knowledgeable he ought to quiet down and
accept Christ as the military leader he has to be in an epic.
The
follower of Socrates says nothing doing.
A God like that doesn't fit into the vision of the good religious life
that he has so far put together.
He thinks that Christ carrying a sword, and angels clad in armor, and
spirits getting wounded, and heroic military action itself, are all spinach,
and he says the hell with them.
And
that's reader-response, and that's the Socratic enterprise, and there's Plato
giving his blessing and Stanley Fish issuing his license. Peace with Fish and peace with Barbara
Herrnstein Smith who spoke for Fish in the Modern Language Association (see
note). Peace in the postmodern
world.
Can
it last? Let's answer with a
thought experiment. Let's
construct a student out of Fish's theory (you can do this yourself now, using
Post #240) and put him right into Socrates' circle. See how he'll do.
Suppose
we choose the circle of gentlemen gathering around Socrates as his execution
approaches. Crito arrives first on
the supposed date. Let's lower our
student into his place.
"No," Socrates says to him, "we shouldn't accept popular
opinion — which is that his friends should help him escape — but should follow
'the best course that reason offers.'"
Will
the Smith Crito agree? Let us
assume that it is his "behavioral tendency" (Smith, Post #240) to do
so. They proceed to inquire into
the course of reason, beginning with a principle that they have established in
earlier discussions: that one should never willingly do wrong under any
circumstances. Plato-Crito, after
prompting, agrees to what this proposition entails: that one should not even
"do wrong when one is wronged"; it can't be right to "do an
injury in retaliation" — though "most people" believe that it
can. Once it is demonstrated to
him, Plato-Crito is held by logical implication. Smith-Crito is held by whatever makes an inclination
recurrent. Assume that the
inclination holds, and he agrees to what the logic requires.
Then
from Socrates: "Ought one to
fulfill all one's agreements, provided they are right?" or is one free to
break them? Plato-Crito, held by
his bond, agrees; we'll assume that Smith-Crito, held by his, agrees. Socrates then asks Plato-Crito to
"consider the logical consequences." If Socrates, a victim feeling
injured, escapes from prison, his defiance of the Laws of Athens is going to
injure them, and this will be contrary to his principle and to his agreement,
made when he first accepted their benefits (like his education) and confirmed
when he lived contentedly in the city up to his seventieth year.
Then
the crunch. Socrates believes he
should hold to this agreement, and, a victim not of laws but of men, accept
death. Plato-Crito, seeing
he's bound by the argument, agrees.
Our eyes are on Smith-Crito.
Is he going to accept the logical consequences and agree with
Socrates? If he doesn't he's unfit
for the circle. Nobody will trust
him.
If,
on the other hand, he accepts and agrees, might they trust him? We can't say, but Smith, in a statement
following her description of the natural inclinations that assure us of student
rationality, gives us a clue. She's explaining relativism, the philosophy that
justifies her replacement of norms, standards, and other "external"
(objective) forces with internal (subjective) forces:
At
the most general theoretical level the relativism exhibited by this study is
not a "position," not a "conviction," and not a set of
"claims" about how certain things — reality, truth, meaning, reason,
value, and so forth — really are.
It is, rather, a general conceptual style or taste....
In our time that is what
Smith's opponents have to concede to her in philosophical debate, a conceptual
style (with a concomitant irrelevance of logic) and in ancient Athens that is
what Socrates' friends will have to trust in the newcomer, a taste.
With
this, Smith-Crito (or, in light of the note, Fish-Crito) is revealed to us as a
Euthyphro, the fellow who, when Socrates asks him to state his beliefs in a way
that lets them be analyzed and connected, says, "If that's how you want
your answer, Socrates, that's how I will give it." Some people want beliefs stated one
way, some want them another way.
The company he has wandered into seems to have a taste for logic. Taste, style, who knows what the next one will
be? Well, go with the community
you're in. It's all relative.
Smith-Crito's
unfitness will be revealed to the company as Euthyphro's unfitness first by his
confident assertions and then by his reluctance to test them. Something internal has shown Euthyphro
exactly what piety is so there's no need for him to examine it seriously,
though he is willing to play a game.
When Socrates goes on too long with his questioning he tires of the game
and thinks he hears his mother calling ("I just remembered I have
appointment somewhere") and so leaves the field.
And
I will be going on too long if I lay out all that is obvious here. If Smith-Crito's behavioral
tendencies and recurring inclinations have him taking the same steps logic
demands the number of times we assumed he would be taking them he is going to
be the Eighth Wonder of the Ancient World. In a realistic thought experiment he is at some point going
to light up the chamber with an absurdity, and we are going to laugh ourselves
out of the laboratory. That's the
way it is with naturals.
But
in the real world it's going to be sad.
Bring this fellow into that Milton class, give him the freedom Stanley
Fish gives him, and how is he going to use it? He sees a Christ that doesn't fit the picture he has loved,
and made the center of his life, the mild, loving Jesus. He is uncomfortable with a God whose
offended majesty won't be satisfied until he gets a blood sacrifice. And, unless it comes naturally, he
can't sharpen his words to state his problem, order them to clarify it,
multiply them to refine it, take some steps to solve it, cooperate with others
in testing those steps, and, if they're solid, go on to the next ones. In other words, he's unfit for systemic
examination. Genuine care with
belief.
Smith-Euthyphro
shows us how our promising friendship with Stanley Fish (and any other
postmodern theorists who replace objective norms and standards with something
internal) has to end: with a complete break. His friend can't be our friend. To us the life he lives is not worth living.
Note: To gauge the extent to which
Smith speaks for Fish you might turn to Fish's remarks about her at
I take their affinity to be close enough to make
Smith-Euthyphro into Fish-Euthyphro in every appearance above.
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