245. Postmodern Theorists: Disappointing Friends of Socrates

 
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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

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9ruHdZfrSfg_

I take their affinity to be close enough to make Smith-Euthyphro into Fish-Euthyphro in every appearance above.

243. Conclusions about Postmodern Theorists

 

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.

66. Julian Assange and the Logic of Association

A good way to assure yourself and the world that you are good is to attack something evil. Another way, almost as good, is to attack something associated with that evil. If you want assurance that you're really good you can tear the hell out of it.

That's Julian Assange's way. Secrecy is associated with the KGB and the CIA and the Nixon plumbers. Assange starts WikiLeaks and tears the hell out of it. He's free of any need to think specifically of secrecy's actual operations, or ask how each operation might be logically connected to a good or an evil. The logic of association licenses him to be vague.

The students who burned down the ROTC building in the sixties. operated under the same license. The Army was associated with an evil war. Destroy its ability to produce officers. Ignore the specific need for an Army and its officers — as, say, in Arkansas when Governor Faubus tried to keep black students out of school.

That's the way of all the Americans railing against "Washington." Washington is associated with evil politics. Elect people who will repudiate it. Don't ask where you will put them. (Scatter them around the country? Install them on ships? Send them to the moon?)

Can anything be said for this poor "logic" of association? Sure. It's the only way lazy thinkers can think themselves good.

37. "Begs the question"

The television news commentator summarizes Casey Anthony's activity for several weeks, then, after a pause, says, "...which begs the question, Where was the body during this time?" In living rooms around the country those who know what "begging the question" means (assuming in your premise what you purport to demonstrate in your conclusion) cry, "No, no, not again."

But it's actually a tough call. Nothing in the fallacy Aristotle identified goes with anything we today associate with begging. It does, maybe, if you put yourself back in the kind of arguments Greek philosophers used. "You are pleading with us to concede you the answer to the question before us, rather than have you argue for it." In other words, "You're no man mixing it up in the arena; you're a beggar with your hand out at the door." It's a great move, but you have to be into that kind of game. If you're not, there goes "begging."

Should we lament? No. Even if we hang on to it, even if we can put ourselves right back in the Athenian debating circle, we're in trouble. The word doesn't fit what we're doing. What we're really begging for there is an answer, the answer we prefer. The "question" refers to what's at issue. You can't beg for that. It's already in front of the company.

On the other hand everything in the news commentator's usage fits. What's doing the begging? All that evidence just reviewed, Casey driving around enjoying herself so. It's crying for somebody to ask, "Where was the body?" If it was in the trunk, oh, oh. Please, please, ask the question.

And then, in the sentence itself, all the conditions are satisfied. After that comma you've got to state the question. That noun has to have an appositive. Ah, there it is, "Where was the body?" In the old formulation you didn't state the question. You just stopped. You'd already put down your opponent. If he showed he didn't know what the question was he went further down. Everybody knew what the question was.

I say let's forget Aristotle. Or let him be remembered only by those knowingly engaged with each other in his kind of debate. Academics. For the rest of us, let begging be begging we can see and the question be a question we can hear. Modern usage should win this one.