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.

240. Why Didn't Postmodern Theory Ruin College Education?

 

We expect practice to be consistent with theory, don't we?  Well, parents, if the practice of college teachers in the closing decades of the twentieth century had been consistent with the theory that became dominant in those decades none of your children would have come home from college able to think straight.  Now that they are home you have had a pretty good view of their postgraduate thinking.  You have seen that it's no crookeder than ours was.  I'm guessing that you would like to have somebody up there in higher education explain this to you.  I'm going to try.

First, theory.  Here's a sample that's bound to have been influential.  It's from the president of the Modern Language Association and it comes under the category "Theory" that another president had already declared victorious ("The Triumph of Theory," Presidential Address, 1986) in that organization.  The victory had been gained over those the winners called "foundationalists," people who believed in (among other things) objective standards of rational enquiry, commonly referred to by Theorists as "traditional epistemic norms," then said (by a leading anti-foundationalist, Stanley Fish) to be "lying in ruins around us." The most stubborn of the losers were those who thought they needed at least one of those norms, logic, in order to have a dialogue with students.  "Without rules for passing from one belief to another how can we develop ideas?"  The president, Barbara Herrnstein Smith, is, the passage below, trying to reassure foundationalists of that kind.  She says that their needs will be taken care of by

the innumerable, subtle, continuously operating, nonformalized, usually unrecognized, but nonetheless strong behavioral tendencies [Smith's emphasis] that emerge from individual and social practices themselves.  These are not, as terms such as "rules," "norms," "standards," and "constraints" suggest, external forces that operate upon agents to direct and control their actions but are, rather, the recurrent inclinations of the agents themselves: inclinations, to act in certain ways rather than others, that are corporeally inscribed traces of the differential consequences of their own prior and ongoing actions and interactions (Contingencies of Value, p. 162).

I think that after you straighten that passage out you get a belief in natural rationality.  The young already have in them the capacity to choose and follow the practices from which what we call rationality will emerge.  I have quoted the passage in full so that you can see whether or not I have straightened it out right.

That's the theory.  Do you see all that it, logically, cuts out from under teachers in a university?  Nobody in the whole place, facing a fragmented essay, has anything outside the student to appeal to to get him to glue it together.  The teacher has to stand by waiting for an inclination to recur.                                                                                         

You can imagine what this does, logically again, to all those composition teachers (at least 10,000 of them at the time Smith wrote) working their tails off to get students to be more rational.  And, beyond those teachers, to every teacher of every advanced course requiring that students adhere to logic in their essays.  College teachers have no support, nothing to appeal to, nothing they could call a foundation.

The ones Smith's theory really leaves planted in air, though, are the Socratic interrogators, who depend on the student's ability and willingness to connect her answers and so build a structure of belief that will stand up.  You already know what we Socratists most want to preserve: our students' respect for the rules of speech that let us get somewhere in our office or classroom dialogue.  Half of it is working out the implications of what a student tells us she believes — about a poem, or a piece of criticism, or a statement by another student.  You can't get anywhere in that kind of conversation without respect for logic, rules for passing from one belief to another.  The main thing is not to contradict oneself.  That takes some attention and enforcement, more than you'd think, but I myself have never had to go beyond the traditional norms.

Does that seem so serious, losing support for the law of non-contradiction?  Aren't there a lot of gotcha players who ought to lose their support?  No doubt.  "Let it pass, nit-picker, let it pass."  But if a Socratic teacher lets pass a contradiction then the structure he's got the student building could fall down.  If a student gets used to passing over contradictions his character (or, to Socrates, his soul) could fall apart.  He could be a Euthyphro, a mess, or a Yossarian, a sentimentalist.  (Surely I have by now quoted to you G. K. Chesterton's definition of a sentimentalist: "one who enjoys every idea without its sequence, and every pleasure without its consequence.")  The whole purpose of Socratic education, to produce a person of integrity (or, for Socrates, a soul in harmony), is defeated.  Such a person accepts and takes responsibility for all that he believes and wills (that is, accepts the sequences attached to his ideas and the consequences attached to his pleasures).  If that describes an adult then the sentimentalist is a juvenile.  And if postmodern theorists are right then Socratic teachers are no help turning juveniles into adults.  Which, parents, I think is what you wanted college teachers to help with when you sent your children to them.

All right, that's what's cut out from under teachers.  And what, logically still, is the world stuck with?  What are all the informal teachers — parents, friends, officials — helpless to do anything about?  Well think of all the destructive behavior that results from failure to connect P to Q — smoking tobacco to dying of cancer, texting at the wheel to cracking up the car, all that.  What is the nation stuck with?  The same failure to connect appearing in citizens, who will want from their government benefits without cost, rights without duties, war without sacrifice, victory without casualties, battle without gore, attractively humane intervention without repulsively inhuman behavior.  Constant surprise at the ugly means required by the good ends they vote for.  In the world, every democracy ruled by sentimentalists.

Logically, with all that support removed, all those epistemic norms lying in ruins, all that trust that juveniles were naturally rational, we should have by now experienced all those bad effects.  I don't think we have.  We weren't experiencing them in 1997 when I retired and from what I can see we are not experiencing them now.  Fragmented essays are still put back together, logic is still respected, composition teachers still have acknowledged ground to stand on, Socratic teachers still get students to check, and test, and draw consequences, students still internalize the process, sentimentality is no more a threat than it ever was, and young people are no more irrational than they ever were.  Your children are probably coming home from college able to think as straight as you did.

I am at a loss to explain this.  Why did the logical consequences of postmodern theory, a theory declared to the academic world by one of its leading professional organizations to be the victoriously governing theory, not show up as actual consequences?  I can think of some possibilities but I am open to suggestions.