Stanley Fish: the critic as sophist

Modern Age, Summer, 2003 by R.V. Young

"HEARKEN AND HEAR THEN," says Thrasymachus. "I affirm that the just is nothing else than the advantage of the stronger" (Republic 338C). Thus Plato, the founder of the Academy, dramatizes the political outlook of a sophist of the fourth century B.C., a view that today would be the equivalent of "anti-foundationalism" or of "social constructivism." The rest of the first book of the Republic consists of Socrates unfolding the myriad contradictions in this viewpoint through a series of ironically pointed questions. After Thrasymachus is effectively dismissed, the remaining nine books proceed through a complex discussion of the nature of the Just and its place both in the individual soul and in the community. One of the founding works not only of Western philosophy but indeed of the humanist tradition is careful, then, to acknowledge the influence of sophistry in the intellectual life of Athens; but it devotes a relatively brief space to its refutation. The sophists, however, would now seem to be enjoying their revenge. What is today called the "academy" is largely dominated by sophistry, and a prominent academic spokesman, Stanley Fish, is pleased to flaunt the designation, "The Contemporary Sophist." (1)

Fish may well be the most famous professor of English in contemporary America; that is, unlike most of us, his name will occasionally crop up in Time or Newsweek or even in the New York Times. He first gained notoriety as a defender of political correctness and radical academic programs as Chairman of the English Department at Duke, which he helped to transform into a citadel of postmodernism. When the Department imploded in the mid-nineties, he was briefly Director of Duke University Press and then went on to his current position as Dean of Arts and Sciences at the University of Illinois, Chicago. (It is a curious feature of university administration that reducing an academic department to a state of confused bickering is often a means of becoming a dean on another campus.)

Unlike most left-wing academics--that is, most academics--who sound ridiculous when they attempt to defend postmodernism and political correctness in a public forum, Fish is a nimble debater and a persuasive rhetorician. He presents himself not as a radical, but rather as a moderate of conservative inclinations, and he depicts the postmodern, politically correct professors who currently dominate most departments in virtually all the universities and the vast majority of colleges throughout the United States as an embattled group of ivory-tower innocents threatened by a conspiracy of savage conservative ideologues, armed with enormous sums from right-wing foundations, who have seized control of the levers of government and trumped up the entire issue of political correctness for their own sinister political purposes. Oliver Stone may even now be considering a film version (Tom Hanks as Stanley Fish?), but the scenario may be too far-fetched even for him. Finally, and most significantly, Fish maintains that his sophistic denial of all essences, principles, or moral and intellectual foundations does not amount to relativism and has, indeed, no practical consequences at all. The collected works of Stanley Fish could very aptly be entitled--with a backhanded tribute to Richard Weaver--Ideas Have No Consequences.

I shall devote very little effort to a refutation of Fish's self-portrait, less still to correcting his image of the pitiful denizens of English departments unfairly maligned for a nonexistent political correctness and shivering in terror at the depredations of marauding right-wing fanatics. I am rather inclined to admire the sheer brazenness of it, much as one is filled with wonder by Falstaff's account of being "eight times thrust through the doublet, four through the hose" by an indeterminate number of "rogues in buckram," as he was "at half-sword with a dozen of them two hours together" (I Henry IV II.iv). Everyone likes a good story. I shall be at some pains, however, to show that the ideas espoused by Stanley Fish--his anti-theory theories of literature and discourse--have malign consequences, not only for the faculty and students of colleges and universities but also for the morale and tone of public culture outside the academy. Because his general understanding of human nature and of the human condition is false, Fish fails in the specific task of a university scholar, which requires that learning be placed in the service of truth. And this, finally, is the critical issue in the contemporary university of which Stanley Fish is a typical representative: sophistry renders truth itself equivocal and deprives scholarly learning of its reason for being. Fish's gift for sophistical equivocation is neatly exemplified in his disarming claim to be some kind of "conservative" in his 1991-92 debates with Dinesh D'Souza:

  I appear before you today by virtue of a mistake made by central
  casting that has tapped me for the role of ardent academic leftist,
  proponent of multiculturalism, and standard-bearer of the politically
  correct. Unfortunately, my qualifications for this assignment are so
  slight as to be non-existent. First of all I am, as you can see, a
  53-year-old white male. More important, I have for the past thirty
  years taught only traditional texts written by canonical male authors
  of the ultracanonical English Renaissance--John Milton, John Donne,
  Edmund Spenser, George Herbert, Francis Bacon, Ben Jonson, Andrew
  Marvell. When not writing on these classical authors, I have in recent
  years addressed a number of issues in literary and legal theory, and I
  think it fair to say that I have come out on the "right" end of the
  spectrum every time, arguing against the liberationist claims often
  associated with deconstruction and some versions of feminism, against
  the political pretensions of the New Historicism, against the utopian
  vision of interdisciplinarity, against the revisionary program of the
  Critical Legal studies movement, the left wing of the legal academy.
  (2)