The Trouble with Stanley. - Review - book review

National Review, Feb 7, 2000 by Harvey C. Mansfield

The Trouble with Principle, by Stanley Fish (Harvard, 328 pp., $24.95)

THE trouble with principle, we learn from Stanley Fish, is that it does not necessarily accord with what we like. And when it doesn't, instead of sacrificing our desires to principle-as we should-we sacrifice principle to our desires.

It's not a new point, but Fish, a man of the Left, uses it mainly to attack the stance of liberals toward religion. His book is a collection of previously published articles, all lively polemics employed against professors who do not write as plainly as he does. His opponents are liberals who concoct theories about how to treat people who are not as liberal as they are. Should liberals talk to them, give them a place at the table, deliberate with them? Fish puts his finger on the sore point: Should religious believers, who reject the ultimate authority of reason, be included in debates in which reason is the norm? Isn't someone who speaks from his faith instead of his reason making an unjustified, special, privileged claim, one that willfully excludes others?

Liberals today are constantly manufacturing theories of toleration or freedom of religion that they claim are neutral among all sects. But in fact, Fish shows, religious believers cannot accept them without abandoning or trivializing their beliefs. So while pretending to be tolerant or "inclusive," as liberals like to say these days, these theories are actually intolerant and exclusive. And this is so not only because they are weak-Fish makes easy sport of them-but more generally because no principle can succeed in checking the partisan agenda or "naked preference" that inspired it. It's impossible to be principled or consistent. Being consistent requires you to abstract from what is good for you at the moment, but you cannot do that. Most everybody believes in consistency, Fish admits, but nobody practices it.

This is my first experience with Stanley Fish. Years ago when I first heard of him, I asked who he was. The answer came that Stanley Fish would not have cared for that question. One was supposed to know who he was without asking. I have since learned that he is indeed a big name I should have known-a man of parts with a steep upward trajectory. He began his career as a professor of English, and a Milton scholar. This was not grand enough for him, however, and aided by the laxity of our age and especially of our universities, he became a chairman, a law professor, and a mover and shaker both at supercool Duke University and in his profession. The latest is that he has been made a dean at the University of Illinois at Chicago.

A sign of his prominence is that he relies on himself and doesn't seem to need to drop names like Foucault and Derrida, authors of deconstructionist theories that resemble his argument. Per haps in ignoring his fellow postmoderns Fish is being consistent with his attack on those who propagate theories: He is consistent with his attack on consistency. Or perhaps he wants to be free to be inconsistent, so as to be consistent with his own theory-or is it a non-theory? Fish is a cleverish fellow, and he invites cleverishness in return. But let us look more soberly at the danger he represents.

It is not that Fish is a fiend of some kind. He is, on the contrary, a nice guy whom easy success has left naive about the world-at bottom, a typical American academic. When he speaks of living by your "naked preference," he refers to liberal professors and their foolish causes, not to tyrants who mean evil. When he takes his stand with Machiavelli (as he does), he pays no attention to Machiavelli's recommendation of fraud and cruelty for those who want to live by naked truth. When Fish says, "I historicize reason," he does not mean, "I twist it to mean what I want." Although he exposes liberal toleration as a cover for coercion and exclusion, he himself has no program for repression and extermination.

Rather than being a powerful tyrant masquerading as a dean, Fish, one could almost conclude, has no politics at all. In the grossest contradiction in his book, he claims on the one hand that nothing follows from accepting his argument, and asserts on the other that the same argument releases his desire to win from the constraint of seeming to be neutral. What is the "freedom to win" that Fish discovers-not one of FDR's Four Freedoms!-but a political consequence of his argument? One would want to know how the freedom to win is made compatible with government by consent of the governed, but that little matter is not raised. It is enough that Fish does not want to become a tyrant; we should be happy with that. So, anticipating our gratitude, he feels free to despise our constitutional limits on tyranny. He happens to be "situated" as a dean, and what office could be further from tyranny than that one? Incidentally, when Fish likes the way things are, he calls it a "situation"; when he doesn't, he calls it the quo."

Now, what does it mean when Stanley Fish says we are all "situated"? It means that human beings are always, and only, in a context of contingent and changing circumstances. We have no capacity to rise above or abstract from that context; we can only replace one context with another one. We cannot be objective or rational or universal; we use our reason only to advance our own interests and to fool or befuddle others. Hence we are always politically situated, having friends who help us and enemies who are in the way. Nobody is disinterested or neutral. No occupation or way of thinking is nonpolitical. Everything is "politics all the way down."