Shaking the Anti-Foundation. - Review - book review

Reason, July, 2000 by Mark Goldblatt

The Trouble With Principle, by Stanley Fish, Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 328 pages, $24.95

Stanley Fish is one of a handful of American academics--Harold Bloom, Camille Paglia, and Henry Louis Gates also come to mind--whose reputations transcend their professional disciplines, whose books flirt with bestseller lists, and whose media audience eclipses their actual readership. As public intellectuals, they occupy a peculiar rung on the celebrity ladder--potential panelists on Politically Incorrect if not quite worth a box on Hollywood Squares.

In The Trouble With Principle, Fish-- current Dean of the College of Liberal Arts and Sciences at the Chicago campus of the University of Illinois and former head of the English department at Duke--turns his attention to the practical dangers and logical paradoxes of reasoning from principle. He argues that strict adherence to any abstract principle--call it "rationality," "impartiality," or "tolerance" --is in fact no more than a fetish of a "liberal Enlightenment" that insists "our allegiances [should not be] to persons or to wished-for outcomes but to abstract norms that ... are indifferent to outcomes." For Fish, that's a fetish every bit as dogmatic as the dogmas against which classical liberalism defines itself. Liberal Enlightenment, according to Fish, should thus be recognized as only another competing faith. Even though it purports to arbitrate fairly and "disinterestedly" between the opposing sides in every dispute, it is actually a side unto itself, pre-eminent at the moment perhaps, but still jus t fighting it out in the public sphere with its competition.

The book is actually a gathering of somewhat disparate essays around which Fish has tossed the conceptual lasso of "anti-foundationalism"--the belief that all knowledge is socially constructed, that truth exists only within ways of looking at the world, and that no particular way of looking at the world is any more or less valid than another. The advantage, for Fish, of anti-foundationalism is that it enables him to call into question everything--except, of course, anti-foundationalism. His stance metamorphoses him into the ultimate gadfly. Read in that spirit, and bearing in mind the metaphysical heft of your average fly, his collected buzzings offer occasional insights.

Fish has a broad range of interests. Essays on constitutional law are interrupted by lengthy disquisitions on the character of Satan in Milton's Paradise Lost. Hobbes, Locke, and Mill are trotted out like the old warhorses they are, put through their paces, and then returned to their stalls. Even St. Augustine has a cameo leading up to a consideration of 1964's landmark legal case, New York Times v. Sullivan. In Sullivan, the Supreme Court held that the First Amendment's guarantee of freedom of the press shielded the media from libel suits for publishing defamatory reports about public figures, even if the reports turned out to be false, as long as they were made without malicious intent. That's a decision which, according to Fish, "privileges expression as a value over the substantive worth and veracity of that which is expressed." Rather predictably, Fish mocks a gathering of political conservatives in Washington, D.C.; less predictable are his remarks on the anti-abortion movement, which are measured, eve n compassionate. He does not dismiss religious activism out of hand, as is the wont of many left-leaning academics. In fact, Fish reserves his nastiest comments for the lefty theorist Jurgen Habermas.

Fish is at his very best in a chapter called "Boutique Multiculturalism." He probes the underlying inconsistencies of the multiculturalism movement, dividing multiculturalists into two classes: boutique multiculturalists and strong multiculturalists. The former profess respect and sympathy for exotic cultures, "but [they] will always stop short of approving other cultures at a point where some value at their center generates an act that offends" the boutique multiculturalist. As merrily as the boutique multiculturalist may celebrate the incidentals of Islamic culture, for example, he stands appalled at the death warrant issued against Salman Rushdie after the 1988 publication of The Satanic Verses. The boutique multiculturalist, in short, "resists the force of the culture he appreciates at precisely the point at which it matters most to its strongly committed members.

As Fish notes, the resistance of the boutique multiculturalist to the fatwa is guided by a principle of rationality and the belief system of liberal Enlightenment that coalesces around it: 1) that all people, as rational beings, are really the same under the skin; 2) that evident differences among people, such as religion, ethnicity, race, sex, and class, are superficial, "matters of lifestyle"; and 3) that common humanity requires open-mindedness to dissent. Hence, the boutique multiculturalist's ever-so-reasonable response to Rushdie's book: If it bothers you, don't read it. Religious duty-as well as ethnic loyalty, racial solidarity, sexual identity, and class consciousness-is thus trivialized by the boutique multiculturalist, "who does not and cannot take seriously the core values" of the other culture. Core values, indeed, are dismissed as though they could and should be shrugged off at a moment's notice.