To Justify Something Is To Diminish It?

I think he is right. Either you’re an academic or you’re an advocate and activist. Becoming an advocate for a cause that belongs to your field damages your academic credibility. This seems simple and uncontroversial.

I suspect Fish thinks the flip-side of this is academic immunity from public criticism.

I suspect you are right. In other words, he is intervening in a public debate *with the goal of preserving your professional autonomy*, which (if you haven’t noticed) has been under rather serious attack for a while.

You should thank him.

Yes, you are being unfair. At least as far as this excerpt is concerned. Testing or evaluating the theories is OK. What Fish is arguing is that the point of the class is not to decide whether Marcuse is correct and Strauss wrong or vice versa, although you might find each is right or wrong about particular claims. Fish is trying to avoid the “perfect” exam question: do you personally believe that Marcuse or Strauss is correct.

abb1: If you’re either an academic or an advocate (and I take it that that’s the exclusive “or” here) then academic philosophy is an oxymoron.

I advocate 4-dimensionalism. I am up-front with my students and readily admit to favoring counterpart theory over transworld identity. I do however give the arguments and objections to diverse views and note that these are issues about which rational, informed people can legitimately disagree, and about with very smart people with expertise in such matters do disagree. I treat ethical and political issues the same way.

I do nevertheless dogmatically advocate modus ponens and reject affirming the consequent. And I grade students down when they don’t follow my lead on that one.

To me, Fish seems to be fighting the good fight, here, for academic and classroom autonomy.

Fish, generally, chooses to write from a “meta” perspective, which can be provocative in a sophomoric way, when he uses his “meta” detachment to avoid substantive issues. But, that approach actually contributes to a strong argument in the case at hand, which calls for resistance to an academic model of authoritarian indoctrination.

Next to authoritarian indoctrination as a teaching ideal, Fish’s paralysis of analysis seems an attractive ideal.

h. e. baber: I fully agree with your standpoint. I am in the field of history and this debate has been going on for a very long time. Historians write history, but is it biased? Of course it is biased, but is there anything you can do about it? Yes, you can acknowledge your biases, even though your ideas have been molded by your experiences and so forth, and keep that notion in the back of your mind as you write.

The problem is that even when you acknowledge your biases, and know that you are limited by them, it is hard to change the way you view/write about something. People are always going to be biased, which in-turn can change them into advocates for a particular point of view (ie: social history instead of political history).

Like baber has stated, you have your personal point of view, but that doesn’t mean you cannot, in good conscience, present all sides to an argument and be in the right.

…these are issues about which rational, informed people can legitimately disagree…

Well, exactly. And that’s why Stanley Fish doesn’t think you should tell your students who is right and who is wrong.

What you favor is a different matter. I suppose you can tell them: “I favor this one, but that’s just my personal opinion.” But I don’t think that’s really necessary.

_because to justify something is to diminish it by implying that its value lies elsewhere._

This is so obviously wrong that it is hard to believe that a smart person wrote it. Justification has no such implication. When I justify something in terms of its intrinsice value, I’m precisely saying that its value does not lie elsewhere.

Maybe, being charitable, Fish thinks that there’s always some conversational implication that privileges instrumental justification. But I can’t see why he would think that.

But John Rawls is an advocate for liberalism. That is a politically substantive position, albeit loftily and somewhat top-heavily constructed in this case. Most conservatives abhor Rawls. Does it follow simply from this that his academic credibility is damaged? Is this uncontroversially the case?

The end point of this view is that the academic field of philosophy is like a fractal pattern of survey classes. But that is kind of silly; that wouldn’t be very interesting and it is pretty much the intention of universities to support these so-called advocates in their work. It seems to me that first, that’s a legitimate cause to support and secondly, we might as well call it being an academic.

Indeed, a classroom discussion is not the place for advocating positions – which is what ‘justifying’ means in these circumstances. That can be done in academic writing; it can even be done in a deliberately provocative lecture; it should certainly be aspired to in student writing.

A good seminar-leader should be prepared to make a case for every point of view under consideration – up to and including Hitler – if it is a useful way of bringing forth counter-arguments from students; but to use the class as a whole to insist on any one interpretation, especially amongst an academic field, well….

Isn’t it kinda obvious, though, that one needs to be somewhat detached from the subject he/she is teaching? Seriously?

No.

As Fish describes it he is an academic in the field ‘The History of Political Thought.’ That is fine as long as you do not claim to be doing or teaching normative political philosophy. If one does not want to call the later an ‘academic’ endeavour I will not be sadden the least. However, in the current university climate giving up the point on the appropriateness of the term academic would sink the status of our field as much as admitting to doing more thinking than research. This would of course be an ass backwards result and I continue to lay claim to the title of ‘academic doing research’ for pragmatic reasons.

Note (abb1) that adopting the premise that one can only subjectively favour normative positions does not help Fish at all. That premise and its competitors all have to be defended and none has an a priori privileged position.

No. Cataloging things is not knowledge.

What is it that makes people fantasize about the university classroom as monkeyhouse or Clockwork Orange conditioning session or Olympian colloquy?

No, they shouldn’t be, because all it does is reproducing and reinforcing the prevailing common wisdom of the day

You can be an advocate of the one and faithfully teach the other. It is not magic.

No, they shouldn’t be, because all it does is reproducing and reinforcing the prevailing common wisdom of the day

As if the common wisdom of the day is to only have the cowardice of our convictions.

I fail to see how a teacher can consistently

Once again a leap is made to “consistently”.

Because, like, duh, there’s a, like, difference, between offering a range of counter-arguments and positions, each laid out in their best light, which one might at any given point be said to be ‘advocating’ pro tem; and the effort to persuade a class of the validity of a single such viewpoint. Now blow that out your hole.

One annoying thing about this discussion (Fish’s–not this one here on CT) is that it takes certain bias complaints (my professor is so biased!) more seriously than they should. While complaints about particularly biased profs should be taken seriously, that such complaints exist shouldn’t be the basis of all discussions of contentious matters in the classroom–such that profs must inoculate themselves against them by not pronouncing on any matter whatsoever.

Dave this is a pretty standard way to teach political philosophy:

1) Place the issues/arguments being addressed in the history of political thought
2) Offer a range of arguments and counter arguments in their best light
3) Explain why you view some arguments to be better than others
4) Explain what is going on ‘under the hood’ in the debates. What are the premises or assumptions that explain why you take some and not other arguments to be better?
5) Help students get a picture of how to go about developing their own compelling position on said issue/arguments (note that this is also ‘advocacy’)

Why only offer the first two to students? That just seems lazy.

The intellectual problem with Fish’s argument is that if, say, you are a student investigating Hobbes’s contributions to conservative thought, you will eventually come to consider criticisms and defenses of both Hobbes and conservative thought. At some point, you’re going to have to decide that you will either simply catalog the positions of others, or say something yourself with respect to the convincingness of various positions (which you will then justify using appropriate academic standards). The second one is called analysis; the first is how you write really boring papers. The first is also going to take up an absurd amount of your time, because there’s always another critique to add to the tree.

While I agree with Fish that it’s not appropriate for professors to simply argue for a particular intellectual or political position in class – how could I disagree? – part of the point of academic analysis is to argue that a particular line of reasoning is correct and gives better insight than some other line of reasoning. Professors need to help students not only see the general outlines of the discipline (hello survey courses), but also help them construct decent arguments. So asking a student to argue for or against a particular position is a pretty decent assignment, as long as you don’t grade on which side they take but instead on their understanding of the relevant academic material and ability to use it in an academic style.

Fish’s preferred style seems to be academics studying academics without making arguments about correctness, which is a) boring and b) not much use.

My comment after #31 got stuck in moderation, so again:

A classroom discussion of Herbert Marcuse and Leo Strauss, for example, does not (or at least should not) have the goal of determining whether the socialist or the conservative philosopher is right about how the body politic should be organized.

Are you seriously arguing against this position?

the idea that academics are really all advocates is a very effective stalking horse for the illiberal Right.

What is the measure of its effectiveness?

…. hm, now I see RB is more on Holbo’s side here.

hm, now I see RB is more on Holbo’s side here.

It’s more that I think either extreme pole people are clinging to does not represent what happens when one adult – who possibly has an opinion – teaches another group of adults. People know what they are supposed to teach and students often have a pretty decent idea of what they should get out of a class (in addition to a 4.0). I read Holbo as being in “the middle” rather than on a side.

I am honestly interested in “What is the measure of [the illiberal right’s academic] effectiveness?”

I agree with Aaron M. Absolutely, one must get to 5. If you don’t get to 5, you run the risk of being dogmatic in the classroom. But one has to be careful to respect students as novices. Most professors can easily dismantle a position they disagree with, when that view is advanced by an undergraduate. Some self restraint here is called for if one doesn’t want to be an intellectual bully.

I agree with Lemuel P. Fish is engaged in a pragmatic exercise, defending a position from which we can hold interesting questions open, urge sympathetic & rigorous understanding of different positions, and all the other things good teaching does. This is not a matter of establishing an absolute, philosophically-defensible way to sort all texts or utterances into either advocacy or scholarship. It’s rather a matter of establishing the rules and protecting the practice of a kind of conversation in which everything is not idiotically reduced to one of two political positions, which is the pressure he’s seeing from outside. The proof of the stance is in its use — as LP points out the relevant NYT pieces are full of good sense, and the slightly glib boundaries Fish draws save him from being drawn into a lot of pointless conversations.

Fish is engaged in a pragmatic exercise

The defenses of what Fish wrote as pragmatism seem to me like “It’s okay that he’s gulling the rubes.”

Neutral scholarly objectivity may or may not be intrinsically a good thing, but it is absolutely not an effective defense against rightwing attacks on the autonomy of the university. Objectivity and neutrality are things that conservatives especially hate.

Huh? The point isn’t to convince conservatives that obhjective scholarship is a good thing, it’s to convince the liberal establishment (aka NYT Magazine readers) that it’s worth defending and paying for.

The day I was to receive my undergraduate degree in philosophy, I asked my Professor why he had taught me all these different ways of seeing the world, truth, knowledge, and being, but had forgotten to tell me which was correct. I’m still waiting for an answer…

I just went and actually read the damn thing to make sure I wasn’t going off half-cocked. This: A classroom discussion of Herbert Marcuse and Leo Strauss, for example, does not (or at least should not) have the goal of determining whether the socialist or the conservative philosopher is right about how the body politic should be organized.

Condemns 70% of what goes on in my intro to political theory class. We do a bit of historical context and intellectual history, but we’re constantly interrogating our theorists in precisely this way.

I wasn’t going to do this but why not?

Henry Farrell upbraided me on J Holbo’s behalf after the first of my snide comments on the disconnect between Holbo’s professed philosophy and that of his chosen place of residence. The context was H’s glib discussion of moral fuzziness of Zizek’s politics.
HF said specifically that Holbo’s academic field was purposely divorced from such issues.

Fish is merely channelling Eliot on Henry James:
“He had a mind so fine that no idea could violate it,”

Does Fish use the term “objective”? I’m confused.

I don’t mean pragmatics as cheap argument, but as practice — how do you hold open the space for the kind of classroom practice that djw describes so well?

I fail to see where Fish is saying that an academic can’t proselytize for a certain political point of view in a book (eg, A Theory of Justice). That would of course be an absurd proposition, but luckily he’s not making it, as he is usually not making the kinds of absurd proposition that people up whose noses he gets are often so eager to attribute to him.

Obviously, in this column he is quite explicitly talking only about what an academic qua teacher ought to do in a “classroom discussion”, not about what she should write in her books when she’s not teaching students.

I fail to see where Fish is saying that an academic can’t proselytize for a certain political point of view in a book (eg, A Theory of Justice). That would of course be an absurd proposition, but luckily he’s not making it

Right. Holbo’s summary — which djw and others, understandably, seem to be relying on — is beyond tendentious.

People really should read the Fish piece—it doesn’t say what Holbo says it says, at all.

It does, but you’re looking at the point of the article and Holbo is examining the arguments used to support it, which seem to involve flipping through texts with tongs while wearing a white smock, rubber gloves and eye protection.

The paragraphs quoted are at issue. The second one in particular seems obviously wrong in everything it asserts.

LP, are you trying to be intentionally thick headed?

Righteous B’s point (69) is obvious. Furthermore Fish’s position is one that perpetually resurfaces, is easily recognisable to many of us, and it entails more than you seem willing to acknowledge. There is little room to interpret Fish as doing anything else than advocating the teaching of ‘the history of political thought,’ and it should be possible for you to understand the distinction between this endeavour and teaching political philosophy based on the comments given so far.

Also, the noble lie defences of Fish are brilliant…

Aaron, with apologies in advance for my own obtuseness, can you unpack what is at stake in “advocating the teaching of ‘the history of political thought,’” which seems to upset you, as opposed to “teaching political philosophy”? I understand that these are not identical endeavors and entail distinct research questions, but as a practical classroom matter, the two seem hard to separate.

John, clearly this is tripping wires for some of you all that it doesn’t for others of us. Is there some older disciplinary struggle that Fish is wittingly or unwittingly reviving? I see nothing in the Fish position that enjoins “judgment of the intellectual quality of political philosophies.” I ask students to do that all the damn time. Perhaps “advocacy” is being used to mean rather different things.

I just said he commits himself to the position that doing so is not ‘academic’.

You said that, but it isn’t true.

Colin

I think Fish does a spot on job of describing what teaching the history of political thought (HOPT) looks like.

“to describe the positions of the two theorists, compare them, note their place in the history of political thought, trace the influences that produced them and chart their own influence on subsequent thinkers in the tradition.”

The above will be more or less necessary in teaching political philosophy depending on the subject at hand. So I agree with you that teaching political philosophy often requires the HOPT part. However if you stop there I would say that you are not really teaching political philosophy but doing a type of history, the history of ideas.

I gave a list at #40 of the other things that a political philosophy teacher typically does. I admit it is not all that good, but I only spent a minute on it and I did a better job than Fish I think.

Colin, After Fish explicitly says we can’t consider whether the theories offer superior accounts of how to organize the body politic, he conveniently provides a list of appropriate classroom intellectual activities for teaching political theory texts: description, comparison, place in intellectual history, and tracing influences. None of those covers “judgement of intellectual quality of political philosophies” as far as I can see.

There’s nothing in the pieces Fish actually wrote that sounds like that at all. Not remotely.

Can I disagree by saying “Look at the quoted paragraph?”

So Holbo, Bubba, anyone: what do you think justifies the academic enterprise?

Should I tailor this to anxious New York Times readers?

LP, I’d love to see you parse the contested paragraph to explain how it means what you keep saying it means. I can’t imagine this being any clearer than Holbo’s last post. Fish is directly saying that about 70% (give or take) of what goes on in most political theory course I’ve taken, TA’d and taught is decidedly not a proper part of any academic course.

Only if you read it in the context of the original piece. Which I still don’t think you’ve done.

Alas I did not post my lame joke about what “lampooning” might mean to Stanley Fish. Again I envision the lab dress.

#90 – Well the point has been put to you in so many clear, interesting, and hilarious ways (thanks for these bubba) I don’t feel that I can make that assumption.

For crying out loud!

The entire point of Fish’s piece is that even though Colorado’s faculty are mostly liberal in their personal views, that doesn’t limit their teaching of political ideas. SO there’s no need ot hire conservatives for balance.

That’s waht the piece is *about*.

So naturally, he emphasizes the ways in which teaching an idea doesn’t depend on your personal views of that idea. That’s what you do when you make an argument — you emphasize the things that are relevant.

I gave a list at #40 of the other things that a political philosophy teacher typically does. I admit it is not all that good, but I only spent a minute on it and I did a better job than Fish I think.

Yeah but Fish wasn’t making “a list of things a philosophy teacher typically does.” He was explaining why the University of Colorado doesn’t need a new chair in Conservative Thought. Context matters.

If I told you the paragraph quoted is a recipe for fruit salsa, would you conclude that Fish is a lousy cook?

the quoted paragraph contains a discrete and specific argument about pedagogy.

Really? The argument I see is the one that reaches the conclusion in the final sentence — “a discussion of this kind could be led and guided by an instructor of any political persuasion whatsoever, and it would make no difference.” The preceding stuff is there to justify that conclusion.

Where — in that paragraph or anywhere else — does he say you can’t present arguments on the strengths and weaknesses of different political thinkers? All he says is that you yourself should not, speaking with your authority as a professor, use the classroom to express your own political opinions. That’s all that second sentence says.

1) We get the point of the article.
2) Even though we get the point of the article we disagree with claims like this.

“Steven Brence may or may not be right when he announces that an ‘untenable’ Hobbesian notion of individualism is responsible for ‘much of contemporary conservative thought.’ But ‘untenable’ is not a judgment he should render, although he should make an historical argument about conservative thought’s indebtedness to Hobbes. Save ‘untenable’ for the soapbox.”

This is because if we did what he suggests here we would be teaching history not philosophy.

I don’t reckon anyone’s mind is likely to change at this point but one other thing:

Fish says that a course on political philosophy should not determine “whether the socialist or the conservative philosopher is right about how the body politic should be organized.”

Holbo then glosses that as “You may not test ideas, theories, positions for validity or intellectual merit.” And that’s just not an accurate paraphrase. “Validity” and “intellectual merit” are *much* broader than “right about how the body politic should be organized.”

Fish:

A classroom discussion of Herbert Marcuse and Leo Strauss, for example, does not (or at least should not) have the goal of determining whether the soc14list or the conservative philosopher is right about how the body politic should be organized.

In this sentence, he’s expicitly enjoined us against considering in the classroom whether the theorist successfully justifies his argument. Notice (this is important) that at this point, the professor’s own views on the proper organization of the body politic are nowhere to be seen.

the (academic) goal would be to describe the positions of the two theorists, compare them, note their place in the history of political thought, trace the influences that produced them and chart their own influence on subsequent thinkers in the tradition.

This sentence follows up on the last one. The previous sentence told us what academic inquiry is not, how he tells us what it is. The sentence construction clearly suggests that this list is a complete one (as many of us have said, it’s not the items on the list we object to, it’s what’s missing). I count five possible appropriate classroom topics regarding political theory texts. Under which of these five does evaluation and justification fall?

And a discussion of this kind could be led and guided by an instructor of any political persuasion whatsoever,

Of course Fish is correct here. But so could the (appropriate and necessary) activity he enjoined us against in the first paragraph. If he’s not implying otherwise, why would these (not explicitly connected) topics be combined in one paragraph?

…and (while you’re at it, if you will) whicn of Fish’s five allowed intellectual activities that assessment of intellectual merit would fall under.

LP says,

“I don’t read the sentence that way. In the context of the piece, ‘right about how the body politic should be organized’ clearly means something more like, ‘has ideas which I would like to see implemented’ than ‘makes a consistent, compelling argument.'”

OOPS!!!

How do you explain the quote I cited in 104?

Aaron, all Fish is saying is that most professors would say, “Conservatives draw heavily on Hobbes’ ideas” rather than “Conservatives draw heavily on Hobbes’ ideas, which are bad.” And that that is how it should be.

In the context of the piece, “right about how the body politic should be organized” clearly means something more like, “has ideas which I would like to see implemented” than “makes a consistent, compelling argument.”

You should rewrite that because nobody wrote what’s between your second pair of quotes.

lemuel, why do you think it is ‘clear’ that Fish means something that is radically different than anything he says?

Funny, I could ask you the same thing.

djw, I fully agree that the influence-plotting Fish describes is too bloodless, and I wouldn’t accept that as the limit of academic inquiry. If we’re reading Strauss, yeah, we have to take into account that Strauss thought he was *right* about very important questions. And as you say, we need some ability to sympathetically enter into that view.

We can clearly say a lot of things about the logical structure of an argument, its mobilization or use of evidence, its insight, its depth, its critiques. And I’m pretty sure Fish would not rule out that kind of internal critique. What Fish is trying to *avoid* is pretty obvious: the idea the the outcome of a class is that you settle a political question. This still strikes me as a pretty narrow controversy.

85: See, people are advocating refusal to advocate, but really they’re subtly advocating subtly-coded advocacy. I don’t see why that’s so hard for you to understand.

What he says is really simple: A good professor’s presentation of political ideas in the classroom does not depend on the professor’s own political views.

Presumably a professor’s teaching and a professor’s political views are both dependent of his understanding of political ideas, and not completely independent of one another. This seems to put “political ideas” in some kind of forbidden, incommunicable, unclean limbo.

Fish’s view looks like a quick rehash of Weber’s Science / Politics as Vocation pieces, which were in themselves rather makeshift attempts to find a place for social science in the WWI and post WWI Prussian state.

Actually, rb, lp still strikes me as right … and fwiw *I’m* not pseudonymous. Thanks to John for clearing up the esoteric stuff and hey, we can do worse than Weber.

I still find the indignation of Aaron and others weirdly misplaced, but I guess this is a lesson never to piss off Political Theorists by, Godforbid, confusing them with historians of thought.

Can we at least unite in supporting Fish’s candidacy for this Colorado chair in Conservative Thought?

I wouldn’t say I am indignant, I just decided not to let LP get away with the tactics he tends to employ.

I am making an intelligible interpretation of the text, by which I mean accepting what Fish actually says. Fish knows what he is saying is those passages and does not intend something other than what I have claimed he intends. LP on the other hand is just repeatedly announcing that Fish is not arguing that we should teach as if we are historians of political thought not philosophers no matter how many times Fish actually says exactly that.

It seems I’ve taken a straightforward uncharitable reading of Fish and Colin’s taken a charitable but strained reading. But since I don’t think we disagree on anything but how to parse a paragraph by Stanley Freakin’ Fish, I think I’m ready to let this go. I’m on board with sending Fish to CU and forcing him to hold a series of public debates with Ward Churchill, which would be a fitting punishment for all involved.

Where is one to write about penis-enhancing drugs on the internet if not here? Moderator!

Another way to put it is that he’s making the argument about political philosophy that others make about creative writing classes. You don’t go to school to learn how to write but how to read. Writing you do on your own, in the world.

That makes sense: the language and argument of “objectivity” is unavailable to Fish, so he has to rest on a certain humanistic tradition.

He’s also addressing a different audience, in a way shaped by his experience as an administrator and columnist. Read the NYT comments … OK, sample them, as they run in the hundreds. Yikes! So when he writes “goal … right” he wants to fend off the constant charge that the purpose of classes is indoctrination, the constant stream of horror-story anecdotes. I have a certain sympathy.

Gosh, I am mighty surprised that so many of you seem to wholeheartedly support indoctrination in education, telling your students that this ones philosopher is right, all those are wrong and some of these are misguided but have occasional good ideas.

I guess I need to take another look at David Horowitz’s writings…

If you are against indoctrination, then what wrong with NOT having “the goal of determining whether the socialist or the conservative philosopher is right about how the body politic should be organized” and simply analyzing their positions, hopefully well-contextualized within their historical, socio-economic and other contexts?

Jesus, Abb1 is nutso. After all his months and years storming around about this and that, we find that he’s a standard average neutral liberal.

The problems Weber and Fish were dealing with are problems of the state, the role of state functionaries in education, and the relationship between teachers and the funders of education (e.g., the state). They would not apply to, e.g., Socrates or Plato teaching fully voluntary self-funded students from a position of no authority. They could teach any way they wanted. They would teach best if they justified their positions rationally, refrained from trickery, and responded fairly to objections, but there’d be no need for them to refrain from advocacy if advocacy seemed appropriate to them. Students who didn’t like it could leave.

Weber’s problem was that the German state thought of scholars as public servants to be employed by the state in public projects such as wars. Weber devised a fiction of neutrality to place university scholars above the battle, as the church supposedly was during the middle ages. Pure science replaced pure religion as the counterweight to political action, transcendent but disengaged.

After WWII neutrality was retrofitted in the US for slightly different purposes. Unlike the German state, the American state itself came to be thought of as neutral (pluralistic). So neutrality became an obligation and foundation for authority. Look at the way economics pretends to bracket out values in order to become fully scientific — and thus politically powerful.

So Fish’s neutrality is conventional administrative liberalism, and a way of convincing taxpayers and the parents of students that he’s really harmless and also that they’d be wrong to pster him.

jholbo, I have to say my take on what Fish meant by the paragraph you linked is closer to what lemuel pitkin is saying. Because a paragraph that means ‘it is utterly impermissible for a professor to defend a position in class’ seems at odds with the rest of the essay, along with ‘compare [the two positions]’ in the middle of the part you quoted.

In other words, I think there’s an equivocation on the word ‘political.’ Fish seems to use it not just to mean ‘the theories in political philosophy’ but ‘current events and public concerns of the day.’ So I think your 149 would be fine.

I think he’s wrong that a good class can’t take or require students to take positions (i.e., one they choose and defend with reference to the literature) on current events and major political questions, but that’s an argument for another day.

abb1, you realise there is a difference between believing something and knowing it, right?

Shorter abb1: You claim that there is a right answer about X. But you disagreed with A when he claimed that this answer was P. Hypocrite!

I actually think that we’re at the state of cultural development where the basic paradigm (administrative liberalism, positivism, procedural democracy, neutrality and objectivity, etc.) is unconvincing and unsatisfying upon close examination, but retains its authority because no one is able to think of anything else better.

Emerson, of course it’s ‘personal preference’ like a taste for ice cream; it’s crystal clear when look at the activists. Che Guevara trembles with indignation at every injustice, and Grover Norquist organizes the Leave Us Alone coalition. Why? Because that’s what they are. It’s exactly like the Fish fella says:

If the question What justifies what you do? won’t go away, the best answer to give is “nothing.”

Because they freeze out everyone else by a hiring cartel…

But why shouldn’t they, once they’re 100% sure that their view of economics is superior to any other view of economics? They do exactly what you said they should do: they advocate their favorite view at the expense (obviously) of all the other views.

“If the question What justifies what you do? won’t go away, the best answer to give is “nothing.”

That’s a request for self-reporting. The answer is as stupid as the question, People don’t argue for American exceptionalism, they argue from it. The response to criticism is: “Huh!?’

To claim neutrality is only to claim it, not to be it. When everyone agrees that Grand Poobah IX is a neutral arbiter that’s only because everyone agrees on the terms.
All theory no history. Modern exceptionalism: “determinism for thee but not for me.” If you spent as much time questioning your assumptions as you do indulging them this whole discussion would have been unnecessary.

So whenever two people disagree about something, if they are both sincere then there is no way of saying who is right?

So whenever two people disagree about something, if they are both sincere then there is no way of saying who is right?

It depends, in the case of moral categories like ‘justice’, I think that’s true. The ‘justice’ that lives in my head against the ‘justice’ that lives in yours – if we disagree, I don’t see how you can prove me wrong.

I’ve spent entire semesters provoking students with argumentative stances that I don’t at all believe in; how is that not advocacy?

I’m confused — that seems obviously not advocacy. If you’d been advocating, you would have tried to get them to hold the positions you *do* believe in.

This seems symptomatic of the whole discussion here….

This seems symptomatic of the whole discussion here….

What does? I’m still not sure how advocacy is measured by intent and not effect (or even affect) when Fish talks about it, but effect when Horowitz does (per your “rather serious attack” comment, earlier).

I’m still not sure how advocacy is measured by intent and not effect

In standard English, advocacy means an attempt to persuade people of a view or position. So yes, it is measured by intent.

Lemuel: see 133.

sorry – “characterized as if in a vacuum”

in the case of moral categories like ‘justice’, I think that’s true. The ‘justice’ that lives in my head against the ‘justice’ that lives in yours – if we disagree, I don’t see how you can prove me wrong.

Now we’re getting somewhere. ABB1 thinks political philosophy is nothing more than preening bullshit to dress up one’s favorite ideology. If I agreed with him on that I suppose I’d argue for scrapping it in favor of courses in the history of ideas as well.

And for you, apparently the only alternative to what Fish proposes is the caricature of the opposing position that’s stuck in your brain.

So, you yourself introduce this “hiring monopoly” caricature and then you blame me for caricaturing the opposing position? Nice move, John.

“Advocating a point of view” is a sure way to get the most popular point of view (OK, maybe a narrow spectrum of popular views) propagated and reinforced, which is what seems to have happened in economics. There’s no literal “hiring monopoly” there, right? Or is it stuck in your brain and you will continue caricaturing?

…unless there is a scientific proof…

Moral categories, we are talking about moral categories. Are the the laws against public nudity oppressive? Nudists say – yes! Are they right, wrong? Well, they certainly feel oppressed – enough said.

“Most popular views” among the academics in the field in question, obviously, not among taxi drivers.

Two other points:

1) Even if someone does hold to some radical Humean view whereby the only meaningful statements are either strictly logical or empirical ones, it is not clear why he would have to forswear making evaluative judgments about competing views in political philosophy, since these judgments often turn on these kinds of claims anyway.

2) It is hard to see how academics could carry out the kind of interpretative work that Fish calls for without making evaluative judgments at all. When reading any text, charitable disambiguation requires the student or teacher to choose from between the many possible interpretations of what has been written the one(s) which she judges to be the strongest. In the absence of any assumptions about the relative merits of different positions it’s not clear how this would even be possible.

Even if someone does hold to some radical Humean view whereby the only meaningful statements are either strictly logical or empirical ones, it is not clear why he would have to forswear making evaluative judgments about competing views in political philosophy, since these judgments often turn on these kinds of claims anyway.

True but not under dispute. The question is whether Fish wants to ban all evaluative judgemetns from the classroom, or just the narrow class of judgements that turn on the instructor’s own political preferecees.

It is hard to see how academics could carry out the kind of interpretative work that Fish calls for without making evaluative judgments at all.

Which is evidence that Fish is probably not against evaluative judgements in general, no?

Lemuel, I don’t read Fish’s article the way you do. On your reading (which I note you have never attempted to defend, except by repeated assertion) none of my points apply.

But thanks for making clear your view that any successful criticism of Fish is ipso facto evidence that Fish does not hold the opinion being criticised.

Returning to an earlier point: this is about the state, professional authority, and the desires of those who pay the bills for education.

It’s not about how to teach. Ideally a good teacher can advocate directly or indirectly. (Plato’s advocacy was mostly indirect, but he certainly wasn’t neutral; as far as that goes, he wasn’t even always fair).

Could he advocate “not at all”? I really doubt it, though I suppose that he could on dead issues he didn’t care about — the argument between the Chalcedonians and the Monophysites, for example. But this shouldn’t be the standard.

All this stuff tends toward the conclusion that primary philosophy, ethics, or literature is not acceptable within the university, whereas writing about philosophy, ethics, or literature is. (Dworkin and Velleman have said as much about ethics).

You end up with a peculiar situation where the parasitical meta-discourses are well-funded and officially recognized, whereas the primary producers are starving artists and free-lancers.

Actually, that’s sort of like any primary production. The middlemen make all the profit, and the farmers, miners, loggers, and fishermen risk their lives for a pittance.

I have not read every last word in this thread, but a perusal of it suggests to me that some people are trying to draw the sensible (to me) distinction between advocacy and what I would call dogmatic advocacy, or just dogmatism. I would think advocacy is basically inescapable in teaching political philosophy, whereas dogmatism can veer in some cases toward indoctrination. Dogmatism and indoctrination, however, are not the same: I have experienced professors who clearly wanted to persuade students of the correctness of their overall political perspective (dogmatic teaching, in my view) but who were nonetheless willing to listen to dissenting views. The dogmatism still rubbed me the wrong way, however. Still, if a teacher is good in other ways — knowledgeable, smart, engaging, etc. — dogmatism need not be a fatal disqualification.

…but I’m not sure that I’d want to call having a strong desire…

If 90% of the teachers advocate, for example, revolutionary marxism (“marxist doctrine is all-powerful because it is true”) and against liberalism and conservatism, then certainly we’re likely to end up with more marxists in the next generation than in the parallel universe where all major ideologies are treated impartially.

I can’t say for certain, because I’ve never tried to indoctrinate my students, but I’m pretty sure this wouldn’t be the outcome. What you learn in a 10-15 week class, even a really good one, can’t really compete with the other sources of ideology.

I don’t necessarily disagree with John’s argument; but as a college professor I completely sympathize with Fish’s position. People who don’t teach undergraduates may not realize that most of them find it almost impossible to do anything other than pass judgments on the ideas they encounter in the classroom. It takes a lot of work to get them to understand that drawing out the assumptions and implications within a given text is (A) possible, and (B) separate from the project of evaluating it against external criteria (e.g., their own, their professors’, another writer’s, etc.)

This doesn’t mean that such evaluation is not valuable or important. But students already know that method of analysis like the back of their hands, even if they do it clumsily. What they do not know, and what they need to be taught, is precisely the “close reading” and/or historical analyses that Fish is talking about.

Students desperately need to learn to analyze a work on its own terms before they need to be taught the much more familiar operation of analyzing it on their terms.

Well, come to think of it, it should be fair enough for less liberal ideologies to reproduce themselves by less liberal means. So, I suppose it’s mostly liberalism that must carry the burden of impartiality. Hey, that’s what pluralism is all about, what’s fair is fair. Gotta eat your own dog food, as they say in the software business.

I cannot be criticized by an intelligent layperson?
More and more the academy says ‘no.”
Believe me, I speak from experience.

I didn’t start off as an asshole.

“But this is actually an incredibly radical and implausible claim.”

Within limits, I think it makes some sense. It’s similar to claims once made by labor unions.

“I, a professor, make an argument about ethics. Or about liberalism and politics. I cannot be criticized by an intelligent layperson? Why not?”

Well, you said it yourself. According to Fish, as long as a professor is arguing for or against a substantive ethical or political position, he or she is not actually acting as a professor, but should be taken to be indistinguishable from a mere private citizen. It seems to follow that a professor could say authoritatively what the discipline has determined to be the good and bad arguments concerning a substantive position, but this is very different from engaging in the political arena.

“If the person has a good objection (which, of course, they may) I get to trump it decisively with ‘but you aren’t a professor, so I can ignore you’. Surely not.”

To be honest, I haven’t been able to figure out how Fish’s argument in these columns leaves room for objections. Either it’s been said before or it’s out of bounds in the classroom, and if it’s been said before, I suppose there should be a footnote for it. Then it’s not a layperson’s objection after all.

“Seth, that must have been a while ago”

Yes it was.

“It seems to follow that a professor could say authoritatively what the discipline has determined to be the good and bad arguments concerning a substantive position,”

That’s the distinction she’s referring to. It doesn’t work very well, but it seemed clear what she meant.

Am I immune to lay criticism? That just seems wrong.

You are not immune to lay criticism. You need to justify your work. It’s the enterprise, you don’t need to justify.

Suppose I am a chef, expert in Italian cuisine. When I burn an omelet I am criticized, of course. But if you come to my kitchen and start asking: what’s the deal with this Italian food, man? You pour olive oil everywhere – what’s the point of that? Why do we need Italian cuisine? What the reason for anyone to follow these recipes? What justifies what you do? – then the best answer is obviously “nothing”.

You don’t like Italian food? Fine, go to the Chinese place next door and leave me alone.

That would be fine if Fish were a private individual sitting at home doing his work, or if they were selling on some sort of market. But academics are publicly recognized and rewarded people who have influence over the careers and futures of their juniors who hope for recognition and rewards. The public asks “Why reward this man?” It doesn’t seem like an unfair question, not an unanswerable one.

Fish speaks like any other government employee who feels invulnerable because his position is legally guaranteed and protected by multiple layers of political connections. Sort of like The Army Corp of Engineers, or the Bureau of Indian Affairs, which are almost immune to public pressure.

There is no palpable reason for them to care

You just assert this, as does Bloom. Bloom does so because he reasonably believes himself to be invulnerable, has a feeling of entitlement, and can’t be bothered. You assert this because assertion is your predilection.

Suppose we had astrology professors in the universities. Would they be invulnerable too? Should we establish astrology chairs? Why or why not?

There’s a long history of justifications of literature and the humanities — it’s almost a genre. It’s not an impossible task, and you don’t have to convince everyone. The hardcore wingers are only 30%, and with any luck they’ll be marginal after Jan. 20.

Now, if the public then asks: “but why should we care about the field of X?” – be it history or philosophy or arts – what are you going to tell them? There is no palpable reason for them to care; the discovery of the Rosetta Stone doesn’t affect financial markets or commodities markets, it doesn’t improve your plumbing or the mileage of your car, it doesn’t help with your cholesterol or your erection. There is no justification in the pragmatic sense.

I don’t agree. A space shuttle exploded, arguably, because somebody made a decision – an ethical issue that we argue in class. I ask students to judge the actions of the engineers involved in the ethical issue as a means of informing their professional outlook as well as the immediate practical issue of writing for accessibility and with certain broader political and cultural contexts in mind (and we’ve had a particularly useful example of the ramifications this past AY). So I generally have at least two responses to questions of justification: because you don’t want your shit blow’d up, and/or you don’t want people messing with your shit at work. No way in hell am I going to say “nothing” justifies the enterprise, if only for the reason that I also see more than one dimension to the meaning of the term “enterprise.” Funny that “justification” should be the focus, there, and not any other term, which I assume are just as transparent as glass?

“It’s like table manners.”
Tracing the genealogy it’s like art or high culture or the high church. Dance without toe shoes if you want, but this is the Ballet not a sock hop and I am the Premier Maître de ballet en Chef. The Church is the latin church. If you have a problem with that start your own. A symphony has four movements, not three, and you don’t tell Jascha Heifetz how to play the fiddle. etc. etc. etc. etc.

As usual the arguments are crisscrossing between the humanities’ relation the arts and the sciences.
Fish is pulling language from one end and you’re pulling from the other. Only abb seems to get that. To say “It’s like table manners” is just insulting. JH, you’re against Fish’s terms without even knowing where they originate. I find that shocking.
And what’s your field again? Are you so trapped in the fog of your own post-Sputnik “expertise” that it takes an amateur to point this out?

“Opinions are like assholes, everybody has one” meets, “All knowledge is universally translatable as data.” Jonathan Richman is Mozart and Computer science is philosophy.

What a lousy way to run a railroad.

Only abb seems to get that.

Well, I thought that Abb1 was repeating positivist cliches. Perhaps he’s repeating emotivist cliches instead. But they’re the same cliches.

If there is a discipline for, say, philosophy of music or dance notation, why not astrology or numerology?

Do you feel you have the obligation to justify to your plumber why you’re a professional dance notation-er? If so, you should find a different line of work.

You really do like to argue, don’t you, Abb1?

I would object to the addition of astrology to the curriculum except a history-of-ideas, but would regret the removal of literature. The arguments for these positions are not hard to make, except when arguing with a dogmatic relativist. Fish could have made the arguments, but couldn’t be bothered.

Another way of looking at it would be to say “Do you assume that your plumber is too stupid to be interested in your work, so that you will refuse to talk to him about it?” Once someone’s already hostile (Horowitz et al) you probably can’t persuade them, but plenty of laypersons are willing to listen. But not if your opening statement is “I don’t need to justify my work to the likes of you.”

What if someone asks an astrologer or a quack doctor to justify what they do? Is that an invalid question too?

They probably do it for money, which is a different matter, but in case they do it for the love of astrology or homeopathy (which is quite possible), then yes, it seems like a stupid question. They don’t need to justify it to you; they believe in what they do and that’s all there is to it. What meaningful response do you imagine here?

Fine, but Fish does it for money.

Well, but if that’s the case then it appears that he’s being paid exactly for writing things like “the value of my work is nil”. And if it indeed pays 200K/year, then it sounds like a great gig and I want some of it.

But I guess that would be one of those justifications that diminish the enterprise…

_100 (Lemuel P:) He was explaining why the University of Colorado doesn’t need a new chair in Conservative Thought._

As the heirs to the riches of the top 1% strata of wealth and income in Western Civilization become increasingly inbred, they gradually lose intellectual acumen like the Ottoman Emperors and make poorer decisions — call it Tao, entropy, karma, or whatever. They make their media, governmental and academic organizations follow tightened regimens to purge any opponents of the top 1%, and so get rid of independently-minded journalists, academics, politicians, etc. Part of this plays out in getting more certified right-thinkers into teaching positions at the University of Colorado. Fish is trapped by his own co-optation into the service of the 1%, so he makes only arguments that won’t ruffle feathers. He conforms to a society that overwhelmingly coddles up to the rulers. I don’t advocate violence, but the need for more discerning argument and opposition to that ruling group seems desperately needed in order to slow down our descent into the sewer.
—
Aloha ~~~ Ozzie Maland ~~~ San Diego

“It seems to follow that a professor could say authoritatively what the discipline has determined to be the good and bad arguments concerning a substantive position,”

Not sure what s.e. had in mind, but I’m wondering now whether that sentence doesn’t describe MacIntyre’s position better than Fish’s. In his other writing, Fish hasn’t really talked much about arguments that I recall. He talks more about methodology. I suppose you could say he describes kinds of arguments, and explains that only certain kinds are acceptable in certain classrooms. On the other hand, as others have pointed out, he’s basically describing a way of teaching intellectual history (How Milton Works appears to be a contribution to intellectual or cultural history), and intellectual history is the study of arguments people have made in the past. There’s no reason to think that he’s discussing the teaching or evaluation of argumentation generally.

It does seem unfair to Fish to call him an anti-foundationalist who thus thinks all argumentation is “only a game” with arbitrary rules (set, I guess, in order to defend professional prestige and boundaries) — though maybe my defense of him is going to sound even more unfair. Fish isn’t a philosopher. The really hard philosophical lifting and carrying is done by people whose books he reads and whose advice he presumably takes. It’s just the division of labor he’s defending in his columns. It seems to me that all Fish is saying is the commonplace that social rules are determined socially, and what goes on in the university is social or sociological. (As a pragmatist, I don’t see why he should be required to define “social” and “discursive” as mutually exclusive.)

To engels at 197: I take your point on “dogmatism,” but I still would want to try to make distinctions of the kind I suggest, perhaps with a different word.

Fish describes/theorizes academic intellectual activities in a way that would make sense only if those activities were, in effect, arbitrary forms of etiquette. (Nothing else could make them as hermetic as Fish wants them to be.)

But they can’t just be arbitrary forms of etiquette. And certainly academics don’t think of them as being just that.

OK. This is well posed. But why can’t academic activities be *somewhat like* etiquette?

I see he published dozens of books, is there one that captures the essence and doesn’t have too many difficult words in it?

Hi, Murray!

Back to the original argument, sort of, or one of them, what I especially I object to is the way that Fish, while refusing to justify what he does, concedes too much by defining the way he thinks things should be done academically (non-advocacy) in an unnecessarily restrictive way. And more restrictive to others than to him.

Engels. there’s a difference between studying a historically and socially constructed activity and choosing to adhere to it. Rosen advocates a divided loyalty. So do I. Practicing conventionalists often have a better understanding of change than the adventurers.
You might want to read my comment on this thread as well.
The subjects are related.

Maybe if you posted a bit less that might leave you more time for reading? Something to think abourt maybe…

Seth has a blog.

If you know I have a blog bubba I’d suggest you spend some time reading it. You might learn something. Or just the link in #258 to HB’s the post on Douthat.

LP at 231 (surely of no interest to anybody else),

As I have been trying to put forward and you still seem to be missing, it is your approach to debate that is extremely insulting. What I have seen under this post are commenters that have taken your points seriously even thought they found them lacking. They have made serious efforts to engage with the substance of your views, and where they have disagreed with you they have provided both textual evidence and broader contextual reasoning about the meaning of the texts. In fact, the comments have been of the nature that 1) they understand the general point you are making but 2) argue that the general point is not the issue at question in the post and 3) that the is it very difficult to see how you can get to the interpretation on the specific issue because it just does not seem to be supported by what the author says in the specific text or in other writings.

You however have not made any effort to respond in kind and to address the evidence and substantive arguments presented to you in a way that is comparable to what your objectors have done. Instead you have just stubbornly reasserted your own position, not taken the textual evidence presented as worth anything whatsoever, and used various transparent debate techniques to keep the discussion going so as to ‘win’ by having the last word. By not taking others efforts seriously and refusing to try addressed the actual evidence and reasons presented by others you show a great deal of disrespect by 1) not taking others efforts as being worth anything and 2) by actively frustrating a debate instead of trying to push it forward (i.e. bad faith). Your approach only works in the blog format. Among a ‘live’ group of people the unacceptability of treating others in this way becomes quickly apparent and collectively rejected. So I do not feel the least bit bad about the few sarcastic comments directed towards you; in fact I feel vindicate in my expectation that such an approach is the only one that could get your attention.

I have little doubt that if David Duke was allowed to teach a political philosophy class

David Duke may still have a teaching gig at the Ukraine’s most antisemitic private university, so perhaps your thesis is being tested.

See, here’s the thing: David Duke has a good argument. His basic assumptions and values are different from yours and mine, but his argument (from what I heard in that 6-minute show), his argument based on those assumptions is flawless.

Do you value the Irish culture, Irish traditions, Irish language, Irish looks, Irish character, Irish genes; do you feel these things need to be preserved, kept pure and protected from corrupting influences? No? Well, if he can manage to get you start caring a lot about these things, then you’re gone, he’s got you. And that has nothing to do with any arguments.

Is Plato taught as one of the progenitors of fascism or as a “philosopher?” Is Julius Caesar taught as being a tyrant, and basically a scumbag, or merely the first Emperor of Rome?

Is the past taught as the present. Should it be? Is it possible to teach it any other way?

Read those three questions carefully.

L Pitkin #231 points to Smaug [#195]:
Smaug: “How would Adam Smith’s preferred ordering of the economy compared with Karl Marx’s affect social equality?” is an academic exercise. Asking, “Because of its effect on social equality, is Marx’s or Smith’s preferred ordering of the economy right?” is a political question.”

That’s nicely put. Disinterested description is preferable in the interest of clarity, but it’s amoral. It’s also impossible to achieve.
At #258 on this page I linked to my mention on another post of Derrick Bell’s discussion of Brown vs Board of Education. He argues that segregation should have been allowed but equality enforced. He argues this with cool reason founded on fact. He’s not a self-righteous white man trying to feel good about himself. He doesn’t begin as so many liberals do with the assumption that intentions are valuable in themselves. (I think of Brad DeLong turning purple with rage at the thought of his liberal technocratic justice being questioned.)

Players don’t have the best view have the chessboard. I make my sharpest observations when I force myself to think as if I don’t really care about the outcome of a particular debate, one way or the other. Sometimes it’s easy; but then I go on just to practice my debating skills. As a parallel to the academic preference for an ideal of engaged disinterest, it’s good to remember though few people here do that our justice system is maintained by advocates and factotums for hire.
The rule of reason is the rule of good intentions. Fish is being a pompous ass and playing a political game, but the question that stands at the title to this post is the question that divides Moses and Aron. It’s standard stuff.
What’s vexing is that the answer is “yes.”

Argument is a game and you can’t assume what side you’re on. Liberals assume while claiming not to. Conservatives are chained to their assumptions and proud of it. But contrary to Liberals continued attempt to engage them, it’s not the assumptions that they celebrate it’s the chain. There is a logic to this that needs to be examined. Indeed it has been, but not by liberals.

Try not to assume. Try not to have faith, in others or yourself. That last one is really hard for liberals. If the Palestinians had a nigger Jesus like King or Mandela liberals would be more than happy to celebrate their recognition of him and bask in self-satisfied glory. But all the Palestinians had was Arafat, and that and memories of WWII meant that “reason” was against them.
Try not to have faith. Pace the New atheists, you’ll never succeed, but living “the examined life” it’s your job to try.

Here’s an old old lecture. I heard it first in about 1968:
Creative writing classes have no place in the university. And the same for courses on contemporary fiction. Business schools are trade schools and there’s no reason for them to be accredited as anything else.
Live life in the present, study the past. Without distance there’s no chance for anything approaching clarity. The objective and scientific study of the present is no more than the celebration of yourself dressed up in a labcoat. You’ll always end up lying to yourself.

So here I am 40 years later debating with academics who want to change the world by writing books. When Fish is saying if you want to go out and change the world do it. If you want to talk about ideas then do it. But don’t think that replaces anything else. I want to talk to you about living under an authoritarian government in Singapore, and you won’t do it. You probably can’t. But you want to bring politics into the academy because you can’t bring it out on the street. Fish is giving you a dare.

Do you know when I started to become an asshole? It started the first time I was lectured by academic snobs who called themselves leftists and accused me of being both under-intellectualized and reactionary, while they had the publications and the references to prove it. Publications full of dogmatic rereadings of sophisticated and ironic europeans, retooled as roadmaps to careers in the academy. And here I was, a carpenter and construction worker and the son of academics who read Chaucer and Henry James, for pleasure, and who risked arrest and having their 3 children taken away and put in foster homes, in the defense of what they believed.
My qualified defense of Fish is due to the fact that he amuses me. My unqualified contempt for you due to the fact that you deserve it.

And yes, it was Augustus, not Julius.