Comments on: Curiosity

By: Jerry Vinokurov

Jerry Vinokurov — Wed, 23 Sep 2009 17:07:54 +0000

I once attended a dinner with Fish, given for graduate students at my university, in which he tried to convince all of us that ideas don’t matter. Fish may be a well-regarded Miltonist, but I can’t see why anyone would take him seriously outside that one specialty. He’s a terribly sloppy thinker whose single schtick is to play chiding parent to liberals. He has nothing interesting to say and says it loudly and frequently.

By: roac

roac — Tue, 22 Sep 2009 21:39:30 +0000

I should perhaps add that the line about Fish converting was strictly a joke.

By: roac

roac — Tue, 22 Sep 2009 21:34:03 +0000

Ah. Thank you.

By: Dave

Dave — Tue, 22 Sep 2009 17:18:31 +0000

For those curious about the Griffiths-Fish connection. Fish, when dean of LAS at the University of Illinois at Chicago, hired Griffiths to be the founding member of the new program in Catholic Studies. Fish was very enthusiastic about this program and about Griffiths. It’s not that surprising that a Milton scholar would have some interest in theology and I don’t know of any reason to think that Fish’s interest in Catholic Studies was other than intellectual and political. On the other hand I don’t know much about Fish’s doings since he ceased being my dean.

By: roac

roac — Mon, 21 Sep 2009 19:06:36 +0000

OK, this is a here’s-something-I-read column of the kind that George Will turns out on days when he can’t be bothered. The question is, how did Fish come to read the book that this guy Griffiths is working on? They have Duke in common, but Griffiths’ Wikipedia entry doesn’t say how long he’s been there.

(It says Griffiths used to be a world authority on some strain of Buddhism, but has given it up and converted to Catholicism. Wouldn’t it be something if Stanley Fish went that way? What a feather in Pope Benedict’s cap!))

(Further BTW, I see Fish’s own Wiki entry makes no reference to Morris Zapp. Somebody should fix that.)

By: Bloix

Bloix — Mon, 21 Sep 2009 17:16:29 +0000

Fish is making the case for book-burning.

By: Substance McGravitas

Substance McGravitas — Mon, 21 Sep 2009 17:13:25 +0000

What he is arguing for is applying a bit of common sense to your X, whatever it is. Against technocratic, rationalistic-idealistic approach.

It’s not curiosity that demands a solution to how best you can get rid of people.

By: Jim Harrison

Jim Harrison — Mon, 21 Sep 2009 16:54:48 +0000

Phooey, Fish is a lot like Camille Paglia. They both go in for a strategy of provocation that is guaranteed to work because it exploits the most predictable pieties of their respective audiences. Denouncing curiosity to fundamentalists would be rhetorically pointless, merely boring, and unlikely to keep you in print at Salon or the New York Times. The problem I have with Fish is that the questions he raises never get at the significant issues, for example, what is problematic or at least unconsidered about the values that underlie the sciences. He merely exercises people’s ideological reflexes. He isn’t objectionable because he’s objectionable but precisely because he never has the nerve to stick with a line of thought. His rhetoric never becomes dialectic. The ideal-typical Fish essay always takes back in the last paragraph what it put out in the first.

By: Tim Wilkinson

Tim Wilkinson — Mon, 21 Sep 2009 16:05:14 +0000

I'd say this was in the same genre as this fairly nasty little screed: Conspiracy Theories 101. Can readers spot the deliberate mistakes? (clues: think theory v metatheory, contemporary history v political action, balance v self-censorship...)

By: Henri Vieuxtemps

Henri Vieuxtemps — Mon, 21 Sep 2009 15:52:55 +0000

What he is arguing for is applying a bit of common sense to your X, whatever it is. Against technocratic, rationalistic-idealistic approach.

By: bored observer

bored observer — Mon, 21 Sep 2009 14:47:41 +0000

“the musician or the inventor?”
more typos.
I was in a hurry.

By: bianca steele

bianca steele — Mon, 21 Sep 2009 14:46:47 +0000

Actually, @11 . the fact that Fish’s writing is just academic/pseudointellectual enough to be unreadable or unbearable to at least 75% of the readership of even a newspaper as well read by educated people as the Times.

By: bored observer

bored observer — Mon, 21 Sep 2009 14:43:04 +0000

The right to curiosity is more important than the right to speech. It’s a better more solid foundation to the law, even though it covers the same relation.
But the argument Fish is making, or merely reporting, is more complex than its adherents know. It’s not curiosity they’re bothered by but specifically “unbounded” curiosity. They would say that curiosity needs to be framed and that they are arguing in defense of a frame. Examining their fears (religious arguments are all based on a concern for community) you can understand their logic. And you can take it even further: isn’t all curiosity framed? History re-contextualizes our assumptions, “framing” them better than we could or did. Our grandchildren will see frames where we saw freedom.

And what about that sort of enquiry that engages framing in its processes? Learning the violin is enquiry framed by the cultural knowledge of the instrument. Learning to write “well” requires a form of curiosity about language, about the frame itself. The narcissism of Ayn Rand is evidenced in her lack of interest in the frame and consequently she’s a lousy writer. The same arguments, morally simplistic or not, made by a better writer would have made a better book.
Fish is hazy/lazy in his presentation because he’s aware of the problem, like the priests, but also doesn’t know how to phrase it in a way that would satisfy [his own?] secularism, so I’ll do that for him. Is curiosity best represented by the desire to invent a new musical instrument, therefore a new individual thing, marking its maker as an individual person, or by learning to play an instrument that already exists? Is it best represented by the musician and the inventor? The curiosity of the inventor is one theologians worry about. The danger of individualism is that it produces a herd of independent minds, each preoccupied with self-expression of one sort or another, but inarticulate. And if self-expression is connected to machine knowledge than that articulateness is asocial; the primary interpersonal relationships are between a person and a mechanism, not between one person and another. The problematics are all there, in the present and in American history. Observer or inventor? What’s the model for secularism in the 21st century?

By: bianca steele

bianca steele — Mon, 21 Sep 2009 14:36:17 +0000

Not for the first time, when I read Fish’s last blog/column, I found myself wondering who he thinks his audience is.

Or: @2 . @3 . the fact that the readership of the New York Times is widely known to be liberal and disproportionately Jewish.

By: Substance McGravitas

Substance McGravitas — Mon, 21 Sep 2009 13:48:54 +0000

Cookies: are they good? Just ask a diabetic.