Curiosity

I don’t normally go for Fish’s columns, but this seems to me a misreading of him. He knows that most forms of curiosity are now seen positively within our culture and that a ‘right to curiosity’ now seems sensible. Most of what he is doing in this column is pointing out that this view is a historical phenomenon and that other traditions have existed: he is not saying that hostility to all curiosity is right. Does any discussion of a previous cultural attitude have to include a large flashing sign saying: ‘I do not approve of this’?

This seems like one of those columns in which Fish is signaling that he doesn’t really expect us to take him seriously. The argument against curiosity he relays (he isn’t really making the argument, just passing it along, which, not coincidentally, frees him from the obligation of having to defend it, in accordance with the standards of contemporary journalism) is based either in fiction (Genesis, Frankenstein etc…), in metafiction (Augustine), or on the authority of people who sound like cranks, given the quotes Fish has chosen: Griffiths, who speaks of the “obscene inundation of every aspect of human life….” and Newman with his “They have no power of self-control because they have no allegiance. . .” Fish is just going through the motions here…

But the comics do look wonderful! Eventually, John Holbo, you are going to convince me to take the plunge

I just can’t get past the irony of an academic presenting an argument against curiosity. Since Fish cannot completely lack a sense of irony, I am led to believe that either he’s equivocating for the sake of it, or being inflammatory, or both. The only substantive point I gather from his column is, as you’ve pointed out, ‘some say x is good, some say (or have said) x is bad’.

Cookies: are they good? Just ask a diabetic.

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?

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

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…)

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.

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.)

Ah. Thank you.

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.