The fella says here
Stanley Fish is being tricksy, as he generally is, but it’s a pretty crude form of tricksiness for a supposedly sophisticated literary ‘theorist,’ especially one who is reputed to have seen through Everything at least forty years ago.
He’s comparing secularism with its opposite by setting out what he takes to be their respective views.
Let those who remain captives of ancient superstitions and fairy tales have their churches, chapels, synagogues, mosques, rituals and liturgical mumbo-jumbo; just don’t confuse the (pseudo)knowledge they traffic in with the knowledge needed to solve the world’s problems.
This picture is routinely challenged by those who contend that secular reasons and secular discourse in general don’t tell the whole story; they leave out too much of what we know to be important to human life.
No they don’t, is the reply; everything said to be left out can be accounted for by the vocabularies of science, empiricism and naturalism; secular reasons can do the whole job.
Oh? Everything can be accounted for by the vocabularies of science, empiricism and naturalism? That’s the secular reply? I don’t believe it. I think most people clever enough to be secularist are also clever enough to realize that not everything can be accounted for, no matter what the vocabulary.
He goes on to make heavy weather of the difference between facts and values, and a book on the subject by one Steven Smith, and a brief acknowledgement that Hume got there first – and then abruptly ends with a sweeping claim that he hasn’t actually justified.
But no matter who delivers the lesson, its implication is clear. Insofar as modern liberal discourse rests on a distinction between reasons that emerge in the course of disinterested observation — secular reasons — and reasons that flow from a prior metaphysical commitment, it hasn’t got a leg to stand on.
And the bell rings and the students rush off to Beginning French.
One of the reasons I am not a fan of fashionable literary criticism type stuff, is that they never say anything new. It’s always the same arguments, with added snarky comments about “naive” “positivists” who are always completely made up straw men, who cannot tell their elbows from their ontologies.
…but surely that leaves theistic discourse with a negative number of legs? So it must be wrong on purely mathematical grounds.
There is Michael Schmidt-Salomon’s “Manifesto of Evolutionary Humanism” (not sure whether that’s available in English, though I do know Dawkins got sent a special English edition).
In it, he posits three humanistic “disciplines”: Science, Art, and Philosophy can, to him, address anything that religion claims to be specifically “made for”. I really like that idea.
I’m hoping to find some time to blog about this myself. Briefly though, Fish makes a mess of the fact/value distinction, which is quite different from the empirical/metaphysical distinction or the natural/supernatural distinction.
It’s true that we can’t have motivation without values (defined broadly to include preferences, desires, fears, hopes and so on). Without values, there would be no reasons to support moral norms or laws. Moreover, no number of facts, in the absence of values, ever adds up to something like a reason for action, moral or otherwise.
But that does not apply just to facts about the natural world. If there is a supernatural world, no number of facts about it, in the absence of values, ever adds up to a reason for action either (or to a reason to support a moral code or a legislative proposal). Religion is thus no better off than science.
So there is no body of value-free morality or reasons for legislation, or whatever. Hume is right. But that has nothing to do with what Fish is criticising.
Locke and his followers (including me) don’t make a claim such as Hume would correctly criticise. What we claim is that the state should, for various reasons, confine itself to acting on values to do with worldly things. It should not attempt to work out which, if any, of the richer sets of values that are on offer to do with spiritual salvation is correct. It is not well-placed to do that, and when it does so the result is often horrible. Better for an institution such as the state to concentrate on laws that protect basic worldly things that almost everyone values (such as our interest in having some sort of allocation of property that we can all live with, our interest in not being murdered or raped, our interest in not starving, and so on). The various churches and sects can then concentrate on offering their rival methods of obtaining spiritual salvation.
The arguments, as developed by liberals since Locke, are to do with the clumsiness of the state, historical experience, social pluralism, and so on, not to do with any claim that morality or the law can get by without values of some sort.
Nothing that Fish says gainsays any of this.
Okay, I guess the above is now the core/first draft of my blog post.
What IS it with Literary Theorists? They have an unerring knack of jumping on any bandwaggon heading the wrong way.
They took up Marxism just when Marxists abandoned class conflict; they took up psychoanalysis when Freud was laughed out of the psychology department. Now they’ve got religion.
Literary Theory is a retirement home for dying beliefs.
So, what Fish really needs is an argument that we can now, for the first time in history, trust the state to decide such matters as which religion is correct, then legislate accordingly – all without some disaster ensuing. I’d love to see that argument.
Now Shatterface, don’t forget poststructuralism, postmodernism, and every other post-whatever Theory (with an always-capitalized ‘T’, which you can even hear when they reverently speak the word). Those belonged to literary theorists right from the start, even when they were shiny and new.
And they are most welcome to them.
Hmm, I’m a bit befuddled at this point. You say yourself that you don’t believe that “everything can be accounted for by the vocabularies of science, empiricism and naturalism.” So it’s only natural to ask, in your opinion, what *can’t* be accounted for through it? What’s missing?
Alex — Any topic of active scientific research, for one. Scientific research depends for its very existence on the fact that not all questions have been answered.
Well, fair enough, but I don’t read Fish to say anything of its kind. He says that the vocabulary can account for everything, that which we know and that which we not yet know. I don’t think he says it answers everything, only that its processes and language can account for everything, that if given enough time, there will be no answers in religion left, no?
Another similar example:
Secular reason — reason cut off from any a priori stipulations of what is good and valuable…
Does anyone here think that’s actually what secular reason is? Can’t I have secular reasons for stopping you murdering your Grandmother on fairly uncontroversial grounds that don’t need to be repeated here?
It’s absolute blindness: Fish is the one making a priori commitments; here the one is to some kind of moral realism governed by divine command. He doesn’t state that, but if you’re going to come to the table arguing that secular discourse is by definition unable to say anything about what’s good, then you’re pretty much in that camp.
You can dress it up in flowery language and quote Augustine, but it doesn’t give the Emperor any clothes.
“One of the reasons I am not a fan of fashionable literary criticism type stuff, is that they never say anything new.”
Or indeed anything. It’s more a place to live than a tool to utilise. An ideological comfort blanket for the politically impotent.
I won’t read Steven Smith unless someone gives me a very compelling reason to read it, but surely it’s laughable to suggest that adding religious convictions to the mix of public discourse will either (i) lead to a more profound debate about what really counts, or (ii) be able to give direction to the soi-dissant shallowness of secular discourse.
Indeed, reading Marci Hamilton’s eye-opening book, God vs. the Gavel, it is clear that introducing religious commitments into public discourse has a way of turning public discourse into a joke. Not only are religions and religious values multiple and conflicting, many of them are shallow and shallower when it comes to understanding the impact of religious reasoning on public debate and decision. Also obvious from that book is the mindlessness that results when religious reasons are introduced into secular processes of decision.
But an entire book suggesting that this is precisely what is lacking in our public discourse, based on the idea that secular reasoning has no secure basis, is surely as far wide of the mark as it is possible to get. It also, as I suggested earlier, seems to be based on a mistake, the mistake of thinking that there are no secular values, and that secular discourse cannot give rise to any. For that you need religion, apparently.
Fish and Smith obviously do more than just confuse the gap between fact and value. They misunderstand what it means to have values, and where they might come from and find some reasonable ground.
Unlike Russell (with tongue firmly in cheek I assume), this is an argument I wouldn’t want to see – that is, governments trying to sort out the true from the false religion. American religionists are already making it clear that they think society must have a religious foundation, since the founders thought that way (not); the fact that a lot of congressmen and women and Senators think this way is already making a mess of public discourse, as well as public decision making.
Marci Hamilton’s chapter on the prison system is a hilarious (but seriously so) demonstration of how helpless religious reasoning is when it comes to making decisions for the good of society. Religion has no secure basis, so religions and religious reasoning can be concocted on the spur of the moment, to suit any temporary interest. The idea that there are no secular reasons (values)is surely as assinine as it is possible to get. Fish had better go back to reading poetry.
Tongue very firmly in my cheek, Eric.
I’ve developed what I wrote earlier with a little bit more rigour over here: http://metamagician3000.blogspot.com/2010/02/doing-what-comes-supernaturally-fish-on.html
Alex, well I just don’t think “everything can be accounted for,” period. That’s an absurdly broad and woolly claim, of course, and one could offer Fish a charitable reading in which he meant [something], but I think the broadness and woolliness is the whole point (i.e. deliberate). That’s always one pole of this false dichotomy – believers understand that science can’t “account for everything” while “secularists” or atheists or positivists etc stupidly think it can.