Reply to Stanley Fish

Stanley Fish is a college administrator and public intellectual who's done a lot of work on interpretation. I got into his work on interpretation as part of research on what we do when we "interpret" requirements documents and the "needs of the user".

Fish blogs at the New York Times under the name Think Again. He's made some interesting comments, but is turning yet again into a neoconservative who uses complex arguments in defense of the status quo.

I have no beef with complexity. Instead I find the arguments superficial at key points.

I will post my reply to Fish's post on the application of Kant to Affirmative Action here on my blog, because not all my replies to Fish make it through moderation. My posts, I think, try to speak to him as an equal and to engage his thought, which makes them as verbose as Fish's own.

Dr. Fish:

I'll start with two facts. This year, only 33 African American students were admitted to UCLA, the lowest count in 25 years. Last year, two women nonstudents were brutally assaulted by the Duke University lacrosse team which had advertised the event with references to American Psycho, the novel by Brett Easton Ellis describing a Yuppie murderer.

Now, as to Kant.

Fish confronts the "naive" view of Kant, that his moral and political theory can be interpreted today to license Affirmative Action, with Fish's dour reading in there's a text in the class with a more or less fixed meaning that the author meant.

As far as I can tell, after a sort of interregnum in which we creatively read all sorts of liberatory messages into Milton, Kant, and the United States Constitution, we now have to return to the intent of the author(s).

However, at the very beginning of Groundwork for a Metaphysic of Moral lies a strange passage.

This is Kant's statement that the only action we can KNOW to be a good is a GOOD WILL.

I think Fish misses the fact that there is no bright line between thought and action. I think he'd have to agree that thought is a subclass of action in which we have to obey with a good will what we know about the moral law.

An objection would be that we can do no mischief in that action which is thought and whose physical evidence is the philosophers EKG.

Not everyone, of course, believes this. Most interestingly, religious people believe that there are "bad" thoughts, in many cases including, but not restricted to, sexy thoughts. Doubt of the central tenets of Catholicism was in traditional Catholicism a "sin".

To which I think Fish might reply (based on his own posts here) that in the Protestant and American tradition, which I guess he's adopted in part as a (secularized?) Jewish person, "thought is free", as Caliban says.

But Fish elsewhere makes a strong case for the liberal state to leave thought alone.

Nonetheless, the philosopher has at a minimum to behave himself according to a partial and bootstrapping moral code in the interval of time (which can for some philosophers extend for a lifetime) while he is arriving at the strong principles to which Fish makes reference to.

He, the philosopher that is, cannot use his philosophical state as an excuse for ravishing the serving maid.

But if this is at all the case, then a reading of the Federalist Papers, a Life of Milton, or of Kant shows that for the philosopher or public intellectual, this intermediate period extends throughout his life!

Milton was not as sure about the doctrine and discipline of Divorce as his rolling 17th century prose makes us, who speak more tentatively and sometimes with a rising inflection at the end of declaratives??, feel that Milton was a self-identical male entitled by fixity of principle to speak from beyond the grave in defense of divorce, or freedom of speech.

Nor was Tom Jefferson so sure as to the reliability of a single Constitutional interpretation, and his "tree of liberty", he famously averred, might need refreshing and perhaps replanting.

Finally, Kant's infamous lack of style was in part a work in progress.

Another example of a work in progress, according to the editors of the New Oxford, was Shakespeare: the New Oxford Shakespeare provides two versions of Lear for the price of one because it appears to the editors that Shakespeare, like any first-rate artist, treated his own production as never quite adequate to the vision.

In fact, there's an entire aesthetic theory, becoming ever more visible thanks to the hard work of Edmund Jephcott, a translator of Adorno, in which the work is always the reproduction of an almost ineffable idea, and this for Adorno was made evident by problems in musical interpretation.

This means that if we return to the beginning of the Groundwork of a Metaphysic of Morals, we realize that even if we can THINK without sin, we cannot in the real world exist in a sin-free judicial space while condemning, as has Fish's new best friend Justice Clarence "who put the pubic hair in my Coke can" Thomas, men to death.

Even if thought is free, as Caliban and Luther thought, actual interpretation of what it might mean to redress that exclusionary racism which belied what a university was isn't just thought it is also action which in applying principles has itself to be principled.

To by inaction reduce gradually the representation of African Americans is to be a judge acting outside of equity and justice in the name of a higher justice. Hey, they tried that in the Soviet Union.

Ordinary people, and poets like Shakespeare, realize that it's a far trickier business to be a judge than we think it is. The judge or university administrator can't be blind to the effect of his high principle. Otherwise, in ways that remind me of Judge Richard A. Posner, the judge becomes a tinpot god, not himself subject to his own rulings.

Dr. Fish, this isn't "utilitarianism" at all. It has no name because it is the ordinary, and ordinarily silenced, moral intuition that "we are all mortal" as John F. Kennedy, no philosopher, said.