The Trouble with Principle

Stanley Fish is an equal opportunity antagonist. A theorist who has taken on theorists, an academician who has riled the academy, a legal scholar and political pundit who has ruffled feathers left and right, Fish here turns with customary gusto to the trouble with principle. Specifically, Fish has a quarrel with neutral principles. The trouble? They operate by sacrificing everything people care about to their own purity. And they are deployed with equal highmindedness and equally absurd results by liberals and conservatives alike.

In this bracing book, Fish argues that there is no realm of higher order impartiality--no neutral or fair territory on which to stake a claim--and that those who invoke one are always making a rhetorical and political gesture. In the end, it is history and context, the very substance against which a purportedly abstract principle defines itself, that determines a principle's content and power. In the course of making this argument, Fish takes up questions about academic freedom and hate speech, affirmative action and multiculturalism, the boundaries between church and state, and much more. Sparing no one, he shows how our notions of intellectual and religious liberty--cherished by those at both ends of the political spectrum--are artifacts of the very partisan politics they supposedly transcend. The Trouble with Principle offers a provocative challenge to the debates of our day that no intellectually honest citizen can afford to ignore.

Fish's central thesis here is that there are no such things as neutral principles - those completely objective, a priori dicta, formula, and abstract ideas to base our 'neutral' theories on. From my experience with this book (and I think you will have the same experience), not only was Fish saying something quite differnt (less radical?!) than what his critics pretend he was saying, but I found myself in more agreement with Fish than I thought I would (or wanted to be!).

To make it brief: Fish is saying that whereas intellectuals like to think that we derive theories from neutral principles ("We value freedom, liberty and individual autonomy; therefore we shall create a policy of free-markets."), it is usually the opposite that takes place: we figure out what our ideology is and THEN we quest for the 'neutral principles' that will justify it. ("I believe in the free-market; the free-market emphasises liberty, freedom, and individual autonomy, so I will use those to justify my preferences.") More directly, the neutral principles, Fish writes, are not _a priori_ but _a posteriori_. Actually his most revealing example (towards the end of the book, as I recall) was that of christians struggling to 'justify' creation science by using, of all things, the postmodern criticism that science (or evolution, at least) is simply ideology masked as empiricism. These christian thinkers even CITE POSTMODERN THEORIESTS AS AUTHORITIES. This is fishy (excuse the pun) becuase, as Fish writes, there is no way these christian thinkers would have aligned themselves with the post-modern argument (that they usually criticize) unless they found the argument, not true, but useful. That is, whereas christians might believe in objectivity of facts as a general principle, they don't really mean that. They'll gladly switch to the postmodern 'relativist' argument if it suits their needs.

He's not ONLY bashing the christins or the right wing in this book (his criticism is dispersed over all ideology). Rather, through 'deconstruction', he is trying to show that ALL general principles are constructed in the service of conclusions ALREADY REACHED. I do not take it that far as I think that in science and law, for instance, where the rules are already somewhat 'set', one can reach conclusions not ideological by nature, therefore I found myself disagreeing with Fish's assessment of the first amendment as ideologically laden.

Still, I found the book a warm antidote to some of the problems in this petty world I sometimes call crackademia. Particularly, I can vividly recall not being able to control my laughter (signifying agreement with Fish) in, of all places, my university library, during a chapter where Fish criticizes academic philosophers. Philosophers, he says, think that in order for morality, epistemology, of what have us, to work, there needs to be a coherent, internally consistent system or theory (and it is the philosophers job to argue for one). Therefore, moral philosophers are baffled because morality (as it is in the real world) doesn't seem to follow one system, any system. The philosopher wants a sound argument for a cogent system, looking at human action as somehow extracted from this system. The philosopehr wants first principles (without those, we can't act). Fish's response? "Open your eyes, look at the world, and realize, dear philosopher, that people survive without your philosophic systems and first principles." The philosophers job, then, is not to concoct general principles or argue for systems that nobody will use anyway, but to actually look at behavior, action, and things as they are in the real world, not the fake one philosophers gleefully construct for themselves. The chapter is the last one called "On Truth and Toilets" and is alone worth the price of the book!

To end, while I do not agree with Fish's ideas as applied as extremely as he applies them, I think there is much more truth to what Fish says than critics let on. Fish does not say that judgment is impossible; he only says that neutral judgment (an oxymoron) is impossible. We judge from where we are; our first person subjective viewpoint. Nor is Fish a nihilist. If the world is not objective, FIsh is not saying it is nihililstic, but _intersubjective_. Basically, may the best first-person argument win. Whether Fish seems like your cup of tea or makes your stomach churn, you will not come away from this book unchanged or unscathed.


Posturing, pseudointellectual hooey.   September 26, 2003
 8 out of 21 found this review helpful

All Stanley Fish does is rephrase Machiavelli and Hasan I Sabah. "Nothing is true, all is permissible, and I will gladly lie to you if it advances my interests." He's a phony, his prose is repetitive and self-congratulatory, and his constant and shameless self-promotion is nauseating to behold.
He is the glib and gladhanding public face of an utterly useless and morally repugnant philosophy, and he has as much as admitted--in this book as well as his other works-- that he'd be happy in a totalitarian society as long as he and his fellow postmodernism-peddlers were the ones making the rules and burying the bodies.