Stumble it!Deconstructing Stanley Fish
posted in Philosophy by themaiden |O’Leary apparently thinks Stanley Fish makes sense, and perhaps he does… but not here.
To be fair, O’Leary isn’t responding to, or quoting, Fish directly but is citing Dinesh D’Souza’s TownHall portrayal of Fish’s thought, so perhaps it is just D’Souza who doesn’t make sense. But I’m not sure how to make the call. Fish, after all, is a post-modernist literary theorist which means he, by association with his calling, rates well below, say, therapists and crystal healers on the ’scum’ scale and well above MENSA on the mental masturbation scale. On top of that, Fish has made a career of saying stupid things. I wonder if O’Leary praises the idea ( as parsed by Brad DeLong ) that “people who think differently should be hated, terrorized, and scorned’? I wonder if she agrees that “There’s No Such Thing As Free Speech: And It’s a Good Thing, Too“? Still… benefit of the doubt and all, what does he, supposedly, have to say that so impresses O’Leary?
Fish observes that while religious people over the centuries have dug deeply into the questions of life, along come our shallow atheists who present arguments as if they first thought of them, arguments that Christians have long examined with a seriousness and care that is missing in contemporary atheist discourse.
First off, so what? You are an idiot if you pretend that significant contributions have not been made by the religious. And you are an idiot if you pretend– I’d say you misrepresent the case, create a straw man, if you say — that atheists ignore these contributions. Most contributions have been made by the religious. That is a fact of history, just as it a fact that most contribution ( to intellectual pursuits at least ) have been made by men. Second, this doesn’t mean that men have dug deeply and women and women are shallow, or that men have dug deeply and so they are the ones who should dig deeply, or that women who take up the digging deeply are automatically out of their league. Yet this muddled mess is just the sort of thing that seems to be implied– or hoped for, perhaps.
What else impresses her?
Harris, for example, writes that “there will probably come a time when we will achieve a detailed understanding of human happiness and of ethical judgments themselves at the level of the brain.” …. Fish comments, “Of course one conclusion that could be drawn is that the research will not pan out because moral intuitions are not reducible to physical processes. That may be why so few of the facts are in.”
Ummm… well that falls a little flat. I thought ID theorists were opposed to ‘just so’ stories, you know, like the ones Darwinists tell? That’s all Fish has here. What he’s said is… his response is… his retort… his damning coup de gras is … “Well, maybe its something else.”
Let that sink in.
Are you feeling the intellectual vacuum yet?
Another ‘conclusion’ could be… well… anything. This ought to have some weight, why?
In the D’Souza’s article but not quoted by O’Leary, Fish makes a couple of other foolish moves.
The first is this: Fish notes that critics of religion like Harris, Dawkins and Hitchens fault religion for the crazy behavior it engenders. He then notes that characters in the arguably religious “Pilgrim’s Progress” ask the same questions. His conclusion is “that the objections Harris, Dawkins and Hitchens make to religious thinking are themselves part of religious thinking.” He concludes, in other words, that Harris, Dawkins and Hitchens are thinking ‘religiously’. This makes about as much sense as claiming that a liberal is ‘thinking conservatively’ if that liberal presents a conservative talking point for purpose of addressing it.
Finally, Fish displays his ignorance.
Citing the atheists’ portrait of religion as unquestioning obedienece (sic), Fish writes, “I know of no religious framework that offers such a complacement(sic) picture of the life of faith, a life that is always presented as a minefield of difficulties, obstacles and temptations that must be negotiated by a limited creature in the effort to become aligned with the Infinite.”
Whatever might be espoused by the theologians, in reality ‘unquestioning obedience’ plays a big role in a great deal of religious practice, so Fish has a partial red herring here. ( Whatever his ‘deconstruction’ might tell him, I lived through precisely the ‘religious framework’ he claims doesn’t exist, and frankly, it isn’t hard to find examples of it. )
That said, true life is presented as “a minefield of difficulties, obstacles and temptations” but these “difficulties, obstacles and temptations” are presented as things to overcome in the pursuit of obedience. The ‘questioning’ is superfluous. The questioning is in many ways one of the obstacles.
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