Stanley Fish - Why we all can not get along

Why We All Can't Get Along
-Stanley Fish
(some excerpts)

#1

I make the point strongly because it is so alien to the modern liberal- enlightenment picture of cognitive activity in which the mind is conceived of as a calculating and assessing machine that is open to all thoughts and closed to none. In this picture the mind is in an important sense not yet settled; and indeed settling, in the form of a fixed commitment to an idea or a value, is a sign of cognitive and moral infirmity. Milton's view is exactly the reverse: in the absence of a fixed commitment-of a first premise that cannot be the object of thought because it is the enabling condition of thought-cognitive activity cannot get started. One's consciousness must be grounded in an originary act of faith-a stipulation of basic value-from which determinations of right and wrong, relevant and irrelevant, real and unreal, will then follow.

For the modern liberal, beliefs are what the mind scrutinizes and judges by rational criteria that are themselves hostage to no belief in particular; for Milton, beliefs-in God or in oneself or in the absolute contingency of material circumstances-are the content of a rationality that cannot scrutinize them because it rests on them. Milton's motto is not "seeing is believing," but "believing is seeing"; and since what you see marks the boundaries of your knowledge, believing is also knowing; and since it is on the basis of what you know-whether what you know is that there is a God or that there isn't one-that you act, believing is acting. What you believe is what you see is what you know is what you do is what you are.

It is a tenet of liberal enlightenment faith that belief and knowledge are distinct and separable and that even if you do not embrace a point of view you can still understand it. This is the credo Satan announces in Paradise Regained when he says "most men admire / Virtue, who follow not her lore." That is, it is always possible to appreciate a way of life that is not yours. Milton would respond that unless the way of life is yours, you have no understanding of it, and that is why, he declares in another place, that a man who would write a true poem must himself be a true poem and can only praise or even recognize worthy things if he is himself worthy.

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#2

“Moreover, the belief whose prior assumption determines what will be heard as reasonable is not itself subject to the test of reasonableness. Reason's chain does not ratify it, but proceeds from it. After all, Augustine explains, the logical validity of a chain of inference is independent of the validity or nonvalidity of the proposition with which the chain begins: "Correct inferences may be made concerning false as well as true propositions." It follows that a conclusion reached will be really-as opposed to formally-true only if a true proposition anchors it, and "the truth of a proposition is inherent in itself"; that is, its truth cannot be established by some procedure to which it must submit. A reasonable mind, then, is a mind closed to the possibility that certain basic propositions-Augustine's example is "Christ is risen"-could be questioned. A reasonable mind is a mind that refuses to be open.

Of course an open mind, a mind ready at any moment to jettison even its most cherished convictions, is the very definition of "reasonable" in a post-Enlightenment liberal culture; and in the ears of those who have been socialized into that culture, a position like Augustine's will have the sound of obvious irrationality. That is certainly how John Stuart Mill, with whom Milton is often linked, incorrectly, as a precursor of modern thought, hears it. For the Mill of On Liberty, what "no reasonable person would believe" is that the highest value is the value of obedience. Mill is incredulous before a philosophy according to which "all the good of which humanity is capable is comprised by obedience," and he is aghast at an ethics that requires nothing of man but "the surrendering of himself to the will of God." He thinks it barbarous that Christians hold obstinately to an article of faith and then "stigmatize those who hold the contrary opinion as bad and immoral men." That is no way, he complains, to know the truth, which can be known only "by hearing what can be said about it by persons of every variety of opinion." It is a man's obligation to keep "his mind open to criticism on his opinions" and "to listen to all that could be said against him." He must strike the stance not of the "impassioned partisan," but of "the calmer and more interested bystander" who exercises his "judicial faculty" and sits "in intelligent judgment." The duty of the reasonable man is to be tolerant of all views, and he identifies intolerance with religious thought, for "in the minds of almost all religious persons . . . the duty of toleration is admitted with tacit reserves"; that is, with the reserve of whatever position they hold sacred. It is intolerance that leads Christians to "teach infidels to be just to Christianity" while they themselves show no disposition to be "just to infidelity."

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#3

“This is a very powerful argument, and one to which I shall return, but it is not the argument I will finally want to stress, because to use it as a weapon against the doctrine of liberal toleration is to win a debating point but concede the larger point by accepting toleration as the final measure of judgment. If you persuade liberalism that its dismissive marginalizing of religious discourse is a violation of its own chief principle, all you will gain is the right to sit down at liberalism's table where before you were denied an invitation; but it will still be liberalism's table that you are sitting at, and the etiquette of the conversation will still be hers. That is, someone will now turn and ask, "Well, what does religion have to say about this question?" And when, as often will be the case, religion's answer is doctrinaire (what else could it be?), the moderator (a title deeply revealing) will nod politely and turn to someone who is presumed to be more reasonable. To put the matter baldly, a person of religious conviction should not want to enter the marketplace of ideas but to shut it down, at least insofar as it presumes to determine matters that he believes have been determined by God and faith. The religious person should not seek an accommodation with liberalism; he should seek to rout it from the field, to extirpate it, root and branch.

rest of the article here

http://www.firstthings.com/ftissues/ft9602/articles/fish.html