I'm a bit heart-weary right now to pursue the question Stanley Fish poses (well, poses and answers, really), but here I go anyway. Maybe it will cheer me up.
Does philosophy matter? By philosophy, Fish means a comprehensive, all-informing belief in the nature of Truth. For instance, you could believe that Truth--the capital-T, it's really there Truth--exists in terms of things like morals or God or the meaning of life. One might call this brand of beliefs foundationalism, since it asserts the ultimate existence of a foundation, a moral-ethical-theological-what-have-you grounding for a host of other, smaller beliefs.
Alternately, you could believe that there's no such thing as Truth, at least no Truth that we as humans can perceive in any unadulterated way. This, of course, would be something like a postmodern antifoundationalism, which would point out that the ideas and ideals a particular time/place/society reveres as absolute, couldn't-be-more-obvious Truth turn out to be bounded to that time/place/society. Other times, other places, other peoples turn out to have their own unique foundations.
Now, the foundationalist might say that those other times simply got it wrong,or perhaps, vice-versa, that they got it right while we in the here and now have it wrong. Either way, the Truth actually exists. Moral Absolutes exist as certainly as planet Pluto does. (See what I did there?) Being trained in postmodernist historiography, I lean more toward the antifoundationalist side of things. Historical study can be awfully hard on notions of transcendent or universal Truths of humanity. The more you search the breadth of human experience through history and geography for a universal Truth of homo sapiens, the more likely you are to find exceptions to just about any Truth you can assert beyond, well, mortality (and even then, any anthropologist can tell you that how cultures conceive of dying and death varies radically across time and space).
But does being a foundationalist or an antifoundationalist really matter? Fish says, more or less, "Not really." At least, he clarifies, your position on Truth generally exists without the world-shattering consequences many would attribute to it. To quote from his "Truth but No Consequences" article I cited in yesterday's post:
"That is to say, whatever theory of truth you might espouse will be irrelevant to your position on the truth of a particular matter because your position on the truth of a particular matter will flow from your sense of where the evidence lies, which will in turn flow from the authorities you respect, the archives you trust, and so on" (Fish 390).Thus, argues Fish, it's specious for foundationalists to point to antifoundationalists and say (for instance), "Well, since you don't believe in absolute truths, why don't you step out of a window since gravity's just a socially contingent construction" or (and this is a favorite) "So, since you don't believe in absolute truth, on what grounds would you be able to take a moral stand against someone like Hitler?" Beliefs on particular matters like the persistence of gravity or the wrongness of genocide, notes Fish, don't require the backup of an unquestioning faith in Universal Truths. One needn't be a professional physicist, in other words, to not want to fall out of a window (nor does one have to be an ethicist to express a brute-level disgust at the idea of hurting or killing other people).
Nor, Fish continues, is it any better for an antifoundationalist to claim superiority over a foundationalist via some comparison to cultish fundamentalism: "You just believe X because you aren't smart enough or brave enough to question your core beliefs. Anyone who doesn't agree with you in every detail must be an infidel." Plenty of people would dispute such a characterization, actively making an argument about the need for constant self-reflection by referring to Foundational Truths like the goodness of tolerance or liberty. One needn't be antifoundationalist, in other words, to be critical, ethical, or nuanced.
Indeed, Fish concludes, the metaphysical position on truth (foundationalist or antifoundationalist) is by definition a general metaphysical position, detached from "mundane and empirical" matters of a particular situation. Governing such mundane/empircal matters (Fish's examples: how can God exist in the face of the Holocaust? and what are the contingent historical situations that gave rise to the Holocaust?) are not metaphysics but the requirements of a particular discipline--theology (theodicy, to be specific) for the one example and history for the other. Each discipline has its own set of investigative methods, its own rules for defining questions and finding answers, and none of these flows necessarily from one or the other position, antifoundationalist or foundationalist. You can do good or bad historical work, good or bad theodicy, good or bad just about anything regardless of whether or not you believe in Transcendent Truths or in contingent truths.
It's a provocative argument Fish unfurls, especially as he does so in his signature grumpy-old-iconoclast mode. I don't always agree with Fish--I don't totally agree with him in this line of argument, for example--but I nearly always find him a bracing read. He makes me think more carefully about the assumptions that underlie my scholarship, my activism, and of course my faith.
More tomorrow,
JF
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