Aristotle Had It Right

...Early on in this new book he says ""principle does not exist," but it turns out that all he means by this is that "abstractions like fairness, impartiality, mutual respect, and reasonableness" cannot be defined except in "ways which are hostage to some partisan agenda...

...The ink was barely dry on Plato's parchment, however, when his brightest student began to mock the very idea of such an Idea...

...A lot of what liberals call "universal moral principles" are attempts to sanctify their own decent, tolerant, openminded, efforts to bring about social justice and greater human happiness...

...No noncontroversial principle can supply guidance...

...We anti-Platonists are all for rationality, if that simply means talking things over with other people, justifying our beliefs and desires to our neighbors, avoiding violence wherever possible, and trying to reach a consensus...

...Our mutual respect does not, and should not, extend to anti-Semitic hate speech...

...But principles exist, nevertheless...

...Aristotle thought that making moral choices and taking political decisions was never going to be much like doing applied geometry...

...I would bet that elsewhere in the world Fish's numerous essays in law reviews are being translated by professors of law, some of whom probably have no idea that Fish is a distinguished Miltonist...

...This reworking is what we call intellectual and moral progress...

...Fish started out as a teacher of English literature and became famous for studies of John Milton and George Herbert before turning to philosophy...

...But that does mean we think decisions should be made by "arbifrary will" or "blind passion" or something else that can be contrasted invidiously with Reason...

...It does not help Fish's case for him to say on one page that "academic freedom is a bad idea, a dubious principle," and on the next that "I am in favor of academic freedom and would do anything in my powerto preserve it...

...It will dawn on them that the only coherent moral view is one that treats all members of the species as members of our moral community...

...For Aristotelians—John Stuart Mill and John Dewey, for example—a moral principle is, at most, a suggestion about what action might lead to the best consequences...

...A lot of what social conservatives call "divine commands" are the controversial interpretations they have put on Scriptural texts in order to sanctify their own mean, resentful, squinty-eyed, disapproval of their neighbors...

...The effect of invoking either is to pat yourself on the back, to suggest that your side of an argument is supported by something larger than yourself...

...He offers the edifying and cheering spectacle of a brilliant scholar strolling into the midst of academic disciplines other than the one he was trained in, joining in the highly professionalized games being played, and winning...

...To illustrate Fish's point about principles, consider what might seem an uncontroversial deliverance of reason: that it is always wrong to deprive others of their hard-earned property...

...But we are for this because we have been acculturated into a relatively decent, tolerant society, not because we have hearkened to the commands of a truth-tracking faculty called "Reason" found in all adult human beings—commands that our differently acculturated racist and homophobic fellow-citizens are somehow too deaf to hear, or too unruly to obey...

...But anti-Platonist philosophers like Dewey and Fish himself are still philosophers, and still political liberals...

...But does that mean that redistribution by means of income taxes is always unjust...

...If we do not agree about which set of consequences would be "best," principles are not going to help us settle the issue...

...In a certain sense, we are...

...This comparison of the actual with the ideal would tell them what to do...

...But political liberalism will, with any luck, still be going strong...

...This seems like idle paradox-mongering...

...Fish has as much, or more, analytical and argumentative acuity as his opponents (most of whom are professors of law or philosophy), and he writes much better prose...

...In the last 20 years or so, he has been writing more and more on philosophical topics and has become a figure for the Platonists to reckon with...

...Reason" is on a par with "God...

...While I was reading Fish's book, I got a Christmas letter from a fellow philosophy professor in Poland, telling me that he was bringing out a collection of Fish's essays in Polish translation...

...Those who think Plato was on the right track are convinced that we need firm, unshakable moral principles—principles that will tell us what political institutions to have, what laws to write, and how to resolve painful moral dilemmas...

...author, "Achieving Our Country" Plato invented philosophy because he hoped to rise above politics...

...For him, Fish counts as a philosophical colleague...

...Rather, it would always be a matter of selecting the best available compromise, muddling through, sorting out the likely consequences of the alternatives and trying to act for the best...

...There are no skyhooks, and even if there were they would not help much...

...The rationalist heirs of Plato and Kant include some of the most eminent American philosophers—for example, Cristine Korsgaard, chair of the Philosophy Department at Harvard and author of a tightly-argued defense of moral principle called The Sources of Normativity...

...In particular, the idea that the liberal good guys have something called Reason or Principle on their side, whereas the fundamentalist won - sers do not, has got to go...

...The price of attempting to rise above politics is vacuity...

...Fish, andphilosophers like myself who share his suspicion of skyhooks, are often said to be "irrationalists...

...Both rhetorical gestures are equally vacuous...

...To philosophers like Fish and myself, this claim of moral redemption through rational reflection seems utterly implausible...

...Even if a voice from Heaven thundered "Thou shalt not kill," we would still have to figure out how to interpret that command when faced with, for instance, invading armies, unwanted pregnancies, or incurable patients begging to be put out of their misery...

...Politics, interest, partisan conviction, and belief are the locations of morality...

...Those who sympathize with Aristotle think that appeals to principle are merely rhetorical devices—useful when summing up the case for your side of the argument, or when making your painful and dubious decision look good, but bereft of independent authority...

...Ever since, philosophers have divided into two camps...

...The moral Fish draws from such examples is that the whole idea of an "tincontroversial deliverance of reason" should be abandoned...

...Philosophers like Korsgaard believe that if a Nazi or a mafioso really thinks things through—really uses his truth-tracking faculties for all they are worth—they will become liberals like us: they will recognize that excluding Jews, or enemies of the capo, from their moral universe was an irrational thing to do...

...Instead, we think of human beings as networks of beliefs and desires, mostly built into us by the parents and the societies that nurtured us...

...Yet Fish would, or should, be perfectly prepared to grant that there is more free speech in Chicago than in Beijing...

...What do we say about the impoverished woman who steals the expensive life-saving medicines her child needs...

...He wanted a skyhook...

...At one point Fish makes this odd identification explicit, saying that "liberalism is just one recent name" for "the project of philosophy," by which he means the project of Platonism...

...Fish sums up one of his essays by saying: "Politics, after all, is what is usually opposed to morality, especially in the texts of liberal theorists...

...Fortunately, we have enough spare neurons so that we can— and constantly do—rework these beliefs and desires into larger and larger, more and more coherent, networks...

...It is in and through them that one's sense of justice and of the 'good' lives and is put into action...

...Stanley Fish is one of the most vigorous and effective champions of the Aristotle-Mill-Dewey side of the debate...

...In The Trouble With Principle, his latest collection of papers, Fish deploys a master argument that goes like this: The trouble with principles is that they are either so abstract and contentless that all the work is done filling in the details, or else sufficiently concrete as to be very controversial indeed...

...we are opponents of the tradition of philosophical rationalism that runs from Plato through Kant to the present...

...We should not," Aristotle archly rebuked his teacher, "seek more certainty than the subject matter admits...

...One of Fish's previous books was offputtingly titled There's No Such Thing As Free Speech— and a Good Thing Too...

...For instance, we liberals cannot tolerate enemies of tolerance beyond a certain point...

...I hope that rationalism in philosophy may someday seem as quaint as fundamentalism in religion now does...

...Both are names for a skyhook...

...But although Fish is perhaps the best representative of his side of the argument, he sometimes allows himself to go overboard...

...It would be good, for example, if he kicked his habit of saying that something or other "does not exist...

...Indeed they cannot...

...As soon as we get down to the details, we are going to start talking about the overall consequences of a decision, rather than trying to deduce the decision from general principles...

...They are just not all they are cracked up to be...

...In his utopia, the philosopher-kings would look up at something he called "the Idea of the Good," and then look back down to the transient and messy political situation in Greece...

...All he needs for his purposes is to demonstrate that we cannot make the First Amendment (an admirable constitutional provision) into an unambiguous directive for judicial decision-making, and that the judges will get no help from philosophers' "analyses" of concepts like "free," or of distinctions like "speech vs...

...There will always be controversy about what those consequences are, and how they should be evaluated...

...Again, Fish would do well to stop running together ordinary political liberalism (the dream of social justice that I strongly suspect he shares with Mill and Dewey) with rationalist philosophers' defenses of this political stance...

...action...

...The quarrel between Plato and Aristotle continues in contemporary intellectual life...

...What I have attempted here is a reversal of this judgment...

...Politics, interest, partisan conviction, mere belief these are the forces that must be kept at bay...

...Anybody who reads both Fish's and Korsgaard's books will have a good sense of where the action is in philosophy today —of how the age-old struggle between the Platonists and their critics stands at present...

...Fish has shown this, but he has not shown that there is no such thing as free speech, and he should stop trying to do so...

...We reject Plato's idea that the soul is divided into higher and lower faculties...

...They would deduce the morally and politically correct decision from philosophical principles, just as geometers deduce theorems from axioms...