Fish, Stanley. The Trouble With Principle. Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1999. 328 pages

Reviewed by Lucerne French Snipes

Twenty-five years ago Stanley Fish saved me from worshipping an idol: "principle" as "The Truth." We turn "principle" into "Principle" when we exaggerate the status of ideas abstracted from experience. When we assume that our Principles are unchanging, transcendent standards, not situated in experience, we cross the line from worshipping God to worshipping our Beliefs. Those who wouldn't worship God, in any case, can still make the mistake of worshipping Principle. So the trouble with principle is what we do with it.

Once we have idolized Principle we fall into two camps: the believers and the skeptics. The believers have The Truth and are intolerant of untruths. The skeptics, suspending judgment until The Truth is undeniable, in the meantime worship the Principle of Tolerance. Both camps require transcendent Truth. Holding out for The Truth is an endorsement of Principle, the mirror image of believing one "has" The Truth. Skeptics will abandon their relativism once they too "have" The Truth.

In his book The Trouble With Principle, Stanley Fish once again exposes the either/or dilemma we create for ourselves. Rather than succumb to the tyranny of Absolutist Truth, we overreact with Relativism. But both extremes, despite appeals to transcendent Principle, are disguises of political positions and power plays, because even our abstractions are earthly products, framed in language derived from experience. And so, if it is politics all the way down, and all principle is situated, let's admit it and reconsider how we make commitments.

A lawyer as well as a literary critic and Milton scholar, Fish devotes much of The Trouble With Principle to the freedom of speech and the separation of church and state. Another reviewer might focus on the legal analysis which comprises several of these essays. But the underlying purpose, which unifies this collection, is to expose the political nature of Relativism. Once relativism is understood as the mirror opposite of absolutism, Fish comes on strong. He calls his target relativists Liberals, which is misleading, because he often takes stands that could be called politically liberal (e.g., he is for affirmative action, e.g.). "My target," writes Fish, "is never liberalism in the sense of a set of particular political positions on debated issues; rather my target is Liberalism with a capital L, that is liberalism as an effort to bracket metaphysical or religious views.. ."(pp. 285-286). Fish is really attacking the deification of Tolerance, i.e. Relativism, as it paralyzes people when they need to take a stand.

When we take a stand, Fish explains, we need not invoke Absolute Truth. Instead, we acknowledge that, although our knowledge is limited and our information will probably change, to not take a stand would be wrong. To be paralyzed by "mere opinion" is to refuse responsibility, a political position Fish deplores. Situated as we are, we are where the action is, and to refuse to act until our decisions can be unsituated, ratified by absolute Principle, is to cop out. Fish believes that "in a world where nothing is fixed or permanent and the relationship between present urgencies and ultimate ends is continually changing, one must take one's constructs not less seriously ... but more seriously. For if we wait for constructs that are in touch with eternity, we will fail to act in moments when action is possible for limited creatures" (p. 239).

Although Fish has been called a relativist, and he may have been one in his reader-response days, he acknowledged in class twenty-five years ago that he had changed. He recognized the paralyzing effects of relativism years ago. The Trouble With Principle is about moral judgment and responsible action, but it reverses the location of morality from theory to politics: "Politics, interest, partisan conviction, and belief are the locations of morality. It is in and through them that one's sense of justice and of the 'good' lives and is put into action. Immorality resides in the mantras of liberal theory-fairness, impartiality, and mutual respect-all devices for painting the world various shades of gray" (p. 242).

If, as Fish says, theory is the liberal's game, and "liberals don't have to win the theory game in order to win; all they have to do is get antiliberals to play it" (p. 221), one wonders if Fish, the antiliberal, hasn't played in vain. Nevertheless, Fish argues strongly and invokes the authoritative example of his specialty, John Milton, because Milton's view is also "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" (p. 247). At the outset, on page 2, Fish tells us he is "with Milton," whose view "is exactly the reverse" (p. 247) of liberalism. "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" (p. 247). And "Satan is the very type of those who would reason before they believe" (p. 267). And, in case you still suspect Fish of relativism, he invokes Dante, who cast liberals into the seventh level of hell.

Without a transcendent anchor, yet with passionate belief, Fish acknowledges that his thesis is "resisted by both the right and the left" (p. 280). As long as Principle is given transcendent status, Fish's alternative view of situated principles which can change may seem relativistic. "To be sure," says Fish, "the process is circular, but as the operation of a dictionary is circular ... It is beliefs that alter beliefs ... and among the beliefs internal to any structure will be a belief as to what might be a reason for its own revision" (p. 281).

Stanley Fish is currently dean of the College of Liberal Arts and Sciences at the University of Illinois at Chicago. He is also the author of How Milton Works, Surprised by Sin. and There's No Such Thing as Free Speech, and It's a Good Thing Too. Nevertheless, Fish has managed to challenge/demonize both the conservatives and the liberals without being burned at the stake, thanks to the "Tolerance" he despises.