Fish????

[Terrance]

"If Nietzsche's already fabulous powers of prophecy had been
specific enough to dream up a couple of characters to
dramatize the deconstruction of Truth with a capital T that
he foresaw, he would have dreamed of Fish and Butler and
thrust them into Thus Spake Zarathustra."  
				---Wolfe, Harper's essay

Maybe Fish is the perfect man to attack? His brand of
"Reader Response" has been a disaster and his recent
writings attempt to demonstrate that there is no such thing
as "the good" and equally no rational foundation on which we
may stand in order to formulate ethical behavior of any
kind: cognitive ethics of the sort that "idiot" and
"childish" Plato (building on that "misogynist" "proponent
of slavery" Socrates) or the "discriminating" Kant (building
on that "dead white greek" "pigeonholer" Aristotle)
formulated are as empty as morality founded on some
conception of a divine being.  All are self-delusional. 

"Where else can the millions recently freed from the late
Soviet tyranny turn? To America's clergy? Alas, except for
the rare brace Roman Catholic padre, America's clergy have
become irrelevant to public opinion, unless the yield to the
temptation---and many have---to become intellectuals
themselves. That leaves our academic philosophers, our year
2000 versions of Imanuel Kant, John Stuart Mill, and David
Hume. Here we come upon one of the choicest chapters in the
human comedy. Today, at any leading American University, a
Kant, with all his dithering about God, freedom, and
immortality, or even Hume, wouldn't survive a year in
graduate school, much less get hired as an instructor." 
				---Wolfe, Harper's essay


Theory, Theory, Theory, but what of Practice? What the Hell
do Americans know about theory without practice? Isn't it
America that stands and has stood against such Theories that
play dangerous with the language of evil? Yes, isn't Thomas
Pynchon concerned about this too? You bet, Jackson! Why is
it that we forget? What Wolfe says is true, it's almost as
if we have defeated the Nazis and the Communists in vain.
With the Holocaust only 60 odd years behind us, are we in a
position to forget? Why should comfortable
university-trotting professors without an apparent ounce of
fidelity discharge such dangerous words to students and in
print without having to face the consequences of their
words? Oh yes, it is because words have no consequences
other than rhetorical ones.  Why did literary critics and
critics-cum-philosophers embrace and advanced Fish in the
fist place? That is a good question. Politics? Moreover,
what have these muddy political waters produced?  Crossed
off  disciples and inside out and backward thinkers. Where
is Dewey's practice? Lost in the school of new fish,
swallowed up by the great theoretic Fish, dissolved in the
French theoretical waters turned wine that invalidates the
appearance of everything but the Fish. This is the great
triumph of theory. Formal academic philosophy is, as
everyone has recognized for decades, completely sterile. Why
does Wolfe's Conrad have no verisimilitude?  Is it because
Wolfe has never met a black person or been to jail? Or is it
because "bear and forbear" is not theory without practice?
Who could take Epicureanism or Stoicism seriously as viable
ways to live today? The boundless abyss that separates us
from founders of this republic and the ancient world, when
philosophy was a living presence, is full of sound and
theory signifying nothing.