I was dismayed to read in your August issue the review by Kenneth R. Craycraft, Jr., of Stanley Fish’s There’s No Such Thing as Free Speech. I have noticed lately in certain other “conservative” publications a tendency for some self-styled conservatives to try to derive some benefit from so-called “postmodern” ideas, on the theory, as Craycraft puts it, that “the enemies of our enemies are our friends, no matter where we find them.” But I had thought that Chronicles at least was safe from this serious corruption. Apparently I was wrong.

Craycraft seems to think that such individuals as Fish—or Jameson, Rorty, etc.—have successfully “subverted” (a favorite word of theirs) the claims of pure rationality, etc., of the liberals (or whatever term one chooses for the other side). That leaves the ground clear for the rebuilding of religious faith, for example. Alas, this analysis makes at least four serious errors.

First, what Craycraft thinks are caricatures of Fish’s position are actually more insightful about deconstructionism than is Craycraft himself. The basic unacknowledged premises of this ideology are: first, everything is always political, including language and literature—this they have cribbed from Marx; and, second, there is no aspect of truth, in reality or in the text, that transcends the cultural context of the writer. Alas, the caricaturists have been unfair to poor Fish, who actually upholds truth, according to Craycraft. He cites a passage in which Fish states that we can “rely on truths that according to our present lights seem indisputable.” Our present lights? Seem indisputable? This is a claim that there is, in the last analysis, no real truth or no truth that we can really know. It is precisely the claim of the ancient Sophists, without one iota of originality and with no Socrates or Cardinal John Henry Newman to argue effectively against it.

Second, the analysis fails to distinguish the soft and hard versions of the deconstructionist doctrine and then to determine which of these is upheld by Fish. The soft version would be: a writer’s (or a reader’s) cultural-historical context influences his view of reality and of any given book he is writing or reading. The hard version: this context inevitably and completely determines his view. The soft version is, of course, true, but trivial because no one has ever denied it for a moment. It allows for an element of transcendence and freedom, which we intuitively know exists in the remarkable individual. The hard version of the doctrine might be interesting as far as the history of philosophy is concerned because no one appears to have made such a total claim before, but it suffers from one little problem: it is manifestly false. Thus Fish is either trivial or deluded.

Third, the “interpretive community” of which Fish speaks exists in an ontological and epistemological vacuum, given his belief that truth issues from this community. Craycraft, somewhat pathetically, embraces this aspect of Fish’s theory because it undoubtedly reminds him of the Church as interpretive community and therefore acts as a counterweight to the excessive individualism of liberalism. The Church is a community in which inheres the Holy Spirit, one of the three persons of the Trinity. It is therefore the vessel of the highest immutable truths, those of God. But of course Craycraft, being a theologian, has taken Theology 101 and already knows this. Fish, by contrast, considers all interpretive communities as equal and as generators of meaning rather than recipients of transcendent meaning. Arrogantly, he states that he personally has not received revelation and so cannot accept it. Does this give comfort to Craycraft in his acceptance of Fish as a champion of the struggle against individualism? Actually, conservatives must always uphold a robust individualism in the context of acceptance of a higher moral code that constrains destructive behavior. Fish is anarchic in his impulses; for this reason, as C.S. Lewis might put it, he is attacking liberalism from below, not from above.

Fourth, Craycraft simply misses the outright evil in Fish. Admittedly, this is something hard to discern. Fish’s sarcastic, sneering attitude is a mask for an underlying rage and will to power. Perhaps easier to understand for Craycraft would be Fish’s secret campaign to persuade the provost of Duke to block the appointment of any faculty who were members of the National Association of Scholars to key committees involving tenure or curriculum decisions. This is the man praised by Craycraft for his “devastating salvo against liberal intolerance

        —Jonathan Chaves
Chairman, Department of
East Asian Languages and Literatures
George Washington University
Washington, D.C.

Kenneth R. Craycraft Replies:

Professor Chaves says that a “basic unacknowledged” premise of deconstructionist thought is that everything is always political. Wrong. At least, insofar as Stanley Fish might be loosely called a deconstructionist (a dubious premise), he fully and explicitly acknowledges that everything is always political. Professor Chaves announces this as though it self-evidently is an evil doctrine (he seems to believe that there are all sorts of self-evident truths, something that is not self-evident to me) that necessarily denies the reality of truth which transcends “cultural context.”

I don’t know about Fish, but I most emphatically affirm the reality of objective truth that transcends particular political or cultural contexts. But so what? To acknowledge this is to acknowledge that any expression of that truth is necessarily determined by the habits, mores, manners, customs, morals, grammars, and idioms of particular communities. In short, all language that points toward transcendent truth is political. This is an idea as old as that great postmodernist St. Augustine of Hippo, as expressed in that subversive deconstructionist tract De Doctrina Christiana.

Professor Chaves confuses the sign with the thing, as though he has immediate knowledge of transcendent truth, a plain contradiction. All truth is mediated through language, and all language is an expression of particular politics, including the (largely and broadly discredited) Enlightenment liberal democratic epistemology of Professor Chaves. Saint Paul, John Henry Newman, and I see through a mirror darkly, “according to our present lights,” until that time beyond time when we will know in full. The “interpretive community” to which I belong docs not originate the truth-claim; it receives it. But its expression of the truth-claim is always strongly embedded and never exhaustive. If Fish believes that all interpretive communities are created equal, I strongly disagree. But that does not change the reality that any expression of truth is particular to such communities. Moreover, since I am not a conservative but a Roman Catholic Christian, I do not share Professor Chaves’ interest in upholding individualism, robust or otherwise.

Fish is, of course, very critical of the NAS, as am I. The NAS is composed (principally) of a bunch of liberals who are whining and moaning because they got what they wanted: a university based upon the suspension of particular truth in the name of a “universalist” rationality and free speech. In such a university, all that remains are will and power. I probably disagree with Professor Fish about the particular truth to be defended in the university against free speech. But I agree completely with him that a university should presume and defend particular truth against an ideology of free speech that ends in assertions of raw power. Ironically, the NAS still beats the very free-speech drum that got the university into this mess in the first place.