When in the wake of September 11 a number of commentators began to draw lines of cause and effect between what had happened and the "rise" of postmodernism, a new chapter was opened in a very old story. It is the story of the supposed relationship between philosophy at its highest reaches and the events of history. The governing thesis that makes the story go is that philosophy matters and matters both at the societal level--the actions of a society will in some sense follow from the philosophical views encoded in its institutions--and at the level of the individual who will think or do something as a consequence of the philosophical views to which he or she is committed. My counterthesis is that philosophy doesn't matter and that when faced with a crisis or choice or decision you and I will typically have recourse to many things--archives, consultations with experts, consultations with friends, consultations with psychiatrists, consultations with horoscopes--but one of the things we will not typically consult (and if we did it wouldn't do us any good) is some philosophical position we happen to espouse.

Let me make clear what I do and do not mean by philosophical position. I don't mean a substantive idea, like the idea that gender differences justify discriminatory practices or the (opposing) idea that they don't. Ideas like those most certainly matter and have real world consequences as the history of the twentieth century amply shows. Moreover if you are committed to one of those ideas, you will be inclined to act in certain ways in certain situations. You say to yourself (for example), "since I believe that gender differences do not justify differences in compensation, I will take care that men and women receive equal pay for equal work." But if you say to yourself, "I believe that what is true is what corresponds to the independently specified facts," or, alternatively, "I believe that truths are internal to historically emergent and revisable frames of reference or interpretive communities," nothing follows with respect to any issue except the issue of which theory of truth is the correct one. 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. It is theories of truth on that general level that I refer to when I say that philosophy doesn't matter.

Stanley Fish is dean of the College of Liberal Arts and Sciences at the University of Illinois at Chicago. His most recent books are The Trouble with Principle (1999) and How Milton Works (2001).

 

 

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