by relativism one means the practice of putting yourself in your adversary’s shoes, not in order to wear them as your own but in order to have some understanding (far short of approval) of why someone else might want to wear them, then relativism will not and should not end, because it is simply another name for serious thought.
Discussion of Leo and Fish Part I: Some Theoretical Background
We begin with the most controversial element of our discussion: our belief that Fish’s argument is the stronger one and that our grounds for preferring it are not just ideological but professional and technical as well. The first part of this confession is probably less surprising to most than the second part of it. Many readers of this book will find Leo’s argument less persuasive, just as many readers of, say, the conservative newspaper The Washington Times would probably find Fish’s argument less persuasive. The basis for this division is congruent with the different assumptions about argument held by our two authors. Leo would surely claim that our readers have misread his essay and been hoodwinked by Fish because they—that is to say “you”—are in thrall to “moral relativism.’” By the same token, Leo would doubtless find the readers of The Washington Times a more perspicacious lot largely because they have somehow managed to elude indoctrination by a “therapeutic culture” overseen by the intellectual elite—that is, once again, “you.” That is to say, for Leo, the differences between our two hypothetical readings are not so much differences in interpretation as they are differences in meaning. Competent, uncorrupted readers will find the correct meaning in each of the texts, incompetent, corrupt readers will not. There is no room in Leo’s world for Fish’s “rival interpretations” of texts or events because in the end there is only one correct reading.
Fish, meanwhile, would find the differences in the two readings unremarkable, and certainly no matter for scandal. While he would be prepared to argue against a reading of the two essays that deems his argument inferior to Leo’s—indeed one imagines he would be greatly exercised by such a judgment—he would not interpret an unwillingness to acknowledge the superiority of his position as a sign of moral corruption. The Washington Times readers simply constitute a community of readers who share different beliefs and assign different meanings to terms like truth and justice than would an audience of Fish-sympathizers. He would be prepared to present arguments showing why they are wrong and he is right—in effect he does so in his essay—but he would accept at the outset that in his arguments he could not appeal to any set of universal standards adhered to by both his supporters and Leo’s supporters that would underwrite his conclusions and put paid to Leo’s in the eyes of all parties to the dispute. (Because Fish sees the boundaries between communities as far less permeable than we do, he is less optimistic about the prospects for inter-community dialogue than we are.) Leo, meanwhile, assumes that such universals, known to all and perversely ignored by some, do exist, though he is careful not to name them or elaborate on their entailments. Leo’s absolutes to-be-named-later, like religious deities whose names are never to be spoken, are more impressive in absentia than in the flesh.
Our own view inclines us less toward Leo and more toward Fish for several reasons. For one thing, Leo’s assumptions about the nature of truth and meaning are incompatible with a number of assumptions shared by most members our own community. The most important of those assumptions is the belief that argument has heuristic power, that through the dialogues we carry on with ourselves or with other people, doing what Aristotle called “proving opposites,” we do not just defend truth and vanquish error, we actually modify accepted truths and discover new ones. Implicit in this view is the belief that truth cannot be, as Leo appears to assume it is, independent of human judgment or the language we use in forming those judgments. If truth truly is absolute, independent of us and incorrigible by us, and if language is merely a transparent medium of expression not what Burke calls a “terministic screen” that shapes what it reveals, rhetoric is a trivial business deserving of the sort of scorn that the early absolutist Plato heaped on the first of our breed, the Sophists.
While our position here, a position consistent with if not identical to that held by most members of our community, may look suspiciously like the position Leo characterizes as “moral relativism,” we do not believe it is. Describing us or Fish as moral relativists is more a caricature of our position than a representation of same. Just because we accept the inevitability of multiple positions on any given issue of significance is not to say we accept—like Leo’s hapless student who “dislikes” Nazis but cannot bring himself to denounce them—the moral or cognitive equivalence of all positions on an issue. As rhetoricians we cannot claim membership in the “I’m Ok, You’re OK,” school of human relations; indeed if such a view prevailed, rhetoricians would be out of work. Rhetoric and argument have no place in either of the two worlds that for Leo represent the sum of all possibilities: his world of One Truth, or the world he imagines us inhabiting where there are countless equivalent truths. In the world of One Truth, rhetoric and argument might serve either to propagandize for the one true faith or to seduce people away from that faith, but it could have no legitimate effect on the truths that form the faith’s foundation. In a world of multiple equivalent truths, not only would we be powerless to alter each other’s position, there would be no reason to try absent good reasons to prefer one position over another.
Our position, thus, is neither absolutist nor relativist; we prefer to think of it as “realist” in the sense that Kenneth Burke uses that term. In a realist world, rhetoric and argument are essential activities precisely because it is a world that recognizes the significant, though not limitless, role that human agency plays in resolving the world’s problems and the important part that language plays in enabling human agency to realize its ends. In particular, language has the realistic capacity to “induce cooperation” among human beings even while it lacks the magical power to “induce motion in things” (Grammar 42). While Burke recognizes the enormous power of language to effect change, his realism also requires belief in a world independent of language’s shaping power. Our knowledge of this extra-verbal realm comes to us negatively, through the power of things, events and bodies to resist our assertions and claims and thwart our designs. This power of “recalcitrance” in the world encourages an attitude of humility like that which Burke finds in the pragmatist William James, whom he refers to admiringly as “an expert in the comparative degree of adjectives of value.” James rejected “absolutism (which is really the superlative, identifying the One as the Best)” and preferred to think “in terms of more rather all. . . . To optimism or pessimism, he preferred ‘meliorism’” (Attitudes 12). While absolutists like Leo sometimes allow the perfect to become the enemy of the good, deeming anything less than all insufficient and corrupt, realists look to make things better by degree by inducing cooperation among people and working toward collectively defined ends that are themselves constantly being redefined. In such a world, rhetoric and the arts of persuasion are not trifling tools for distracting the masses, they are “equipment for living.”
In the world we describe, justice and truth are important, albeit lower case, terms in our vocabulary. What the words mean to a given group of people at one moment in time may not be precisely the same as the meaning they possess at a different time under different circumstances, or to a different group of people in the same time and place. But every group in every circumstance imagines itself pursuing justice and truth. Or as Fish puts it more strikingly: “No one declares himself to be an apostle of injustice,” even those whose methods may strike us as heinous. Different groups may use different means to arrive at different meanings for important terms like truth and justice, but these differences are not “subjective” any more than Leo’s meanings are “objective.” Only Leo’s failure to articulate a specific meaning for his notion of truth can preserve its aura of universality. Leo’s community, like Fish’s, has worked out a definition of the term that is consistent with the principles of that community. But unlike Fish, Leo and the members of his community appear to disown the process that produced their version of truth in the first place. Upon arrival in the realm of Absolutes, they pull up their ladders after them and denounce ladder-users. Like the Platonic world of Pure Forms, Leo’s Truth appears to exist apart from the world, unaffected by the interactions of mortals. Exceptional souls may occasionally glimpse an essence amid the
