Nussbaum (Sophistry about Conventions) BB.pdf

Sophistry about Conventions

Author(s): Martha Nussbaum

Source: New Literary History, Vol. 17, No. 1, Philosophy of Science and Literary Theory

(Autumn, 1985), pp. 129-139

Published by: The Johns Hopkins University Press

Stable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/468984

Accessed: 03/01/2009 15:42

Your use of the JSTOR archive indicates your acceptance of JSTOR's Terms and Conditions of Use, available at

http://www.jstor.org/page/info/about/policies/terms.jsp . JSTOR's Terms and Conditions of Use provides, in part, that unless

you have obtained prior permission, you may not download an entire issue of a journal or multiple copies of articles, and you

may use content in the JSTOR archive only for your personal, non-commercial use.

Please contact the publisher regarding any further use of this work. Publisher contact information may be obtained at

http://www.jstor.org/action/showPublisher?publisherCode=jhup .

Each copy of any part of a JSTOR transmission must contain the same copyright notice that appears on the screen or printed

page of such transmission.

JSTOR is a not-for-profit organization founded in 1995 to build trusted digital archives for scholarship. We work with the

scholarly community to preserve their work and the materials they rely upon, and to build a common research platform that

promotes the discovery and use of these resources. For more information about JSTOR, please contact support@jstor.org.

The Johns Hopkins University Press is collaborating with JSTOR to digitize, preserve and extend access to

New Literary History.

http://www.jstor.org

Sophistry about Conventions

Martha Nussbaum

We'll let Teisias and Gorgias continue

sleeping. For they noticed that plausible

stories win more public honor than the

truth. And so they make trivial things

seem important and important things

trivial through the power of their dis-

course, and they dress up new views in

old language and old views in new lan-

guage, and they have discovered how to

speak about any subject both concisely

and at interminable length.

Plato Phaedrus 267a6

T HE SOPHISTS are once again among us. Like Socrates, we need

a "true rhetoric." That is, we need a form of discourse about

literature that concerns itself with real things of serious

human importance and that reveres, in so doing, the recently de-

spised notions of truth, of objectivity, even of validity in argument,

clarity in definition. For if we are talking about real things, it does

matter, and matter deeply, whether we say this or that, since human

life, much though we may regret the fact, is not simply a matter of

free play and unconstrained making. And if it matters, it is worth

taking the pains to do years of undramatic, possibly tedious, rigorous

work to get it right.

That is my initial unsorted reaction to Stanley Fish's paper, much

of which I found alarming. It will be evident that I am expressing

two related worries-one about the content of some of the views

expressed, the other about a way of proceeding in giving them

expression. One about a loose and not fully earned extreme relativism

and even subjectivism, the other about a disdain for rigor, patience,

and clarity in some of the discourse articulating this subjectivism or

relativism. For a number of contemporary literary theorists, as for

the Greek sophists, these two items, content and form, are not acci-

dentally connected. For if one really believes that each person (or

group) is the criterion of truth and/or that there is no salient distinc-

tion between rational persuasion and causal manipulation, one is not

likely to have much

for traditional philosophical ways of at-

respect

130

NEW LITERARY HISTORY

tending to validity and clarity. One will tend to regard those who go

on about such things as reactionaries who have failed to see some-

thing. (The terms left and right were freely, and astonishingly, used in

Fish's paper to make this point, lambasting the unfashionable truth-

seekers among us. I am not sure what political position in America

does have a deep commitment to open public dialectic governed by

traditional norms of rational argument and fair procedure, but I

believe that it is not the right. I have a suspicion that it just might be

that equally maligned and allegedly old-fashioned character, the lib-

eral.)1 At the same time, if one secretly, or openly, despises rational

argument and wishes, like Gorgias, to win fame and fortune by some

other means, what more convenient doctrine to espouse in the pro-

cess than the Gorgianic view that there is no truth anyway and it's all

a matter of manipulation, more or less like drugging? Then one's

failures to exhibit the traditional rational virtues will look like daring

rather than sloppiness.

I have mentioned sophists. And in fact I want now to talk about

the Greeks. For the history of relativism and its interaction with di-

alectic in Greek philosophy contains clearly many moves that are

being made in current literary debates about truth. We can perhaps

see the illegitimate transitions more clearly, and understand what

motivates them better, when the object of our scrutiny is further from

ourselves.

Greek philosophy, in both science and ethics, began, it appears, by

being naively realistic. Alternative scientific views were put forward

without any hesitation as candidates for the way things really were in

the universe. Even ethical norms were taken to be given for all time

by the gods, independently of culture or history. During the fifth

century, a variety of factors caused thinkers to focus on the presence

of an irreducible human element in the purported eternal truths, an

element of interpretation or conceptualization that seemed to entail

that our theories do not passively receive and record a prearticulated

given. (Among the factors that led to this emphasis were: the dis-

covery of quite different human communities that lived by quite dif-

ferent beliefs; a new interest in the way our perceptual apparatus

shapes what it receives; the presence of radical or skeptical views that

forced the recognition that for us to think and speak at all, certain

things must be accepted as true-for example, the world must con-

tain plurality and change, and so forth.) It seemed no longer possible

to reassert the old story of the received and altogether uninterpreted

given.

At this point, the field was open for a variety of responses. One

fashionable one was the view that came to be called Protagorean sub-

jectivism, though

it is unlikely that Protagoras himself held it. This is

SOPHISTRY ABOUT CONVENTIONS

131

the view that, given the variety and nonhomogeneity of the deliver-

ances of perception, and given the apparent absence of any "harder"

criterion of adjudication, each person must be regarded as the cri-

terion of truth. If the wind feels hot to A, it just is hot for A; if it

feels cold to B, it just is cold for B; and nothing more can legitimately

be said. A more radical version dropped the qualifications "for A"

and "for B"; its holders were thus forced to suspend the Principle of

Noncontradiction. The wind is at one and the same time both hot

and cold, just in case we can find two people to say so. (The view was

not confined to cases like heat and cold, where its appeal is at least

comprehensible; it was a quite general view about all assertions.)

This doctrine leads naturally to a question about what discourse

and teaching can be. Since each citizen or each critic is the arbiter of

how things are, how can the Protagorean attract pupils? This was a

troublesome question. The Protagorean position implies that argu-

ment is not really argument; it removes the idea of a common truth

concerning which we are striving to come into agreement. In its mild

form it tells us that there are no arguments, only assertions of one's

views and perceptions. In its radical form it knocks a vital prop out

from under all argument by doing away with noncontradiction. What,

then, is going on when people purport to argue and to instruct? And

why should we listen to a professional instructor? Gorgias provided

one famous answer. What discourse really is is a kind of drug, a tool

for the causal manipulation of behavior. Like Stanley Fish, he (or his

spokesperson Helen of Troy) asserts that there is no distinction be-

tween persuasion and force. It is all manipulation, and the ability to

manipulate can be taught. The influence of this position produced,

as one might expect, a serious crisis of confidence in the political

arena. As one of Thucydides' speakers puts it, "A state of affairs has

been reached where a good proposal honestly put forward is just as

suspect as something thoroughly bad." (This state of affairs seems to

me to be the logical conclusion of Fish's way of talking and the climate

of discussion that it naturally engenders.)

Now the thing that is likely to strike us as we examine these de-

velopments is that they are not rational. The discovery that there is

not a divine code fixed eternally independently of our existence and

thought, the discovery that truth is to some extent or in some manner

human and historical, certainly does not warrant the conclusion that

every human truth is as good as every other and that such time-

honored institutions as the search for truth and the rational criticism

of arguments have no further role to play. We wonder, then, what

would motivate people to make this inference, and what would lead

others to applaud

them when they made it.

Aristophanes,

wise here as in so many things, provides a revealing

132

NEW LITERARY HISTORY

example. A young man comes home from a day of sophistical edu-

cation. He says to his father, "Dad, I can prove to you that sons ought

to beat their fathers." The father exclaims, "But that's not the con-

vention anywhere." He has said the magic fashionable word, and now

the son's fatal "proof" follows directly. If these beliefs are really only

conventions, then, says the son, it was a human being who made them,

a human being just like you and me; and he imposed them upon

others by force of persuasion. So then I, being a human being, can

perfectly well make my own new convention, that sons should beat

their fathers in return for the beatings they received as children.

What is most amazing of all, the father, "persuaded," bends over and

takes his beating. Now in this farrago of Protagorean my-law-is-as-

good-as-his and Gorgianic let's-impose-our-law-by-any-means-we-

can, there is an important truth lurking-namely, that this son wants

to beat his father. The argument appeals not because it is a good

argument, which it plainly is not (for there are all sorts of good

human grounds for preferring the old set of human institutions to

this one), but because it is a handy, elegant justification for what this

son wants to do anyway. He doesn't want truth, he wants power. This

shows us something about him, not something about truth. It does

not show us that truth is power, or that there is no such thing as the

search for truth as distinct from the search for power. The father's

acquiescence is no mystery either, if we read the rest of the play and

understand its warnings about the extent to which simple people who

try to emulate the intelligentsia can be led by the nose out of sheer

guilt over their own rusticity.2

In this situation, with sophists getting richer and truth in disrepute,

many lovers of the search for truth gave up in exhaustion and de-

spair. Both Plato and Aristotle record this problem, as they grapple

with the challenge of defining a true and honest rhetoric-or, as

Aristotle puts it, a dialectic that is distinct from mere eristic.3 But so

as not to set that sort of negative example for one's students, it is

important, they both agree, to get into the arena and grapple with

these famous people, unravel their arguments, and show them that

there is profound incoherence in their own position.4 Not all will in

fact be persuaded by such attempts, for "some need persuasion, and

others need violence," Aristotle wryly remarks, recording his belief

in the importance of this difference.5 His attempt to restore the

search for truth (in all areas) to its place of honor is a good one for

us to examine, since (as I have argued elsewhere)6 it relies on no idea

of a reality "as it is," given to us independently of all conceptualiza-

tion; and yet it argues that within the "appearances," that is, the world

as perceived and interpreted by human beings, we can find all the

truth we need, and much more than the sophists believe.

Plik z chomika:

Inne pliki z tego folderu:

Inne foldery tego chomika: