Justifying Belief: Stanley Fish and the Work of Rhetoric (review)

Justifying Belief is a concise synthesis of Stanley Fish's recent work on nonliterary topics and, as such, clarifies some of Fish's more contentious discussions on topics such as the interpretation of legal discourse, the disciplinarity of English studies, and the role of rhetoric in belief systems. Olson handles these topics adroitly in the first three chapters; the book also contains two in-depth scholarly interviews with Fish by Olson, an illuminating foreword by Fish himself (an autobiographical narrative that traces his development of thought), an afterword by J. Hillis Miller, and a comprehensive bibliography of Fish's writings. This book is an impressive introduction to Fish's work and remarkable for how Olson links the arguments that Fish has been making for the last few years to the various issues to which he has been applying them. Olson, in addition, is careful to contextualize the debates concerning Fish's ideas—important because, as a major outspoken intellectual, Fish certainly has his admirers and critics: as Olson says in his Introduction, "There simply is no such thing as a tepid response to Fish's work" (2002, 2).

As the title implies, Olson focuses quite a bit on Fish's ideas concerning rhetoric and belief. In times of stalemated moral battles, Fish's takes on conviction and belief are refreshing and, more importantly, offer ways to think through current ideological impasses. Fish's thesis is that most of us who think (and teach) that ideological positions are taken up and revised from evidence presented have things backwards. (Fish, admittedly, never tires of letting people know when they're wrong.) As he sees it, people take up and hold their positions from their convictions and beliefs first and then shape evidence to fit in with those convictions and beliefs. Not the other way around. In other words, strongly held positions often are not taken up reasonably, nor are they easily revised or overturned by contrasting evidence; ideological positions follow from belief more often than from reason. Contrasting evidence—then, in fact—may serve to further entrench existing beliefs or may not be accepted at all; it is more likely that contrasting evidence will be rationalized or justified, shaped to fit in with already held beliefs, or disregarded altogether. In the Foreword, Fish offers the following example from his work on Paradise Lost. After being cast out of heaven, Satan and his minions can use all evidence presented to them that they are in the wrong to make a case for precisely the reverse: that what they're doing is right, that they are freedom fighters, revolutionaries fighting an unjust tyrant who "occupies the rhetorical [and moral] high ground": "Do they experience pain for the first time? It merely gives them something to disdain and condemn, something that proves rather than undercuts their heroism." And so on. With little interpretive effort, Satan and his minions can turn all evidence against them into evidence that furthers their cause and impels them (2002, xvi-xvii).

Fish offers the rhetorical and political predicament of hate speech as another example of the connections between rhetoric and belief, and he also highlights how it serves as an example of what he sees as the empty principle of free speech. Hate speech is an expression of those who believe firmly in inherent racial hierarchy. Because many such racists are passionate about these beliefs, there is little hope of changing their minds by showing them that racism is a deficit in reasoning. It simply doesn't work. The thing to do then is to treat hate speech as the speech of your enemy and not argue to protect it but to do whatever you can to retard or stop the speech that represents the positions with which you disagree. For Fish, of course, "there is no such thing as free speech." As Miller puts...