Our structure, both public and private,
is full of imperfection.
But there is nothing useless in nature,
not even uselessness itself.
- M. Montaigne


S: What are you reading, Phil? And why the long face? The matter must be sad – weighty, too, if chains bind the large and heavy things of this world to things large and heavy in quite a different sense.

Phil: Oh, hello, Socrates. Yes, it is a big book, and philosophical in ambition. But as to these chains you allude to: if such there be in this case, I fear they are neither of adamant, nor gold, nor silver, but of some exceedingly shoddy and threadbare material. And as to the length of my face: the stretch-marks must be due to repeated efforts to tear myself from a wearisome post to which I find I am, however, nailed fast.

S: Phil, this is a great and strange misfortune! And your fate is rendered the more bitter, I must believe, since when first you plucked this volume of philosophy from the shelf, you aspired to more exalted bondage: to be as a peg wound round with lyre-string, strung to the fret-board and sounding-chamber of the world, attuned to some theme of spheres! Yet here you are: pegged, out of tune, sounding and fretting in a different key.

P: In truth, Socrates, I was pretty sure it was a bad book when I bought it.

S: Phil, I perceive it to be from a university press! It can hardly have cost you less than $25! But wait: the Persians, it is known, employed persons whose office it was to taste a morsel of every dish before it passed the despotic lips of a Cyrus, Darius or Xerxes. Are you perhaps such a one – a taster, but of literary morsels – in the democratic service of a Reading Public. In a word, Phil: are you a reviewer?

P: No.

S: Then we have a riddle. Two, in fact, which I instantly suspect must prove mutually illuminating. Why did you buy this book? And why are you now unable to put it down? As William Empson sagely remarks, “as a point of conscience, anyone can think of more pressing duties than reading a new book he dislikes.”

P: As always, Socrates, you put the matter neatly, when you finally come to it.

S: I put a further question to you, with what I hope will be deemed equal neatness: do you not think we can solve these two riddles, by putting our two heads together?

P: I feel I could put my case in the hands of no more capable an investigator. Nor could the methods and specific knowledge of any specialist be more suitable. I fear only that I may be unable to render much assistance along the way, and that the interest of the case may scarcely repay your efforts – for I know you too well to suppose you anticipate monetary rewards.

S: Since I now know you for one who is willing to pay money for a book he believes to be bad, I am relieved by this hint that you would also be willing to pay to be rid of one. From this I infer that a civil war of sorts is being waged in your soul; and both factions are willing to call upon the resources of your purse, as if it were a war chest.

P: That doesn’t sound good for my purse.

S: But it is better for your soul. Phil, have you never seen a bookcase colored in with the spines of bad books, in rows and rows, as if it were a general’s shirtfront? And the scholar-owner of these shelves puffed out by his possessions as if he were a general? And yet if such a scholar-general were ever contacted in a quiet moment – as when one patrol had passed along the ramparts of the conquered citadel of his mind, and the next patrol not yet come into view – I feel the prisoner would laugh, and weep, and admit defeat; and call for aid in his extremity. But fear not for the state of your finances, Phil. You are right I will accept no money for my services. I see the relief on your face.

P: You misread my mind. When you spoke just now of bookcases full of bad books, a hot blush of shame came to my face, Socrates. Unlike some people, I collect them because I regard them as dreadful. But that is hardly a sufficient excuse. I am grateful to have such a friend as you.

S: Speak not of it, Phil. And fear not that your case will prove uninteresting, nor that I shall depart from your side unrewarded. Philosophy is a mighty wreck, built up of lesser ones. And yet the wonder is that considerable intellectual capital been accumulated over the centuries, though most of our schemes have proven to be speculative bubbles.

P: Why is that, Socrates?

S: That is two questions in one. As to the lack of progress, today I feel my daimon is dumb on the subject. But as to philosophy’s profitability, I am put in mind of a passage in Plato’s Phaedrus – one insufficiently considered by commentators, if that can be believed. In this passage Plato wonders in his usual, indirect way, whether he is a placid and simple creature, or a complex monster more terrible than Typhon. Clearly he fears the latter is the case. This fear, he implies, spurs him to philosophize.

P: I do not yet see this, though I follow with the confidence of one who follows a trusted guide.

S: Phil, do you not perceive how your bookcase is very like a many-headed Typhon-monster?

P: By Zeus, there is something in what you say!

S: And do you not feel that this bookcase and its contents, being the sort of thing J. L. Austin refers to as ‘medium-sized dry-goods’, may prove more amenable to investigation than the contents of your mind?

P: I do feel it.

S: Do you think it is possible to understand a philosopher without studying his entire bookcase?

P: No, Socrates. One must study the entire bookcase.

S: And yet we must start somewhere, select a single volume from the lot. For if the contents of many shelves were to be poured out on us all at once, we would surely be crushed.

P: It is so.

S: Phil, just as you trust me to guide you, so you and I must trust the gods not to set our feet on a false path. We shall start with that very volume you hold in your hands. You say many trees have given their lives in an unworthy cause – in short, that this book is a bad book?

P: I do say so.

S: Its contents are neither true, nor beautiful, nor useful? For what is a bad book but one that wants all three virtues?

P: A bad book can be nothing else, without ceasing to be itself.

S: A pregnant response! I, midwife that I am, must do what I can to deliver forth what it contains. What is the book’s title? I cannot quite make out the lettering on the spine.

P: It is Stanley Fish’s book – several years old now – Doing What Comes Naturally. It is 613 pages long, inclusive of index.

S: One might have supposed a pamphlet sufficient unto the titular purpose. Which reminds me: why did you buy the book?

P: Oh, I had already bought Stanley Fish’s newer book, The Trouble with Principle. Here it is beside me.

S: Ah, I have seen it in the bookstores, and I applaud your decision to remove the dust jacket. It is somehow wrong – or else terribly honest - for academic authors to display, so prominently, oversized black and white photographs of themselves, as if they were Hollywood character actors applying for work. Be that as it may, why did you buy Doing What Comes Naturally, given that you had first bought The Trouble With Principle?

P: I was so irritated by The Trouble with Principle that I couldn’t help myself.

S: I see. And why did you first buy The Trouble with Principle.

P: I had read Fish’s essay, “Is There a Text in This Class?” in his volume of essays of the same name.

S: Ah! And you thought that now-classic anthology so philosophically slip-shod, from cover to cover, that when you saw The Trouble with Principle sitting on the shelf you snapped it right up?

P: How did you guess?

S: I think perhaps another line of approach is now in order. Fish is a prolific writer? And a characteristic denizen of the academic age in which we live? An eminence grise atop the greased pole?

P: I think that is a fair, though indefinite characterization. Fish himself might object. He preens himself on his iconoclasm. He is a self-styled rebel against much he sees on the academic scene. He even rebels against those rebels who are – usually quite ridiculously – trying to make out the latest theoretical fads as occasions of large political and cultural consequences: “No Consequences” is one of the essays in the book, and a sort of slogan for the man himself.

S: A rebel without an effect, then.

P: I suppose so.

S: Despite his iconoclasm, suppose we take Fish for an academic type.

P: Fish is last to hear it breathes water, so they say.

S: Yet this is not to catch our man straightaway in any net. Fish’s character – as creature of his times – makes him somewhat slippery to come to grips with.

P: How so?

S: It is often said, and rightly, that it is hard to comprehend works of genius. But it can be equally difficult to understand works of non-genius that rise to prominence through their kinship with other works of non-genius. One feels like a swimmer overcome by an enormous wave that one realizes – only after it is past - consisted unaccountably of tepid bath water.

P: What can one do, to beat back such an uncanny tide?

S: I believe not just the gods but the poets must be enlisted to aid the lonely swimmer, just as Athena and Homer conspire to ferry Odysseus through his various watery misadventures.

P: Truly, no force, however mediocre, can stand against both gods and poets! And surely we are right to trust that the gods and the poets will take a stand against mediocrity!

S: What poetic instance, then?

P: I implore your judgment!

S: We should look somewhere between All’s Well That Ends Well and The Tempest.

P: These titles do seem to express the prospective poles of our enterprise.

S: Fish is a sometime professor of English, humanities, law, I know not what, at various prestigious institutions of higher education. He is a writer of oft-reprinted books. In short, he is a darling of Dame Fortune, academically speaking; one of the first in her favors.

P: And?

S: Perhaps we are satisfied to say that Dame Fortune is fickle, in academia as in Hollywood.

P: Only a madman would deny it!

S: Then leave it at that. Fish has gotten lucky. We may acknowledge this, not begrudging him his fortune, yet devoutly swearing off him all the same. In the words of Shakespeare’s clown: “I will henceforth eat no fish of fortune’s buttering.” Sell your copy of The Trouble with Principle, Phil. Sell your copy of Doing What Comes Naturally. With luck, you will get $7 for each. With one $7, buy two bottles of beer, with the other $7 two more bottles of –

P: Socrates, I see the wisdom in what you advise. And yet –

S: – I am glad to hear you say it, Phil! Your unwillingness to drown your troubles in alcohol, though you risk drowning to save them, commends you as a philosopher. On, then, to The Tempest. If you will not swear off Fish, perhaps the fisher will become the fished.

P: How is that?

S: I will play Alonso to your Ferdinand, wondering whether you are lost forever beneath the waves: “What strange fish hath made his meal on thee?”

P: That’s good! So our theme is to be the strangeness of the Phil-eating fish?

S: There is more. I myself may end up playing the drunk. I will be Trinculo to Fish’s Caliban, inquiring of him: “Wilt thou tell a monstrous lie, being but half a fish and half a monster?”

P: Do you mean to imply that Fish intentionally deceives me? That he knowingly writes bad books, for profit, or fame, or else out of some still stranger motive?

S: I do not go so far. I am not Fish’s analyst, I merely analyze his writings. But note how deftly I have effected a return to the Platonic figure with which I began. Fish, though he be but half fish, half monster, is perhaps not so unlike you and I, Phil.

P: How is that?

S: Philosophy is, in large part, an investigation of peculiar monstrosities of mind. Therefore, I think we may learn from Fish. His book, though neither true nor beautiful, may prove useful – but only if, as per your wise qualification, it ceases to be itself, since by nature it is a bad book.

P: How can a book both be, and not be, itself?

S: You are right not to let this shallow paradox pass unchallenged. Let us resolve it, as best we can. Do you know what a straw man is, Phil?

P: A straw man is a misinterpretation of a figure or argument or idea or position. It is constructed to facilitate ease of attack. Weak points are drawn larger than life, strong points smaller.

S: Very good! And why is it that the construction of straw men is frowned upon by those who are true to philosophy?

P: I should think it obvious, Socrates. The straw man has a sign hanging round his neck, identifying him as Kant, or Descartes, or Quine, or some such well-known thinker. Yet the straw man is not this thinker.

S: And do the makers of these straw men, and their attackers, understand this thing you think obvious, Phil?

P: It is an odd question. I suppose they must, in a sense. Someone who makes a Kant of straw, slapping him together out of crude material, in a crude manner, must wonder that the construction process should be so easy. Likewise, someone who attacks a straw Kant must wonder that the sage of Königsberg would allow himself to be hacked down with a few light blows.

S: Even crows quickly come to know the scarecrow for what he is, the farmers say. And yet?

P: Yes, indeed, Socrates. Unlike crows that soon nest in the scarecrow’s head, ceasing to fear or even take note of him, men will occupy themselves with these straw men ad nauseam, building them and destroying them, building them and destroying them.

S: And what do you make of this behavior?

P: I must confess, there is something almost eerie about it, though this has never struck me before. I hardly know what to say.

S: Is there any other sort of activity that makes the hairs stand up on the back of your neck in the same way?

P: I suppose certain religious rituals and primitive magical practices might affect me similarly, were I to witness them in person.

S: Indeed! In The Golden Bough, Frazer distinguishes two varieties of magical practice: those that operate on a principle of contagion, and those that operate on a principle of sympathy.

P: Go on.

S: Sometimes magical action at a distance is to be workable by means of an object that was once in contact with the person to be affected. A hair or scrap of clothing is burned, and this is thought to have the power to make the original owner become sick, or die. This is contagious magic.

P: And sympathetic magic?

S: The idea is that two objects that resemble each other are bound by a natural affinity. Anyone who has seen two professors going at it, hammer and tongs, knows this proposition is subject to doubt. But the general idea is that a crude effigy of the victim – since it resembles him – will have a deleterious effect on him as it burns.

P: I think I see where you are going with this, Socrates. The construction and destruction of philosophical straw men has something of sympathetic magic about it; and something of contagious magic as well. The straw Kant is an effigy of the true Kant, and it is felt – as it were, superstitiously – that the strained resemblance of a grotesque to the man affords a sort of magical link. Furthermore, there is almost always an element of contagion in such cases. Personal articles – technical terms that are Kant’s, and dear to Kant, but now separated from him by accident or theft – are secreted on and about the person of the dummy: the exegetical equivalent of hair and fingernail clippings.

S: You are a quick study, Phil. Can you take the next step?

P: I know not where to plant my foot.

S: Do you not perceive how, in the savage minds of these builders and burners of effigies, a confusion arises beyond mere superstition?

P: Yours eyes are keener than mine.

S: Perhaps I have simply passed this way before. These minds offend against logic itself by supposing that a certain effigy both is, and is not, Kant himself, or Descartes himself, or Quine himself.

P: I am more ashamed of this sort of behavior than ever, now that you point this out, Socrates.

S: And yet it is precisely this sort of shameful behavior that you instinctively warned me against, in asking how a book can both be, and not be, itself. You are worried, I think, I might make a straw man of Fish.

P: In truth, it is hard for me to believe these thoughts, which are as fresh to me as wild pansies, were already mine when I asked that question some time ago. But my old thoughts have wandered away in the meantime, and I cannot summon them back. Continue, Socrates.

S: Phil, do you know the difference between a straw man and a straw dog?

P: I do not.

S: In ancient China a certain rite was practiced. And, since the ancient Chinese were wise, it must have been a wise rite. At any rate, we may suppose it was so for the sake of the argument. Before being presented at the altar, straw dogs were kept in boxes under an awning of brocade. They were sacred objects; thus, the Dead One – that is, the boy who represented an ancestor – and the Reciter had to be ritually pure before touching them. But once the dogs were presented at the altar, their heads and spines were crushed. Then they were burned up. If they were put back beneath the brocade, it was thought that anyone who slept nearby would have terrible nightmares, not the dreams he wanted. Or so I have read in Chuang Tzu, admittedly an author who can be turned now one way, now another.

P: I understand but imperfectly, Socrates.

S: As do I. But let me propose a reading. The straw dog is Fish, and the awning of brocade is the trouble you and I – the Dead One and the Reciter, I suppose – are evidently prepared to take over a object that seems, in and of itself, of little significance. The rituals of purification are the dialectical care we will take, in presenting this thing on the altar. The trampling and burning correspond to a thorough-going refutation. The object of it all will be to prevent bad dreams – to ensure sweet sleep. And Fish's book, that both is and is not itself, is the straw dog, before and after it is burnt into smoke and nothingness.

P: You seem inclined to update the classics for today’s audience. But I have an historical question. I suppose I can understand why these Chinese burnt their straw dogs, if they thought they brought bad dreams. But why did they construct them in the first place? It seems that their only use was to prevent an evil, of which they themselves were the root and efficient cause.

S: Ah, yes. Perhaps the ancient Chinese themselves found it strange that they made straw dogs, and placed them beneath awnings of brocade. People do strange, uncanny things. Perhaps we have said enough for today. Tomorrow we will begin again, if you are willing.

P: Indeed I am!

S: I’ll bring a great many Stanley Fish books tomorrow.

P: You mean you own them yourself? You have them on your shelf?

S: Never you mind about that. Until tomorrow! I think we will focus especially on Fish’s new essay from the latest issue of Critical Inquiry, “Truth But No Consequences: Why Philosophy Doesn’t Matter”.