The Common Good of Practices

Abstract

This was my contribution to a collection of very short commentaries on Stanley Fish's work on academic freedom. Here is the first paragraph's description: “Has Fish, in defending the integrity of academic practice, trivialized it? This issue haunts Fish’s deflationary account (“it’s just a job”) throughout, but it is an issue he addresses directly only in the coda. This is the issue I want to address here, but without exploring (because space does not permit) what difference what I have to say would make, if any, to his defense of a functional account of academic freedom, a defense I wholeheartedly endorse. In fact, I hope to advance Fish’s cause – in the context of law and legal practice it has been my cause as well – by offering what I think is a better case for why Fish’s account of the work of the academy does not trivialize it. My argument is that the practice relates to “larger concerns of life” in ways required by the practice itself; that what it offers in this regard are not “by products” or “side effects” as Fish describes them, but constitutive of what it means to be a practice. For no practice is completely closed. Each is purposive in at least one sense: every practice, for its own good, seeks to foster within the broader culture the ability to appreciate that which the practice has on offer. It does this, primarily, by initiating people into its ways of thinking, by teaching in other words.”