Fish Relativism

Fish goes on to explain how Postmodernism views, and how to view the recent attacks through the lenses of relativism. Fish describes how the postmodernist view is that there “can be no independent standard for determining which of many rival interpretations of an event is the true one.” (Fish, 2001) He goes on to explain that we would not be able to justify our response to the attack to everyone universally, because everyone has his or her own notions of justice and truth. Throughout this piece, Fish also tear apart phrases that we use in a time of terror. He says by us saying, “We have seen the face of evil,” we are reducing our enemy to evil, which is something beyond our comprehension, but rather we must view them as our enemy who is attacking
He ends by saying that yes, obviously our convictions and notions are strongly preferred over those of other, and that by definition makes them convictions and notions, and no one is blaming us or putting us at fault for that. Relativism is not asking us to prefer other’s notions to our own. What relativism is, on the other hand, is “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.” (Fish, 2001) Fish finishes by saying that with this being the true definition of relativism, it is not dead, and it should not die out, because what it truly is is thought and consideration. Throughout Fish’s piece, he made some very strong and convincing arguments to support relativism, and if one were not looking at it with a critical eye, I can see how they might be persuaded to think as he does, yet I find myself disagreeing with the overall approach that he has taken. To an extent, I understand Fish’s argument. The attackers who participated in 9/11 were acting on their own moral code, which happened to disagree with our, but I am not truly convinced that that means we must accept the attack at being