Re: Allegory; Radical Interpretation; Principle of Charity

[EMAIL PROTECTED] (a reader) writes:

> Gerald Bruns's ideas are interesting, but I think I have a problem
> with the idea that an allegorical reading amounts to nothing more
> than the "principle of charity".

I don't think he said that.  I think he said that Philo's reading
conforms to it, as described by Davidson.

> You mentioned some of the equivalences Philo of Alexander came up
> with, like Adam=Natural Reason, Eve=The Senses, Egypt=The Body, and
> Israel=The Soul.

Trivial correction: These were from Torah interpretation manuals which
were widespread *before* Philo's time.  Philo's interpretation had
this flavor, but I didn't quote the description of it.  This was news
to me, by the way; I had thought it was Philo who pretty much invented
this way of reading Torah.

> These equivalences seem to me to be much more than what is required
> by the principle of charity. They don't just try to maximize the
> truth of the Torah. They add something totally new to the
> text. These metaphors are great wild poetic leaps of the
> imagination. Many other allegorical readings spring to mind, leading
> to many other alternate sets of equivalences. How about,
> Adam=Loyalty, Eve=Temptation, Egypt=Oppression, and
> Israel=Freedom. Or, Adam=Origin, Eve=Procreation,
> Egypt=Estrangement, and Israel=Home.  And so on. On the face of it,
> these other metaphors seem to be as valid as Philo's allegorical
> reading.
> 
> What I'm saying is that an allegorical reading amounts to much more
> than what is required for "radical translation".  An allegorical
> reading adds a lot of new content to the text through free leaps of
> the imagination. What constrains these creative additions? How do we
> reduce the set of all possible allegorical interpretation down to
> the right one, or even a manageably small set? Certainly not merely
> by making use of the principles of allegorical reading.

Agreed.  Here's the way I look at it.  There exist interpretations
which maximize the truth of the text, since the number of sentences in
the text is finite.  In fact, there are an infinite number of
interpretations that maximize the truth of the text, right?  Now if
you have a partial ordering on this set of interpretations such that
every chain has an upper bound, then by Zorn's Lemma there exists a
maximal element (that is, maximal with respect to your ordering, not
with respect to an interpretation's truth value) of this set.  That
would be the interpretation you'd choose.

For example, say you like parsimonious interpretations.  The partial
ordering here is logical implication, where we identify logically
equivalent interpretations.  If interpretations A and B are the same
except that A interprets "Adam" as "a sheep" and B interprets "Adam"
as "a black sheep", then B implies A and so in our ordering B < A, and
we say B is less parsimonious than A.  (Remember, both A and B
maximize the truth of the text, since those are the only
interpretations we're looking at.)  The hypotheses of Zorn's Lemma are
satisfied, so there exists a "maximally parsimonious" interpretation
from this set of interpretations which maximize truth.

Maybe you can't do the same with "poetic" replacing "parsimonious",
because the hypotheses of Zorn's Lemma aren't obviously satisfied: do
chains have upper poetic bounds, or is their poeticalness unbounded?
Thus, maybe you don't get a maximally poetic truth-maximizing
interpretation.  I guess that means you just go with what you like.

Bottom line, this Principle of Charity seems to select those
interpretations which are "admissible", and then you need some other
criterion to select the one(s) you like.  Like I said before, this
Principle of Charity as applied by Davidson to "radical
interpretation" seems needlessly strict, i.e., it seems like it
needlessly throws out lots of good interpretations.  The reason, I
think, is that there's always *some* meaningful context, unless the
text is beamed in from outer space, and the Principle of Charity seems
to ignore that contextual information.