RE: Literal and Not Literal
August 31, 2019 at 4:25 am
(This post was last modified: August 31, 2019 at 6:07 am by Belacqua.)
(August 31, 2019 at 3:17 am)Darwin1245 Wrote: You said you do agree that interpretations are arbitrary, and that they depend on the person's personality and other factors. It is not acceptable that a psychopath interprets the texts in his own way that probably involves violence.
I did not say I agree that interpretations are arbitrary. Please don't add things to my position that I didn't say.
[definition of arbitrary: based on random choice or personal whim, rather than any reason or system.]
Just because something is open to interpretation doesn't mean that it can be interpreted any damn way. Just because something is non-literal doesn't mean that any damn meaning can be assigned to it.
The words of Baudelaire, where he says that nature is a living temple whose columns emit confused words, are not literal. But if I interpret this arbitrarily, to say the words refer to next year's football season, it would be laughable.
In the saying attributed to Jesus, "let him who is without sin cast the first stone," the meaning is non-literal. (In the context of the story, people are holding stones, but the meaning is supposed to be applicable to non-stone-holding situations.) Does this mean that I can interpret it to mean that it is good for me to do violence? A psychopath certainly could reach that conclusion, or an arbitrary computer bot. Could a reasonable person?
Several times on this thread I have said that hermeneutics is difficult. How we interpret a non-literal sentence is a challenge, not something we can just do however we want.
The value of the history of interpretations is that they are NOT arbitrary. Each new reading of the Book of Job, for example -- fatalistic, or Kabbalistic, or Christian, etc. -- is offered with a commentary and REASONS for how the interpretation can be useful. If someone were to offer an arbitrary interpretation (e.g. the whirlwind represents silverware) it would be dismissed and forgotten.
Moreover, many people who offer new interpretations of a famous story do so without claiming that their reading is the one and only, true forever best reading. Have you read Zizek's interpretation of the Clytemnestra story? He gets a fascinating lesson out of it, without in any way claiming to replace or supersede previous readings.
Quote:Well, he was surely specific about other things that they did have in the age he lived in; therefore, he likely did not intend that people interpret texts non-literally.
Is the parable of the sower agricultural advice? I hold that it was meant non-literally. Most Christians do, also, since it is labeled as a parable.
Quote:The relevant lessons are more likely to be moral, which is one thing that did not change much from when he existed.
Right. A statement about farming is non-literal, intended then and now to be moral/spiritual.
Quote:It is obvious that people prefer to believe in myths because they are consoling, and because they provide explanations for things like death that are relevant to us.
Maybe so. I don't want to speak about other people's minds, and why they believe things. No doubt there are good thinkers and bad thinkers in the world.
Aside from the motivations people have, though, there are myths that are interpreted non-literally as tools to think about things. Neither Aristophanes nor Socrates, for example, believed the myths they recounted in the Symposium. If we keep in mind that such usage of myths was well known in ancient times, I see no reason to think that the Christian use of myths won't be informed by such practices. (You said, and I agree with you, that ancient holy books resemble ancient non-holy books. At least in some ways.)
I don't believe in any myths, I hope. I do find the discussion of myths to be relevant to moral and human issues, just as fiction like Proust is informative about moral and human issues. I don't have to believe in the literal existence of Job or of Charlus to find these stories helpful.
Quote:It would have been wiser to make the "holy" texts literal so that they can be interpreted the same way by everyone no matter how different their personalities are and what age they live in.
Well, I guess it's too bad that they didn't ask you how to do it. Rather than dream about a counterfactual ideal past, I think we should learn to deal with myth, religion, literature, and human issues in the way that history gives them to us, without dumbing down the wisdom and beauty they sometimes contain.
I still maintain that the wisdom of literature comes largely in its varied applicability independent of the specifics of the text.