FUCK THEORY

Pro et Contra - Philosophy & Allegory

(I/II)
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This is the contra one, obviously.

Here’s the problem with allegory.
Imagine that in the distant future the entire world is in the grip of a giant totalitarian state.  Now imagine that this totalitarian state executed an absolute eugenics program, strictly controlling all reproduction.  Now imagine that the way this program was executed was through the surgical removal of every person’s reproductive glands, so that not only was all reproduction conducted in a laboratory under strict government control, but also no adult in the world had functioning gonads - women had no ovaries and men had no testes.  Now imagine that you’re an ordinary man from our present moment who travels to this future and has an argument with one of these gonad-free future-humans.  In this scenario, wouldn’t one of these gonad-free future-humans be confused if you told them to lick your balls?  Clearly they would, because in the hypothetical world under consideration, the set of “men who have testicles” is an empty set.  Isn’t that a good allegory for how set theory works?

If you answered “not really, no,” then gold star for you. 

Let me start bluntly:  allegories can be rhetorical, but they cannot be truly philosophical, insofar as philosophy is an activity consisting of the creation, modification, and organization of concepts.  (In this definition I follow, as always, Deleuze & Guattari’s What Is Philosophy?).  Prof. O’Connor gives the unfortunate example here of “Nietzsche’s myth of eternal recurrence,” a rather poor choice considering that Nietzsche certainly didn’t think of the Eternal Return as a “myth.”  A better example would have been the parables and fables of Thus Spoke Zarathustra.  But parables and fables are not allegories.

The difference is that an allegory represents, while parables and fables illustrate.  The reading of the former is a hermeneutic process, the reading of the latter an analytic process.  The practical implication of this is that while a behavioral or moral principle is given in the parable or the fable, the underlying principle of the allegory must be interpreted, extracted or translated out of the symbolic content; it is generated anew with each reading.  But as the sages made clear in the Talmud, to say nothing of Freud and Derrida, interpretation, hermeneutics, is always an overdetermined process.  Some symbols mean multiple things; sometimes several symbols together mean a single thing.  Sometimes both of those things are true at once.  What this means is that the allegory, unlike the parable and fable, has a much looser relationship between form and content, insofar as its “meaning” can be distributed through any number of symbolic elements without, in theory, fundamentally changing (this is what Lacan implies when he insists in the “Seminar on ‘The Purloined Letter’” that “the letter” is infinitely divisible).

In practice, this means that the allegory is, potentially, infinitely extensive.  An epic novel can serve as an allegory, and a sonnet can serve as an allegory, and in principle, they could be interpreted as having the same “moral,” which might consist of a single sentence.  Aesop’s fables and Zarathustra’s animal companions offer us a diagrammatic relation between the elements of the story and the elements of the conceptual principle: there’s a crow, there’s a fox, and there’s a piece of cheese.  You can change the symbolic register and make it a fable about a woman, a drag queen, and a Chanel clutch, but no retelling that claims to retain the same moral principle can fundamentally alter the triangular constellation of the key elements.  This remains remains true even if the story is the length of a novel: consider Ibn Tufayl’s Ḥayy ibn Yaqẓān, one of the greatest “philosophical novels,” a book-length parable (and well worth reading). 

In an allegory, on the other hand, the principle is not given; it must be generated interpretively.  But because the principle is not given, the distribution of symbolic elements is hermeneutic rather than diagrammatic, and there is no clear conceptual correspondence.  This makes the allegory, as I’ve suggested, extensive: there’s no diagrammatic reason not to add or remove symbolic elements or to reorganize the symbolic distribution.  That’s why allegory, unlike fable and parable, is never properly philosophical, but only aesthetic or rhetorical:  because the distribution of symbolic elements becomes a matter of taste, rather than a matter of conceptual correspondence. The allegory violates William of Ockham’s basic metaphysical principle: Numquam ponenda est pluralitas sine necessitate (“plurality [of entities] should not be posited unless necessary”; this is the basic principle of conceptual organization - see Ockham’s Quaestiones on Peter Lombard’s Sentences). 

In fact, Plato’s allegory of the cave (in The Republic, Book VII, 514a–520a) does precisely this.  The allegory represents, according to the standard interpretation, Plato’s theory of Forms or Ideas or however you want to translate εἶδος (eidos) and ἰδέα (idea).  The idea here is apparently that the world we live in and perceive is a pale imitation of a pure world of Ideal Forms, where every entity exists in its pure essence.  For Plato, the table in front of you is just a particular incarnation of the universal form “table.”  OK.  So in the allegory of the cave, the shadows on the wall are the material incarnations of forms, the world of our perception, and the real world out in the sunlight is the world of pure forms.  There are really only three conceptual elements here:  the material world, the world of forms, and the limited human consciousness.  But…if the shadows on the wall are made by puppeteers who hold puppets up to the light of the fire, and the shadows represent our material perceptions, wouldn’t perceiving the world of forms just involve…turning our heads to see the puppets?  Why does the allegory continue beyond that point?  Why then is this freakish puppet show just an intermediary between the cave and the outside?  Why is there an outside at all?  For that matter, why don’t the people who leave the cave end up on a mysterious island that moves around and is protected by a giant smoke monster?  Also, who the hell are these puppet show people and don’t they have anything better to do?  Plato is definitely ponenda-ing pluralitas sine necessitate. 

The idea here, as Prof. O’Connor suggests, is that the philosopher’s inquiry helps lift humanity out of the cave and into the light.  The philosopher does this by inquiring after the essence of things, their form, that ancient Socratic question:  “What is it?” (a question, one notes, endemic to 4-year-old children and 70-year-old men).  The profound irony here is that Plato’s allegory fails in exactly the same way that Socrates’ inquiry fails.  In distributing the elements of the allegory figuratively rather than conceptually, Plato fails to answer the fundamental question, “What is it? [What does the allegory represent?].”  This is left to the reader to determine, in an act of interpretation.  The essence is not given, only the distribution of symbols, a particular distribution, arranged formally in accordance with a rule of taste.  From this particular example, the reader is left to extract a general principle, a truth or ἰδέα, the essence of the allegory which would remain the same even if the allegory itself was changed (this is the supposed letter that supposedly always arrives at its destination, chez Lacan). 

This is the basic failure of Platonic-Socratic inquiry:  Not that it attempts to extract a general principle from particular examples, which would simply be inductive reasoning, but that it does so dialectically, by rejecting symbolic elements, in an endless loop whose dynamo is precisely the absence of essence.  Socrates putters around the agora accosting random people.  “What is it that you’re doing?” he asks on young man.  “I’m on my way to an audition, I’m a musician.”  “How do you know that what you’re doing is truly ‘music’?” Socrates asks.  20 minutes later this poor flute player is stumbling to his audition sweating because he has no idea who he is anymore.  But while this young man’s audition is blown, Socrates is no closer to answering the question “What is it?” because he’s simply rejected every example as inadequate, a process of negation the Upanishads refer to as नेति नेति (“neti, neti”; neither this nor this).  Socrates continually tries to generate something from nothing.  And fails.

Ironically, considering Plato’s continual insistence on the clear light of reason, both allegory and Socratic method represent what Hume called “theism”:  acts of the imagination that extend the given indefinitely without a corrective principle.  The principle is not given; there is no conceptual correspondence or schema; and thus while Platonic allegory, like Christian allegory, can produce belief, it cannot produce philosophy in any proper sense of the word.