Interpretation Freedom
I was pondering the question: What makes a text philosophical? I put the challenge to my university students to suggest a philosophical quote in order to analyze the criteria that make a text a philosophical text. Two texts they suggested were the children’s song “If you’re happy and you know it clap your hands” and a more adult appropriate limerick about safe sex. Perhaps the students thought they were being a bit cheeky, and a bit ironic, since I had not at this point given them a definition of what is philosophical in the first place nor trained them in thinking philosophically at this point. Undeterred, I used the Socratic Method to provoke them to compose their own suggestions of criteria instead of waiting for me to be a “good teacher” and explain. In the discussion that followed, they were able to propose several interpretations and important questions based on each text about the nature of humanity, emotions, authority, autonomy, consequences, communication, and social interactions. This group of twenty year olds, with very little training in philosophy and likely none in literary criticism theories, had successfully demonstrated that a reading of a text has much more freedom than the author may have intended, as they were able to read very unlikely candidates as philosophical texts. Our discussion turned from the criteria of a philosophical text to a much more interesting topic of criteria of a philosophical reading—and this freedom of the dialogue form enriched my thinking about the problem.
Interpretation work goes beyond informational reading, where we find different possibilities, different perspectives, different meanings to a text or situation. We find the ability to think outside our initial perception when we search for and test multiple ways of understanding. The next time you hear a song or read a story, see if you can name and play with three different meanings.
In philosophical practice, we employ critical thinking to reduce the essence of a meaning down to one concept, to expand the possibilities of meaning out into different interpretations, to examine the assumptions expressed, and to challenge the author to acknowledge and understand their limitations while expanding their thinking abilities through exercise.
Further reading: Stanley Fish, Is There a Text in This Class? The Authority of Interpretive Communities