Parable and Exposition

Contemplative Life in a Potemkin Village

Jewish tradition describes every parable (mashal) as having an exposition (nimshal).

Divergent thinkers are partial to parable. Convergent thinkers are partial to exposition.

Poets dwell in possibility. Systematic thinkers dwell in operational definitions and logical conclusions.

The mashal is dense. The nimshal clarifies.

The mashal is imagistic. The nimshal is abstract.

“And Cain killed Abel.” Cain is the nimshal, the reductive meaning, the moral; Abel is the mashal, the open-ended verse, the story. Cain is what we acquire. Abel is vapor, the mere thing, without conceptual imposition.

“Cain spoke to Abel”—that is, Cain super-imposed his interpretation on Abel. The first murder was announced by an act of eisegesis, “reading in.” The text does not say that the two brothers spoke, but that one talked at the other.

The philosopher who seeks to strip Scripture of its poetry and turn it into doctrine is like Cain. But the blood of the text cries out in protest.

“A poem must be, not mean,” says Archibald McLeish. And the Torah is compared to a poem. Yet philosophers want the Torah to mean, to refer.

Kabbalists take the figure of Abraham and allegorize him: Abraham is Hesed (loving-kindness). They take the mashal and alchemize it into a nimshal.

Duchamp did the opposite. He took nimshal and returned it to its mashal form. He took exposition and rendered it parable again. A bicycle wheel is no longer for cycling, but for contemplation.

Expositions that are disconnected from the complexity and richness of the parable they exposit are like Potemkin Villages. Doctrine without life, meaning without poetry, concept without image—this is what happens when the Apollonian overwhelms the Dionysian, when order subjugates creative chaos, when God becomes “good” instead of a presence traveling in a cloud pillar, when evil becomes banal and stops being a fiery sea dragon.

Mashal is myth, and the disenchanted world has mostly sanitized itself of it. But mashal will not be repressed.

The desire for mystery can never be quashed by the will to demystify. Thus, religion will never be destroyed by science, but will always adapt.

But not all religion is poetic. Some forms of religious life are bad science, renouncing mystery while simulating rationality.

And not all science is prosaic. The great technologists and inventors and experimentalists are motivated not just by a desire to know, but also by religious awe at the sheer fact that things are.

No matter what scientists discover, one thing will never be explicable: (self-) consciousness, how it is that the scientists know what they know. The laws of physics may be “true,” but no other creature that we know of knows them. And the existence of ET would only intensify the mystical point, making it seem as if the world is not just out there to be discovered, but actively calling for us to discover it.

Mashal exists because we can’t but personify the impersonal. Nimshal exists because the world is more than it seems. Perception is structured by nimshal. We rarely hear an empty sound, but always the sound of the rooster or the motorcycle or the child crying or the air conditioner. The act of hearing doesn’t precede the act of interpreting. To hear is to interpret. Thus, in many languages “to hear” and “to understand” are the same word.

But our understandings are often wrong, and so we need parable to re-orient ourselves to the source of our perception, the “clearing” itself wherein things come to presence. This is the task of poetry, of philosophy in the sense described by Heidegger, and of contemplative life: to renovate our world of exposition by returning us to the world of the parable.

If the ancients needed to move towards exposition and systematization, we moderns must re-learn the hidden art of parable.