In Response to “Academic Research and the Prohibition of Touch”
Article Contents
In Response to “Academic Research and the Prohibition of Touch”
By Michael Abraham, in the Bo issue
Philosophical Thought Comes from Academia
“The academic physicist,” writes Dr. Abraham, “is supposed to investigate the laws of nature created by the Creator.” First, one may infer from the opening of the sentence that there is such a thing as a non-academic physicist. There is no such thing. A physicist is not a painter or a poet. Physics is not painting, sculpture, poetry, or literature, which can be created independently of the academy. To be a physicist, one must study in a university physics department and receive an academic degree.
Second, the assertion that the Creator created the laws of nature is fundamentally mistaken. The Creator, Dr. Abraham should know, created nature. He did not create the laws of nature. The laws of nature are scientists’ attempts to explain nature by means of laws that they formulate. There is no way to prove that nature operates according to any laws whatsoever. Laws of nature that once seemed clear and certain have been refuted one after another. The role of scientific research is to formulate the laws of nature through laboratories and experiments. The physicist certainly creates new things in the course of research, such as laws, formulas, and the like. He does not “investigate the laws of nature,” as Dr. Abraham says; he investigates nature. It is impossible to formulate new laws of nature or advance the science of physics except in the course of academic research. One cannot detach the physicist from his laboratory in the academy.
As for philosophy, it is indeed not like physics, but on the other hand it is clearly not poetry, literature, or painting. It is certainly possible for a philosophical work of value to be written by thinkers who are not academics and who even lack any formal philosophical education whatsoever, but this—though perhaps more common in the past—has become exceedingly rare. One may safely assume that a groundbreaking philosopher will know the field of philosophy well and know what has been written before him, so that his work will truly have value. The overwhelming majority of leading thinkers in recent generations came from the ranks of academia. It would be embarrassing to speak of intellectual giants such as Karl Popper, Bertrand Russell, Isaiah Berlin, Emmanuel Levinas, and many others in isolation from the academy, for their philosophical thought was an outgrowth of their academic and research work. The technical question of whether their books were published by a university press or by a private publisher is merely semantic and not essential.
And one final note: “A scholar in the humanities is supposed to investigate what human beings create,” writes Dr. Abraham. Metaphysics, epistemology, and the like, which are central components of philosophical inquiry, are in no sense research into what human beings create.
Hillel Lerman
Hillel Lerman is an engineer, a manager of start-up companies, and the author of the book “There Are No Stupid People”
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Creators Bound by Rules of Inquiry
Rabbi Abraham’s basic distinction sounds reasonable and acceptable, and yet it also invites reflection. There is no doubt that there is a clear gap between the poet and the scholar of poetry, and it is right to make a similar distinction in philosophy as well. Nevertheless, not in every discipline can one draw a sharp line between engagement in the thing itself and speaking ‘about’ it. Unlike poetry and philosophy, there are fields of creation that require the creators themselves to abide by rules of inquiry.
Take legal decision-making in Jewish law as an example. According to Rabbi Abraham, there are decisors “of the first order,” the creative figures in the field, for whom precedents mean nothing. On the other hand, there are “scholars of Jewish law” who cling to precedents and are willing to permit conversion without acceptance of the commandments because that is what R. David Zvi Hoffmann said. But even the first-order decisor proves his arguments on the basis of sources; the only question is sources from which “order.” The criterion of assessability certainly applies to him, as it does to the scholar—with quotation marks or without—and it concerns not only methodological quality but the reliability of the conclusion. In short, the distinction between types of decisors is significant, but it is not clear that it is fundamental.
Assessable criteria also apply to creators in physics such as Newton and Einstein, and to pioneers in biology and genetics. The same is true of the historian’s work.
Creation, discovery, and description are three concepts that lie along a continuum. The difficulty of sharply distinguishing among them is not necessarily the result of blurring by misguided scholars; it may be immanent. And if that is so, there is no need to treat the phenomenon as a “difficulty.” The loosening of boundaries may in fact be an opportunity to enrich thought.
Therefore there is no need whatsoever to require the researcher to “put to death” the object of his research-love. Objective research is a positive and creative contribution that advances the field.
Elyakim Krumbein
Rabbi Elyakim Krumbein is a teacher at Yeshivat Har Etzion
A Methodology Modeled on the Sages
I enjoyed the distinction Abraham drew between research in Jewish studies and the thinkers in that field. Thus, similar to the difference between the philosopher and the scholar of philosophy, and the difference between the scholar of literature and the writer himself, I agree that the writing of the thinker, the writer, and the musician is not assessable by academic criteria.
However, the bottom line of Abraham’s analysis implies that it would not have been justified to grant professorial rank to A. B. Yehoshua, Haim Be’er, and great musicians who teach in academia. Since, in order to illustrate the importance of the distinction, Abraham framed the struggle over the place of Dr. Avinoam Rosenak at the Hebrew University as a confrontation between adherents of the historical-philological method and those who believe that “raising contemporary issues” constitutes legitimate material for academic teaching, I would like to protest here against the methodological narrowness of vision that Abraham enlisted in his article.
Thus, since he included me in the list of those supposedly supporting contemporary discussions in academia, I would like to accuse him, from this platform, of failing to understand what he read. Accordingly, he apparently did not understand, or did not notice, the fact that I reject granting academic standing to postmodern—and even contemporary—musings that are not anchored in a textual interpretation of sources.
How so? For some time now I have been crying out against writers on Judaism and the humanities for ignoring psychosophic knowledge directly relevant to their studies. Accordingly, by way of illustration, I present the rabbinic midrashists as masters of tendentious distortion of scriptural texts, using examples such as their presentation of Lot’s daughters and Tamar as “righteous women,” because the aim of the Sages was to explain the possibility of the establishment of Davidic kingship, and so forth.
In my writing I repeatedly emphasize that my research method is distinctly “modeled on the Sages,” because I agree with them that, for the sake of cultivating the Jewish ethos, one must establish, for example, that “it is a settled rule that Esau hates Jacob” (Sifrei Beha’alotekha 69; cited by Rashi to Gen. 33:4). For according to the plain meaning of Scripture, Esau would, heaven forbid, come out righteous. All I ask of writers on Jewish subjects is that they understand that without addressing the Sages’ method of deconstructive interpretation, even the philological-historical study of Jewish texts is sterile.
Thus, the academic disqualification of developmental research into Jewish methods of education, therapy, and self-repair because of its lack of systematic reference to sources is not only mistaken; it also fails to identify the creative ethic embodied in the thought of the Sages.
Mordechai Rotenberg
Prof. Mordechai Rotenberg is the recipient of the Israel Prize for research in social work for 2009
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Physics and a Bachelor’s Degree / Rabbi Dr. Michael Abraham Responds:
Despite the certainty with which they are stated, Hillel Lerman’s remarks are full of errors and misunderstandings. The over-subtle inference from the term “the academic physicist” does not accord with the rules of logic, for from an affirmative statement one cannot infer a negative. In addition, I have never heard of a law requiring a physicist to study in a university physics department and receive an academic degree as a condition for engaging in physics. As for my assertion—“fundamentally mistaken,” in his words—that the Creator created the laws of nature, and the information Lerman “brought to my attention,” in his words, on this matter, I have written several books about it, and I can only refer him to them. In any event, this is at most an opinion—one that in my view is utterly unfounded—and therefore I am astonished that he treats it as though it were a fact.
As for the possibility of creating philosophy outside the walls of the university or within them, I disagree with him. And finally, his concluding paragraph attests to a basic misunderstanding. I did not write that epistemology is the study of what human beings create. I wrote that the humanities deal with human creation. Metaphysics and human cognition are, of course, acts of the Creator, and they are the philosopher’s concern. The study of the philosophers’ systems belongs to the humanities. This mistaken identification, in my view, was the subject of the article.
I am inclined to agree with most of Rabbi Krumbein’s remarks. But the existence of a gray area does not mean that there is no black and white. It is important to make distinctions, and it is also important to understand their limits. Every student understands the difference between a first-order and a second-order decisor, even though first-order legal decision-making is also committed to sources. Blurring is never a blessing; flexibility sometimes is.
As for Prof. Rotenberg’s remarks, I do indeed claim that there is no place for a writer in academic teaching unless he also functions under the hat of a scholar. I explicitly wrote that I do not distinguish between people but between hats. A writer can, by chance or not, also be a scholar of literature, and likewise a scholar of Jewish law or philosophy, but it is important that he distinguish between those two hats. I would also note that I did not accuse him of anything; at most I cited him as supporting what he has once again explicitly acknowledged here: that he accepts work in academia that is not assessable. It is entirely legitimate, of course, to present a position different from mine and even to accuse me of narrow-mindedness—on what basis?—but if we are speaking of failure to understand what one reads, then I must say to him, sadly: put your own house in order first.
A further clarification. After my remarks were published, I spoke with Dr. Avinoam Rosenak, and he told me that my description of what took place in the department at the university was not accurate. I wrote that he had been transferred against his will to another department, and that he integrates contemporary issues into teaching in the department. As I noted, I have no information whatsoever on the matter and relied on what was written in articles that had previously appeared in this supplement. I used the case as a trigger for the principled discussion. In any event, I apologize to him if the description I gave was inaccurate.
Published in the ‘Shabbat’ supplement of Makor Rishon, 12 Shevat 5776, 22 January 2016