Q&A: Several Questions
Several Questions
Question
Good evening, Rabbi,
Following the lecture you gave on Thursday evening at Yakar Synagogue in Tel Aviv about freedom and liberty, at the end of which I didn’t want to hold you up and so I only asked about the column dealing with the matter of dogs, I thought of two questions:
A. When in the lecture the Rabbi distinguished between liberty and freedom, and especially when you spoke about liberty, you repeated several times that an expression of liberty is an action done within a framework of laws, but without those laws dictating to me how I must act (or think), and if I understood correctly, that is what you called liberty. But this is difficult—regarding every “act of liberty,” couldn’t one say that in fact I was not limited beforehand from doing it, if I succeeded in doing it? I’ll try to illustrate with an analogy to the law of gravity.
The law of gravity is a law that places limitations on me. If, for example, I start running downhill, I can “go with it” and let it carry me quickly downward, or alternatively choose to stop, slow my pace, go down in skips, etc. And to the best of my understanding, such an act (that is, for example, stopping in the middle of the descent and not letting the force of gravity carry me downward in a run) is the kind of act that the Rabbi would see as an expression of liberty. My difficulty is this: if I managed to stop, then in fact hasn’t it been revealed here that the law of gravity does not limit me in this respect at least? And if it never limited me from stopping, then isn’t this a free act (according to the Rabbi’s definition of freedom that he spoke about in the lecture) and not an act of “liberty”? And so it comes out that every act fits one of two categories: if I succeeded in it, it was done within a free framework. And if not, I am unable to do it, and there is no question here of liberty or freedom at all. I hope the difficulty is clear.
B. During the experiment you referred to the signals experiment that tried to confirm or refute free choice, and you argued that although it was discovered that the signal precedes the choice, this is actually a reasonable finding in light of the fact that the subject was not facing a real dilemma. But I wondered whether there still isn’t something novel in the experiment: after all, without the experiment, one might have thought that free choice means some moment of decision and only afterward the creation of a signal that leads to the act we chose. But in light of the experiment’s findings, what became clear to us is that free choice means (at least according to your view) not a specific moment that generates a signal, but that a signal is not the only thing dictating what a person will do. This is a great novelty, since we learned that in fact the “content” of the signal does not compel!
And unrelated to what has been said so far, I would be glad to know what you think about the interview that was published on the news channels, of Rabbi Eli Sadan with Dana Weiss (especially in the last few minutes, where he seems to call himself “tolerant” precisely in the sense that you defined so well).
Have a good week; I hope this didn’t come out too long.
Answer
A. The more precise analogy is the following: within the framework of the law of gravity, it is hard for me to climb up a slope and easy for me to go down into the valley. And nevertheless I choose to climb, even though others choose to go down. That is liberty, because I acted against constraints. Clearly we are not talking about acting against deterministic constraints, because that is an oxymoron. But within the framework of constraints not under my control, I chose my own path and did not let them channel me. As I explained in the lecture, even in a concentration camp there are very strong constraints, and still there were those who gave their piece of bread to others. That is a similar example. I don’t know whether you are familiar with my book The Science of Freedom; the issues are explained there more precisely and in greater detail.
B. That is indeed correct. There is definitely something new in that. There is also another novelty, more relevant to our issue: despite the fact that we feel we decided, that does not always reflect the truth.
I did not hear the interview.
Discussion on Answer
A. There was a limitation that made it harder for me. That too is a limitation. A limitation that makes something impossible obviously means I cannot act freely against it. We are always talking about limitations that leave some room within which I maneuver. People who are less free will surrender to the limitation and not struggle against it.
B. A person can develop new ways of thinking (like Maimonides), against what is accepted, because that is what seems right to him. He can issue a halakhic ruling differently from what is accepted when he finds creative justifications (in the positive sense—correct arguments that no one had thought of). For example, Rabbi Shlomo Carlebach conducted himself in a way that was criticized by all the rabbis. After his death, it again became more accepted. Among other things, because they understood that there was justification for what he did. I will touch on this topic in the continuation of the posts I am now writing on the subject.
A. As you have already pointed out several times, limitation is an inability to do something specific. According to this definition, I make two claims: 1. There is no limitation here, since if the defined thing is climbing the mountain, then I succeeded in climbing the mountain (and obviously, according to the definition above, it makes no difference at all whether the thing was hard or easy), and/or alternatively 2. If the defined thing is climbing the mountain easily, then indeed there is a limitation here. But on the other hand, I never overcame that limitation, because although I ultimately succeeded in climbing the mountain, it still was not done easily.
Rabbi, I am driving at the point that after much thought about the subject of your recent columns (and following the lecture at Yakar Synagogue), I am not so sure that the relations you sketched between the state (or “asset,” in your terminology) called freedom and the value called liberty are so clear.
If we take, for example, your treatment of the subject of aesthetics and the mistake of postmodernism, which thought that smashing all the frameworks and rules of art would lead to “higher” art—in your view the mistake here is clear: the postmodernists “confused” freedom with liberty. They are not aware that the value of art is drawn דווקא from the constraints of style, form, message, and so on. But one can formulate the postmodern turn also in terms of liberty, and argue that at most this is a dispute over what ought to be the boundary of artistic creation and what ought not. This is similar (at least in this respect) to the question of whether and when it is appropriate to use the argument of human dignity or not in Jewish law; that is, when this limitation should find expression, in what way, if at all, etc.
From this point on, the discourse that “a moment ago” failed through the naturalistic fallacy and identified freedom as a value becomes a different discourse, one that contains within it a value dispute about the dosage and character of limitations! And once we are all in the same boat (both those whom you claimed confuse freedom and liberty, and the religious camp that serves as an example of a public that can potentially behave in a “liberty-oriented” way), it seems that the differences between human beings are not differences of form, but at most of content.
B. Thank you very much. I’ll follow the upcoming publications.
A. I already answered that. An action that requires effort from me and that someone else would not do because of that expresses my liberty. No point in conceptual hairsplitting.
B. If that is indeed what postmodernism means, then it is just a quantitative argument and not really any innovation. I have no problem with that. I am arguing with the position that advocates breaking constraints and seeing them as just a meaningless and arbitrary narrative. If you claim there is no such position, I tend to agree. No one actually thinks that, but many speak that way (they live in an illusion).
A. And still, even according to your analogy—logically, what is the difference between an act that is hard for me to do but that I nevertheless succeeded in doing, and an act that I succeeded in doing with no difficulty? After all, in terms of the outcome it was “revealed” that in both cases there was no limitation on climbing the mountain.
My claim is that the state in which I do things but under constraints (what you called liberty) has no unique logical meaning compared to that same act that I did without limitations. As stated, in both cases I succeeded, and therefore I was never limited.
B. I’d be glad if you could drift a bit outside the analogy and give an example of “liberty-oriented” conduct in the lifestyle of a religious person.