Q&A: What Caused the Ideas
What Caused the Ideas
Question
Hello, according to the approach of Dawkins, may he live long. At the beginning of the book God Plays Dice, the Rabbi philosophizes about what ideas are. The Rabbi says that if each person has a different definition, then these are different concepts that are unrelated to the idea they claim to mean. My question is: how did all the people making different claims create the same idea? (In every language there is the term “good.”) Fine, the color yellow is something real, but good? That is something completely abstract. Kant says that at our base each person has something called “good,” but because the definitions are so different, it is no longer the same thing. (Even Hitler, in his own eyes, did good deeds.) Is there some basic definition that is a translation of the idea and is not disputed, such as: “Good — the right thing to do”?
Answer
On the contrary, in Two Carts I wrote exactly as you say (I don’t remember a discussion of this in the dice book). The idea of the good is the connotation that accompanies saying about something that it is good. What counts as good—that can be debated. Without the assumption that there is such an agreed-upon idea, there is no room for argument, and in fact we would be dealing with definitions rather than claims. See Two Carts, second section.
Of course this is not a definition of the idea, since the definition deals with the characteristics of the idea, and at that point there can already be disagreements.