Q&A: Platonism in Jewish Law
Platonism in Jewish Law
Question
Some time ago you wrote a column dealing with this topic. You presented there two approaches, one of which says that the conceptual reasonings are existing ideas, while the other holds that they are only the path to the halakhic ruling.
I thought of a principled practical difference between the two methods: the later authorities (Acharonim) disagreed about whether one can combine two disputes among halakhic decisors in order to say that there is a double doubt, or whether “the category of a dispute among decisors is one single category.” If we say that every dispute rests on a reasoning that represents an idea, then it seems this is really like two doubts about different realities; but if all the reasonings are only the path to the ruling, it is more reasonable that they cannot be combined, because they are not things that exist separately.
What do you think? Do you have another practical difference between the two approaches? (On the halakhic plane, not on the plane of how one learns, etc.)
Answer
There is a practical difference discussed in my article “What Is a Legal Effect,” namely whether it is possible to impose two contradictory legal effects or not.
I don’t think your practical difference is correct. Even in a factual double doubt you could argue that the category of doubt is one, since in the end what matters is what the correct facts are. The pieces of evidence have no independent existence; they are only a path to the facts. And nevertheless, in a factual double doubt we are lenient.
Discussion on Answer
I don’t understand what you answered to my claim. The doubt whether it was forbidden fat or permitted fat, and the doubt whether there is or is not an olive-bulk, are both aiming at the same bottom line: was a prohibition violated here (that of an olive-bulk of forbidden fat)? Exactly like a halakhic double doubt. I do not see even the slightest difference.
As for the question itself, why these views hold that a halakhic double doubt is treated stringently—there are other explanations for that, and there is no need to arrive at this explanation (which I also do not agree with). The later authorities have already discussed this at length in explaining the matter (most of them connected it to “these and those,” and to the question whether a halakhic doubt can be decided, or whether there is one halakhic truth, but this is not the place to go into it).
Because I didn’t understand it. Obviously in practice there is one final question, but the question is how many separate doubts are included within it. Nobody thinks that because there is a practical bottom-line question, everything before it is unimportant. Regarding a halakhic double doubt, Mahari ben Lev argued that the fact that the two halakhic questions are one question is not because there is a final practical question of what the ruling is, but because the two questions themselves do not deal with concrete reality but with what the law is.
I’m not trying to explain why a halakhic double doubt is treated stringently, but why the two doubts here are one category, unlike a doubt about something concrete. There is no doubt that one can find many distinctions as to why a halakhic doubt is different and must be treated stringently, but one still needs to explain why here two unrelated questions are one doubt (that is what Mahari ben Lev wrote, and he did not explain why).
Thank you very much
I didn’t invent the view that in a double doubt involving disputes among halakhic decisors it is one doubt. I’m trying to say that according to this approach it is hard to distinguish between the question of whether one ate forbidden fat or permitted fat, and the question of what the definition of acquisition by money is, if we are taking a Platonic approach in which the definition of acquisition is something that exists exactly like a piece of fat.
In my opinion, the view that disputes are one doubt agrees that you can’t say “perhaps forbidden fat, perhaps permitted fat” and “perhaps an olive-bulk, perhaps less than an olive-bulk” are the same question; but it is certainly possible to say that all conceptual reasonings are not really questions, because they do not deal with something that exists, and therefore the only question is what the Jewish law is.