An Overview of Torah and Torah Study – Lesson 1 – Rabbi Michael Abraham

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[Rabbi Michael Abraham] where that is written, how I responded. But I’m saying, what is this actually—this thing is a poem? So what, just because he broke it into lines and punctuated it? After all, that’s what I wrote in the first place, just an ordinary question; it has nothing to do with poetry. So you’re going with what Zanbank wrote—that is, that the difference between poetry and prose is simply a basic question of how you approach the matter, and when you break it into lines or punctuate it, you give the reader a hint that this should be approached as a poem, and that itself is what turns it into a poem. Okay? That’s basically the claim, okay? That’s basically what he wanted to argue here with this little game. He really wanted to say: there is no answer to your question; the answer to your question is that what you see as a poem is a poem. What? Not always. Poetry today is certainly postmodern—no rhythm, nothing. You can read texts there with no meter, no rhyme, nothing, just nothing. Yes, I think they still generally insist on line-broken writing, though even about that I’m not sure. Yes, today the rules are already completely out of force. So the point is, yes, that’s what he’s saying. If you know the literature and poetry sections in the newspapers, maybe you came across the poem quoted above—which of course is what he did to me. On the other hand, maybe you read it in a different format. Poetry is what people decide is poetry; see also the entry for a work of art and Duchamp’s toilet. You know Duchamp’s toilet? Duchamp was a herald, one of the heralds, of postmodern art. And one of his most famous works was—he called it The Fountain—he put an old toilet there. That’s it. Now the question is: is that a work of art or not a work of art? He had something to say. That is, mountains upon mountains of words were written about Duchamp’s toilet. So this thing sparked discussion. Meaning, it has something to say. Even though the object itself was taken from a plumbing supply store. Well, or old—not from a store, I think it was actually an old toilet. But still—is it a work of art? Is it not a work of art? So the claim people often end up with, the conclusion they ultimately reach, is that art is what is displayed in a museum. That’s it. There’s no definition, just context. If it’s inside a museum, then it’s art. Put the exact same thing outside, and it’s not art. This is very similar to what he was trying to argue here. What I wrote was certainly not a poem. It was a question. Fine—he took it, put it into the formal framework of a poem, and then it became a poem. Okay?

Now, you need to understand—let’s go back for a moment to the moral of the analogy. This whole discussion about poetry is an analogy. Let’s go back to the point. This is basically what I claimed earlier—or not claimed, but raised as a possibility earlier, right? Maimonides takes Aristotelian philosophical arguments, writes them in Rashi script, binds them into a book that looks like a Jewish book in some sense—I don’t know, it stands in the Jewish library. In any case, nothing there besides that looks Jewish, but—and that’s it, it became Torah. But it’s the same thing Aristotle wrote. At least parts of it, not the whole book, but certain parts of the book are simply Aristotelian philosophy. That’s all. What turned it into Torah? Simply the fact that it’s in the museum, yes—that it’s in a Torah library. That’s it. Is that enough? Is it not enough? You understand that these questions are very similar questions. The question what Torah is and the question what poetry is. Methodologically too, we’re dealing here with a complex concept. But as a result of the concept being complex, people often arrive at a certain kind of despair, and then they basically propose a nihilistic definition, a definition that essentially says there is no definition. Torah is what we perceive as Torah, or poetry is what we perceive as poetry, or art is what is displayed in a museum. Okay? Therefore these outcomes, or these conclusions, stem from the complexity of the issue. Because of the complexity, you ultimately reach despair: I can’t define it. Fine, but still—something. So how do I distinguish between what is poetry and what is not poetry? What is art? What is Torah? So it’s what is displayed in a museum, or what is found in a Torah library. That is what is called Torah. Which is basically the definition we usually use.

The big question is of course what justifies placing something in a Torah library. If it’s there, then you tell me, fine, the fact that it’s there means the librarian decided this is Torah. Okay? I’m asking what the librarian’s considerations were—in other words, on what basis did the librarian decide to put this book in a Torah library? We do not solve the problem by saying that what is in a Torah library is Torah, unless we say that this is an arbitrary matter. And that really is a definition—that is, whatever the librarian decides is what is called Torah. That’s it. He doesn’t need to decide according to anything. It somewhat reminds me of various queer-type questions, you know, like: what is the definition of a woman? A man? Whoever decides about themselves that they are a woman is a woman. Right? In the more extreme queer approaches, that is basically what they claim. Or in other words, they say there is no such thing as a woman. There is no such thing as a woman—what do you mean? You say about yourself that you are a woman; explain to me the word you are saying. It cannot be that saying the word is the meaning of the word I’m saying. There has to be—when I say this word, what do I mean? But I don’t mean anything; I mean to say the word w-o-m-a-n. That’s it. It doesn’t mean anything. The moment I said it, it turned me into that. What is that? Nothing. You understand that… what? Tautology. Yes, an empty tautology.

Malcolm once wrote—a well-known philosopher—he once wrote that there are tautologies that are illuminating tautologies. Is that word just a tautology? It’s a self-evident statement, yes, which basically says nothing. For example, evolution is a tautology. Because what survives is the most survivable. Obviously. And the fact that it survived means it was the most survivable. But you understand that this is an illuminating tautology. It’s a tautology that explains so many phenomena that before Darwin and his followers we did not understand, that you cannot accuse it of being an empty statement or a stupid one or one that says nothing, even though it is entirely a tautology. Therefore the fact that it’s a tautology does not exhaust the matter. But this is an empty tautology—it says nothing. It says absolutely nothing.

There’s a wonderful film called What Is a Woman. It’s by an American clown—not a clown, he does it in a clownish way, but it’s very serious. An American conservative who goes around among various gender lecturers and lecturers and other idlers and tries to extract from them a definition of what a woman is. Now, this is your field of research; you dedicate your life to it. Not only did they fail to offer him a definition of what a woman is, they didn’t even understand what he was asking. They didn’t understand that they were in fact using the concept in an empty sense. Well, the people there are not the sharpest pencils in the box—otherwise they’d be doing physics. But still, I would expect people who devote years to this to give themselves some account of what the meaning is of what they are engaged in. Those people—not all of them, by the way, but the extreme part, the part that completely empties concepts of content—are basically people dealing with a vacuum. They are dealing with nothing. They are simply playing with words that have no meaning whatsoever, and that’s it. That’s how they make a living. And for that they cut down the forests of Brazil to print their articles.

[Speaker C] Too bad—we had a discussion about this in another class. There was Duchamp’s toilet—that if it wasn’t Duchamp, then how do you call it art?

[Rabbi Michael Abraham] Okay, that’s—

[Speaker C] the same thing.

[Rabbi Michael Abraham] It’s the same thing. It’s like saying that art is what is displayed in a museum, or what was created by Duchamp. It doesn’t matter, it’s the same idea, the same idea. No—the context was created. Obviously, the toilet wasn’t created by him, but the context was created by him. By the way, with Duchamp it really is not a simple question, because in the end it really is a very significant work in the history of art. Very significant. It sparked many important discussions. Fine, maybe it’s a didactic aid for those studying the history of art. The question is whether such a thing is automatically defined as an artistic work—that’s another question. For example, I’ll give you an example in the context of what Torah is—I keep moving between the analogy and the point. In the context of what Torah is, many times all these heretical statements of mine about what is not Torah, and that Hasidism is not Torah and aggadic literature is not Torah—we’ll get to that later, but this is a preview. But people tell me: “Look, but these things are tremendously important, they build people, they give them some important perspective, their service of God looks different because of them.” All that may be true, but why does that make it Torah? Breakfast also gives me strength, I don’t know what, to study Torah. So is breakfast also Torah? There are many things that are important to me. The fact that something is important to me does not mean it is Torah.

So here too: Duchamp’s toilet contributed greatly to the discussion of what art is. There is no doubt about that, okay? The question is whether that turns it into a work of art. No. It’s very important for understanding what art is, fine. But that does not mean the thing itself thereby becomes a work of art. That’s another question, okay? There’s room here to hesitate; I’m not giving an answer right now, I’m raising a question.

There is indeed one of the well-known art scholars in Israel, named Gideon Ofrat. And he wrote a book called What Is Art. That book has twenty-something chapters, in each of which he tries to define art and rejects the definition proposed in that chapter. And in the end he reaches the conclusion that art is what we call art—that is, what is found in a museum. Yes, that is basically the conclusion. Now, what is nice there is that he gets to it in a very sophisticated way. That is, each such chapter is an analytical, clever, intelligent chapter. He proposes some definition and shows that all sorts of things that are works of art do not fit that definition. Therefore that cannot be the definition of art. In other words, this involves analysis, examination of examples, serious understanding. So it’s not just some little game by someone who understands nothing and says, “Art is what is in a museum,” out of some kind of despair. The despair here is despair that is the result of a very systematic attempt to propose a definition, and an attempt that failed. In other words, he didn’t succeed. And then he says: “Fine, so apparently there is no definition, and art is what is displayed in a museum.”

[Speaker M] Two comments. First comment: in our interdisciplinary program, for example, there’s always the recurring discussion about whether studying biblical criticism counts as Torah study.

[Rabbi Michael Abraham] Every—

[Speaker M] time there are different answers, so that too is a question—for example, whether studying biblical criticism is really Torah. And the second question about Gideon Ofrat: what he tried, for example—that’s the analogy regarding what a woman is. What he tried was to take all the different possibilities that exist in humanity and in the society of artists, see what each person’s view is, and because there is no single all-encompassing view, then there is no definition. That is, he defines…

[Rabbi Michael Abraham] No, no, no. He didn’t survey opinions. He surveyed proposals of his own for offering a definition.

[Speaker M] So I’ll tell you—who are we to determine an authority to decide?

[Rabbi Michael Abraham] That’s another question, which I’ll get to in a moment, because what Gideon Ofrat’s discussion assumes—and again, all this is very important for us too, so this discussion is worth having—when I examine, say, definitions of art, I say: I have works of art, and I take a definition I proposed and test it. Then I suddenly discover that there are a few works that do not meet that definition, so apparently that definition is no good. Then I move on to the next definition, and so on; I reject all the definitions. But who says? Maybe those works really aren’t art. In other words, he has some assumption that we know what art is. Okay? That, we know. These works are certainly art. Now what I’m trying to do is offer a conceptualization or formulated definition of the concept of art, and I test it on the basis of the facts. The fact that these objects are works of art—that for me is a fact. That is, I am not willing to question the definition of some famous painting or some musical work as a work of art; that is obvious to me, it’s a fact. And now I take these facts and test against them my formulated definitions, my intellectual abstractions, okay?

And here the question you raised can absolutely be asked: who told you? After all, as long as you don’t know what art is, why are you so sure that these things really are works of art? Why is that so simple for you? Ostensibly the order should be the opposite. First of all we should define, and then we can characterize what is a work of art and what is not. In logic there are two kinds of definitions: definition by extension and definition by intension. Say I want to define a democratic state. I can define a democratic state by giving a list of democratic states. That is one possible way to try to define this concept. A second possibility is definition by content—that was definition by extension, yes, the set, the extension-set of the concept. Definition by content means: what is a democratic state? It’s a state with separation of powers—or supposed to have separation of powers—and civil rights and elections and things like that, okay? That is a definition by content.

Now the question is what the relationship is between these two definitions. On the one hand, I cannot give a definition by extension unless I have the content-definition, because when I go through all the countries in the world and ask myself which of these countries is democratic, by what criterion do I decide? There has to be some criterion. So I am basically supposed to be equipped with a content-definition of the concept of a democratic state, and that can help me build the extension-definition. Right? But on the other hand, it’s fairly clear that the content-definition itself is nourished somewhat by looking at democratic states. You can see it in the arguments here today: people say, well, in all democratic countries it is customary to do this or not customary to do that. We look at those countries—it is taken as a given that they are democratic—and I test a proposal being made here by asking whether it exists in other democratic countries. In other words, you understand that an argument of this kind assumes the definition by extension and tries to build the content-definition on its basis, whereas logic says to do the reverse. Logic says: you need the content-definition, and then use it to build the set of democratic countries. You now have litmus paper that determines which country is democratic and which country is not democratic. But it doesn’t work that way.

And the reason it doesn’t work that way—I’m skipping a bit—but the reason it doesn’t work that way, let me put it like this: there’s a book by Pirsig, do you know it? Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance. It was a cult book, I don’t know how many years ago, when I was in the army—a long time ago, I won’t say out loud, almost fifty years. The book is basically about a rhetoric lecturer, an American rhetoric lecturer, called Phaedrus—a literary name—who goes on a motorcycle journey across the United States and thinks to himself about various concepts, philosophical thoughts. Throughout the whole book almost nothing happens. It’s philosophical thoughts on that motorcycle. And his son too, yes.

Now among other things in that book he reflects on the concept of quality. As he checks—he’s a rhetoric lecturer—so he grades student essays at some American college, doesn’t matter, and he gives them grades. A good essay is ninety, eighty, a hundred, seventy, I don’t know—he gives grades. Then he asks himself: what is the criterion for quality? Can I define the concept of quality? Do I have a definition by which I can calibrate the different essays and determine what grade, or what quality, each of them has? His conclusion is that he cannot. He fails to define the concept of quality. But the conclusion does not mean that the grades are arbitrary. It only means that there are concepts that are hard—or perhaps impossible—to define. That does not mean these concepts do not exist. It means I do not know how to define them in a formulated way, okay? He says that what the wicked Greeks did was mess up our minds by causing us to think that a concept we haven’t defined does not exist or cannot be used. No. We have concepts that we understand and can use, and sometimes it’s worth trying to define them, but sometimes it is very hard. Sometimes we do not succeed—perhaps it’s impossible, perhaps just difficult—but we do not succeed, okay? Therefore it is not necessarily true that every concept we know we can define, and conversely—yes, denying the consequent—every concept we cannot define does not thereby fail to exist or become something we do not understand. Those are two sides of the same coin. So basically that means—what did you mean

[Speaker G] by the question about meter—that a composition in meter is…

[Rabbi Michael Abraham] I said: the formal properties. Again, I can’t justify it, but I think the simple feeling is that formal properties are not what define a poem. The form expresses the fact that this is a poem, but it is not the definition of the concept poem. And the fact is that in contemporary poetry you don’t have that—no meter, no rhyme, nothing.

[Speaker G] It feels sort of like a neural network, let’s call it that. As if in the end we’re doing some kind of weighting of lots of things and arriving at a conclusion, a decision. It’s some imitation of our decision-making process. I didn’t understand. A neural network, for example—as if there’s lots and lots of details, lots of information about every poem, I don’t know, number of letters, all sorts of things like that, and in the end you get to some…

[Rabbi Michael Abraham] No, that’s fine—that really is how we operate before we’ve made the definition. Now I’m trying to extract a definition. And a neural network does exactly that—that is, it arrives at the answers, hopefully the correct ones, without using rules in an explicit formulation. It simply succeeds in building within itself imitation mechanisms from the examples, from the training it undergoes, and it manages to produce the task in a way that is not conscious. Usually when we produce tasks, we produce them like a classical program, not like a neural network. That is, we use criteria and based on them we make decisions. Now I’m trying to do that, okay? The question is whether I can define this concept, okay? So basically what you wanted to bring as evidence—that concepts have meaning and can be used even without defining them—from neural networks, is that what you meant? If so, I accept that. That I’m willing to accept.

[Speaker G] Things that are fluid in themselves too.

[Rabbi Michael Abraham] No, whether they’re fluid or not is another question, but many times they’re hard to define or formulate, perhaps impossible. An interesting question is whether things whose rules are impossible to formulate—a neural network would succeed in doing that? Or can a neural network do only something whose rules are very hard for us to define but where there is some rigid rule-definition, and it succeeds in getting there without going through all the human hesitations? But if there is something that is a task that is not computational at all—that is, it simply cannot be conducted systematically according to rules—not that I don’t know the rules, but there are no rules, even the Holy One, blessed be He, doesn’t know; there aren’t any—then the question is whether a neural network could perform such a task at all. That’s an interesting question, an interesting philosophical question; I’m not sure. What?

[Speaker J] Are there things that can’t be defined at all?

[Rabbi Michael Abraham] That’s an interesting question. I don’t know. If there is such a thing, maybe that will be the glass ceiling of neural networks. Think about chapter two of tractate Bava Metzia. It says there, in Elu Metziot, that a lost item is returned to a Torah scholar on the basis of visual recognition. A lost item is returned to a Torah scholar on the basis of visual recognition. He doesn’t have to provide identifying marks. He says, “It’s mine”; he sees it, he recognizes it, he says, “It’s mine.” Now in yeshivas there’s usually some saying like that: the visual recognition of a Torah scholar. A Torah scholar has some special ability of visual recognition to identify something. That’s nonsense, of course. The Talmudic distinction between a Torah scholar and a non-scholar is not because a Torah scholar has better visual recognition, but because with a Torah scholar there is no concern that he will lie. Though even that, I’m not so sure about today. But with a Torah scholar, if he tells me, “This is mine,” and he didn’t give identifying marks, then how do I know he’s not lying? So if he’s a Torah scholar, I don’t suspect him of lying. But it’s not that a Torah scholar has more visual recognition than an ordinary person. That’s not what it says there in the Talmud, okay?

Now the interesting question really is: how does this mechanism of visual recognition work? How does it work? So the simple view, the intuitive view I think, is that when you see the thing—say it’s a ball—and I say, wow, that was my ball, I recognize it. Now I can’t give you identifying marks, tell you clear marks that would give you an indication or prove to you that this ball is mine. So how do I myself know it? The accepted assumption is that it’s a collection of many tiny marks that I don’t know how to formulate. But basically there are marks here. On the principled level I could also give you clear marks and prove to you that this ball is mine. And since it’s such a complex matter, all these nuances and so on, I don’t know how to formulate it. But I recognize it. In other words, this is basically doing a kind of shortcut. In fact I could go through and inspect the angle of every scratch on this ball and its length and so on, and on that basis show you that this ball is mine, okay? But I don’t know how to do that, I can’t do that, and I also don’t have the data on the original ball because I didn’t do that before it was lost. Therefore all I can do is do it by shortcut—that is, I recognize that this is so, without actually going through each such scratch in detail, okay? That is the simple view.

But maybe—here’s a suggestion—maybe not. Maybe it doesn’t go through the external signs. Maybe I have some ability to understand that this ball is mine. I manage to see that this ball is mine. I have some intuition, I don’t know, that does not pass through the external visual signs, okay? I don’t know, I have some kind of sense that tells me: this is my ball. Could such a thing be possible? I don’t know. Maybe yes, maybe no. If there is such a thing, you understand that a neural network probably won’t be able to do it. Even though, according to the second approach too, I as a person am not really operating consciously through the signs. But a neural network would be able to do the first way and not the second—or the other way around; that’s what I think at least. Okay? So that is just an analogy for what I was talking about before.

What this basically means is this: look, returning to our topic, there are really two kinds of definitions. One definition—and this is how mathematicians usually think—is an arbitrary definition. That is, I take a collection of characteristics, put them together, define that as a concept, give it a name, some linguistic term, and for me that is the definition of the concept. The definitions of mathematical concepts—group, set, space, all kinds of things of that sort—are basically definitions of this sort, okay? I define a definition. There is no such thing as a correct or incorrect definition. I defined it this way, and now I just need to preserve consistency. That is, make sure I indeed use the definition consistently, in the same way all the time. That is an arbitrary definition.

There are definitions of another sort. Definitions where the basic concept is one I already understand, and I’m trying to formulate these insights. I’m trying to define what I feel in an unformulated way. To formulate what I feel in an unformulated way. A definition of that kind can be right or wrong. That is, if your definition doesn’t really hit your original intuition, then you defined it incorrectly. Because you are trying to hit that very concept which you grasped before you defined it, okay? It’s not like an arbitrary definition where whatever you define is the concept. In an arbitrary definition, the definition constitutes the concept. In a non-arbitrary definition, the definition points toward the concept. In analytic philosophy they make a distinction between general systems—

[Speaker D] But here you don’t always know what the phenomenon is, where it stems from.

[Rabbi Michael Abraham] How does that relate to what I’m… I didn’t understand. I have no information, I have a feeling, and now I want to formulate it. I say: I… I have a feeling for what Torah is, or what poetry is. And now I’m trying to pour that into words, to formulate it. Although, as he remarked earlier—remind me of your name? Itai. As Itai remarked earlier, how do I know these artworks are artworks if I haven’t yet defined the concept of art? How can I test my definitions on the basis of certain works of art? The opposite—definitions are what determine what a work of art is. The answer is no. I have an intuition of what art is. I have an intuition of what works of art are, okay? And now I’m trying to conceptualize that intuition, formulate it, and present an explicit verbal definition that tries to capture that intuition. A definition of that sort is not an arbitrary definition. It is a definition that can בהחלט be judged as true or not true. If it hit that concept, then it is true; if not…

I’ll give you an example. I was always troubled by the move—the move of multiple intelligences. Yes, by now it’s been very popular for several decades. Multiple intelligences means that once people thought Einstein was intelligent. Yes, smart people are intelligent. And little by little there emerged an approach, an understanding, a view that there are many kinds of intelligences. Maradona too is a genius. He too is intelligent. And there is emotional intelligence and motor intelligence and I don’t know, all kinds of intelligence. There are seven, nine—there are all sorts of classifications of the types of intelligences. There are many intelligences. And then it turns out that we’re all Einstein. Everyone is Einstein in a different place. Now this is of course very convenient for a postmodern generation that doesn’t want to distinguish between better and worse. Everyone is equally good, just in a different field, okay? And still, by the way, they still make rankings, but at least it allows lots of rankings. There are those who don’t accept rankings at all. They say Einstein wasn’t even a genius in physics—not only was he not the only genius. Well, that really is the extreme queer thing I mentioned earlier.

In any case, this move of multiple intelligences worked like this on the methodological level. Today it’s already an academic discipline. How did it work? It started when people asked themselves: wait, what is intelligence? And they tried to conceptualize, to define for themselves, what the traits are in Einstein because of which I see him as an intelligent person. Or Einstein and those like him, or other people, okay? Then they arrived at a formulation of five, seven, I don’t know how many, characteristics of intelligence. What is intelligence? After they formulated those characteristics, they suddenly discovered that these characteristics fit not only genius of the Einstein type but also Maradona, or people with very good emotional understanding, or things of that sort. Then they say, fine, if so there are many intelligences, and all sorts of people whom in the past we did not see as intelligent—they had certain skills that were good, but we did not classify them as intelligence. Okay, so today that too is intelligence. And there are all sorts of intelligences.

Once I heard on the radio some school principal from Tel Aviv saying that he stopped teaching computer science at the school—I’m talking many years ago. Why? Because girls were getting lower achievements than boys in computer science. So he stopped teaching it at the school. As if to equalize the outcomes from there?

[Speaker M] Yes, so that there would be equality between the male and female students.

[Rabbi Michael Abraham] Fine. In any case, for our purposes, that’s the goal—the social goal is basically to show that everyone is equal, that everyone is good. So the scientific or academic way to do that is basically to try to formulate the concept of intelligence, define it, and then show that in fact we are all intelligent, each in a different field, okay? And I always suspected this move because it is a postmodern move, a move that tries to empty concepts of content just in order to create the longed-for equality, okay?

And my claim was basically built like this. Today we’re dealing with methodology, so it’s fine, no big deal, we’re drifting a bit into different areas. My claim was basically this: you started with a concept that was intuitively clear to you. Right? And in its application—what? Intelligence, yes. Now in its application it was clear to you that Einstein is intelligent and Maradona is not. That was the initial situation, okay? Then you said, fine, let’s break down for a moment the concept of intelligence that we find in Einstein. Let’s formulate it with five or seven characteristics. You did that, and boom—you discovered that Maradona too is intelligent. What’s the conclusion? That you did not formulate the concept correctly. Because after all, you were trying to conceptualize that same prior insight you had, right? But according to that intuitive insight you had before, Maradona was not intelligent. Now you conceptualized it, and suddenly Maradona comes out intelligent. So that means your conceptualization is not good. That means—the wording, the formulated definition you arrived at did not really succeed in capturing your intuitive concept. Because if it had succeeded in capturing it, I would not expect the results to be different. My intuition tells me this is intelligent and that is not intelligent, just like with a work of art. My intuition tells me this is a work of art, this is a work of art, but that one is not a work of art, and from that I test the definitions. And definitions are supposed to fit what intuition yields. If it doesn’t fit, that only means the definition failed to hit the intuitive content it was trying to hit.

[Speaker N] Maybe the intuition is wrong and the definition is better?

[Rabbi Michael Abraham] Okay, but then what does it mean that the definition is better? Better in what sense? Better at hitting what?

[Speaker N] You relied on your intuition and criticized it and defined.

[Rabbi Michael Abraham] In light of what? In light of what? What is the given?

[Speaker N] What is the hard datum here?

[Rabbi Michael Abraham] If the hard datum is intuition—yes, intuitively I know who is intelligent and who is not—then it failed the test, because the hard datum is not realized after the formulation. So you say it’s not a hard datum—then what is? How do you know your definition is good? You can’t test it by its fit to intuition, because it doesn’t fit. So how do you know that this is really a good definition? And note: we are talking about definitions that can be right and wrong. If you’re talking about an arbitrary definition, no problem. Arbitrarily you can define whatever you want, and then everyone comes out intelligent, but you’ve simply emptied the word intelligence of content and then you can use it however you like. That’s not what you’re trying to do. You’re trying to understand what intelligence really is and expand the applications. But that is strange, because if you are trying to define in the second sense of definition—that is, a definition that tries to hit intuition—then it can never happen that you expand it, because if you expanded it, that means you are not hitting what your intuition says. So there is something methodologically problematic here. But why is intuition the—

[Speaker N] definition? If you relied on your intuition and criticized it and saw that the definition is better—you criticized it in light of what?

[Rabbi Michael Abraham] In light of what? What is the datum against which you compare the intuition? Your intellect. What is intellect? Intellect is intuition. What is intellect? What else? Besides that there is nothing. There is logic, by which you can derive conclusions from intuition. That’s it. Beyond that, nothing. We have no other hard datum. So against what do I compare the definition? Only against my intuitions. Unless you say this is an arbitrary definition—that’s fine. But then of course you haven’t proved anything. You can say Maradona is a genius like Einstein when you empty the word genius of content. Fine, obviously.

[Speaker M] Is intuition completely identical with intellect?

[Rabbi Michael Abraham] In my view yes—that is, intuition plus its logical derivatives. You can process…

[Speaker M] So what is the definition of intuition?

[Rabbi Michael Abraham] Immediate apprehension of truth. You have a logical argument; it is based on premises, right? Where did the premises come from? From the intellect. What is intellect? Assumptions about the world, say. What does “from the intellect” mean? Where does the intellect get them from? You can’t know something—Mark Twain already said that the world doesn’t owe you anything; it was here before you. And the fact that you think in a certain way says nothing about whether that’s really what’s going on in the world. The fact that you think that way means that that’s how you are built, that’s all. But how do you know that that’s what’s going on in the world? You need some sort of observation of the world, right? You can’t just determine things. Aristotle determined things about the world without looking at it; that’s why he determined that two bodies fall to the earth in proportion to their mass, their weight, which is of course nonsense. It doesn’t depend on their weight; they all fall at the same speed. And you don’t need a particle accelerator to test this. Go up to the second floor with a heavy stone and a light stone, throw them down, and you’ll see that you’re talking nonsense. And he didn’t bother doing that because it seemed terribly logical to him, so why should I test it empirically? In other words, yes, I need… where do I know my premises from? I know my premises from some kind of observation of the world. In my view intuition is a cognitive tool, not a thinking tool. Intuition is direct apprehension of something in the world.

[Speaker L] Is that a priori or a posteriori?

[Rabbi Michael Abraham] That depends how you define it. It is a priori if you regard observation only as observation through the senses. But I think we have additional means of observing the world—what Maimonides in Guide for the Perplexed calls “the eyes of the intellect.” Then you can call it a posteriori. That is, it is the result of observation—not sensory observation, but the result of observation. Because I also don’t agree that if I think something, the world owes me something. In other words, the fact that I think—so what? On the other hand, anyone who thinks that all our insights about the world are extracted from sensory observations simply doesn’t know what he is talking about. Nonsense. Every scientific law is the result of generalization on the basis of sensory observations—and how did you make the generalization? There are infinitely many ways to generalize.

[Speaker M] But the generalization is a hypothesis.

[Rabbi Michael Abraham] That’s what I’m saying, but the result is a scientific law. Do you believe the scientific law? Right? Good. So that means it’s true. Again—not certainty. I could always be mistaken, but it’s not a shot in the dark. It’s not just something subjective. I think the law of gravitation is true, or electromagnetism, or whatever. On what basis? All I saw was a collection of particular facts, and I processed them, sometimes in a very sophisticated, mathematical and scientific way, and so on. It can be done in a thousand ways. Why do you trust the result? I claim that this processing is not processing done only here. It is processing that also has a cognitive dimension. I understand that in the world itself this generalization is the right one and not that other generalization. I even have a proof for that, but I won’t get into it here.

[Speaker E] Intuition can mislead you. The example you gave with the stones—they will indeed fall at the same speed, but their different mass will cause the heavier stone to hit with much greater…

[Rabbi Michael Abraham] Of course. Right. But the speed is the same speed.

[Speaker E] Intuition misleads you.

[Rabbi Michael Abraham] I didn’t say intuition doesn’t mislead. Of course it misleads. But we have no better tool; we have no other tool.

[Speaker E] The moment you have some intuition and you test something and discover you were wrong—no, it’s not what you thought—then you learned.

[Rabbi Michael Abraham] No problem, right. But now I’m asking: in the world of definitions, not in the world of scientific observation, in the world of definitions, how do you discover that your intuition was wrong? On what basis? What are the data against which you compare? Let’s return to intelligence. There is no hard datum besides what my intuition says: this is intelligent and that one is not intelligent.

[Speaker I] So if my definition of intelligence is not correct in the context we were talking about—what is not correct? The form of the definition, the way I defined it, or the intuition?

[Rabbi Michael Abraham] If you take your definition as having one whole purpose—to capture the intuitive insight—then the definition is not correct, because as a matter of fact it does not fit the intuitive insight.

[Speaker I] Maybe the intuition itself is not correct?

[Rabbi Michael Abraham] If it itself is not correct, you have no way to discover that. Compared to what? You see? That’s the point. After all, what did you do? You took the intuitive definition and tried to abstract characteristics from it. You failed, because the characteristics do not give you the result intuition gives. That means these are not the characteristics equivalent to the intuitive definition. You simply didn’t succeed. So that means the intuitive definition is always in a better position than the definition. Because a definition tries to capture the content of what intuition says, only to formulate it in words. But what determines things is the intuition. If you don’t match what intuition yields, you simply failed in the process of conceptualization. That’s all. You’re saying

[Speaker O] that intuition is what determines?

[Rabbi Michael Abraham] Always. Only when you define it—again, intuition can mislead, that’s obvious. I completely agree. But we don’t have any other tool. Meaning, this is what we have.

[Speaker O] Could we also say that after you threw, say, two stones and discovered that…

[Rabbi Michael Abraham] No, no, that’s scientific. You simply look and see that your intuition was wrong. I’m talking about definitions.

[Speaker O] What’s preferable in a definition? Because in a definition you tried to, after the fact…

[Rabbi Michael Abraham] No, but I’m talking about definitions of concepts, not scientific experiment. In scientific experiment there is certainly a way to test intuition—just do an experiment.

[Speaker P] Is it impossible to rely on scientific experiment in order to check the boundaries of intelligence?

[Rabbi Michael Abraham] No—how? What would you do? What would you test? You can’t really test anything. What would you test? Whether it knows how to perform this task or that task? And how do you know that performing that task is intelligence? Because your intuition tells you that doing such a task requires intelligence. You’re not going to manage to escape that.

[Speaker D] All of science is full of lots of internal parameters, with some shared intuition, and how do I know? I went through review and scientific law and all the scientific-technological literature and all the labs and instruments, and in the end it turns out that I relied on shared intuition. So what’s the claim? That science too, in nature, is built on foundational assumptions?

[Rabbi Michael Abraham] Yes, of course. Our science too is based on intuitions. Science is saturated with intuitions, obviously. So seemingly—I’m coming back to our discussion here, I’m trying to sharpen it a bit more—I want to say that my criticism of this whole process of multiple intelligences is seemingly logically necessary. In other words, you can’t expand an intuitive concept on the basis of analyzing the intuition itself. It just can’t be. Because if you arrive at an expansion, that means you didn’t correctly analyze the intuitive concept, so go back and repeat the process. But in the end, as I got a bit older, I came to the conclusion—just a second—I came to the conclusion that I think it actually is possible. And there is meaning to a process of this kind; it’s not just some sort of postmodernism or a drive toward equality at any price. Because many times, after I formulate this definition of intelligence, right? and I reach the conclusion that Maradona too is intelligent, suddenly I understand that intuitively he really is intelligent. I suddenly discovered that my previous intuition was partial or inaccurate. And now the definition helped me build a new intuition—not because of the definition itself. After I reached the conclusion that this is the definition and I apply it and discover that Maradona too is intelligent, suddenly I can also see it intuitively. I understand that yes, I had missed something before. I think that’s the process. And therefore processes of this kind really do have meaning. In other words, after I try to propose some definition, I don’t need to remain enslaved to the intuition I started from. I should take it into account, but I should check myself again. It may be that the intuition itself has undergone some kind of metamorphosis. In other words, now when you look at it intuitively, you’ll see that you see it differently.

[Speaker M] But it’s a bit of a chicken-and-egg thing.

[Rabbi Michael Abraham] What do you mean?

[Speaker M] Intuition is determined by phenomena in the world, and the phenomena in the world are determined by intuition.

[Rabbi Michael Abraham] Right. Not the phenomena in the world—the things that happen in the world happen in the world—but my way of looking, yes. You know, I’ll give you another example of the same chicken-and-egg issue. In philosophy of science too there’s a very interesting phenomenon that I saw in two independent places. There’s a book by a historian named E. H. Carr, a Briton—it’s a translation from English—called What Is History? or History: What Is It? something like that, that’s the title. And there’s a book by Hempel in philosophy of science, Introduction to the Philosophy of Science, or something like that, and they talk about the same phenomenon in two completely different contexts. Carr talks about what history is. So he says this: suppose I want to start as a tabula rasa. I don’t know how wars work, what the relevant factors are for winning wars, strategies—I know nothing. And now I begin to build this field of the science of war. Okay? So I look at the Battle of Waterloo and I want to know why Napoleon was defeated, right? Why Blücher and Wellington defeated Napoleon. Okay? So what does Francis Bacon from the 16th century tell me to do? Right? He’s the father of scientific methodology. So he built inductive logic. What does he say? Gather relevant facts, build some theory out of them, then test it perhaps on other battles and refine it further. But it begins with gathering the facts, and then on their basis you build a theory. Nonsense. It can’t be right. Hempel’s raven paradox is related to this, right. It’s nonsense. Why is it nonsense? Because let’s try it. Suppose now I want to gather the facts. I approach the first stage of the work. Which facts should I gather? The name of the lieutenant’s mother? Whether he had a stepsister? Is that relevant? A relevant fact? What was the weather? The morale in each army? The average height of the soldiers in the second rifle company? The color of the tents? There are infinitely many facts. How do I know which facts to gather? You can’t gather infinitely many facts. I need to gather the relevant facts, right? But how do I know which facts are relevant if I still don’t know the criteria or the parameters that determine victory in battle? You tell me that the theory comes after I gather the facts, but I can’t gather the facts unless I come equipped with a theory. The theory is what determines which facts are relevant and which aren’t. So what came first? Does the gathering of facts begin and then I arrive at the theory, or does the theory come first and then I gather the facts? Both seem impossible. Clearly I don’t know the theory without gathering the facts, right? You simply can’t know it. But I also can’t gather the facts without knowing the theory. So what do you do? Again, the chicken and egg. The answer is that it’s a kind of back-and-forth. I have an initial intuition about what sorts of things might affect victory in battle. I have an intuition. It’s obvious to me that the lieutenant’s mother’s name is not relevant. For that I don’t need any information or anything—I know it. A priori I know it. Okay? Never mind, maybe because of previous accumulated experience, but I know it before I approach the science of war. Okay? So therefore I do some initial filtering on the basis of intuition as to which facts might be relevant. Now I take those facts, try to build a theory from them, test it on various battles, and refine the theory again. Then I go back to intuition, go back again to the facts and build a theory, go back to the facts, and so on. Okay? In other words, there’s a process here of back-and-forth between the facts and their analysis and the building of the theory. Neither one precedes the other. It starts with some sort of raw intuition about what might be relevant, and then I gather facts, discover which facts that could have been relevant indeed were relevant. I test it on more battles and discover that maybe I was somewhat mistaken, and I correct it. And this is a process that keeps going all the time until we arrive at something solid enough, okay? But again, this simplistic way of thinking—first we gather facts and then we build a theory—that’s not how it works. It’s not. It always comes together, a kind of back-and-forth—what’s called in Kabbalah ratzo va-shov—and the two things come together.

[Speaker M] Can you explain the inductive process, for example, in the definition of a chair? How do you define a chair?

[Rabbi Michael Abraham] I can’t explain it, I can describe it. In other words, when you look at the whole collection of chairs, why do you decide that they all belong to, or are expressions of, the same Platonic concept—or non-Platonic, doesn’t matter—some shared idea, the idea of chair? Some chairs are quite different from one another. Why do you decide that they are all expressions or different realizations of the same idea, the idea of chair-ness, namely the chair, the idea of chair? The answer is: because through them I see the idea of chair. My intuition is a kind of contemplation, and I simply see that there is something common to them, and that is their being chairs—or horseness, or redness, yes, the color red, or anything else. In other words, I claim that contrary to what Aristotle said—that we abstract from the objects and arrive at categories, meaning we abstract properties from objects and group them into categories—I think that’s not right. We see the categories. We simply see them with the mind’s eye and not with our sensory eyes. We understand that there is a shared category here. There’s a brilliant story by Borges—you know the Argentinian writer? He’s a genius, truly a genius. He has short stories, and among them there’s one called Tlön, Uqbar, Orbis Tertius, about a planet called Tlön that is ruled by a collection of idealists. Idealist philosophers are people who don’t believe in the existence of an external world, right? That everything is only forms of my perception of the world. Who this “I” is—that’s another question—but forms of my perception of the world. So he said—never mind, it’s a whole story, really a brilliant presentation of the problem—he says that on that planet they would combine a set of properties and create a concept from them. For example: the bird’s cry in space together with the sunrise time that morning and the good or bad mood of the person I met at noon—to that I give the name “Yukum Purkan.” Those three characteristics create a concept, and I call that concept “Yukum Purkan.” And every combination of characteristics is a concept. Why? Because someone who doesn’t believe what I said before, someone who thinks that we create concepts, from his point of view every combination of characteristics is a concept. When we define the concept of a democratic state, it has several characteristics—I spoke about this before—it has several characteristics: separation of powers, civil rights, free elections, and so on. Okay? Why did I gather those three characteristics and create one shared concept from them? Why not countries located on the seashore that grow wheat and have over five million inhabitants—and I’ll call that “Yukum Purkan states”? That too is a kind of state, right? No, that sounds like nonsense to us. Why is it nonsense? Because we don’t see those three characteristics joining together to create some sort of idea. In other words, when I coin a concept, I’m not actually performing a technical act of combining characteristics. Rather, I’m performing some kind of act of contemplation. I understand that this set of characteristics, when you group them together, creates a certain concept of which they are the characteristics. This is not a merely intellectual process; it is a cognitive process, not just an intellectual one—a cognitive process. I understand that there is such a thing as a democratic state, and the moment someone coined the concept “democratic state,” all of us find it somewhere within ourselves; we understand what he’s talking about. And if he had coined the concept of a plutocratic bird, I don’t know, whatever example I gave before, nobody would use that concept. It wouldn’t interest anyone. We don’t see any concept there, just a random grouping of characteristics that have no connection to one another. Okay? In other words, there are things that appear to us to be processes of thought, but in fact they are processes of contemplation and not of thinking. Contemplation not with the senses, but contemplation with the mind’s eye. And when we contemplate concepts this is even clearer, because with concepts we certainly are not contemplating with the senses. With concepts we contemplate—yes, this is what Husserl called eidetic seeing, viewing ideas. We have some ability to view ideas. We observe the idea of a democratic state, and from that we derive the characteristics. Okay? It’s not that we collect a set of characteristics and produce the concept of a democratic state. The concept of a democratic state—the Platonic one, yes—exists somewhere. We look at that idea, and from it we extract the characteristics. The same goes for the concept—I’m returning now to poetry, it already took me a lot of time—the same goes for the concept of poetry, the concept of intelligence. All these complex concepts that we try to define—it’s not an arbitrary process. And it’s not an intellectual process in the sense of thinking alone. No, there is a cognitive dimension here. We look at this concept and understand what its characteristics are, what it includes and what it doesn’t include. Okay? And the process of definition is an intellectual process. It is not arbitrary, the way mathematicians think. By the way, mathematical definitions are like this too, contrary to what mathematicians think. When you define a mathematical concept, clearly you are actually understanding that there is such an idea. And no wonder that later we really do find this also in physics—that results from mathematical fields are used many years after they were created, suddenly we find applications for them in our world, in different areas of physics. And why? Because the mathematicians who first conceptualized them actually saw that there is such a thing. Saw it not with the eyes but with the mind’s eye. In short, what I want to say—I don’t want to continue with this next time, so I’ll try just to close the picture. So how do we nevertheless approach… no, actually I’ll probably have to continue, I don’t want to close it after all because I still need a few more things here. So how do I nevertheless manage to move toward a definition of a concept like poetry? Such a complex concept. First of all, I look—I begin with observations, like Francis Bacon. What gets called poetry? There are various kinds. Psalms look to us somewhat like poetry. I don’t know if it’s entirely poetry, but there is a poetic dimension there. Okay. There are ballads, even though a ballad is a story, but it’s a story that isn’t quite just a story. Literature too has a poetic dimension, say, as opposed to an encyclopedia entry. Right? An encyclopedia entry is not literature. Literature has some kind of poetic, lyrical dimension that an encyclopedia entry does not have. In other words, we see that there is a whole spectrum of phenomena in which the concept of poetry, or poeticness, or lyricism, appears in different doses, in different forms, but it appears in all of them. And then I try to ask myself what they have in common, and what does not exist in the other things in which I do not see it. That is the first way to try to understand how to define complex phenomena. I simply gather all the places, all the complexities, all the things in which everywhere I see something of this, and then I try to understand what all those things have in common. And I’ll tell you in one sentence what is common—I may continue this next time, but I’ll tell you in one sentence what I think is common. To understand this I go to something that has none of it at all: an encyclopedia entry. It has no poetic dimension at all. A phone book, something that is pure information. Plain information, yes? That’s something with no poetry in it whatsoever. It is absolute prose. Why? I think what characterizes texts that are absolute prose is that their meaning lies in the meaning of the words. The words tell you what the text wants to say. When I describe something in words, that is prose. And if someone

[Speaker E] sets a phone number to music? I didn’t understand. What if someone sets a phone number to music? Sets it to music? No, I haven’t talked about musical settings yet.

[Rabbi Michael Abraham] Musical settings are part of the form. That’s not what interests me. Later we’ll talk about what the significance of form is; I’ll come back to it after I propose the definition. So that’s prose. Prose is something whose meaning lies in the meaning of the words. I simply convey information to you through language. Transferring information by means of language. Okay? That’s what I would call prose. In that sense, literature is not prose. Usually people call literature prose, but it isn’t prose. It is prose as opposed to poetry, but it isn’t really prose. Why? Because it is clear that when I read a story, Dostoevsky’s story is not telling me about Raskolnikov who murdered someone. That is not what interests Dostoevsky. He’s not conveying information to me. There never was any Raskolnikov; that murder never took place, ever. He is trying to convey something else to me through the text, through the words. The meaning of that text is not anchored in the meaning of the words. If I understand what Raskolnikov did and what he thought, I still haven’t understood the story—or not enough to understand the story. And if I go even further, to the other side of the axis—now let’s build an axis. On one side is pure prose, yes, an encyclopedia entry, a phone book. On the other side, what is a good, distilled poem? It is something whose meaning has no connection at all to the meaning of the words. When I… no, no, not music—I’m talking about words; there are words there, but the meaning is not rooted in the meaning of the words. For example, “There once was a lonely lamp at the edge of a neighborhood,” right, you know that song? A very beautiful song; I like it. Fine? So that’s an example of a poem. Clearly the poet did not mean to talk about lamps, or a neighborhood, or loneliness. That’s not the point. He uses the lamp, the loneliness, the situation, in order to convey something entirely different to me, in order to create some mood in me, in order to convey to me some sort of—who knows what—this or that feeling. It has nothing to do with lamps or neighborhoods. In theory he could have done this by completely different means. That means that even though the poem is written in words—it’s not music, it’s a poem—it’s written in words, and for the sake of the discussion it isn’t even set to music. A poem does not have to be set to music. I can read the poem “There once was a lonely lamp at the edge of a neighborhood” and not know that it was set to music. I understand that it is a poem. Why? Because nobody is trying to tell me that there really was a lonely lamp at the edge of a neighborhood. That’s not the point. The meaning of the words and sentences is not the meaning of this text. And a pure poem, a pure poem is something—I don’t even know whether it exists—but theoretically, yes, a pure poem is a poem whose words have no connection whatsoever to the meaning it is trying to convey to me. It has no connection at all to the meaning of the words. That is a pure poem. Now in the middle there are lots of things. For example, literature is more prose than poetry, but it is more poetry than an encyclopedia entry. Why? Because in literature events and situations are conveyed to me; I read things; it’s not like a poem. There are occurrences there, a sequence of events, people, yes—they convey a great deal of information to me in that story. But clearly the meaning of the story is not what happened in it. What happened in it is a fictional creation; it didn’t really happen. It comes to convey something much more abstract to me, something else. Okay? Therefore literature too is basically a kind of poetry, just in a different dosage than a poem. Okay? And a ballad is even more poetry, because it is literature but literature also written in the form of poetry; it is even further from the meaning of the situations. Otherwise they would have written it as a story—why write a ballad? You write a ballad because you want to make it even more poetic than if I had written it in the form of a story. And a pure poem doesn’t tell anything at all. Nothing happens in it. I walked, I walked, I heard, I felt, I don’t know, something like that—completely, completely unrelated to the meaning of the words and sentences written in the poem. I think the definition of poetry in this sense is a negative definition. If I properly understand what prose is, poetry is that which is not prose. All right? I think that’s a good definition; it doesn’t matter that it’s negative. It’s like defining spirit as anything that is not material—that’s spirit. That’s a good definition of spirit; it doesn’t matter that it’s negative. If I understand what material is, then that’s a very good definition of what spirit is, what spiritual is. Okay? So here too it’s the same thing. In other words, you see that I’m trying to show you that when we examine complex concepts, there is some kind of spectrum of appearances of the complex concept, and what I can try to do is create some kind of axis, on which one can arrange, say, between the two extreme poles—prose and distilled poetry—a great many phenomena in the middle that are closer to this pole or closer to that pole, according to the degree of poetic quality they contain, those phenomena. Okay? But that is a good definition for a complex concept, and it is not right to despair and say, well, there is no such thing as art, there is no such thing as poetry, because everyone has his own… there are so many forms and so many kinds and so much… No! You have to not be lazy and try to propose some sort of definition as much as possible, and this is a good definition for a complex concept. Now I understand what he means; he clarified the matter for me. He didn’t give me litmus paper to determine what is a poem and what is not a poem, because this is something more continuous, yes, fuzzy logic, more vague. But… what? Not subjective—that’s what I’m trying to say—not subjective. Subjective means there isn’t really a definition; you decide whatever you want. No! I claim that it is completely objective. It is objective but flexible, objective but varied, complex, different, and therefore it needs to be defined in a way that is not binary—not yes or no, but some kind of continuum. Okay? All right, we’ll continue next time. I need these methodological introductions for what comes next too, so I’m still going to roam a bit more in this area. Good.

[Speaker J] Thank you very much. Thank you.

[Rabbi Michael Abraham] Thank you very much, thank you.