Objectivity and Subjectivity in Halakha and in General – Lesson 2

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[Rabbi Michael Abraham] They didn’t really address this. It’s like the difference between an airplane and an infantry soldier. For a pilot it’s easier to do the job because it’s from many kilometers away, and then it’s not just the barrel, that mechanical contact. Exactly. In any case, the claim is that in the context of moral principles, for example, there too we see in many places this tension between the two meanings of the term “subjective.” There are those who say morality is subjective when there is no moral truth and falsehood—but where do they derive that from? They derive it from the fact that usually arguments about morality can’t really be decided. You can’t manage to persuade your interlocutor, or be persuaded by him. And then the obvious conclusion is that this is probably a subjective matter: that’s how I feel, and you feel differently. There’s no truth or falsehood here in that context. A lot of people say this. Very few people, in my opinion, actually feel that way, but they say it because of distress—I mean intellectual distress. The fact is that you can’t persuade anyone about it; it’s not like science or observational facts. And then they immediately make the leap: ah, so apparently it’s subjective. And they don’t notice that there’s another possibility: to say that this is subjective in the weaker sense. It’s subjective in the sense that I can’t convey to you the content of my thoughts or my cognition, but that doesn’t mean there isn’t some claim here that is true or false, that there isn’t some real argument here. It’s only a limitation of discourse. It isn’t exposed to someone else. All our mental behaviors, for example—the world of philosophy is a good example, but this is true of all the mental events within us. Leibowitz defined mental events this way in his little book on the psychophysical problem. He said that mental events are those events that are inaccessible to observational tools or to someone from the outside. When something happens inside me, it isn’t accessible to someone outside. I can tell him I’m sad, and if he knows the feeling of sadness within himself, then maybe he’ll identify within himself what I’m saying. But he has no way to see it directly, to encounter it immediately. And so basically there can always be some doubt whether the person standing opposite you really feels the feelings you’re talking about—sadness, happiness, joy—whether he even has feelings inside him at all, or whether he’s maybe some kind of robot that got used to talking about feelings. You can train a computer too to tell you, “I’m sad,” “I’m happy.” There’s that movie Her—did you see it? There’s a film about someone who falls in love with his computer, and it’s really a computer program, and it’s software that talks to him, a woman actually, the program is a woman’s program, it talks to him and he lives with her in the house and they go through experiences. It’s a program that passes the Turing test, it knows how to speak intelligently, and little by little he falls in love with her. And little by little he falls in love with her and they really carry on conversations and there’s a romance between them. I don’t remember the details, but it’s a very interesting film. And it’s obvious that behind everything that computer says, there’s nothing there.

[Speaker C] Meaning, it—

[Rabbi Michael Abraham] It says, “I feel this way,” or “I experience this way,” or “I…” nothing. It’s all just a technique of electron flow. That’s all. A flow of electrons making sounds. But that doesn’t stop a person from falling in love. Why doesn’t it stop him from falling in love? Because he immediately makes the translation: if she says it, then apparently she feels what she says the way I feel what I say—and then really he’s not facing a human being. Now how do you know that all the people around me aren’t really some kind of computer programs of the same sort? And how do I know they aren’t? All I know is what they say. Fine, the program says things too. Okay, now I’m not inclined to think that—again, I’m not inclined to think that—and that’s an assumption. It’s an assumption that I really have no way to verify. I can’t check and see whether I’m right or not. It isn’t accessible to me.

[Speaker B] You can take it one step further here too—the science of free will goes one more step, in the direction of determinism. Then each of us too is basically just things moving.

[Rabbi Michael Abraham] Yes, right, of course. Free will is another one of the phenomena that aren’t accessible to measurement, because they happen inside me. And therefore it’s always possible to translate things into deterministic terms, and there’s no good way to decide whether we’re a deterministic system or not. Yes, so there are the tricks they tried to do with Libet, but in my opinion that doesn’t work. Okay, so here too you really have the second meaning of the term “subjective.” And here I mentioned Kant, so maybe I won’t go on about this too much, but what Kant basically says is that when we speak about the world, we’re really speaking about the world as it is perceived by us—the world of phenomena, yes, the phenomenal, experiential world. We are not referring to the noumena, to the world as it is in itself. Because then you get a kind of reversal upon reversal here. Meaning, when I converse with someone, I’m conveying to him contents connected to phenomena, to how the world is perceived; I don’t know how to speak about the world itself. So what here is objective and what here is subjective? You can look at it in two ways. Seemingly, the objective thing is the world, and what I feel or how I perceive it is the subjective matter. On the other hand, everything I talk to you about, our science, all the things that are supposedly most objective and shared by all of us, are actually precisely the subjective dimension—precisely the phenomena, right? And the noumena are some kind of thing that maybe subjectively I feel exists. That’s Zeitlin’s criticism. Zeitlin has some… he wrote—actually it isn’t his, he quotes it in the name of some Russian philosopher, I don’t remember his name, it escaped me, doesn’t matter, some Russian philosopher, Lev something. Lev Shestov.

[Speaker F] Exactly, I’m reading that now.

[Rabbi Michael Abraham] Ah, what, Zeitlin? Yes. Ah, okay, Lev Shestov, exactly. I’d never heard of him before. So there he has some criticism of Kant: where did the distinction between phenomena and noumena come from for you? That too is in your phenomena. After all, we have no access really to the thing-in-itself, so how do you know it exists at all? Meaning, that distinction itself too lies within the phenomenal world. Yes, and so in certain senses the roles of the subjective and the objective are actually reversed. Meaning, all of science and everything that seems to us the most objective and that we all talk about and are all synchronized about—that is specifically the phenomenal dimensions, specifically the conscious, cognitive dimensions, the way we perceive the world. The world as it is detached from how we perceive it is, on the one hand, the objective thing, not the subjective thing. But on the other hand, it is exactly the thing to which none of us has any access. In that sense it’s the most subjective thing there is. None of us has access to it. It’s so subjective that in most subjective things one person at least does have access to them, only others do not. Meaning, things that happen inside me—I have access to them; others don’t. But that thing there is ultra-subjective, meaning no one has access to it—not even because it’s not something inside a human being at all, but because it’s the world itself, yes, the phenomena in the world itself. So we have no access to them at all. Is that the most subjective thing or the most objective thing? Very unclear.

[Speaker D] No, but the word “subject” refers to a certain person, a first subject, as it were.

[Rabbi Michael Abraham] Yes, of course. Literally, “subjective” clearly means the phenomena. But in essence, when you make a distinction between subjective and objective, there’s room here to discuss what it is right to call subjective and what it is right to call objective. Maybe—maybe I’ll add one more remark. There’s a common mistake in the interpretation of Kant’s philosophy, of Kant’s distinction between phenomena and noumena. People think Kant is basically talking about a human limitation: that a person cannot grasp the world as it is because he is bound to his sensory system, to his cognitive system, to his perception, and therefore he has no way of grasping things themselves independently of the colors with which we paint them, of our cognitive terminology, of our set of cognitive tools. But I don’t think that’s right, and in my opinion that’s a mistake. Again, I’m not making this claim about Kant but about the truth; I don’t really care at the moment what Kant intended. Because to perceive something is, by definition, to insert it into the conceptual system of the perceiver. When people ask me—when I say that the color of the table is white—then this interpretation of Kant basically says: you can’t really say that the color of this table is white. You are limited; your sensory tools perceive it as white, but you can’t really know what its true color is. That’s how people interpret it, those who see Kant’s statement as some statement about our limitation.

[Speaker E] And then no one can.

[Rabbi Michael Abraham] What? And in that respect no one can, no one can. And I say—it isn’t right, because there’s no such thing as the color of the table in itself, as such. Color is by definition the image that appears only in our cognition; there is no color in the world itself. Like sound.

[Speaker E] Yes, like sound.

[Rabbi Michael Abraham] Yes, like sound, the same thing, yes, the tree that falls in the forest. So there is no sound or color in the world itself; it exists only in the perceiving consciousness.

[Speaker B] And therefore what Kant says is that what exists is wavelength.

[Rabbi Michael Abraham] Yes, and every meaning you give to the concept of wavelength will also be a cognitive meaning. When you describe wavelength in the form of some graph, that is already a visual presentation of the matter. Wavelength in itself—you can’t say anything about it. Meaning, even what we call physics, in the purest sense of the word, all of it, all of it is phenomena. All of it is phenomena. Meaning, I can say that there is a wavelength in reality, but I can’t say anything about what that wavelength is. Every time I describe it in some way, I draw the sine wave, the distance between two peaks—that’s only a representation. It’s my cognitive representation. It’s not really the thing itself. So the claim is basically that this is not a difficulty, not a human limitation, the distinction between phenomena and noumena. It’s a definition of the concept of perception. Meaning, to perceive the table means to describe it in terms drawn from my cognitive world: its color, its height, what material it’s made of, its shape, all sorts of things like that. Someone with a different perceptual system would describe the table in a completely different conceptual system. He might hear the table and not see it, or he might perhaps—I don’t know—have some sense I don’t understand at all because I don’t have it, and describe the table in his own subjective language. Who’s right? No one is right, or all of us are right. We are all right, because that is what it means to perceive the table. So it’s not that we’re limited because we can’t perceive the table itself. This is how one perceives the table itself. I do perceive the table itself. How do I perceive it? I describe what color it is, what sound it has, what shape it has, what material it’s made of. That is called perceiving the table itself, because perception is a concept that by definition is an interaction between perceiver and perceived. And therefore the concept of perception will always be formulated in subjective language. It’s built into the concept of perception. It’s not a limitation. It’s not that the Holy One, blessed be He, can perceive things as they are in themselves and only we human beings are limited. He can’t either, because there is no such thing as perceiving things as they are in themselves. To perceive is always to describe them in some conceptual system, to say what their color is, what their shape is, or what their sound is.

[Speaker E] But then according to that there is no objective. What? According to that there is no objective.

[Rabbi Michael Abraham] That’s why—because of that I’m saying this. Meaning, it sharpens even more what I said earlier: that defining what is called objective and what is called subjective is a very, very non-simple question. Meaning, all this cognitive language comes to describe something that exists in the world itself. The table exists in the world itself; wavelength exists in the world itself. But everything I say about the table, or about wavelength, or about whatever you like, will always be colored in cognitive colors—colored, or heard, yes, “colored” is only a metaphor. I mean all the senses: smell or taste or whatever—in cognitive colors. There is no way to describe the thing in itself, not as I perceive it—not because I’m limited, but because description is the meaning of the very concept of description. Meaning, to describe is always to say what it is. What its projection is on the axis of color, what its projection is on the axis of shape, how it is perceived through these glasses and through those glasses. That is called to describe. There is nothing else. Even the Holy One, blessed be He, can’t describe things. I think—again, I don’t know.

[Speaker C] But that’s on the subjective level? The description is on the subjective level.

[Rabbi Michael Abraham] Correct. But on the other hand, as I said in this book The Abolition of Man, we are describing something in the world. There is truth and falsehood here. It’s only the language in which that description is formulated that is subjective language. By definition. That’s what description means. Okay. Therefore I say this is a mistake that very many people fall into. The mistake Lewis describes is the same mistake as postmodernism, what you mentioned earlier—the same mistake. They all understand that if so, then there is no truth. And we are not speaking about the world, and there is no falsehood and no argument and nothing, but rather each person is trapped inside his own conceptual system. That is not true. That is not true. Rather, this conceptual system serves me in order to describe something in the world. And therefore, in fact, sometimes people do argue and are even persuaded. It happens from time to time. People can be persuaded, can decide an argument. Meaning, these are facts, that such a thing happens. If there were no truth and no falsehood, then it’s very hard to understand the meaning of persuasion. What, is it just some kind of hocus-pocus where suddenly my head flips over and that’s it? Even though there’s no connection to truth, I didn’t come to realize anything, something just happened in my head? Therefore that conclusion is a logical leap with no justification. The leap that says that if something can’t be measured with objective tools and can’t be argued about and the argument can’t be settled, then you’re not really talking about the world but about yourself—not true. There are forms of speech that are speech about myself, and that is subjectivity—“Only of myself did I know how to tell,” as the saying goes. And that is subjectivity in the first sense. But there is also subjectivity in the second sense.

[Speaker D] You could also say that the Holy One, blessed be He, made a match between noumena and phenomena? Meaning, He made some kind of—let’s call it—a function so that the inner and the outer correspond to one another, and then we can say that the way I perceive things is really the way things are in themselves, and then I can also argue with you.

[Rabbi Michael Abraham] Exactly, that’s what I’m saying. We discussed that claim when we talked about what Torah is. I said that the synchronization—say I speak about the color green and you speak about the color green—then seemingly in our cognition we may actually be seeing completely different things. They could be completely different. It could be that you see what I call red, but you’re used to calling it green. So seemingly we’re synchronized only in language. You say green and I say green, so in language we’re synchronized. But the thing we describe with the language is not synchronized; it’s something else. But there is a deeper layer in which, once again, we are synchronized. The same thing that generates the color you call green—and which is actually what I call red—and the thing that generates in me the color I call green, is the same thing. So the reality itself that we’re talking about is the same reality. And therefore the correspondence—unlike what, say, the postmodernists say—they say no, there are only these two levels, and then they basically say, fine, there is no objective truth; each person has his own truth. The fact that we are synchronized in language is no guarantee of that; the signifier is the same, but that doesn’t mean the signified is the same. And that doesn’t mean that the identical expressions we use describe the same thing. Because they don’t understand—in my opinion they don’t understand—that there is a third level. There is a third level, and cognition too, phenomena too, the cognition through which we perceive the world, is not the end of the road either. It is the result of something that happens in the world itself. When I say I see the color green, I’m talking about the world, not about what I see. What I see is only the expression of what is happening in the world. I use my subjective language to describe something, and there once again we are synchronized. Because if we both talk about the color green, even though we see different things, the physics is the same physics. Meaning, the wavelength measured by an instrument—after all, both of us will agree. You’ll look at the instrument and see that the wavelength is, I don’t know, ten angstroms, and I too will see that the wavelength is ten angstroms. Even though the cognitive color you see is what I call red and you call green. Meaning that in physical reality we are synchronized too. This is really built on three levels. There is physical reality, there is its cognitive representation, and there is the verbal representation of the cognitive representation. But if you continue onward, the verbal representation, through the cognitive representation, represents reality. And an amazing thing happens here, actually. We talked about this when we discussed what Torah is. I said that in Torah too there are all these levels. An amazing thing happens here: seemingly we have synchronization only on the verbal plane, but our cognitions can be completely different. Totally different. It could be that you don’t see things at all—not another color; you don’t see, but hear, or smell, I don’t know, whatever it is that you’re accustomed to saying. But what is inside us too is, after all, the result of what happens in the world. The cognitive translation of what happens in the world. And with respect to what happens in the world, we are synchronized. I talk about the color green and you talk about the color green, so in words we are synchronized. In cognition, it may be that we are not synchronized. I see the color green and you see the color that I call red. You call it green, but I call it red. But those two colors that exist in our cognitions come from the same wavelength, or the same distance between atoms, or electromagnetic radiation. Here, the reflections from the table are the same wavelength, the same structure of the table. And there we agree again. Meaning, the verbal expression skips over cognition, and that is, by the way, the role of society. A lone individual can’t do this. It’s the role of society. Our verbal synchronization coincides with physical synchronization and skips over a lack of cognitive synchronization. There may be a lack—there may be, yes. Meaning, there is no guarantee that there is cognitive synchronization. But there is synchronization in physics. What is true, though—

[Speaker E] I think what does come back here is that the fact that there may be no cognitive synchronization—but since that can’t be proven, I don’t deal with it because it doesn’t matter, because the point of departure is that when we both said “green,” each of us saw something else in his cognition, but that’s only maybe, because maybe he did see the same thing and I don’t go further into it.

[Rabbi Michael Abraham] No, now here we need to distinguish between two meanings. Distinguish between two meanings. You can say, “There’s no point going into it, because we have no way of knowing what we really see, and as long as we are verbally synchronized we’ll go on talking.” But if you look at it as a philosopher, you’d say, “Then why talk at all? Just because it’s pleasant?” But not really—we’re not really conveying information, because all the information I convey to him he actually receives not in the way I want him to… maybe, yes, maybe. So since you don’t know, you don’t know, right? So what will you tell me? That there’s a presumption that not? And there’s no point—fine. So you decide it; that’s what all of us assume. All of us assume that true, this is an interesting philosophical question, but practically we assume it is the same thing. But I say, leave that aside—let’s go with the philosophers, with those who say, “No, really it isn’t the same thing.” There is still a point in talking. There is a point in talking because in physics we are synchronized after all, even though in cognition we are not. Because the fact is that when we all measure with physical instruments, we all see the same wavelength. There it is synchronized. Meaning, if you were to see a different wavelength that didn’t fit your word “green,” then you would change your position; you’d factor that in as a practical consideration.

[Speaker B] What? A consideration that is simply practical.

[Rabbi Michael Abraham] What do you mean?

[Speaker B] We do—so what is it? In practice, in the end, it lets us conduct life, do things.

[Rabbi Michael Abraham] I wouldn’t call it practical. We are really talking about the same thing. What is “practical”? We want to talk. And there is a point to talking, I claim, unlike what they claim—that talking is just exchanging words, but the meaning of the words is completely different. Not true. The cognitive meaning of the words is completely different. But the physical meaning underlying the cognition—there we are synchronized again. And that is tremendously interesting, because the most subjective discourse there is is just the words. Words are a human creation. What are words? Words are arbitrary. There we are synchronized, and in physics too we are synchronized. And the objective or intersubjective thing—our cognitions—there it may be that not at all. Right? We grasp the world through our cognition. We have no way to grasp the world in itself. But our synchronization with one another corresponds to synchronization in the world even though there is no synchronization in cognition. That’s a wonder, this thing. Think about it for a moment—it’s amazing. I can’t grasp the world except through my cognition. I have no way to say anything about the world except in my cognitive terms, right? But in discourse between us we manage to skip over that. We manage to say something about the world independently of the question of how we see what we say about the world. And we achieve that through linguistic synchronization. Our linguistic synchronization succeeds in overcoming the gap that an individual person cannot overcome. An individual person can’t say something about the world except in cognitive language. And precisely discourse between people succeeds in saying something objective about the world.

[Speaker C] Why objective?

[Rabbi Michael Abraham] Because when we agree that it’s green, that means that in the world an instrument will probably measure a green wavelength. Why? Because—

[Speaker C] That’s what’s called green.

[Rabbi Michael Abraham] He sees red, he—

[Speaker C] He sees red, but—

[Rabbi Michael Abraham] What he sees as red comes from a wavelength that I see as green. The wavelength is the same wavelength; only his brain structure translates such a wavelength into the color that I call red. And my brain structure is different; I translate it into what I call green. But we are translating the same thing. So when he talks about green and internally sees red, and I talk about green and internally see green—green—in physics we are talking about the same thing. Meaning, synchronization between people, the social phenomenon, social discourse, manages to overcome something that an individual person cannot overcome. What I really want to argue is that it’s not actually possible to build a science of a lone individual. Meaning, a lone individual cannot build science. It’s pretty amazing. Meaning, Adam couldn’t have been a scientist. He was alone in the world. Meaning, you need some kind of synchronization in order to cross-check, in order to get some feedback, because that helps you skip over your cognitive constraints.

[Speaker E] But on the other hand you also have to have a shared language.

[Rabbi Michael Abraham] Of course. The synchronization is done through language. That’s the whole idea.

[Speaker E] So of course you need the social element.

[Rabbi Michael Abraham] Yes, of course. It happens through language. We talked once, I think, about Whorf. There was Benjamin Whorf, some scholar of languages, a linguist, sociologist, amateur anthropologist—he wasn’t a professional, didn’t study it at the university—but he wrote books and he’s considered something of an expert, somewhat controversial, but lots of people study him. He’s considered an important figure in this field. And among other things he brings examples that I also once saw in some article in Nature. I think we talked about this once: about a tribe in Brazil, the Pirahã tribe in Brazil, that speaks a language whose numerical system is a one-two-many system. Meaning, there is no one, two, three, four; there is one, two, and many. And some American researcher got there and tried to see what kinds of problems they could deal with using that language and what kinds they couldn’t. Now they can tell you, say, that twenty is more than three, even though both are “many.” Meaning, it’s the same term but they understand there’s a difference. But between three and four they can’t tell you which is greater. Meaning, the resolution. Like green: there’s dark green, light green—like the shades of snow for Eskimos, the types of snow among Eskimos—they have lots of words and through that they can also distinguish between kinds of snow that to us look the same. We don’t even have words to distinguish between those types. And the interesting question, of course, is what causes what. Does the ability to distinguish between many types of snow create many words, or does the existence of many words in the language help you distinguish between the different types of snow?

[Speaker B] Presumably it’s the first.

[Rabbi Michael Abraham] That’s how it starts.

[Speaker E] The words—

[Speaker B] —were created.

[Rabbi Michael Abraham] That’s how it starts. That’s what I argued against that article in Nature; there was some debate in Buzz about it. It’s obvious that it has to start there. But it’s also obvious that Whorf is right that to pass it on further, you can only pass it on if you have an appropriate language for it. Meaning, if there were no language, then it may be that even other human beings who would understand that maybe there are slightly different kinds of snow here still wouldn’t really manage to distinguish them.

[Speaker B] Right, but the language is created.

[Rabbi Michael Abraham] It would be terribly vague for them; they could confuse different kinds of snow. Language helps solidify those distinctions. So it works in both directions somehow. Meaning, language affects distinction, and distinction creates language, and somehow they go together. The dimension of language also helps us in perception. Meaning, the limitations of language—when you have one-two-many, there are things you won’t be able to… even though I want to believe they know that this is three and this is four, that it’s not exactly the same thing. But still they can’t always tell you which is greater. That’s something very hard to grasp in our world. But it’s a kind of vagueness. Potentially, certainly, they have the ability to make the distinctions we make; they’re human beings like us. And he taught them too. They know how to do it. So that isn’t the point. But as long as they don’t have those words, there will be things they won’t be able to do. Meaning, there is something—and this is exactly the same phenomenon I talked about before. Synchronization on the verbal level enables us to do things with physics that a lone individual—whose world, of course, has no language because there is no communication, he doesn’t need language, yes?—would not be able to do. And therefore he also probably wouldn’t be able to make distinctions, because he has no words for those distinctions. And words usually aren’t created unless you need to communicate with someone. So a lone individual usually doesn’t invent a language for himself. A community does, but a lone individual doesn’t invent a language for himself. There is something very interesting in this skipping over the cognitive layer, between physics and the layer of verbal description that skips over the cognitive layer, and how society somehow manages to help us, social action manages to help us, leap beyond our cognitive limitations to reality itself. And that really brought me to another important distinction. There is a difference between objective and intersubjective. Suppose I’m right that there is no problem of the philosophers’ palace—that when we all talk about red, we all see red, okay? Or experience red, experience red, sorry. So suppose that really is the case. Then is the color red objective? Does it belong to the objective world? This cognition that we see, yes.

[Speaker C] Let’s say it doesn’t exist.

[Rabbi Michael Abraham] Right? It isn’t in the objective world; in the objective world there is no color. But if it is found in all of us, then there is something objective here—something objective that is cognitive, not in the world itself. You could call it something intersubjective. That is, all subjects experience it in the same way. But it still doesn’t belong to the objective world. Very often, the second meaning of the term “subjective,” the meaning with respect to which there is truth or falsehood even though it isn’t accessible, is really meant to say that it is intersubjective. And that is distinct from objective. Objective is something accessible to instruments—yes, wavelength. Yes, but intersubjective is not the same thing as subjective. Subjective is something where if each person feels differently, there is no argument.

[Speaker B] Intersubjective is inaccessible objectivity.

[Rabbi Michael Abraham] Exactly, it’s inaccessible objectivity, yes. Fine. So that’s basically the same distinction from a different angle. There may be—I probably can’t get into this topic now, it seems to me we’ll do it next time—but maybe two more remarks related to this issue. I once mentioned Pirsig’s book Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance, yes, that cult classic.

[Speaker B] It used to be very popular.

[Rabbi Michael Abraham] Yes. During my regular army service that was—it was more or less, I don’t remember when it came out, but around my regular service that was I think more or less the—

[Speaker E] Was that before The Monk Who Sold His Ferrari?

[Rabbi Michael Abraham] Yes, yes, long before. The Monk Who Sold His Ferrari is New Age stuff; I didn’t like it. So the book tells about some rhetoric lecturer named Phaedrus—Phaedrus is a Platonic dialogue—but a lecturer at some American college who at a certain point starts asking himself: on what basis does he grade essays he gets from students? He gives them grades—eighty, ninety, seventy. Based on what? I like this one, I don’t like that one—in what sense? By the number of lines?

[Speaker E] Yes, exactly.

[Rabbi Michael Abraham] Of course not. Who appointed me to decide that what I like is ninety and what I don’t like is seventy? Or in other words, is there some knowledge here that I’m conveying to the students and testing them on, or is it just a matter of taste? You understand that this is the same question. The same question: is this something subjective or something intersubjective—not objective, but intersubjective? Meaning, something with respect to which there is truth or falsehood even though it is not measurable. I certainly can’t give some sharp criteria that say what the quality of an essay is, but it is still true that there are high-quality essays and low-quality essays—that at least is the assumption.

[Speaker B] How do they give the Nobel Prize for Literature?

[Rabbi Michael Abraham] Yes, yes, exactly. And at some point he struggles with this, and he goes off on a motorcycle journey across America with his son a bit, and all kinds of Zen reflections and things like that. But in the course of it some coin drops for him, and he suddenly comes to the conclusion that those wicked Greeks messed up our minds by basically—it was probably Aristotle—by implanting in us very strongly the idea that what cannot be defined does not exist. And if you can’t define or give sharp criteria for the quality of an essay, then apparently there is no quality of an essay. There is no such thing; it’s just a subjective matter. And once again, it’s the same point. And once again, it’s this leap between saying: it cannot be objectively quantified—do you say “quantified”? quantified objectively. Quantified. Why does it sound odd to me? Quantified, I think. Why the stress? But that’s because it’s at the beginning of the word. No, it isn’t at the beginning of the word.

[Speaker C] If it’s at the beginning of the word then it’s one pronunciation, and if not then it’s—

[Rabbi Michael Abraham] Should you say it this way or that way? I don’t know. Could be. I don’t know.

[Speaker E] Maybe the reduced vowel changes something.

[Rabbi Michael Abraham] Yes, in these things I don’t understand, ask Dafna, she probably knows. In any case, so what cannot be quantified basically doesn’t exist. That’s the… until he reaches the conclusion: what are you talking about? The Greeks messed with our heads. Not true. There are things that cannot be quantified but they exist. Or in other words, there is such a thing as something subjective that is intersubjective. It’s not subjective in the sense that it’s not—that’s one point. A second point: the two ultimate examples they always bring regarding this issue of subjective and not subjective are the theory of relativity—different frames of reference moving, say, at some speed relative to one another, measuring various magnitudes differently, time intervals or lengths differently. And then it supposedly says that everything is subjective. That’s the example they always bring in this context, or the illustration everyone brings in this context. And the second example is non-Euclidean geometries. Geometries you can construct whose assumptions are not the assumptions of Euclidean geometry—that through two points there passes one straight line, or that parallels never meet, or other assumptions; there can be other geometries, and then the theorems will be different, the sum of the angles won’t be 180 but whatever number you want—you can build geometries to your heart’s content. So there too, supposedly, you see that the whole business is subjective and there’s no real way to determine which is the so-called correct geometry. There is no “correct”; it depends on what your basic assumptions are, and that is what—

[Speaker B] —will determine the results.

[Rabbi Michael Abraham] Exactly. So what happens here is, I think, something similar. In the context of relativity, the truth is really exactly the opposite. In relativity, everything Einstein did—all of Einstein’s conclusion, that he arrived at the idea that distances and times are measured differently in systems moving at one speed relative to another—that was only so that the laws of physics would be universal. That is the way he showed that there must be contraction of time or expansion of length or all sorts of things like that.

[Speaker B] Because he believed the picture was objective.

[Rabbi Michael Abraham] Exactly. Because physics is objective, there is no choice but to say that time and space are not. So the give-and-take, the relations between time and space—physics deals with the relations between them—that is objective. But true, time and space themselves are indeed not objective. In that sense it’s true. But it’s not true that this means only that everything is subjective and that’s it. Rather, there is something objective here, and our perception of that objective thing is done with tools that are subjective tools. And space and time, as Kant already said, are certain subjective forms of ours for grasping reality—and Einstein actually greatly reinforces this Kantian conception. But that doesn’t mean reality itself is subjective. On the contrary, your whole path to reaching the conclusion that the tools are subjective is only because in reality itself you’re talking about the same physical law. And that is exactly the same as what we discussed earlier about synchronization in physics and synchronization in words, but in cognition what I perceive may actually contain some large gap. But we skip over it; the synchronization skips over that stage. And the same thing with non-Euclidean geometry—there it’s even much simpler, because geometry is of course something completely objective; it simply depends on the question of what your space is.

[Speaker B] If the space is a plane, then it’s Euclidean geometry.

[Rabbi Michael Abraham] Euclidean, if the space is a sphere, exactly.

[Speaker B] If the space—

[Rabbi Michael Abraham] —is flat, no matter in how many dimensions, if the space is flat then the geometry is Euclidean.

[Speaker B] And only the question whether the space—

[Rabbi Michael Abraham] —is flat or not is an empirical question. That’s not the mathematician’s concern; he doesn’t care about any of that. He speaks about whatever spaces. Make such a space and you’ll get such a geometry; make another space and you’ll get another geometry. But that doesn’t mean there is no truth. It means there are many coherent, consistent geometries. But which is the correct geometry for our world? That’s the physicist’s mandate, not the mathematician’s. And the physicist is supposed to determine whether our world is a flat space or, as Einstein said, not—a non-flat space. But here there is one truth: for one given space there is one correct geometry; the other geometries are not correct. The fact that you can formulate many consistent geometries does not mean that in reality there are many correct geometries—on the contrary. It gives me many tools of observation or ways of looking or ways of thinking, but only one of them will actually fit a given reality. And therefore the multiplicity often arises among human beings because their angles of view differ, but that multiplicity actually reflects the fact that they are all seeing the same thing. Precisely because we are all seeing the same thing with different tools, the appearance comes out differently. Theoretically, if we were seeing different things with different tools, it could even cancel out and come out the same. Meaning, reality is the same thing, and therefore if the tools are different then the image necessarily also has to be different. Fine, these are just different ways to see it. Here I’m ending the introduction. Yes, exactly.