Gate Three: A Priori Structures of Meaning — Myth and Science

From the book A Presence and an Absence by Rabbi Michael Avraham. Translated from Hebrew using gpt-5.4 (reasoning_effort=high, batch API).

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A Priori Structures of Meaning: Myth and Science

Introduction

Science and Myth: A Historical View

In this gate, the concept of myth and its relation to the scientific discipline will be discussed. The two will be presented as a priori structures of meaning, a kind of “glasses” through which the world can be examined, both the physical world and the world of values and spirit.

The relation between science and myth has changed throughout history. In the modernist period, myth was disparaged as an irrational domain, even as an escape from analysis and rational engagement. By contrast, in the postmodern period there is a tendency to blur the distinction between the two domains, and at times even to grant myth renewed legitimacy after so much denigration.

Usually, myth is perceived as a collection of legends with an ostensibly historical character, sometimes more and sometimes less so, but in fact lacking any grounding in reality. Groups of people—nations, religions, and so forth—adopt these legends without examining their factual basis. Against this background, it becomes more understandable why myths are so often criticized as irrational or unintelligent. This stands in contrast to philosophy, ideology, or science, which are usually accompanied by an aura of rationality.

In the introduction to Myth and Memory,¹ its editors, Ohana and Wistrich, clarify that the difference between myth and history lies precisely here. There is no point at all in asking of a myth whether the events it describes actually occurred, or in what form. Myth is a different mode of handling history. It is a processing of history—and sometimes an invention of history—in order to give meaning to the present. In this sense, myth is the structure laid at the foundation of culture and constitutive of it. It is through myth that we judge and understand the past, and also the events of the present.

These authors, like many others today, argue that the credibility of the historical claims described by myth is of no importance. Myth’s pseudo-historical claims are only a symbolic embodiment of a collection of ideas and interpretations, through which and within which society interprets itself.

Today it is clear that there is no society that operates without a background of myths laid in its cultural foundations. Society cannot be detached from the myths within which it operates, because in the absence of myths, understanding is absent as well. Nothing has meaning except within a framework of primary classification of meanings, relations, and modes of categorization. When one gives meaning to something, this must be done within a conceptual system that precedes the very act of assigning meaning. In practice, this is viewing that thing through a quasi-mythical screen of concepts.

Thus myth is not only a collection of pseudo-historical legends; it also has a dimension of an a priori structure of meaning. In every society, meanings and values are transmitted through myth and from within it. It functions as a kind of “glasses” through which we view reality and analyze and judge it. Myth is therefore a structure that stands at the basis of every culture and every system of thought in every field. According to this definition, Cassirer’s conclusion—that myth is transcendental, in the Kantian sense, relative to the domain under discussion—seems almost self-evident. Myth is a necessary condition for any understanding or imparting of meaning.² Precisely for this reason, it is very difficult to expect an interpretation of myth itself within the framework of the culture that it itself constitutes.

Maturation as a Three-Stage Process: Science and Myth

In the first book, we described the development of our culture, parallel to the development of each individual within it, as a three-stage process:

1. The childish stage, which is the ancient mythic age, in which humanity believed in myths and in their rule over life. This is a dogmatic stage, in which society—or the individual person, the child—accepts truths imposed from above as unquestionable truths.

2. The second stage is adolescence, corresponding, in the context of our civilization, to the analytic-rationalist age. At this stage, sharp criticism arises against mythical dogmatism, together with a rejection of myths and the illusion that all human problems can be solved with scientific-rational tools. The adolescent thinks he will solve all his problems by means of intellectual considerations and logical proofs. He says to the adult: “Who told you that? Prove it!” and refuses to accept things without proof. This is the core of his critique of the adult, who demands that he accept dogmatic truths.

3. In the third stage, the stage of maturity, our civilization—as well as the individual person—reaches a decisive crossroads. We mature; that is, we come to see that no essential problem can be solved by logical considerations alone. From here, two paths are open before us: either to continue clinging to the assumption that every truth must be proved, and thereby become complete skeptics—postmodernists; or to give up that very assumption and understand that essential truths cannot be proved, yet that need not detract from their truth. Historically, it seems that in the middle of the twentieth century Western civilization reached the crisis point marking the end of adolescence. From there, two paths of “maturing” into the third age opened up: the postmodern path, which denies, at different levels, the possibility of reaching rational and objective conclusions about reality. This is the skeptical form of “maturity.” And the synthetic path, which recognizes that there are unproved truths. The struggle between these two paths of maturation is in fact being waged in our own day, between postmodernism in its various forms and mature modernism—which, unlike the naive adolescent stage, recognizes its limitations, yet is unwilling to relinquish foundational anchors of certainty.³

This third age, in both its forms, seemingly grants rehabilitation to the childish dogmatism of the first stage. Postmodernism treats every outlook seriously, however childish, as the only possible representation of its bearer’s world. By contrast, modernism is a mature return to dogmatism. From a superficial perspective, this seems like a regression to childhood, or a surrender of the will to struggle intellectually, and a return to unfounded views.⁴

The relation between myth and science can also be seen as a reflection of the process described here. I will offer a schematic and simplified description of it in broad outline. At the dawn of human history, human society believes in various myths, and through them explains to itself what happens in the surrounding world. Human influence—usually minor—on the surrounding world is likewise exercised by ritual appeal to those mythic agencies: gods, natural forces, heavenly bodies, and their emissaries.

After that, a scientific, rationalist age begins. At its height, the world⁵ rejects the various myths, and religion as part of them, and offers scientific rationalism as a substitute. This age comes to an end in the twentieth century. When it fails to bring with it the longed-for promise of rational treatment of all the problems of the world and of the human being, humanity turns once again toward myths and grants them rehabilitation. This time, however, after maturation, there is no illusion of full trust in the truth of myths. The legitimacy comes in the opposite way: by undermining confidence in rational thinking itself. The postmodern person says: if all methods rest on foundational assumptions and are therefore arbitrary, why should myth be treated any worse?

By contrast, it is clear that one can mature in this context in the other, synthetic way as well. There is an approach to myth that is not postmodern, but is also not dogmatic and childish. Presenting that approach is the principal aim of this gate.

The postmodern challenge makes use of the fact that every perspective on the world requires “glasses,” an a priori structure of meaning that itself is not examined, and indeed cannot be examined, in rational-logical terms. These are something like transcendental assumptions for thought, cognition, and judgment. Therefore the postmodernist concludes that all perspectives, mythical and non-mythical alike, are arbitrary, and none is truer than another. In this way myth is rehabilitated. It is no longer rejected and banished as though it were irrational. But the reason for this is not trust in myth; it is the undermining of trust in supposedly “rational” systems, such as science.

Rabbi Shagar, in his book Broken Vessels,⁶ expresses this as follows:

It seems that precisely the believing Jew finds it comfortable to live in a pluralistic world. He can easily join the “dance of differences” without feeling exceptional in a world of exceptions. In such a context, observance of the mitzvot (commandments) becomes a marker of uniqueness, a medium of strangeness, which is a realization of “You have chosen us.” But as noted, he will not be embarrassed to declare this in a world in which “anything goes.”

The process in the attitude toward myth expresses a parallel process taking place in relation to science itself, as described in the previous gate. Because of problems in understanding scientific methodology and justifying it, since it cannot be fully explicated analytically—that is, in logical and empirical terms—a postmodern account develops that empties science of its content. This is postmodernism in the context of the philosophy of science. Against it, this book attempts to propose a different form of maturation: synthetic, more moderate, one that qualifies the validity of science and even grants greater meaning to myth, yet does not get swept away into skeptical nihilism.

A striking expression of this historical process can be found in the meaning of the very word myth. In Homer, in certain places in the Odyssey, it is clear that the meaning of this word is: a true factual state of affairs. In The Hebrew Encyclopedia under the entry Myth, Karl Kerenyi explains:

It signified a word of higher authority, and the verb derived from it denoted the speaking of truth.

To be sure, even in Greece there were myths that appeared as folktales, and it was probably clear to everyone that they did not represent pure historical truth. But in the context that concerns us here, to say that a certain event appears in myth means: this is a true event. This connotation strongly recalls the religious connotation, in which an event or a claim that appears in sacred writings, or that is stated by an authorized person, is true and not open to challenge.

By contrast, beginning with the Enlightenment, the meaning of the word myth in most European languages—and in the West generally—and certainly the connotation usually accompanying it, is “fabricated story.”

To be sure, this is not necessarily a pejorative term, because this attitude changed between the modernist and postmodern ages. Yet it seems that both periods share the treatment of myth as a fabricated story. As noted, the difference lies only in the question whether that mythical fabrication has undergone rehabilitation or not.

Rationality as the Scientific Myth: Rationality and Rationalism

In the first book, especially in the tenth gate, we dealt with the problematic nature of defining and characterizing rational thought and rational activity. Throughout the book, we saw how difficult it is to provide a justification—a rationalization—for the principles of rationality themselves. Even if justification of these principles is difficult, they can nonetheless be characterized, at least to some degree. Rational explanations depend on principles that can be observed and reproduced. Rational explanations are those whose reliability can be examined empirically. The concepts used in such explanations are generally drawn from the rational-observational world, although see the discussion in the previous gate regarding the status of theoretical entities.

Even if it is difficult to justify treating science as rational, it seems reasonable that it deserves the title rationalist. Rationalism, unlike rationality, is not a term with evaluative meanings. When I say that science is rationalist, I am not claiming that it is more correct or wiser. I am only characterizing its ways of relating to the world. What I mean is that it uses explanatory tools that are not drawn from other worlds—mystical or spiritual—and do not depend on exceptional entities or concepts that cannot be observed or predicted.

Rationalism is the “glasses,” or the a priori framework of meaning, within and from which science operates. In this sense, it too is a kind of myth—of course without the pseudo-historical substrate that exists only in myth. The very existence of such a framework provides an anchor for the postmodern challenge. It follows from this that these too are subjective glasses, just like mythical glasses. Both depend on a priori structures of meaning, and therefore neither possesses objective significance.

The claim that rationalist forms of explanation are also rational is a claim that contains an evaluative dimension. Here we usually mean that these are better forms of explanation, because they use reason—and, of course, do not contradict it. Postmodernity does not accept this claim. Even if it can acknowledge scientific rationalism, it does not necessarily acknowledge its rationality.

This gate will examine the relation between myth and science on both of these planes: their rationality and their rationalism. We will also try to indicate the relation between these two planes themselves.

Summary

In the present gate we will attempt to sharpen the problematic nature of the relation between science and myth, and thereby prepare the ground for a proposal concerning the proper relation between them, which will be presented in the next gate. There we will argue that these are parallel planes of explanation.

The structure of the gate is as follows: in the first chapter we will address the definition and characterization of myth, and distinguish between its two components: structures of meaning, and mythical “facts,” that is, stories. In the second chapter we will discuss the application of the concept a priori structure of meaning as an interpretive framework in the scientific context. In the third chapter we will examine possible analytic and synthetic attitudes toward myths, as they have been defined here. The final chapter will address the implications of the synthetic conception of these structures of meaning for the reliability of historical myths, and for the relation between that question and the question of the messages conveyed through them. In that chapter we will encounter an interesting implication of the conception of myth as truth for the philosophy of education.

Chapter One: Myth as an A Priori Structure of Meaning

Introduction

This chapter deals with understanding the concept of myth in general, and with isolating the dimension of an a priori structure of meaning found within it. We are not able to conduct a broad discussion of this important subject—which has not received adequate treatment—within the framework of the present book. Here we will discuss the implications of understanding the differences between science and myth for the relations between these two domains.⁷

When we hear the word myth, associations arise in our minds of ancient folktales, pagan mythologies, and heroes of antiquity. What all these have in common is that they belong to the ancient past and are irrelevant to our contemporary world. They are naive beliefs, used by humanity as consolation for its helplessness in confronting nature and the world. Many also associate religious beliefs with such contexts.

Mythical explanations are not rational, and certainly not rationalist. They attribute natural events to the wrath or favor of the gods, or of the monotheistic God, to the activity of demons, to struggles between forces of darkness—the children of light vis-à-vis the children of darkness—and so forth. These explanations do not attempt to understand the world scientifically and rationalistically.

In most cases myth also does not offer a systematic approach, unlike science. To be sure, this is not an essential feature of myth. It is entirely possible—and indeed exists—to have a fully systematic myth that explains all events in the world in light of different states of mythical agencies—gods, demons, and, in a different sense, mitzvot and transgressions, and so forth—in mythical terms, and does so coherently, consistently, and systematically.

Since the aim of the present gate is not primarily to contribute to the study of myths, but to use them as a means of clarifying philosophical issues concerning the relation between the analytic and the synthetic, we will use the concept myth in a broader sense, to be defined below. The discussion will naturally be quite concise, and certainly will not exhaust the various concepts of myth.

Myth as Explanatory and Directive

Wherever it appears, myth serves as a guide to life, but also as an explanation of life. The ethnologist Bronislaw Malinowski writes:⁸

Myth in primitive society, that is, in its original living form, is not merely a story that is told, but a reality that is lived. It is not of the kind of fictions that we read today in novels, but a living reality accompanied by belief, a reality that indeed occurred in ancient times and has since influenced human destiny. These stories continue to exist not because of idle curiosity, nor as invented tales, but not simply as historical truths either. For the natives they are an expression of a more original, more exalted, and more important reality, which determines the life and destiny of humanity, and whose knowledge provides people both with motives for religious and moral conduct, and with ways of realizing them.

One can see here a position according to which myth is not really true, but from the postmodern perspective that is not really important.

A similar position appears in the introduction to the well-known Hasidic book In Praise of the Baal Shem Tov, which describes utterly fantastic stories that happened to the Baal Shem Tov—there he leaps between mountains, overcomes bandits, works miracles, and foresees the future. In order to prepare the reader for the disbelief that may arise while reading the book, the introduction cites several Hasidic rebbes who say that we are not obligated to believe that the acts actually occurred in practice, but we are obligated to believe that they could have occurred. This is the postmodern separation between the degree of a myth’s historicity and the importance of the lessons learned from it. For a more detailed discussion of this point, see below in the final chapter.

Ohana and Wistrich, in the introduction to their book Myth and Memory, write the following:

The historian examines a society along the vertical axis of time. The sociologist analyzes it along a horizontal axis, at a given point in time. The mythologist, the scholar of myths, is entrusted with the axis of depth—the axis of dreams, desires, and memories.

Here there is already an advance in the description of myth. Beyond its describing something meaningful, myth is offered as the basic substrate within which our desires and longings are formed.

Claude Lévi-Strauss says:⁹

We do not think myths or create them; myths think themselves through us.

His intention is that myths are not created by the human being. Rather, if one can speak at all of a relation of priority between the two, myth creates the human being—his thought and his consciousness. Thus, beyond desires and longings, myths also seem to be bound up with thought and value-judgment. Myth contains a set of assumptions and connotations imposed upon us as a basic condition of our thinking. To be sure, these can change over time, but at any given moment there is a mythical space within which and from which every interpretation we give to what happens around us will be carried out.⁸

Thus myth is not only a collection of pseudo-historical legends; it is also an a priori structure of thought and judgment, or meaning. It is important to note that not only historical or pseudo-historical events provide such a substrate for thought and judgment. Canonical books do so as well. Events and figures active in world literature constitute a conceptual system and a constitutive framework for human thought and judgment.

Expanding the Concept of Myth: Its Connection to Foundational Assumptions

At the end of our previous discussion, a distinction was proposed between two planes of myth: the pseudo-historical plane, that is, mythical legends, and the a priori plane, that is, the values, connotations, and judgments conveyed through them. Thus myth is the framework—or one of the frameworks—within which thought takes place. In the scientific context we would call this a paradigm, the framework within which scientific discussion proceeds. This will be discussed in greater detail below in the section devoted to that topic.

We can now perceive the connection between the concept myth and a system of foundational assumptions. Myth has a status similar to that of our foundational assumptions, our axioms. It is true that myth is not formulated as a collection of definitions and first principles, but it certainly functions as such. At times it is very difficult for us to isolate these mythical principles and connotations, because to do so we must try to see things not through the mythical screen.

This analogy explains the description presented in the introduction to the present gate, where we saw that the attitude toward the concept myth followed the same course as the attitude toward the foundational assumptions of thought: beginning with a dogmatic treatment, as absolute truth, characteristic of primitive ancient thought; continuing with a skeptical and undermining treatment, characteristic of the rationalist stage of human culture—adolescence; and ending with skeptical rehabilitation in the postmodern age—everyone with his own truth—in which every system of foundational assumptions enjoys the same legitimate status, because it is impossible to examine the truth of any of these systems. In the same way, at the third stage a person may also hold a mythical system, and this is perceived as legitimate. This is precisely the process that occurs in the philosophy of science with respect to the scientific paradigm; see below in the chapter on paradigm and myth, in the discussion of the philosophical doctrine of Thomas Kuhn.

Two Examples of Myths in the Expanded Sense

We have briefly seen the expanded meaning of the concept myth. In light of the description proposed above, myth is not necessarily a primitive system of thought, but a framework only within and from which we are able to think about values, history, and also science. In what follows, I will try to show that interpretation has no meaning without a conceptual envelope and without a system of principles implicit at the foundation of understanding and interpretation.

In order to clarify and sharpen the matter further, and to indicate how difficult—and perhaps impossible—it is to escape subordination to that a priori and sometimes unnoticed framework, I will bring two illuminating examples in the following two observations. These examples teach, among other things, how deeply we are captive to our own world of images and concepts.

Observation 16: The Courageous Bird⁹

Let us imagine a bird resting on a road. When a car approaches, it usually flies away to avoid being struck. Anyone who pays attention will often notice a puzzling phenomenon: the bird waits, in a manner that seems quite adventurous, until the car comes very close, and only then does it take flight. The question is why the bird does not fly off in time, thereby taking upon itself unnecessary risks by remaining on the road.

Various answers are of course possible. It may be that it takes the bird a long time to process the information about the danger. That is probably incorrect, because if so the reaction time should depend on conditions of visibility, and it turns out that there is no such dependence. It may be that there are limits of sight or perception at long distances, but that too can be ruled out. My point is not to discuss the example itself in detail, but to bring another solution to the problem: the bird can fly and react with very great speed, far faster than a human being. Our estimate of distance, by means of which we assess the degree of risk we have taken upon ourselves, depends on the speed with which we can escape danger. A human being who waits until a car comes within twelve inches will probably be run over, and so such a distance seems to him highly adventurous and dangerous. By contrast, a bird may regard this as an entirely reasonable distance, perhaps equivalent for it to twenty meters in our terms. It is simply quicker. That is, the bird that waits until the car is twelve inches away is neither less rational nor more adventurous than we are. Its scale for relevant distances is simply different.

In fact, one may think that the very way the bird sees its environment is completely different from ours. An object located twelve inches from it may be regarded by the bird as “far away.” Its whole picture of the environment, or of the world in general, depends on its properties, and of course also on its internal structures.

Up to this point, this is a very reasonable argument. What is surprising is that we tend, again and again, to be amazed at the risks birds take upon themselves. We see everything through our own “glasses.” A person may conclude from this that birds are especially adventurous creatures, whereas in light of what was said here, that conclusion appears to have no real basis. More than that: even the very condemnation of adventurousness may be considered a human myth. Perhaps the bird does not mind being run over at all. Here too we see the world through our own glasses and myths.

Regarding the bird’s assessment of time, one may think in parallel terms: does its lifespan, which is usually much shorter than ours, cause it to see ranges of time—not only distances—in a completely different way from the way we see them?

It is worth noting that even this very consideration, concerning the difference between human and bird in estimating dangerous distance, is itself made through human glasses. It may be that the bird’s whole system of considerations is entirely different, if it has any system of considerations at all. Even when we see a dog whining, we assume that it is in pain and that it is distressed. Almost all research on animal behavior uses human terminology and human principles in describing that behavior.

As we will see below, this relativity can arouse deep skepticism regarding the very possibility of rational thought as such, something I do not intend to advocate here. My aim is the opposite. I wish to argue that anyone who takes considerations of this sort seriously assumes that there is a non-arbitrary significance to the a priori system of principles and insights—the human myth, in the broad sense defined above—within whose framework we act and think. If one does not accept this approach, there is no point in the study of animals, and perhaps no point in drawing conclusions about other human beings either, who may be utterly different from the investigator himself.

Observation 17: The Mirror Paradox

This paradox may trouble many people, especially mathematicians and physicists, who are more accustomed to using symmetry considerations. Let us imagine a person wearing a watch on his right hand and standing before a large square mirror. The image he sees opposite him is of a person visually identical to him, except that the other wears the watch on his left hand. The shirt pocket of the figure in the mirror is also on the right side rather than the left. Up to this point everything seems familiar enough.

On the other hand, the figure reflected in the mirror is not standing on its head instead of on its feet. That is, the mirror reverses right and left, but it does not reverse upper and lower.

At this point symmetry considerations enter the picture. The mirror is an object that is symmetric with respect to rotation. If we rotate it ninety degrees, so that its horizontal axis becomes vertical and its vertical axis becomes horizontal, we will still have before us an identical mirror, which should perform the same action. That is, the rotated mirror will also reverse right and left, but it will not do so with upper and lower. This is a very strange phenomenon. After all, those same two sides of the mirror that are now upper and lower were previously—before the rotation—right and left, and then they reflected one another, that is, they exchanged positions. But now, after the rotation, those same two sides do not perform that action. Yet it is clear that no one damaged the mirror in the course of the rotation. The question therefore arises: how does this happen? Why does the mirror always reverse right and left, whereas it leaves the up-down axis unchanged?

The apparently simple explanation is that this phenomenon stems from the structure of the human body. The human body is symmetric between right and left, but not symmetric between up and down—at least for some human beings, namely those whose heads differ substantially from their feet. That is, the right did not really turn into the left; it only appears that way to us because those are two identical sides of our body. The apparent conclusion is that the mirror does not reverse any side at all, and that this is merely our illusion, arising from the structure of the human body.

To put it differently: the person reflected in the mirror does not wear a watch on his left hand but on his right hand, except that the structure of the human body does not allow us to distinguish between those two sides. The problem is not in the mirror, which is indeed completely symmetric and does not distinguish between the vertical and horizontal axes, but in the person reflected in it, whose symmetry is only between right and left and not between up and down.¹⁰

To see that this is not a sufficient answer, let us continue our thought experiment and place two other objects before the mirror. The first object is a sphere, symmetric on all its sides. Let us now mark a point on its upper side and another point, in a different color, on its right side. When we look in the mirror, we will see an identical sphere, except that it has a point on its upper side—not its lower one. In terms of the horizontal axis, the point will be on its left side, not its right. That is, once again the mirror has reversed the lateral sides, but not the vertical ones.

Here we are dealing with a sphere, an object that does not suffer from partial symmetry as was claimed above of the human body. If the previous consideration were correct, the mirror would now also have to exchange the upper and lower parts of the sphere, since the sphere possesses symmetry on that axis as well.

Another object we can try placing before the mirror is one that is symmetric neither on the horizontal axis nor on the vertical axis. Even there, it seems that the lateral—that is, horizontal—sides are exchanged, not the vertical ones. I suggest that the reader who is unfamiliar with this problem try to think about it for a while. Several solutions that initially seem plausible can be rejected by thought experiments of the sort described above. After a number of satisfying attempts, the reader will likely be completely perplexed.¹¹ We may now try to propose a solution to the perplexity.

To try to understand this strange phenomenon, let us now place, next to the right hand—the one wearing the watch—of the person standing before the mirror, another object, for example a cabinet. As all of us can easily imagine, the image that results is a figure in the mirror with the watch on the left hand, but the hand with the watch is still the hand closer to the cabinet. That is, although the characterization of right and left is disrupted by the mirror, the relation of proximity between the hand with the watch and the cabinet is not disrupted.

Here we have our first hint toward a solution. The relation between right and left is affected by mirror reflection, whereas the relation of proximity is not. What is the difference between these relations? Why, and in what respect, is the relation of proximity more like the relation between upper and lower than like the relation between right and left?

Another question one might think about in this context is whether relations between directions in the world, such as north and south or east and west, are also affected by mirror reflection. Is there an exchange between east and west, and no such exchange between north and south?[^^14] It seems that the answer is no. Directions in the world do not change by mirror reflection. Here too we must ask what all those relations that do not change have in common, as opposed to the relation between left and right, which does change.

The answer apparently lies in the difference between the pair right-left and the pair up-down. Up means the direction farther from the earth, and down means the direction closer to the earth. This pair has definitions in geographic-physical terms, just as the four cardinal directions do. The same is true of proximity. That too is essentially a geographic definition. These are objective definitions, independent of the person defining them.

In contrast to all of these, the pair right-left has no such definitions. If the reader thinks about how he could explain to someone unfamiliar with these terms what right and left mean, he will encounter serious difficulties. It seems impossible to do so by means of concepts such as proximity or north and so forth. The only method I can imagine is pointing to one hand, right or left, and tying a ribbon on the right hand. As every child discovers, there is no way to remember these definitions until they have been internalized. One must tie something onto the hand. The reason is that these terms have no root in the physical world. They are products of the human spirit, arising from the peculiar symmetry of the human body.

We saw above that the problem cannot lie in the mirror or in the figure it reflects. But there is yet another player on the field: we ourselves, or the human being looking at the mirror and thinking about the problem.

The mirror does not reverse anything in the physical world. It seems that only the fictive relations defined by us—right and left—are exchanged by it. This indeed happens because of the symmetry of the human body. But the point is not the person standing vis-à-vis the mirror and reflected in it; it is the person who defined the concepts and uses them, the one looking at the spectacle and thinking about the problem reflected in it.

The human being constructed for himself a conceptual world of four directions, but in fact they do not all have the same kind of meaning. Because of the structure of his body, the human being can define terms like left-right, terms that a non-symmetric creature could not understand at all. These concepts do not exist in the world; they exist only in our brain, or in our thought. Beyond that, the human being also defines the geographic directions. These are directions that can be understood independently of the bodily structure of the creature thinking about them. In that sense they are objective concepts.

And yet, after defining the concepts, the human being does not distinguish between them and the directions of the world, or between them and up and down, which do have objective meaning.¹² The root of the mirror paradox lies in the failure to distinguish between the different characters of the two pairs of concepts, up-down and right-left. This perplexity arises because we are unaware of the nuances that exist within the conceptual world we use.

The problem of the mirror’s lack of symmetry exists solely in us and in our world of concepts. As stated, the mirror itself is completely symmetric, whereas the image formed in our consciousness is not. The reason is that this image is based on a conceptual system and on principles that we assume implicitly, often without noticing them at all. In fact these are not principles of thought, but principles of perception or cognition.

This is an example of the existence of a layer of language and conceptual world through which we understand everything that happens around us. This understanding depends very deeply on the conceptual world and on language. The conclusion is that language and concepts are not merely tools of expression; they are also tools that create meaning. The words right and left are common metaphors both in the socio-political world and in worlds of mystical thought. One should note that these basic concepts are, apparently, arbitrary products of our spirit.

According to the anthropological principle that we presented in the first book, especially in the seventh gate, the very fact that such pairs of concepts are implanted in us indicates that they have a root in reality. In Kabbalah, as in other mystical worlds, people speak of right and left as two fundamental concepts in describing the structure of spiritual worlds. These are built something like the structure of a human body. Clearly, in order to adopt such an approach, one must believe in an agency that synchronizes and coordinates the sensations and structures within our souls with the structure of the world itself.

As stated, we saw in the previous book that wholly fictive concepts cannot exist if neither they nor their components have any root in the real world. That was the proof—in Cartesian terms, an anthropological proof—that we offered there for the existence of a substrate of concepts; see there in the second gate. It seems that the pair of concepts right-left is based on an ability to sense—not through the ordinary senses, but through the auditory faculty of cognition—the spiritual worlds in which these concepts themselves exist. That is the sole source of the concepts right and left.

The source of the political-social terms right and left is the seating arrangement of the delegates in the French parliament who belonged to the respective social camps: the right sat on the right, and the left sat on the left. On the face of it, this is a simple technical explanation of the terminology in its political context. But it is important to note that this terminology was absorbed into the world for some reason. By the same token, one could have called the political right and left by terms referring to the colors of the clothes worn by the representatives of the different views in the Swedish parliament. The fact that the terminology drawn from the French parliament was specifically chosen points to some abstract intuition regarding the meaning of these concepts and the relation between them and the social meanings they express. Perhaps this was even the reason that the right chose from the outset to sit on the right side of the French parliament, and vice versa. These sides have an essential, not accidental, connection to the worldviews they represent. In the previous book, we also pointed out that the division between right and left exists in the brain’s hemispheres as well, and correspondingly, as noted here, the right hemisphere is responsible for synthetic thinking and the left for analytic thinking.¹³

The case of the bird and the mirror problem were brought as illustrations of the dependence of our processes of imparting meaning to events and phenomena in the world on a basic conceptual system implicit at the foundation of our thinking and perception. These two examples thoroughly illustrate how deeply the human being depends on an entire conceptual world that he has not seriously examined. This world is imposed on him to a certain extent by the structure of the world, by consciousness, and perhaps even by the human body, and it constitutes a condition for all thought, cognition, and judgment.

It is clear that the metaphors human beings use, which form part of processes of meaning and significance, are also derived from such internal structures. We are seemingly captive to these structures.¹⁴ This whole basic conceptual and evaluative system can be called myth, according to the expanded definition proposed above.

One may observe, by way of example, borrowed concepts in any language, such as coarse, used both to describe the textures of surfaces and to describe unpleasant human behaviors. There is an assumption here about the inner meaning that the concept coarse arouses in the human being. The same is true of light or heavy, which describe objects on the one hand and types of behavior on the other. There are many more such examples. Borrowed uses can differ from one language and culture to another. Perhaps more than anything else, they testify to the inner feeling of speakers when they use these concepts even in their ordinary sense. That testifies to their mythical world.

We will now present an observation that illustrates one of the foundational a priori structures lying at the basis of contemporary Western culture.

Observation 18: The Protestant Thesis¹⁵

A classic example of an a priori layer of meaning—something like a mythical one—that stands at the basis of the modern Western worldview, and perhaps also at the basis of some scientific conceptions, is the Protestant thesis of the renowned sociologist Max Weber. I wish to discuss it and some of its implications here, very briefly.

Weber argued that given the possibility of events over which the human being has no control, such as various disasters, every culture or religion develops a model or pattern of salvation. In this model, the human being is told what he must do in order to be “all right” with certain entities so as to escape such events. These patterns of salvation are usually born in a religious world and then undergo secularization. In this way secular norms are created.

The Indian, even the secular Indian, tends to merge with nature and not fight it and try to overcome it. By contrast, the average American, who is not necessarily religious, is an activist and constantly acts in order to find his salvation. This difference derives from the difference between the religions that served as the basis of these two “secular” cultures. Eastern religion has distinctly passive characteristics, whereas Protestant Christianity is distinctly activist.¹⁶

Protestantism was a rebellion against the prevailing religious conception, as expressed above all in Catholicism. Protestantism preached that poverty and suffering are not the hallmark of religiosity; on the contrary. Diligence and success, including material success, are the sign that you are among God’s chosen, those whom He wants or chooses. Weber argues that this was a religious revolution upon which the entire Western cultural world has fed. This applies to all the components of that cultural world: Protestants, Jews, secular people, and all the others as well. The neurotic achiever-type of the Western world is a direct result of Protestant ethics. Western moral conceptions are of the same sort. Mordechai Rotenberg argues that conceptions of social and personal deviance, as well as psychological classification and labeling, also stem from this conception.¹⁷

The labeling of the mentally ill necessarily has a very large ideological-mythical layer. It is quite clear that current labels have a broad basis in Protestant religion. Erich Fromm already argued that the very resort to the psychologist and psychiatrist itself also stems from a pseudo-Protestant conception. Instead of the confessional priest in the Catholic world, the Protestant secular person goes to the psychologist. See the discussion of this in the first book, in the third gate.

The evaluative assumptions of psychology and psychiatry should arouse the attention of every thoughtful person. Not everyone can be treated by every therapist. A person with a strong religious sensibility may be perceived by a secular Western psychologist as mentally ill, believing in various delusions—and perhaps from the psychologist’s perspective, justifiably so. Someone who is uninterested in material success, does not integrate well into society, or develops various dependencies on others is today perceived as disabled or mentally ill. This is a direct consequence of Protestantism, in which success is the indication that you are among the elect.

At times it is hard to believe how the most basic components of our worldview in all the fields mentioned above—components we do not doubt for a single moment—are in fact merely a consequence of a Protestant worldview. This worldview is aggressively marketed today by all the agents of Western culture of every kind, and often it is difficult for a person to discern how it rests on assumptions in which he himself does not really believe.

We see here how myth, and this time in its traditional and narrow sense, serves as an infrastructure for our entire way of looking at the world. It should be noted that psychiatry is today regarded as part of medicine. Medicine has a scientific, or at least technological, status. This is an example of the fact that even scientific fields, and certainly pseudo-scientific ones, rest—sometimes quite transparently—on mythical foundations.

The modern Western person does not usually ask himself why human autonomy is a basic value in the worldview he accepts, especially in light of the contradictions between this conception and the evolutionary-materialist conception. Why should everyone have to take care of himself and be independent, and why, if someone does not do so, is he classified as mentally ill? Why is productivity today the supreme value in modern Western society? In Israel, sharp criticism is directed at the Haredi public for being unproductive, with many of its members sitting and studying in a kollel, a full-time advanced Torah study framework, their entire lives. People who work for their living, or law students—who study very hard and work in order to finance their studies, as journalistic articles on the subject claim—are “elevated and moral,” even though the usual purpose of their studies is the pursuit of profit. For the sake of unproductive gain they invest all their energy, money, and time in a “very moral and elevated” way. By contrast, people whose entire purpose is the pursuit of spirituality and engagement in it are morally inferior—and, absurdly enough, are usually presented as though they were the ones greedy for money. Here Protestantism reaches peaks of absurdity. Sometimes the underlying process appears as though Jews are saying to those who still preserve a Jewish foundation: why do you not possess Protestant ethics?

According to that same Protestant ethic, people are prepared to sell all their spiritual assets so that the economy may flourish. Things reach such absurd levels that one of the most common arguments against opponents of the current peace process—1999 to 2004—between Israel and the Palestinians is that the extent of outside investment in Israel and economic activity generally declined significantly because the process was halted. Even if that were true, would that provide a counterweight to security considerations, or to value-based considerations such as not returning homeland territory and the like? If there really are differing assessments on these issues, they should be discussed on their merits. But the use of the economic consideration, which today seems self-evident, sometimes reaches absurd levels. This too is a consequence of an unquestionable Protestant desire for economic success, a desire standing at the top of the modern hierarchy of values.

It seems that the analytic mode of thought itself, against which this book argues, even if it existed long before Luther and Calvin, also derives from Protestant sources. At least its establishment at the center of the intellectual-cultural map of the Western world in the present century derives from that. If one wants to succeed, one needs complete control over the world. The human being becomes active on the intellectual plane as well. From here the road opens to positivism, which determines that what the human being does not understand does not exist, and on the other hand to approaches that grasp everything a human being believes as truth. There is no objective truth outside the human being. Science and technology develop, and the emphasis on spiritual-personal development declines dramatically. As we have seen, this approach cannot survive on its own, and so postmodernism is created, followed by the modern search for spirituality. This is already a recovery—blessed, to some degree—from the Protestant-analytic shock.

From the two examples above—the bird and the mirror—we might perhaps infer that we are able to free ourselves from this a priori conceptual system, for we did in fact succeed in discerning its presence in the two contexts discussed there, and in viewing those subjects not through those “glasses,” which were removed. So too it seems from our very ability to discern the Protestant basis of the culture within which we operate. Such discernment requires an ability to extricate oneself from that a priori framework of meaning.

But those examples were only a demonstration that there is no interpretive process without “glasses,” just as there is no seeing without eyes. Even if we remove some of the screens separating us from reality itself—the noumenon, in Kant’s terms—we can never free ourselves from all of them.

This claim is essential and necessary by virtue of the very act of interpretation. In the second gate of the first book, we saw that this is not a cognitive limitation. In strictly logical terms, a phenomenon cannot be defined without the “glasses” that view it. As we saw there, every phenomenon is a function of the means of observation. We saw there that color, for example—or light—does not exist in the world in itself, but only in the consciousness that receives it. Hence one cannot ask what the color of an object is in itself, because it has no color at all. Every question about color presupposes means of observation—in this case, eyes. Without such means, the question itself is meaningless, not merely unanswered. Questions about the world simply do not have an objective answer, but this is not a limitation. The questions are formulated in terms of the world as it exists in our consciousness.

Therefore, on the one hand, we cannot free ourselves from the screens through which we view the world, but on the other hand there is no need to do so. Their use does not necessarily indicate that our answers are incorrect—that is, that they do not correctly describe the world in itself. The terms used by the answer are subjective, but the reality discussed through them is objective reality.

When I claim that the color of the table before me is brown, this is not an error arising from the limitations of my perception. It is a completely correct answer, though it is given in terms of a conceptual system—the system of colors—created by human means of perception. This is the only way we observe reality in itself. This is my way of describing the crystalline structure of a table. I do so by saying that when light strikes it, it reflects toward me an electromagnetic wave, and this creates in my consciousness the color brown. This is my way of describing the table in itself in my own terms. We have no other way to deal with the table in itself.

To be sure, doubts can be raised about the objectivity of these descriptions, though from a somewhat different angle.¹⁸ When someone uses the word red to describe the color of an object, and his friend uses the same term to describe that object’s color, the two seemingly agree. Yet we have no certainty that they actually see the same color in their consciousness. It may be that for person A all red objects do indeed appear alike, but the color he calls red appears in his consciousness as green appears in his friend’s consciousness, or in some entirely different way. They both continue speaking the same language and believing they fully agree, and yet inwardly they experience a different interpretation of the same concept. They perceive it differently.¹⁹ One can extend this example to other concepts, such as light, which might be perceived in someone else’s consciousness the way I perceive dark. We would then continue to agree consistently with the statement that object A is lighter than object B, although in fact we would be making opposite claims. One can continue in this manner and ask about the very concept of color, and similarly about all our other concepts.

All of these, and others besides, are a priori structures of meaning within which we perceive, think, and act. The basis of every perception and every judgment is transcendental and prior to that perception. There is no objective-rational perception detached from prior assumptions and from a conceptual and evaluative system—from a mythical world—within which it is defined and operates.

Here the synthetic meaning of a priori structures of meaning begins to become clearer. In contrast to postmodernity, which uses the existence of such structures to undermine the truth of our conclusions and judgments, a synthetic position will relate to these structures as tools through which objective reality is reflected. Not only is it unnecessary to get rid of these glasses and look at the world without a priori screens, it is simply impossible to do so. This is the only way to observe the world. This subject will be elaborated and expanded below.

Thus, according to the synthetic position, the purpose of removing the screens that separate us from the world is not to reach the world in itself, the noumenon, but only to reach a correct description of the phenomenal world. That is our way of describing objective reality itself. Therefore the assumption that the bird moves at our speeds and is therefore subject to our laws of caution is an assumption we must remove. But after removing it, we hope that we have come closer to a reliable description of reality itself—meaning that our claims about the bird are indeed true. Even so, it is clear that these claims too are laden with our concepts and our ways of seeing; it is simply that, in our judgment—at least for now—these are the right ways, even in relation to birds.

If so, using mythical, subjective concepts does not indicate claims of merely subjective or doubtful status. It may be that this is the only form available to us for grasping reality itself.

Observation 19: A Kabbalistic-Hasidic Perspective: The King and the Garments

In this observation, I would like to broaden the discussion somewhat regarding the point that arose in our remarks about the objectivity of subjective perception. This point also relates to the previous book, and here we will try to shed some light on it through a Kabbalistic-Hasidic perspective. Perhaps this perspective itself will be described, to some extent, through the interpretation proposed here.

In Tanya, written by the Alter Rebbe of Chabad, in chapter 4 of Likutei Amarim, he discusses the relation between God and the Torah He gave, and through that relation the meaning of Torah study. Let us now bring a few quotations from that chapter:

Every divine soul also has three garments: thought, speech, and action, which are expressed in the 613 mitzvot (commandments) of the Torah. When a person fulfills in action all the practical commandments, and in speech occupies himself with the explanation of all 613 commandments and their laws, and in thought grasps all that he can grasp in the four levels of Torah interpretation, then all 613 limbs of his soul are clothed in the 613 commandments of the Torah… according to the capacity of his understanding and the root of his soul above.

For the one who truly fulfills them—that is, the positive commandments—is the one who loves the name of the Lord and truly desires to cleave to Him. And it is impossible to cleave to Him truly except through the fulfillment of the 248 positive commandments, which are, so to speak, the 248 limbs of the King…

These three garments of Torah and its commandments, although they are called garments for the soul in all its levels, nevertheless surpass the levels of the soul itself without any limit or end, as it is written in the Zohar: “The Torah and the Holy One, blessed be He, are entirely one.” That is to say: the Torah is the wisdom and will of the Holy One, blessed be He, and He Himself is entirely one with them. For He is the Knower and He is the Knowledge. See Maimonides, Mishneh Torah, Foundations of the Torah 2:10.

And although the Holy One, blessed be He, is called Infinite, and His greatness is unsearchable, and no thought can grasp Him at all, nor His will and wisdom… regarding this the sages said—see Babylonian Talmud, Megillah 31a—“Wherever you find the greatness of the Holy One, blessed be He, there you find His humility.” The Holy One, blessed be He, contracted His will and wisdom into the 613 commandments of the Torah and their laws, and into the combinations of letters of the Tanakh and their interpretations in the aggadot and midrash (rabbinic exposition) of our sages of blessed memory, so that every soul, spirit, and living self within the human body could grasp them in its understanding and fulfill them, insofar as possible, in action, speech, and thought. Through this, all ten of its powers are clothed in these three garments…

Therefore the Torah is compared to water. Just as water descends from a high place to a low place, so the Torah descended from its place of glory, which is His blessed will and wisdom—and the Torah and the Holy One, blessed be He, are entirely one… and from there it traveled and descended through hidden gradations, from level to level, through the chain of worlds, until it clothed itself in material things and the affairs of this world, which constitute almost all the commandments of the Torah and their laws, and in combinations of physical letters written in ink in a book, the twenty-four books of the Torah, Prophets, and Writings, so that every thought can grasp them. Even speech and action, which are lower than thought, can grasp them and be clothed in them. And since the Torah and its commandments clothe all ten faculties of the soul and all 613 of its limbs, from head to foot, the whole soul is bound in the bond of life with God Himself, and the very light of God surrounds and clothes it from head to foot…

But the Holy One, blessed be He, in His very essence, cannot be grasped by thought at all. Only when thought grasps and clothes itself in the Torah and its commandments does it thereby grasp them and clothe itself in God Himself, for the Torah and the Holy One, blessed be He, are entirely one.

And although the Torah clothed itself in lower, material things, this is like embracing the king. By way of analogy: there is no difference in the degree of one’s closeness and attachment to the king whether one embraces him while he is wearing one garment or many garments, since the king’s body is within them. The same is true if the king embraces him with his arm, even though the arm is clothed in his garments, as it is written: “His right hand embraces me”—that is the Torah, which was given from the right…

The author of Tanya writes that the Torah and the mitzvot are a garment of God Himself, and that He Himself is present within them. Therefore, one who embraces the king in his garments is as though he embraced the king himself. One who grasps the Torah is as though he has grasped God Himself.

A garment is the external appearance of a person, and the Torah is the appearance of God Himself in the world. Therefore, one who grasps it in fact grasps God Himself. The meaning is that the grasp takes place through tools drawn from our world, but what is grasped is the thing itself.

In the context of perception generally, this can be generalized: when one grasps an object or an idea in our own terms, this is not a limitation or an inability to grasp the thing itself. It is a grasp of the thing itself, except that grasping is always something done within a conceptual system drawn from the world of the perceiver. We perceive an electromagnetic wave as light, and this is a perception of the wave itself. True, light does not exist outside us, but this is the language we use to describe the phenomenon that does indeed exist outside us.

Put differently: a subjective apprehension of an objective thing is like apprehending the thing through garments. The garments of a thing are the forms in which it appears to us, but that is the way to apprehend it itself.

Therefore the author of Tanya adds in the passage above that even if the king continues descending through more and more levels and wraps himself in many more garments, this changes nothing. One who embraces the king through many garments is like one who embraces him through a single garment. Embracing without a garment is impossible. Embrace—that is, apprehension—always occurs through a garment. Hence, even being wrapped in many garments, required by descent to a lower stratum of creation, is only the use of another language to translate the thing itself. Therefore one who grasps it in that language grasps the king himself; he simply does so in a “lower,” that is, more material, language.

That same king can be grasped and described in several different languages, and the language is the system of tools of the one who grasps and describes. The process is always a description of the thing in itself translated into the language of the perceiver. The author of Tanya expands this immediately afterward, there in chapter 5—and likewise in many other places in his writings²⁰—and the reader is referred there. This is not the place to expand further.

It is interesting to note that on the other side of the Hasidic-Lithuanian divide stands Rabbi Hayyim of Volozhin, the foremost disciple of the Vilna Gaon and the author of Nefesh HaHayyim. It is commonly thought that this book is devoted mainly to attacking the Hasidic conception of Torah and proposing the “Mitnagdic” alternative. On this point—as on many others—it is surprising to discover how close his formulations are to those of the author of Tanya. For example, in Gate 1, chapter 6, he brings statements from the Zohar, which the author of Tanya also cited above, and draws very similar—though not identical—conclusions from them. Here, however, we will cite only his words concerning the relation between Torah and God, from Gate 4, chapter 6:

One should intend to cleave, through his study of Torah, to Him—that is, to the Holy One, blessed be He. In other words, to cleave with all one’s powers to the word of God, which is halakha (Jewish law). In this way one is truly attached to Him, so to speak, for He and His will are one, as written in the Zohar, and every law and ruling from the holy Torah is His will…

More than that: at the very time when a person occupies himself with Torah below, every word that issues from his mouth is, as it were, also issuing from His blessed mouth at that very moment… and He, blessed be His name, and His speech are one. This is explicit in the holy Torah, in Deuteronomy 30:6: “to love the Lord your God,” which the sages explained in a baraita in Babylonian Talmud, Nedarim 62a, as referring to the study of Torah. And the end of that verse is: “and to cleave to Him.”

And in chapter 27 of that same gate he writes:

Further, the terrifying holiness of the Torah has a superior worth and advantage even over the worlds above, for the higher worlds, although their holiness is indeed very great, when they descended through immense chains of emanation and levels, and although in every world the entire order of the world above it is imprinted and represented… nevertheless the value of its holiness and light is not equal to, nor like, that of the world above it…

But the holy Torah, though it too descended and unfolded from the source of its most holy root through immeasurable levels, from world to world and from level to level, nevertheless its original holiness, as it is at the source of its root at the beginning of its way in holiness, remains exactly as it is even in this world…

This too is the meaning of what the sages said in the Zohar, that the Holy One, blessed be He, and the Torah are one. That is: although the worlds all proceed by degrees and chains of emanation, with many changes in the measure of their holiness, all this is only from our side. But from His side, may He be blessed, there is no difference or change of place at all, Heaven forbid, as it is written in Malachi 3:6: “I the Lord have not changed,” and the holiness has not changed…

So too the holy Torah: although it descended and unfolded through many and immense degrees, nevertheless it has not changed in its holiness at all, and it stands in its original holiness even in this lower world, just as it was in faithful union with Him, may He be blessed, at the place of its root, without any difference or change of place at all.

Thus the author of Nefesh HaHayyim also explains that the Torah is the very essence of things, and is one with God Himself, and therefore undergoes no change. The change between worlds is a change between languages, different translations of the Torah, but all of them refer to the very same thing. Therefore the holiness of the thing itself—God and Torah, which are one—remains the same everywhere, and there is no difference between a higher language and a lower one.

Let us add another side remark related to these matters. Kabbalists were attacked by many sages, in different generations, for recommending prayer to God through created entities such as sefirot (divine emanations), names—which in Kabbalah are real existent entities, unlike names of objects in our world—and parzufim, mystical personae or configurations. This is prohibited by the Torah as part of the prohibition against idolatry; see Maimonides’ famous description at the beginning of Laws of Idolatry. The Torah forbids addressing God in prayer through various mediators such as angels, heavenly bodies, and the like.

The Kabbalists’ answer to this criticism²¹ is that created entities—and angels as well are such entities—are not garments of the king but beings separate from him, and therefore one may not address him through them. But the sefirot, the parzufim, and all the parts of the emanated worlds are not separate entities; they are garments through which He Himself appears. In this there is no prohibition of idolatry, because there is direct address to Him. The address is not to the garment, but to the One clothed in that garment. Even when we address a person, we refer to his physical body. It is his body that appears before us, although our intention is to address his spirit. The reason is that his body and spirit are one entity, something like the Kantian relation of phenomenon and noumenon.

The basic Kabbalistic distinction is therefore between emanated entities, such as sefirot, names, and parzufim, which constitute a representation of God Himself—or more precisely, of the Infinite Light—and created entities, such as angels or heavenly bodies, which do not.

The necessary conclusion is that our forms of reference are conceived and expressed in subjective concepts, and those concepts are created within and from the a priori structures of meaning within which we act. But the fact that our forms of reference are subjective does not mean that they are incorrect with regard to the world in itself. Myth and science are different descriptions of the world, and they are expressed in different conceptual systems. These are two languages, two different pairs of glasses, and both can be correct. The subjectivity of each does not indicate its falsity.

It is true that the fact that these are two different systems, which can sometimes contradict one another, does raise doubt about their truth. But the doubt is not due to their subjectivity—that is, their being laden with heavy mythical freight—but because of their plurality and because of the contradiction between them. In the next gate we will discuss the relation between two forms of description or explanation that exist in parallel with regard to the same phenomenon, and in that way we will try to answer this difficulty. That will be the final stage in describing the alternative form of maturation—with which we are concerned here—in place of the postmodern one, as mentioned above.

The Grounding of A Priori Structures of Meaning

The Protestant thesis, especially in its applications to psychiatry, illustrates the kind of argument that leads to postmodern critique. One of the heralds of postmodernism was Foucault, and in his well-known book Madness and Civilization²² he criticizes psychiatry, which classifies people as sane and insane according to arbitrary criteria. Criteria for sanity cannot be scientific. They are culturally dependent values, and in our context they are usually tied to Protestant values.²³

The recognition that at the basis of every understanding, and at the basis of every science, there lies an a priori system—something like a mythical one—which cannot be examined or justified logically or empirically, leads to postmodern skepticism. At the beginning of the first book, we pointed out that the new criticism is based on the fact that all thinking rests on axioms and foundational assumptions, and it concludes from this that all perception and understanding are arbitrary.

The entire first book dealt with a response to challenges of this sort. The claim was that we have non-logical and non-empirical ways of grounding foundational assumptions and primary truths, in an a priori way. This is the essence of propositions that are truly synthetic a priori, and not only in the Kantian, subjective sense.

As we have already seen above, our ability to ground, adopt, or reject a priori propositions is the faculty called eidetic vision, or auditory reasoning—that is, a capacity composed of a combination of cognition and thought. If myth is not to be used as the basis of an attack on rationality as such, it too must be accepted in similar ways. Our ability to examine and justify myths is based on these auditory capacities. As we have seen, every act of understanding is based on such capacities, and therefore myth is the foundational plane in every form of understanding whatsoever. As we defined above, the role of myth, in relation to the systems based on it and situated within it, is similar to the role of paradigms in science, and of assumptions and basic definitions in axiomatic systems generally.

In the first book, in the example of the train to Scotland,²⁴ we saw that anyone who believes in any capacity to understand the world and his surroundings, and even himself, and who also believes in the significance of such understanding, must assume that this conceptual and cognitive system by which he does so is not entirely arbitrary. This is a process similar to what is done with respect to theoretical entities in the sciences. There too we require a priori justifications, because without them there is no justification for assuming a correspondence between our thought and the structure of the world in itself. That is precisely how Kant’s synthetic a priori is born.

Here, however, we move beyond Kantian transcendentality, which, as we saw, provides only a rather thin cover for analytic skepticism. We again arrive at the concept of God as creator of human beings and of the world, who implanted in human beings not only their beliefs and the basic tools of thought and cognition, but also what is most basic for them: the world of concepts, understandings, and myths.

In the next chapter we will see that myth as an a priori structure of meaning lies on a much deeper plane than science. Such structures are conditions, among other things, for scientific understanding itself. Therefore here too intuitive inner certainty is the supreme criterion of truth, and as we saw in the first book—see the end of chapter 1 of the eighth gate—it is this that also lies at the basis of logical-mathematical certainty.

Two Dimensions of Myth

Let us now return to the accepted concept of myth. In fact, we must divide the concept of myth into two planes of reference, or two dimensions. The first dimension is mythical events themselves. The discussion concerning them is about their historical reliability. But these events serve as mediators for transmitting ideas, meanings, and significances within and from which we think and interpret everything. Such a framework of meaning is the second dimension of myth.

The first plane raises a difficulty because its historical reliability is not sufficiently grounded, unlike ordinary historical events. The second plane raises a problem because the a priori principles we use have not passed through a logical or empirical filter, and therefore all thought, interpretation, or judgment carried out within them would seemingly have to be regarded with suspicion.

It is important to note that there is a connection between these two planes. On the one hand, the events provide the medium through which the ideas and messages are conveyed. On the other hand, the mythical ideas and principles provide the basis for trust—perhaps naive trust—in the occurrence of the events described in the myth.

For example, the biblical events of the Exodus, in which God brings Israel out of Egypt, draw their meaning and force from the belief that God exists, rules over history, and desires the people of Israel to live their lives in the Land of Israel. These ideas are mediated to us by the mythical events, but they are also what stands at the basis of our trust in the events themselves. One who believes in these events generally also believes in the religious messages conveyed to us through them. Conversely, one who believes in the existence of God, in His rule over history, and in His interest in the people of Israel will find it easier to believe in the historical reliability of the biblical events. It is no accident that trust in these events is a fairly clear function of the degree of a person’s religious faith, and vice versa.

Therefore, in the continuation of this gate, we will divide the discussion of myth into two parts: in the next two chapters we will deal with the second dimension of myth, namely myth as an a priori framework of meaning. We will see that in this sense myth exists at the foundation of every culture and every system of thought, and even at the foundation of science. In the final chapter, by contrast, we will turn to the first dimension of myth, namely the historical reliability of mythical events. This plane, of course, does not necessarily exist at the foundation of every cultural or intellectual system, especially not in the context of scientific thought. There we will also return to the connection between the two planes, a connection mentioned briefly above.

Summary and Conclusions

As we have seen, every observation, understanding, or interpretation is conditioned by basic structures of concepts and first principles that serve as a necessary basis for our cognitive activities. This is an a priori structure corresponding to the a priori layer of myth.

The plane of myth described here, unlike the common definition, is not necessarily a collection of tales and beliefs of the kind accepted in ancient times; rather, it is the cultural-intellectual framework mediated to us by such tales. More generally, myth in this sense is not a defined field of activity or thought, nor a specific method. Myth, in this definition, is a foundational layer standing at the root of all fields and methods, within whose framework we observe, interpret, think, and judge.

There are several different kinds of myths. Some are religious myths, and some are cultural, artistic, or scientific myths. What has been said here is not enough to determine the validity of such myths, nor even to determine that the validity of all these kinds is identical. It may be that the scientific myth—that is, the scientific a priori structure of meaning—is more rational, and not only more rationalist, than other a priori structures. It may also be otherwise. The question of the reliability of mythical frameworks will be discussed in the next two chapters. The question of the historical reliability of the various myths will be examined in chapter 4. The question of the mutual relation of these a priori structures to one another will be examined in the next gate.

Chapter Two: Myth and Paradigm: A Priori Structures of Meaning in Science

Introduction

In this chapter we will see that even at the basis of science there lies a mythical plane, in the sense defined above—that is, an a priori framework of meaning within which scientific thought and scientific attribution of meaning take place. This level of reference is also connected to what, since Thomas Kuhn, has been called in the philosophy of science a paradigm, and therefore in the second part of the chapter we will also address this issue.

This fact strengthens, on the one hand, the problematic nature of treating myth as fabricated story; see the introduction to this gate, since science enjoys great trust even in the postmodern age. On the other hand, the questions concerning the validity and reliability of myth can serve as a basis for an attack on science—indeed such attacks are well known in our time—perhaps no less than for an attack on ancient and primitive myths. As we already saw in the previous gate, Feyerabend speaks of science as an ideology, or as a kind of myth.

As the book progresses, we will see that the clashes between science and myth usually occur on the plane of the myth underlying science. If so, in terms of our definitions, these are clashes between a priori structures of meaning, not between a posteriori facts.

Already here it is important to emphasize that the purpose of this description, which places science and myth on the same platform, is not to defend the attacked myth from the aura of scientific rationality. Many in the postmodern world do this in order to diminish the value of science, and thereby ostensibly defend the value of myth. This is the essence of what above was called the postmodern rehabilitation of myth. As stated, in this book I wish to do the opposite, and to defend myth—and science as well—precisely from the rationalist belief in the power and truth of rationalism in general, and of science in particular. As noted in the introduction, this is an alternative to the postmodern process of maturation out of the illusions of adolescence. Synthetic maturation, unlike it, does not give up certainties, but at the same time is aware of our limited ability to prove them.

Structures of Meaning as A Priori Elements Underlying Science

As we saw in the previous gate, scientific methodology rests on various assumptions that constitute the framework within which the scientist operates, and within which scientific thought and observation also take place. At the basis of every scientific theory there stands a conceptual system—namely, theoretical entities—used by the scientist in understanding and describing the domain under discussion. In our terminology, this may be called the scientific myth, or the scientific a priori structure of meaning.

Some of these assumptions are general principles applying to all science as such. We saw some of them in the previous gate. In addition, in what follows we will see several further examples of assumptions lying at the basis of specific scientific fields, such as physics, biology, and others. In the next observation we will see an illustration of such levels in the field of psychology.

Observation 20: The Psychological Myth²⁵

To illustrate the status of the conceptual system—whose status appears arbitrary but certainly is not—in fields of knowledge that are usually not classified as myth, let us now discuss psychology.²⁶

The Freudian conceptual system is an array of terms that Freud himself invented—or at least institutionalized—and which in themselves have no experiential source. The concepts themselves are merely coordinates used to describe psychological reality. These are the tools we use to describe and explain various psychological phenomena. A discussion of the concepts themselves is seemingly no more than speculation. On the other hand, let us imagine a situation in which some researcher is supposed to begin the study of psychology, about a hundred years before the development of Freudian terminology. If he wishes to begin analyzing the world of psychological phenomena on a theoretical basis—that is, to unify some of them and classify them according to some index—he must be equipped with a conceptual system. Without a system of concepts such as libido, repression, Totem and Taboo, superego, subconscious, and the like, it is impossible to construct general propositions about psychological facts. Generalization becomes possible by assigning a set of phenomena to one or another part, or one or another tendency, of the psyche. But parts of the psyche are not given to us in observation in the simple sense of that concept. They must be “invented.” At the stage when there is no conceptual system describing the psyche and its parts, a process of conceptualization is first required. One must find some classification of the various parts of the psyche and draw a theoretical map of them in order to begin saying something—even something mistaken—about psychological phenomena.

Freud’s psychological principles are controversial, and I greatly doubt whether some of them deserve serious attention, at least on the scientific-ontological plane. Some may serve as a model, even if not as a description of reality; we will discuss this distinction in the next gate. Freud’s main and genuinely brilliant contribution was conceptualization: the invention—or discovery—of a conceptual system relevant to the description of bodies of psychological knowledge. Once such a conceptual system exists, one can formulate psychological generalizations, test them empirically, and either refute or confirm them. Even someone who does not accept Freud’s principles or propositions can use his system of terms—or various later developments of it—to formulate objections and to try to refute Freudian theses. Without a conceptual system, one cannot even make opposite claims that deny Freud’s claims.

There are also behaviorist approaches in the world of psychology—see a little on this at the end of the previous gate—which argue that all theoretical concepts are unobservable, and therefore propositions containing them are not really empirically testable, and hence are meaningless, at least scientifically. Therefore, behaviorists think, there is no point in using such speculative terminology in psychology, at least if we aspire to make it scientific. This is a direct continuation of positivism. This approach de facto denies the possibility of an essential theory in psychology and makes do with phenomenological theories, not merely as a first step toward essential understanding. Proponents of this approach relinquish in advance—at least declaratively—all attempts to understand, and content themselves with the ability to describe and characterize behaviorally the world of psychological phenomena. This approach exactly parallels analyticism, which denies the existence of theoretical entities in the natural sciences.

It is highly probable that one cannot completely ignore generalizations that presuppose theoretical super-concepts. This behaviorism is a derivative of analytic positions. An analytic thinker, as defined above, is one who believes only in what he sees, or in what he understands and can define precisely. In the psychological context, this is precisely the behaviorist.

As we have seen, scientific explanation and understanding are always in terms of a language and conceptual system lying at their base. Even in physics, had Newton—and his predecessors—failed to define precisely the theoretical conceptual world of mechanics, which admittedly seems more observable and therefore behaviorists generally agree to use it, concepts such as position, mass, velocity, acceleration, force, friction, and so forth, it would not have been possible to formulate general propositions in mechanics. Even if his discoveries—the laws of mechanics and gravitation—had turned out to be completely false, for example if force were proportional to the square of velocity rather than to acceleration, as Newton himself held, Newton’s merit with respect to the conceptual world he defined would still remain. In that, he created the possibility of understanding the world and formulating various insights about it—including insights different from his own.²⁷

It should be noted that definition in the present sense is not an arbitrary act, as mathematicians—and many analytic philosophers—tend to think. An arbitrary definition cannot have value or superiority in itself. It is clear that the value of a definition lies in its expressing something true that we sense, and giving us good tools—and therefore probably true tools in some sense—for describing the world.

The conceptual world of modern physics is already far more abstract, perhaps more so than the psychological one. Concepts such as wave function, and even the concept of the electron, and certainly concepts like quark, field, and many others, definitely do not belong to the experiential domain. This is the world of concepts and meanings within which the physicist operates, and by means of which he creates and formulates his various insights. This too, in many senses, is myth. In principle, one can certainly imagine a physics—and certainly a psychology—that uses an entirely different conceptual world, perhaps even one that cannot be translated at all into the existing terminology. That would be a description of the same world in a completely different language, or coordinate system.

According to the definition used here, myth is what constitutes these structures of meaning. The concepts of modern physics fit common sense no more than the wildest mysticisms. Their interpretation and their connection to the phenomena of the world are not at all clear, and certainly not unequivocal. The difference lies only in the fact that the relations among them are described by mathematical formulas, which for some reason grants them an aura of rationality. The rationality of mathematical description is itself a myth, like any other myth. A rational grounding for a body of empirical facts can be achieved even in systems far more primitive than these.

In the Torah world as well, a conceptual system has been created in recent generations that serves the analysis and understanding of Talmudic issues. These concepts are mostly based on earlier concepts, although there are variations in use and meaning. This is an evolution of the conceptual system in light of which the issue is understood. Even in the study of the Talmud, as in any other study, one cannot understand what is studied without a theoretical conceptual system underlying the general propositions and the halakhic (Jewish-law) and scholarly generalizations.

For example, Rabbi Hayyim Soloveitchik succeeded in implanting his method and his conceptual world into the beit midrash in an especially impressive way. This success is particularly striking against the background of the conservatism that usually characterizes the beit midrash. This success indicates that, in some sense, this is a “correct” conceptual world, one that already existed potentially and unformulated within many of us. Rabbi Hayyim was the one who succeeded in formulating and defining it, and in extracting it from the subjective plane to the objective one.²⁸ He transferred this world of concepts from the plane of unformulated myth, which is always present in the background of various acts of understanding, to the formulated and objective logical plane. In Greek terminology, one might say: from mythos to logos.

It is no wonder, then, that Rabbi Joseph Dov Halevi Soloveitchik, Rabbi Hayyim’s grandson, in his book Halakhic Man²⁹—which, as is well known, describes in idealized fashion the figure of Rabbi Hayyim himself—describes the halakhic man as one who observes reality through a system of a priori principles and concepts. Rabbi Soloveitchik explains there at great length that a halakhic apprehension of reality is carried out through such concepts and principles. Here we see that such a description is true of every understanding of reality, not only of the halakhic one.

Observation 21: Constitutive and Directive Halakhic Concepts

Because of the description of the halakhic man as interpreting reality through his own a priori system of principles, a feeling has arisen in the yeshiva world as though Torah concepts are constitutive rather than directive. The accepted perception is that these are concepts the Torah created ex nihilo, and therefore the Torah also characterized them. At the basis of this perception lies a view that sees the meaning of Torah study in detachment from the world, rather than as a way of understanding it and relating to it. The world is perceived as a necessary constraint, with which one must somehow manage while minimizing any concession of principle.

By contrast, there is a view—characteristic generally of Religious Zionism, and rooted in Hasidism—according to which the world is not a necessary evil but a good. We need only ensure that it becomes so. The role of one who studies Torah and observes the mitzvot is to see correctly, to repair the world, and to expose the good within it, not to fight against it and negate it. Those who hold such a view will see Torah concepts as directive concepts as well, not only as constitutive ones. That is, the Torah teaches us how to effect betrothal correctly or how to effect divorce correctly, but the concepts of betrothal and divorce exist in the world even without the Torah. The Torah is meant to repair the world, not replace it or offer it an alternative.

In light of what we have said so far, it is highly probable that a correlation can be found between one’s general worldview and one’s mode of Torah study. Here too meanings are determined by the myths—or structures of meaning—at their root.

It seems to me that such a correlation indeed exists to a considerable degree. In the Haredi world there is a stronger tendency to perceive the commandments and principles of the Torah as decrees of Scripture, and not to seek their reasons. This is a system imposed upon the world, not one that directs it or is embedded within it, but one that constitutes it. In fact, it constitutes an ideal world that stands as a negating alternative to our real world. In the Religious Zionist world, by contrast, there is a clear tendency in the direction of connecting Torah with the world as it is. There is a tendency to seek directive meanings, not only constitutive ones.

This is an interesting subject, and I am not aware of any systematic treatment of it, neither on the conceptual plane nor regarding its correlations with contemporary issues. Here I will offer only examples of a view of Torah concepts as directive rather than constitutive. In Sefer HaHinukh, in the section Ki Tetze, in the commandment dealing with divorce, the author concludes with the following words:

One who transgresses this and divorces his wife without writing for her the get (Jewish bill of divorce) in accordance with the Torah’s command and as our sages of blessed memory explained, has neglected this positive commandment. And his punishment is very severe…

Anyone even slightly accustomed to halakhic thinking is astonished when reading this passage. In our eyes, one who violates the laws governing the writing of a get and gives his wife an invalid get has not divorced her at all. How can one say that he divorced her, but did so incorrectly, and therefore committed a transgression? A woman who receives an invalid get from her husband is simply not divorced.

In light of our earlier discussion, it seems clear that the author of Sefer HaHinukh means to say that divorcing a woman is a concept—or act—of universal human significance, not something the Torah constituted but something it seeks only to direct. To divorce a woman does not mean to give her a valid get; it means to remove her from the husband’s home. The correct way to do so is by giving a valid get.³⁰ In the terminology proposed above, divorce is a concept that the Torah directs, not one it constitutes.

The same is true regarding betrothal. The Torah only directs the proper way to perform it; it did not invent the concept. This emerges clearly from the words of Maimonides at the beginning of Laws of Marriage:

Before the giving of the Torah, if a man encountered a woman in the marketplace, then if he and she wished to marry, he would bring her into his home and have relations with her privately, and she would thereby become his wife. Once the Torah was given, Israel was commanded that if a man wished to marry a woman, he must first acquire her before witnesses, and only afterward would she become his wife, as it is said: “When a man takes a woman and comes to her.”³¹

The state of affairs before the giving of the Torah is described here. The process of marriage was then natural, purposive, and simple, without formal ceremonies. After the Torah was given, we received additional instructions that direct this process. It seems that these additions are not an alternative constituting a new concept of marriage, but rather the addition of another layer to the concept of marriage that existed beforehand. Maimonides bothers to describe the state of affairs before the Torah was given because even now, after the Torah was given, that earlier state still has significance. The relationship between a man and his wife is not only a renewed halakhic concept but a simple human one. The Torah adds to this bond, which existed all along, another layer, halakhic and Torah-based. This conception has implications, as we saw above, and many others as well.

Perhaps one can point briefly to another example arising from the language of the Torah itself. When the Torah speaks of the commandment of tassels, it says: “They shall place on the tassel of the corner a thread of blue, and it shall be for you as a tassel.” On its face this is a strange expression. It would seem that the concept tassel is one the Torah created ex nihilo and is defining in these verses. In other words, it would be a concept the Torah constitutes. But if so, the expression “and it shall be for you as a tassel” is not understandable. It sounds as though the Torah is explaining to us how to tie strings onto the garment, and telling us that this will be our tassel. This implies that the concept of tassel is already known to us, and the Torah is only explaining and characterizing what our tassel should look like.³²

Ibn Ezra, in his commentary there, explains that tassel means a sign, a kind of flag—like the forelock of the head, which is the protruding feature of the person, his identifying mark. Here too it seems that the Torah is trying to shape an existing concept—the concept of a flag—rather than define it. In other words, it directs it rather than constitutes it.

This subject—constitutive and directive concepts, and the relation between them and general worldview—requires extensive treatment that does not belong here. The conceptual layer of constitutive and directive legal systems will be discussed in the third book.

The conclusion that emerges from this is that viewing through an a priori, mythical system does not necessarily indicate a detachment from seeing reality. It is a mode of viewing reality. As already noted above, there is no viewing of reality or of any ideas whatsoever that does not occur within the framework of some mythical system. Halakha as well does not deal with itself but with reality; it simply does so through the mediation of a conceptual system and a system of a priori principles.

Thus at the basis of every understanding—and also at the basis of the various sciences and of science generally—there stands an a priori system, a kind of mythical system, within which scientific understanding and research take place. Already at the beginning of the first book we saw that the fact that all domains of human thought rest on foundational assumptions and axioms that are neither checked nor proved is what leads the new critics—the postmodernists—to their view that all positions have equal status, none is better or worse, and all can be examined only from within themselves and not in relation to or comparison with others. As noted above, in this book I wish to propose an alternative to that position. There is indeed a mythical system at the basis of all domains, contrary to the illusion of the positivists, but this need not detract from the validity of the conclusions emerging from those domains.³³

More deeply, the very concept of rationality itself is also a kind of myth. It is certainly an a priori structure of meaning. In the previous gate, and also in the first book, we saw how problematic it is to define the rationality of scientific thought, which is generally—and rightly—considered the glory of human thought and the exemplary model of rational thinking. The definition of this thinking as rational likewise rests on a good many a priori values that cannot truly be grounded. In fact, the very concept of grounding itself is grounded on them.

Beyond all this, the very determination that one ought to be rational, whatever the meaning of that concept may be—at times it simply means the abandonment of other myths—is itself a kind of myth, one that to a large degree grounds itself. The specific characterizations of rationality, that is, the determination of what the modes of rational thought are or who counts as a rational person, are another plane of the scientific myth.³⁴

For example, conceiving thought as operating in the form of an axiomatic system—that is, moving from assumptions to conclusions by means of inference rules—is itself an a priori structure of thought.³⁵ It is very difficult for a person to conceive of a non-axiomatic system of thought, and certainly to use one, even though today it is rather clear—as we will see in the next book—that certain dimensions of his own thought do not operate in such a way.

It is important to note precisely here that the myth of rationality is an especially clear example of the claim made in the previous chapter about the necessity of myth as a condition for understanding and thought in general. With respect to rationality, it is very clear that relinquishing the myth—like relinquishing rationality itself—is in practice relinquishing the ability to understand and assign meaning at all.

Later in the book we will see a qualification of this description of the scientific enterprise. We will discover that science does indeed relinquish, in many senses, the desire to understand, and tries to concentrate on description, so as not to be trapped in the mythic snare. Similarly, relinquishing some a priori structure of meaning is relinquishing the ability to understand and assign meaning. Below we will see that sometimes precisely such relinquishment can advance understanding from a place where it cannot otherwise move forward.

Two Examples of A Priori Structures Underlying Specific Scientific Fields

As stated, the scientific myth, that is, the a priori structure of meaning, is composed of two parts:

1. Structures lying at the foundation of scientific methodology as such, relevant to all branches of science.
2. Assumptions and principles implicit at the foundation of specific scientific disciplines.

Here two important examples of such a priori systems will be presented: teleology and vitalism. In both of these cases, proponents of the scientific approach accuse others of primitive, religious reliance on myths, yet upon closer examination it can be seen that they are themselves disqualified by the very defect they attribute to others. Modern science itself assumes unfounded a priori assumptions precisely in order to escape mythological conclusions in the classic sense of the term. I strongly recommend that the reader not skip the following observations, and at least read them in a cursory way.

Observation 22: Two Types of Scientific Explanation—Teleology and Causality

In this observation we will deal with the scientific myth of causal explanation. In histories of physics one usually finds descriptions of ancient periods in which the explanations given for physical phenomena were purposive. Aristotle explained that a stone falls to the earth because it “strives” to return to the dust from which it was created. Similarly, fire rises upward because it “strives” toward spirituality, that is, upward, since it is made of a spiritual, light, and non-material substance.

Part of the difficulty such explanations arouse in our modern ears stems from the fact that they are teleological, that is, goal-oriented. In them, the stone is pictured as “striving” toward some purpose. Its movement is not caused by this or that cause, but is trying to achieve some purpose—returning to its source. The stone moves “in order to,” not “because.”

Already here it is important to clarify a point that can easily go unnoticed. When we say that the stone “strives” to return to its source, we do not mean that it has free choice in the matter and decides to do so after deliberation. Nor do we mean that the stone is conscious of what it is doing. Aristotle was not a fool at all, and therefore he too understood that stones have neither will nor deliberation. Aristotle described the course of the stone’s fall to the ground as a goal-directed course, but it was clear to him—just as it is clear to us—that the stone is compelled to move toward that goal. Aristotle knew that there is no stone that will decide to renounce its longing for the “womb” of Mother Earth. A stone has no psychology. It has no longings, and therefore cannot renounce them. Teleology is only a description of its course, one made by positing goals rather than by presenting it as the result of efficient causes. In light of this, it is easier to understand the continuation of the Aristotelian picture, according to which the purpose of the stone’s motion itself serves another purpose, and so on. Everything is dictated by some cosmic lawfulness, except that it is described as a chain of purposes rather than a chain of causes.

Let us now return to the line of argument. Historians of science generally describe the abandonment of these explanatory forms, and with them the transition to causal explanation, as one of the factors—perhaps also one of the outcomes—of scientific development. In the case of the stone, it is said that the reason it falls downward is that the earth attracts it to itself. In other words: it exerts a force upon it. This is a causal explanation that describes the motion of the stone as the result of causation, instead of the teleological explanation that describes it in terms of the attainment of goals and purposes. In this, many historians of science—and scientists themselves—say that the teleological conception in physics was scientifically rejected.

It should be noted that the teleological conception in physics enjoyed a certain revival in the nineteenth century, in the time of the French mathematician and physicist Lagrange, who developed analytic mechanics. This theory is based on mathematical principles of minimization rather than on causal laws, like Newtonian physics.

However, it can be shown that these two forms of description are completely equivalent to one another. That is, their scientific content is identical. Every phenomenon predicted by the teleological theory will also appear in the causal theory, and vice versa. The difference lies only in the way of looking at things—whose expression is a different mathematical treatment—and in the foundational assumptions. These minimization principles are important for the present argument, and so I will present them in somewhat greater detail.

The beginnings of minimization principles in physics are in optics, or wave theory. In this field there has long existed Fermat’s principle, which states that all the laws of geometric optics can be unified in the formulation of a single general law: light always chooses the quickest path—the path for which the time required to traverse it is minimal. Use of this law yields all the geometric behaviors of light, whereas in the causal description these are described by a series of several distinct laws. In the teleological form of optics, that is, through Fermat’s principle, a single law suffices to describe the entire range of these phenomena.

The causal alternative in describing geometric optics is very complex, involving several different laws with no connection among them: laws of refraction, reflection, and so forth. It is a more complicated alternative, and certainly less simple and elegant.

Despite all this, the prevailing treatment in modern physics and modern philosophy of physics of Fermat’s principle is as a sort of amusing mathematical anecdote. It is taken as an interesting case in which one can arrive at an artificial formulation—artificial because it has a teleological character, and that surely is not the “correct” description of nature—which is mathematically equivalent to the “real,” meaning causal, laws of optics, but simpler.

Just as Fermat’s principle did for optics, describing the totality of the laws governing it by way of a single minimization principle, one can show that every law in mechanics, electromagnetism, and many other field theories can be represented by a mathematical quantity called the action. The behavior of the system—that is, its path—is determined by a minimization principle: the demand that the chosen path be the one for which this quantity has a minimum value. In the case of geometric optics, which we described above, the action is in fact the travel time along the path. This is the quantity that determines the path by the requirement that it be minimal. In other theories, other quantities serve as the action.

It is important to understand that description through minimization principles of action is teleological, not causal. In such a description the particle, or object—that is, the physical system—supposedly performs a “cost-benefit calculation.” It “calculates” which path makes the action minimal, before it has moved along it, and then it begins to move along the optimal path that it has “computed.” For this reason, even though this mode of description is becoming virtually exclusive in modern physics—as in modern field theories, and especially in quantum theory—it is still treated as an anecdote.

More than that: even where there is no other causal description, or where the causal description is cumbersome and not convincing in terms of elegance, the causal-mechanistic conception still continues to reign purely by inertia. It regards the theory that uses minimization principles as an anecdote rather than as a description of physical reality itself.

One should recall in the background the criterion of simplicity and elegance, which is a fundamental principle in the choice of a scientific theory; see the previous gate. A scientific theory is judged, among other things, by the degree of simplicity and convenience it offers. In particular, when there are two different theories that give adequate explanation to the full range of empirical facts, this criterion becomes critical. This background sharpens the difficulty described here: it is unclear why the scientific community insists on choosing the more complicated and less elegant explanation as the “correct” one, while the simpler and more elegant explanation is treated as a mathematical curiosity.

One should remember that the descriptions are equivalent in every empirical respect. In terms of describing the phenomena, both are equally correct. The dispute here is only philosophical. But precisely because the equivalence is complete, it is not clear why the description by a minimization principle could not be the “correct” one.

The answer lies in the fact that minimization principles, like Fermat’s principle, are teleological principles. That is, according to the theory of minimization principles, the particle seemingly has to “decide” on the fastest path before it has traversed it, and after the decision it must move along that path. The particle moves along the path in order to “save” time, or action. As stated, the prevailing modern view is that particles do not “decide.” At most they are “pushed,” or continue to move according to causal laws of nature.

It is important to note that this is a purely a priori philosophical assumption, with no scientific grounding at all. On the contrary, this assumption contradicts several fundamental principles of scientific methodology, such as the criterion of simplicity and elegance. There is a categorical rejection here of a teleological position, not a scientific result that rejects teleological explanations. This becomes all the more striking in light of our remark above that Aristotle never proposed a theory according to which stones deliberate and decide. He merely proposed a teleological, rather than causal, description of deterministic motion. Therefore there is no reason to abandon teleological description merely from aversion to attributing souls and desires to stones. Aristotle did not propose that either.

Thus no one has proven, nor can anyone prove, that the stone does not “strive” to reach the earth. Scientists today, convinced that a stone has no consciousness and no mind, have determined a priori—incorrectly, in light of our earlier remark—that such a description cannot be true. They certainly have not proven that it is false. This is an assumption—legitimate in itself—held by many scientists, but it is definitely not a scientific result.

Perhaps it would be more accurate to say that if someone insists on maintaining a causal rather than purposive picture of the world, modern science places at his disposal a coherent—though more complex—possibility for doing so. It offers him a causal theory, admittedly more complicated and less elegant, but one that also fits the experimental facts. Here science serves as an escape route for those who for some reason insist on foundational assumptions that are not necessarily the most plausible. If we were operating without prejudice, we should have to choose the teleological description as the “correct” one. Thus science assumes that the “correct” description is causal, and it offers a non-absurd way of holding on to that, but one certainly cannot say that it proves in any way that the teleological description is not the correct one.

For readers who studied high-school physics, let us take another and more familiar example of teleological description. As is known, there are two ways to describe the action of a force upon a body:

1. By way of Newton’s laws, which describe the acceleration the body develops—obtained by dividing the force by the mass—and the path of motion that results from the force’s action.
2. By way of the concept of a potential field. This is essentially a static description, which says that a body will always move from higher potential to lower.

There is a clear mathematical proof that these two descriptions are completely equivalent. Nevertheless, here too, despite the fact that the use of potential is more ingrained in us, even from school, the accepted treatment is that the description in terms of reaction to force is “the real description,” whereas the description in terms of potential is merely a convenient mathematical form for work, not a representation of something ontologically real. Few notice that describing the path of motion through potential is also teleological, not causal. Here too the particle “decides” to move to a region of lower potential. This is why the accepted attitude toward motion under the influence of potential is that it is a mathematical technique, not a correct description of physical reality.

Here too one may ask: why is that really the attitude? The wonder grows even greater when one notices that in quantum theory and relativity the concept of force does not naturally exist at all. The whole description proceeds through potentials. True, there are attempts to define force artificially,³⁶ but they do not succeed in covering all the possibilities, and they are much more complicated than the description through potentials.

The conclusion is that the more modern physics becomes, even without invoking the uncertainty principle or better-known problems, the more it passes—without being aware of it, and together with it the philosophers of science, whose role is to notice such things—into a teleological language. The whole process is generally unconscious, and scientists, as well as philosophers of science, continue to cling to causal-mechanistic positions and reject the teleological position as primitive and unscientific. All this occurs simultaneously with a massive shift in scientific practice toward increasingly teleological language and methods of description.

In conclusion, let us note that there is here a process of unconscious convergence with the midrash (rabbinic exposition) that says: “Over every blade of grass stands an angel that says to it, ‘Grow.’”³⁷ That is, even behind inanimate objects there stands a spiritual entity that indeed acts teleologically. In any case, it is completely clear that the assertion that this is a primitive position that contradicts the laws of science is itself dogmatic and by no means self-evident.³⁸

To summarize, we must say that the choice of causal description is an a priori structure of meaning lying at the basis of modern scientific thought. It has no proof at all, even though many feel—mistakenly—that it is a direct result of scientific research. According to what we have seen, this is an assumption, or a context, within which scientific thought operates. One may say that this is, in fact, a myth of causality that rejects teleology a priori.

Observation 23: Vitalism and Materialism

In this observation we will discuss another example of an a priori structure lying at the basis of a scientific field, this time biology. Our concern here is the dispute between vitalists and mechanists, or materialists, in the life sciences.

Until the nineteenth century, the dominant view was that of classical vitalism, which understood life as composed of matter of a different essence from inert physico-chemical matter. The vitalist claim was that organic tissues could not be produced by the processes of the natural science of the inanimate—that is, physics and chemistry. Toward the end of the nineteenth century it was shown that this could in fact be done, and vitalism lost its standing in theoretical biology. At the end of the nineteenth century and beginning of the twentieth, vitalism reawakened in the form of neo-vitalism, founded by Hans Driesch.

The claim of neo-vitalism was that although the living organism is composed of tissues understandable in terms of physics and chemistry, the overall organization of the living body, of the organism as a whole, is not understandable in those terms.

Today theoretical biology is dominated by a mechanistic worldview, according to which all biological and life phenomena can in principle be explained in terms of physics and chemistry. The conclusion—so most researchers hold—is that there is nothing in the living body beyond its physics and chemistry. Life is a property of the physico-chemical whole, and whatever we still lack in understanding is merely a matter for further scientific research using the tools and methods of physics and chemistry, or extensions of them.

It is important to note that biology is still far from truly establishing this speculative thesis, and certainly far from formulating a mechanistic understanding of biology and life. On the other hand, it is true that vitalist worldviews have thus far contributed nothing to the scientific understanding of life and organisms generally. Claims that there is a vitalist component in living systems are only philosophical positions, and up to now they have had no scientific value.

The conclusion one could draw from the course of matters so far is that there is no vital component taking part in the processes of life themselves. These proceed in physico-chemical ways. But it is quite possible that there is some factor that governs and organizes the system as a whole, and this factor is a vitalist component. According to this view, biology is nothing more than a description of the mode of operation of this vital factor. It is therefore clear that biology itself will not be able to discover or characterize it, because all the laws of biology are simply a characterization of its ways of operating. According to this proposal, no inexplicable gap should appear in the laws of biology that would force everyone to take account of some non-physico-chemical component. This position maintains that the biological laws themselves are simply the characterization of vital substance and a description of its ways of operating. Even so, if we really succeed in reducing all the laws of biology to the laws of physics and chemistry, this would pose a strong—though not necessarily decisive—difficulty for the various forms of the vitalist thesis.

From this it follows that recognizing the existence of such a factor cannot contribute anything to the understanding or characterization of the mechanisms of life. It is only a plausible assumption arising from our encounter with the phenomenon of life, and from our inability to define it as a totality in physico-chemical terms, even though many of its components—and perhaps all of them—are certainly definable in that way.

Thus the question of vitalism versus materialism—in terms of the substance of life—or versus mechanism—in terms of the mechanisms of life—appears to be a philosophical question, not one belonging to the life sciences or to theoretical biology. At present it does not seem that the question of neo-vitalism, unlike that of vitalism itself, can be decided by scientific tools.

Despite all this, and despite the very strong intuition that life is a unique phenomenon fundamentally different from the inanimate world, the vast majority of biologists tend to believe in materialism and dismiss vitalism out of hand. The arguments are usually the inability to observe a vital component, or the lack of need for one, and the lack of usefulness in asserting its existence for understanding biological processes.

But it is clear that these are not arguments against vitalism itself; they are arguments about its status as a component in biological theory. The question whether it exists is a question concerning the meaning of biological laws. Can these laws be understood by reduction to physics and chemistry, or not?

In a similar way, Laplace rejected the thesis of God’s existence on the grounds that he did not need that hypothesis within the scientific framework. See below in the final gate.

That argument is beside the point, for exactly the same reason. It may be true that scientific theories do not require the concept of God, but they themselves are nothing more than a description of His ways of operating in the natural world. This is in addition to what we saw in the previous gate, namely that the existence of God is required to ground the methodology of science and therefore also its results and laws.

The question of vitalism is also connected to the question of body and soul, or matter and spirit—distinctly philosophical questions. Many believe that the discoveries of modern genetics, following the decoding of the genome, indicate that the body has no component that is not physical matter, and that human traits can be understood in terms of chemical-physical processes.

But this is a far-reaching conclusion for which current research provides no support whatsoever. As far as I know, there is still no full explanation, in terms of the genome alone, for even a single one of our psychic traits. The desire to arrive at a materialist picture, and the a priori belief in the possibility of doing so, lead many scientists to get carried away by speculation, as though research had already definitively refuted vitalism.

It seems that even if a full explanation of all psychic traits in terms of the human genome were reached, that still would not refute neo-vitalism, for the reasons explained above. For a detailed discussion of this issue, see the third book, which will deal with the human being and these matters.

Our aim in this observation is to note yet another a priori structure of meaning lying at the basis of accepted scientific thought: the myth of materialism. So long as there is no clear proof of the existence of vital matter, even if the intuition in its favor is very strong, most scientists are unwilling to accept its existence. Within the scientific framework, this is understandable—for according to Ockham’s razor we do not posit assumptions beyond what is necessary; see the previous gate—but the ontological conclusion does not follow from this. This conceptual framework too is a priori, and as such it cannot be scientifically proved, to the extent that there is such a thing as scientific proof in general; see the second gate. This is a mythical dimension within science, in the broad sense we defined above.

In the previous observation, we saw that science has not proved causality. It assumes causality, and in fact at most offers a strained escape route that allows one to continue adhering to a causal worldview, even though the teleological theory is simpler and more elegant. We noted that this conclusion is very puzzling, for it does not fit the prevailing methodology of science, according to which we choose the simpler theories.

In this last observation as well, regarding vitalism, we saw a similar phenomenon: science has not refuted vitalism, but at most has proposed a way—one that, it seems to me, does not fit our simple intuitions—that makes it possible nevertheless to live with a mechanistic-materialist outlook, at least on the plane of scientific facts, which deal with the components of life rather than life as a whole.

It should be noted that with respect to the question of vitalism, unlike the question of causality, this conclusion does fit standard scientific methodology, since within science—and perhaps in thought generally—we tend not to multiply assumptions beyond what is necessary. This is Ockham’s razor, which we already discussed in the previous gate. Thus, so long as we are not compelled to believe in vital components of life, we do not do so. This approach is indeed compatible with scientific methodology, but it is important to point out that Ockham’s rule itself cannot truly be justified, and in fact it too is only part of the scientific myth. Here we have seen that the conclusions drawn from using this rule contradict our simple intuitions, according to which life differs essentially from the inanimate.

What these two examples have in common is that in both it is easy to see that science assumes an a priori conceptual framework of meanings within which it operates. It does not trouble itself to justify that framework, or to measure it in the laboratory, or to ground it in any other way. Nor, of course, can it do so. This is part of the myth that lies at the basis of science, just as a myth lies at the basis of all human activity and thought in other domains.

Footnotes