Gate Two: The Parts of the Soul — Emotion, Intellect, and Will

From the book Like Grass by Rabbi Michael Avraham. Translated from Hebrew using gpt-5.4 (reasoning_effort=high, batch API).

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The Parts of the Soul: Emotion, Intellect, and Will

Introduction

In the previous gate we dealt with the mind-body problem. To the best of my knowledge, no one possesses a sharp description of the psychophysical connection. In that sense, the psychophysical problem still stands. But as we saw, it is not a paradox, but at most a connection that we do not understand, whose nature is presently unknown to us. There are many domains in which even science itself has not yet completed its task, and that raises no essential philosophical problem.

There, however, we reached the conclusion that even without a detailed examination of the nature of that connection, one can say that the most reasonable description of the human being is given by the picture of interactionist dualism. According to this picture, a human being contains two different components, a material one and a spiritual one, which maintain relations with one another in both directions. We noted that this description is also the one most fitting to intuition, and in addition it does not raise harder problems than the alternative descriptions; usually it is, in fact, the more reasonable one. As stated, interactionist dualism does not claim to explain the essence and character of the connection between these components, but it certainly does claim that such a connection exists.

In this gate we will enter somewhat more deeply into the spiritual component in the human being, and we will attempt to propose a functional map of its different parts and of the relations among them.

In keeping with the best synthetic tradition, here too we will rely on the terms commonly used in our language, on the assumption that linguistic terminology reflects our most basic intuitions. One may of course depart from it, but only for very good reason. Thus, already here, we can note a list of the three main parts of the spirit: emotion, intellect, and will.

There are other functions of the human soul, but almost all of them can be integrated into one of these three categories. There are, of course, several kinds of intelligence and talents, and all of these will here be called “intellect.” Memory, in its various forms, will also be included within this part. The distinction between thinking and cognition, if it exists at all, also lies entirely within the domain of the intellect (see on this the eleventh gate of the first book). By contrast, functions such as consciousness do not belong to this map, and therefore we will deal with them very little in this book, except for one section at the end of the first chapter, which deals with the “I.”

It goes without saying that the intention here is not to claim that these parts are sharply distinct from one another, and certainly not that any of them has a unique location in the body. In general, the spirit is not “located,” in the simple sense of that term, in the body. It stands in interaction with the body, and no more. As stated above, what will be offered in the present gate is a functional map of the human spirit. The claims and distinctions presented below are to be interpreted only in that functional context, and no more.

In many respects, what is proposed here is a model, not necessarily a faithful description, of the human spirit.¹ It may be that any explanation or description of the spirit deserves to be called a “model,” since, unlike scientific events and facts, the possibility of offering a “true” description of spiritual elements is highly doubtful.

To conclude the introduction and open what follows, it is worth noting that although this division appears simple and almost banal, the distinctions among these different parts are not so simple, and they can give rise to misunderstandings and various ambiguities. We will see this in the course of what follows. Beyond that, it is obvious that one can continue subdividing each component of the soul into finer distinctions, and some of that will indeed be done below. It is not our aim in this book to enter too high a level of resolution. Our purpose here is philosophical, not psychological, and therefore the schematic analysis offered here is sufficient for our needs.

Chapter 1: A General Map

In this chapter we will examine the general schema of the human spirit with respect to its three components: emotion, intellect, and will. We will do so through a series of distinctions between each pair of components in this triad.

Emotion and Intellect

The distinction between emotion and intellect already occupied us in the first book (see the eleventh gate there, especially chapter 1). We noted that ordinary language contains confusing uses of these two parts of the human spirit. For example, a person may say, “I feel that the solution to this equation is X,” and at the same time say, “I feel great love for Reuven.” The verb “feel” in these two contexts appears with two different meanings. In the first sentence the meaning is intellectual, whereas in the second the meaning is emotional.

In the first sentence, the speaker does not mean to describe an emotion passing through their soul, but a claim equivalent to the conclusion of thought. When a person says, “I think,” or “I know,” that the solution to this equation is X, this usually means that the person made a calculation and reached the conclusion that the solution is X. But when that same person tells us that they “feel that the solution is X,” they mean that in their opinion this is the solution, even though they have no proof, or any calculation, to support the conclusion. Thus, the verb “feel” in this context belongs to the world of the intellect, not to the world of emotion or the emotions. One may feel more strongly or more weakly that this is the solution, but the intensity of the “feeling” here means the degree of certainty the person has in being right.

One indication that we are dealing here with a different kind of “feeling” is that this “feeling” can be right or wrong. After we devote time and succeed in solving the equation systematically, we will arrive at some result. If it turns out to be X, then the earlier “feeling” was correct. If it turns out to be something else, then it becomes clear that the earlier “feeling” misled us. In other words, this “feeling” can turn out to be correct or incorrect. It makes a claim about the world outside the speaker.²

By contrast, in the second sentence, which belongs to the emotional world, the meaning of the verb “feel” is that some emotion is present within the speaker’s soul. This sentence makes a subjective claim about what is taking place within the speaker’s inner life. It does not make a claim about the world outside the speaker, and therefore one cannot judge this feeling as true or false.³ Even if we discover that Reuven, the beloved, is not worthy of such love, we would not say that the sentence was false or mistaken.

With respect to the first kind of sentence, one can say that there are brilliant mathematicians whose intuitions usually hit the truth; that is, after the calculation, we generally discover that they were right. In fact, when we speak of a mathematical or scientific genius, we usually mean precisely a person whose unproven intuitions eventually turn out to be correct. Such a person has a nose for promising directions in research, and sometimes even for the result of the research. But with respect to the second kind of sentence, one certainly cannot say such a thing. What could a sentence like, “There are people with a genius for love,” mean? Does it mean that in the end, after some time has passed, it turns out that they were right in their love?!

What causes this double and confusing use of the term “feel”? As we saw in the first book, the main cause is an implicit analytic outlook. In a world in which an unproven claim is not accepted as true, every statement that contains an unproven claim receives treatment similar to that given to a subjective feeling. In such a world, the claim “I feel this is the solution” is a feeling, exactly like the claim “I feel love for Reuven.” According to the analyst, both of these claims say nothing about the world, and even if someone thinks they are indeed saying something about the world, the analyst will say that they are merely deceiving themselves.

The closer we approach the analytic pole, where in effect there is no truth at all, the more the distinction between these two meanings of the verb “feel” dissolves. We saw that this distinction is based on the fact that in one context we judge the statement in terms of truth and falsehood, whereas in the other context we do not.⁴

According to the analyst, it would be appropriate to say, “I feel that two parallel lines never meet.” This is an axiom, and as such it cannot be proven, so the analyst classifies it as a subjective and unjustified claim. In the analyst’s eyes, this too is a “feeling.”

But in a synthetic world, in which unproven claims are candidates for trust, and some of them are even accepted as true, the statement about “feeling” that this is the solution takes on a different meaning. In more precise terminology, we would say that “feeling” in this context means intuition. It is not connected to the emotions, and it is not subjective. It makes a claim about the world, and this claim can be accepted as true, if the listener is convinced, since the speaker has no proof for it.

Therefore, the synthetic formulation of the first sentence would be: “I have an intuition that the solution to this equation is X.” This is a less confusing formulation, and it better fits the synthetic position. Trust in the axiom of parallels in geometry would here be formulated as: “I have an intuition that two parallel lines never meet.”

In the first book we discussed at length the differences between the two parts of the intellect. There we saw that the analytic position is unwilling to accept the synthetic part of thought as a part of the intellect, or as an act of thinking, since claims without proof are not accepted by it as claims of truth.

As we saw there, especially in the eleventh gate, and also in the second gate of the second book, there is indeed a problem regarding the ability to ground synthetic a priori claims. Our proposal there was that we simply “see” them. They do not arise from thinking, which takes place inwardly within us, but from cognition, that is, from interaction with the world. Therefore, we do have the ability to arrive by such means at correct conclusions about the world itself. The main claim was that there is no sharp distinction between thinking and cognition, and this claim lies at the foundation of the analytic-synthetic dispute. The synthetic position acknowledges an ability to “know” not by means of the senses, and attributes this ability to the synthetic part of the intellect. This part does not merely think; it also cognizes, and thus arrives at its conclusions. So too, the ability to know by means of the intellect lies in its synthetic part. This ability underlies synthetic a priori propositions, in whose grounding so many philosophers have exhausted themselves.

Let us now return to the question of the relation between emotion and intellect. The problematic character of the distinction between these two concepts itself arises from an analytic position. We now see that the relation between emotion and intellect is distinct at the level of principle: emotion belongs to our emotive side, whereas intellect belongs to the cognitive side. The intellect makes claims that can receive truth-values, whereas emotion does not make claims at all, and therefore cannot be true or false.⁵

Sometimes it is very difficult to tell whether some intuition within us stems from direct cognition, or whether it is merely an emotional illusion. But the difficulty of distinguishing between the two does not mean that there is in fact no distinction between them, or that they are the same concept. The conceptual difficulty in distinguishing intuition from emotion is grounded in an analytic position. The empirical difficulty expresses the challenge of distinguishing the mode of operation of the synthetic-intuitive part of the intellect from emotion: both raise claims without reasons, and certainly without proof. The difference between them lies in the question whether there is a claim there about some objective reality. For example, the axiom of parallels discussed above is a product of intuition, not of emotion, even if we have no grounding for it, and certainly no proof. From another angle, one may say that the difficulty here is in discerning that the human being is endowed with an ability to know not by means of the senses, that we possess a “cognizing intellect,” or a “thinking sense,” in the terminology of the earlier books.

At first glance, this claim sounds somewhat mystical. But as we saw in the previous books, it actually expresses a simple intuition that is found in everyone, if only one takes the trouble to attend to it and not repress it. We saw there not only that this claim is rational, but that it is also the only possible foundation for rationalism itself. We noted that in Husserl this part is called “eidetic seeing,” in Maimonides “the eyes of the intellect,” and in Rabbi David Cohen, the Nazir, “auditory reasoning.” In several contexts we found that the view according to which cognition also occurs in this part of the intellect, and not only thinking, resolves important paradoxes with which the philosophy of science, and philosophy generally, struggles.⁶

In the discussion we conducted in the first book, we presented the fact that people often find themselves in a dilemma formulated as follows: “Should I follow my intellect or my emotion?” For example, when a person is considering the choice of a spouse. The heart points in one direction, and the intellect in another. In light of what was said above, there should seemingly be no conflict between these two, since they belong to different parts of the human spirit. Our decision-making, even in questions of marriage and the like, should be carried out by the intellect, whereas emotion is a kind of instinct within us and is not itself relevant to the making of decisions.

Of course, the decision itself, especially with respect to the example of marriage just mentioned, must take the emotional component into account. The emotion a person does or does not feel toward a potential spouse is one of the parameters that must be weighed when deciding whether to marry that person or not. But this is not a distinction between emotion and intellect; rather, it is a matter of different data being transferred to the intellect for the sake of the decision. If the emotion itself also makes the decision, and does not merely provide data to be weighed within it, then there is here a departure from the rational mode of operation. As we will see below, in every case the intellect is involved in the decision, if only in deciding not to take part in the determination.

The picture that emerges from this brief discussion is that according to the synthetic position proposed here, the intellectual part of the human spirit is composed of two different parts: the analytic part, more logical and dissecting, and the synthetic, intuitive part. The analytic part deals with logical analysis, the examination and formulation of arguments, and logical proofs. The synthetic part deals with aspects that do not proceed by proof and logical analysis, but rather have an intuitive character.

We saw in the previous gate that thinking is carried out by the intellect, and the bodily organ that serves it is the brain. It is therefore worth noting here that brain researchers tend to distinguish between these two functions in their physical manifestation as well: the analytic part is mainly connected with the left hemisphere of the brain, while the synthetic part is more connected with the right hemisphere.⁷

Emotion and Will: Choice and Psychology

The essence of will in general, and its place within the total psychic framework of the human being, are among the murkier questions in philosophy, and, to the best of my knowledge, among the ones treated too little. It is not entirely clear whether this question belongs to philosophy at all, rather than to psychology. References to will are found more among various mystics, or philosophers close to mysticism.⁸ Alternatively, there are also various, but unsatisfactory, treatments in analytic philosophy.⁹ Dispersing some of this fog is one of our main aims in this book. Beginning with the present chapter, we will start a systematic treatment of the tangled concept called “will.”

The distinction between emotion and will is very important for what follows. When we say, “Reuven wants something,” we may mean at least two different things: 1. He craves that thing. 2. He wills that thing.

The difference between these two meanings lies in the question of choice. For present purposes, let us assume that the human being has free choice; see below in chapter 2. We will define will as the product of choice. The meaning of the sentence “I want something” is that I chose that thing. By contrast, a “wanting” that is not the product of choice is an urge, or a craving. In these contexts it is correct to say that the person exercises the capacity for choice, but is acted upon by drives.

An expression such as “I feel like it” expresses an urge or craving. The expression “I want” will be interpreted here as a choice of something, though this is not always what the speaker means, and see below on this point. Usually, references to choice will appear in contexts of values in which the person believes and according to which the person acts. A person chooses to be a socialist, a liberal, a fascist, a capitalist, religious, or secular, but a person does not choose “to want chocolate.” That is a natural instinct that awakens in the person against their will. The instinct acts upon them, and it is not the person who consciously and willingly arouses such an instinct.

Of course, once such an instinct awakens, the person can choose whether to comply with it or not. Here the power of will, or choice, enters into action. But the awakening of the instinct is not “will” in the same sense in which commitment to socialism is will. It is not the product of choice.

In chapter 2 we will see in greater detail that anyone who believes in the existence of free choice must assume this distinction. Here we will only try to present some of its important consequences. We will illustrate them through the relation to psychology.

There is great confusion surrounding psychological determinism. The simple feeling is that if we could learn and understand all of human psychology, with all its principles and the whole range of phenomena it describes, we would be able to predict every human action with certainty.

In fact, this is a simple application of the principle of causality. When a person acts, that is an event in the world. As such, it is obvious that it has some cause. Psychology is supposed to describe the causes of our actions and feelings. To claim that there is human activity that lies outside the relevant domain of psychology means, in practical terms, to place a significant qualification on the principle of causality itself.

But on the other hand, if that is indeed the case, then we are led willy-nilly to determinism; that is, to the position that every action is imposed upon us in advance, and we have no choice regarding it. For if the psychological circumstances in which a person is situated dictate the character of that person’s actions, then there is no room for their own judgment. Every person’s simple intuition is that we have free choice, meaning that the human being is not subject to the determinism that rules the world around us, and not even to psychological determinism, that is, to the dictates of one’s own psychic structure and psychic circumstances. In chapter 2 we will present arguments that support this position, but here we will only assume it for the sake of the discussion. As stated, a synthetic position assumes the truth of intuition, or common sense, unless there are weighty reasons to reject it.

This dilemma leads us to the following distinction: psychology does not offer a description of the person themself. It deals with describing the environment within which the person acts. The collection of a person’s drives and impulses constitutes a kind of outline, or psychic terrain, within which the person acts. Psychology offers a topographical map of this terrain that envelops the person.

Take, for example, a schematic, and simplistic, example. When a person undergoes some experience in childhood, the laws of psychology determine that it will have some consequence in adulthood. This determination describes a force acting upon the person in adulthood, but not the mode of operation of the person themself. The character of the action actually taken will be determined by what that person decides in the circumstances that arise, taking into account the totality of forces, including the psychic ones, acting upon them. The action is the result of a judgment about whether to respond to the totality of one’s drives and impulses or not.

For example, a person who was abused in childhood tends toward violence. This means that when the person grows up, there is likely to be a tendency toward violence within them. The question whether they will act violently in a given situation depends on the existence of such a tendency, but not only on that. In the final analysis, the action is determined by that person’s decision, and it is always a matter of free choice.

According to this conception, a psychological map of a person describes the collection of drives, impulses, and social, personal, genetic, and similar influences acting on that person. Given such a “topographical” map of those influences, every action is a matter of turning in a certain direction within the terrain described by the map. For example, an action that overcomes violence is an action such that, in order to perform it, that person will have to invest a very large amount of psychic energy. That is, in that direction on the “map,” a steep and high mountain stands before them, one that is very hard to climb. By contrast, in the direction of a violent response, the opposite direction, there is a steep downward slope, and the person can go there quite easily. No investment of psychic energy is required for that.

When, within this topographical outline, a small ball or a body of water moves, the path will be determined by the nature of the terrain and the contours of the ground. These will move in the direction of minimum potential energy, toward the lowest accessible place.

By contrast, when a person stands at a crossroads where in one direction there is a steep and high mountain, and in the opposite direction a steep descent, the question where the person will go is still open. It depends not only on the contours of the terrain but also on where the person wants to get to, that is, on that person’s choice. If someone wants to get to a northern point, then even if there is a mountain on the the way there, the person must climb the mountain. Of course, the person may also yield to the terrain and choose not to reach that desired place. Thus, standing at the crossroads, that person has the ability to choose to invest great energy and attempt to climb the mountain, or alternatively to make the easy decision, which requires no energy at all, and roll down the slope.

The action as it actually occurs is the result of the decision where to go, not of the topographical terrain. Of course, the terrain itself also plays some part in the decision. Therefore psychology describes the terrain surrounding us, the forces and influences acting on us from every direction, but not us ourselves. The final determination is a product of free choice in light of the environmental data. What does not depend on us and on our choice is the amount of energy required to realize our decision. That is dictated to us by the forces within which we act, namely by the contours of the terrain, that is, by our psychology. But the determination itself is completely free.

In the situation described above, it is clear that the chance of succeeding in climbing the mountain, assuming a decision to climb it, is lower than the chance of rolling downward, assuming I have decided to yield and roll down. But both of these are conditional probabilities. The probability that a person will climb the mountain is the product of the probability of deciding to climb it and the probability of succeeding in carrying out that decision. The same applies to rolling downward. Both of these components depend on the structure of the “terrain,” but certainly not only on it.

When we conduct a psychological experiment, we examine, for example, a group of people who were abused in childhood alongside a control group of people who were not abused in that way. We ask how many from each group will respond violently to a given situation. The results we obtain are the average response expected in such a case, that is, the psychological law of violent response to childhood abuse. It is highly likely that in the group that suffered abuse there will be a higher percentage of people who slide into a violent response than in the group of those who were not abused. But such a result does not prove that people who were abused respond violently; it proves that people who were abused are more inclined to respond violently than those who were not abused. What we measure here is the topographical map around us, not us ourselves. The actual behavior is a weighting of the topographical map together with the free choice of each of the participants.

When we try to infer conclusions from such an experiment and propose the psychological law connecting abuse and violent character, we will be able to offer only an average law that describes the topographical map. We will not be able to offer a law that defines the probability that a particular person will choose a particular mode of action.

Of course, one can attribute this to the existence of additional psychological laws, which also intervene in each person’s decision. Even a person who was abused, if their genetics incline strongly toward forbearance, will have a tendency toward violence that differs greatly from that of someone whose genetics are neutral in this respect. Even so, our claim here is that simple intuition sees the entire psychological complex as a kind of topographical map. Even after we discover all the laws, and the science of psychology is completed, one important component will still remain outside it: we ourselves, the person who chooses how to act within this terrain. As we will argue below, this “topographical” system is not part of the hard core of the “I,” but at most a peripheral system of it.

Up to this point we have assumed that even if psychological research were completed, it still could not predict with complete definiteness the behavior of an individual person. We saw that it deals with the map surrounding the person and not with the person themself. But in fact, the limitation presented here has an additional implication that restricts the significance of psychology: it prevents psychological research itself from ever reaching perfect results. The very limited achievements of psychology, and its unscientific character, see the second book, do not derive only from the complexity of the human soul, meaning the enormous number of parameters that influence behavior, as many think. There is an essential problem here. A psychological experiment indeed deals with the topographical map and not with the person themself, but it can never measure even the “topographical map” as such.

The reason is that every experiment contains an additional component that depends on free choice, and it cannot be separated from the component of the statistical average. This is a limitation on the empirical ability of psychological research, and it essentially prevents it from reaching an accurate map of the human soul. In every experiment we conduct, the results will not reflect only the statistical average of the “maps,” since the choice among the possibilities is not a random lottery. The results will also reflect the choices of the concrete human beings who participated in the experiment.

Thus, the claim that actual behavior is the result of the influences described in the psychological “map,” plus the free determination how to act in the situation described by the map, leads to two implications:

1. Psychological research, even if it could ever be perfected, would offer only a map of forces, energies, drives, impulses, and the like. But the actual determination of each individual person depends not only on that map but also on an element of choice, which cannot be measured or quantified, because it is free; see on this chapter 2. Therefore the map, even the most perfect one, if we could reach it, cannot serve as a perfect tool for predicting and explaining the behavior of a particular individual. It has at most an average statistical significance, which includes the average of the sum of these two components.
2. Psychological research can never offer a perfect map of the human soul. The reason is that a psychological experiment can never neutralize the element of free choice.

At this point one might raise the claim that if there is a high and steep mountain, it may be that the person simply cannot climb it. If so, even if the person decides not to roll down but to try to climb the mountain, there is still no guarantee of success. There is freedom to choose, but not full freedom to carry out and realize the choice.

This claim is correct, but it is not relevant. Indeed, it may be that some of those who choose to climb the mountain will fail in their attempt, but some of them will succeed. As for those who fail to climb the mountain despite their decision, this means one of two things: either they did not decide with sufficient firmness, or, alternatively, that mountain lay beyond their capacity.

The first possibility means that determination is not a binary concept, that is, one that carries only truth or falsehood. There are several degrees of determination, and the more intense the determination, the greater the chance of success in the task. The second possibility means that there are situations in which a person acts deterministically. That is, such situations lie outside the range of their ability to realize. In criminal law this is called an irresistible impulse. In the context of halakha (Jewish law), this is called coercion. But these are extreme situations, and we are not dealing with them here. The account of psychology proposed above concerns situations that are relevant to the person’s choice, since our aim was to reconcile the possibility of choice with the psychological description.

Obviously, even in the physical analogy, when there is a high mountain, we do not always succeed in climbing it, either because it is not important enough to us, or because it really is beyond our power. But that does not mean that the question whether we will ultimately climb the mountain or not is determined by the terrain in a deterministic way.

Thus, the intuition that every person, in a normal state, has free choice does not necessarily contradict psychological intuition. On the one hand, there is a direct connection between abuse and violent responses. On the other hand, there is also free choice.

On our view, psychology deals with describing the topographical map of the psychological terrain created by drives, impulses, and various influences. It attempts, and as noted it will never fully succeed, to describe the height of the “mountain” of restraint standing before a person who has undergone abuse. It tries to offer a description of that person’s character. But within this terrain every such person, each one of us, acts in a wholly free manner.

It should be emphasized that in this model the freedom to choose is absolute. It does not itself depend at all on the topography surrounding us. What does depend on the surrounding terrain, and also on the intensity of our choice, is the success of implementing the choice.

In light of this schematic description, let us now return to the question of will and emotion with which we are concerned here. Emotion is the collection of some of the psychic events that psychology describes, and perhaps all of them. It constitutes the environment within which we act. It is the main part of what we call our “character.” It is indeed composed of many kinds of emotions, found at different emotional levels, higher and lower; see on this in the later gates. But from the standpoint of the schematic description proposed here, all of them belong to the psychological part of the human being.

By contrast, will describes the part of the human being that is not exposed to psychological research and cannot be predicted or explained. Through it free choice is carried out, the essence of which is the determination how to act in any given emotional-psychological terrain.

We will continue to elaborate on this in the next chapter. In the fourth gate we will note that there is also a kind of higher emotion, lying between intellect and emotion, such as awe and love, as distinct from fear and craving. Emotions of this sort have a dimension of choice and judgment, and they are composed of emotional and volitional layers together.

To conclude, a side remark. One should note that at this point another failure of the materialist argument appears. We saw in the previous gate that materialism recruits to its side results that point to the influence of our physical structure, genetics, or brain, on character and behavior. But in light of what has been said here, it is entirely plausible that such influence may indeed be found, and we should recall that up to the present day it has still not been found in a fully convincing way, between genetics and brain structure and the emotions, that is, at the psychological plane. But the will is not derived from prior causes; it is utterly free. Therefore, even if we succeed in reducing sensations and emotions, as well as character, to physiological events or structures,¹⁰ the will can never undergo a similar reduction. I do not see what scientific experiment could prove the existence of such a reduction of the will and ground it in physiology.

Intellect and Will

In analytic philosophy one distinguishes among normative, cognitive, and conative claims.¹¹ Normative claims deal with obligations of various kinds, civil law, religious law, morality, manners, and so on. Conative claims deal with human desires. We already noted in the previous section that will is the basis of norm, or value; therefore the more accurate expression for the conative would be impulses, or cravings. Cognitive claims deal with people’s beliefs.

Of course, these same three kinds can also appear in the context of conflicts. There are cognitive conflicts, for example, a person who believes in determinism on the one hand and in free choice on the other. Here there is a contradiction that concerns truth and falsehood, and therefore we must choose one of these two positions. Choosing one necessarily entails rejecting the other.

By contrast, as Williams argues,¹² in a conative conflict, when a person discovers that they want two contradictory things at the same time, one can hold both desires together and give up neither. For example, a person does not want to eat chocolate because it is unhealthy for the body, and on the other hand does want to eat it because it is pleasing to the palate, or, in another formulation, because it is healthy for the soul. Here there is no necessity to relinquish one of the desires. In practice, of course, it is impossible to actualize both, but it is clear that the person really does want both of these conflicting desires. Even when the desires are in direct opposition, as when someone both wants and does not want to buy some picture, even if the person cannot define whether these conflicting desires rest on different bases, as in the example of bodily and psychic health above, there is still no real contradiction here, and one can hold both desires together.

In normative conflicts this question is more complicated. Here opinions differ, and the question depends on one’s conception of the objective source of the normative system under discussion. Objectivists will liken this to cognitive conflicts, whereas subjectivists, or relativists, will liken the situation here to what obtains in conative conflicts. Williams himself rejects moral realism on the strength of this distinction, and many others disagree with him on that point.¹³ We will deal in greater detail with the question of the objectivity and essence of morality in the fourth gate.

In any event, the distinctions among the cognitive, the conative, and the normative indicate that there are different mental activities, all of which take place within the framework of the human soul. When a person thinks or believes, the person uses the intellect. When the person craves something, and thus their impulse finds expression, the emotional-psychological dimension is operating. When the person decides upon commitment to certain actions, or to certain values, the will finds expression.

The basic claim we wish to raise here is that these three activities are carried out by different parts of the soul. The different kinds of mental activity point to the existence of different parts within the human soul: intellect, emotion or impulse, and will.

Emotion, or impulse, is the part described by psychology. This was our subject in the previous section. In fact, it is only the environment within which the human being acts, but not the person themself. This is also a part of the soul that has a deterministic character, and therefore it is susceptible, at least in principle, to scientific description.

Intellect and will are higher parts of the human soul. We discussed the will in the previous section, where we saw that it is the power underlying our choice, that is, our commitment to values. The will is not deterministic, but wholly free, and therefore it is not susceptible to scientific description.

The intellect, by contrast, is a part that tends more toward determinism. The conclusion of thought can be forced upon us, and need not be a result of free choice. This is certainly true of a considerable part of our thinking, although it is not clear whether it is true of all thought as a whole. That depends on the question whether there are no subjective elements in thought; we will discuss that question below, in the third gate.

It is worth pausing here over a certain conceptual confusion that can arise with respect to the term “conative.” When we mention the human will, the association that often arises is a wish to perform a certain action, or to eat something. Even if we mention will with respect to norms, the statement will be interpreted as a wish to do something normative, or to act against some norm. The norms themselves are usually not perceived as a product of the will.

But if so, it is not clear what the source of those norms really is. The fact that there are moral rules, and that there is dispute regarding their objectivity and universality, see on this the fourth gate, may change the answer to the question what the source of these rules is. Relativists will say that their source is “desire,” in the same sense as the desire to eat chocolate. But objectivists need to find another source for norms. That source is the will.

As we have already seen, emotion and impulse arise from lower sources, those described within the framework of psychology. Values and norms, by contrast, are created by the will. The blurring mentioned above results from the analytic identification of emotion with will. In a place where there is no truth and no real values, the will is nothing but a subjective feeling, and therefore the desire for equality and the desire for chocolate are cousins, if not siblings. But within a synthetic picture, in which there are objective values, see also in the fourth gate, the desire for chocolate belongs to psychology, and perhaps even to physiology, whereas the desire for equality, for example, is a product of value-choice, or, in other words, of the will.

Yet the distinction proposed above does not fully exhaust the complex relation that exists between intellect and will. As we will see in chapter 2, moral principles have two aspects stemming from two different sources. One aspect is the content of the rules themselves; the norms themselves arise from a certain source. A second aspect is commitment to those norms, or acceptance of the yoke. The source of this aspect lies within the human spirit itself. What part of the soul is responsible for the generation of commitment to some normative system? We will refer to this part as will. The will is the psychic power that is the source of each person’s commitment to their values. A person decides to be committed to their values by activating the power of will.

Even according to the objectivist approach to morality, according to which moral rules arise from some objective source, commitment to morality is not derived from anything, nor even from the mere fact that there are moral rules. A person’s commitment always arises out of that person’s own determination. This is a determination, not cognition or thought. Such a determination is a pure act of will, not of intellect. The intellect cognizes, and also draws intellectual conclusions. The will makes normative determinations.

To be sure, there are quasi-intellectual ways of referring to values. We speak as though values are “correct” or “incorrect.” But this is a different aspect, which we will spell out later, in chapter 2: the intellectual dimension within will.

The intellect decides and weighs what is true and false. The will decides about values, that is, about what is good and what is not good. Yet it is clear that some intellectual power is involved in determining, and perhaps even cognizing, which values are good. As stated, we will deal with this in the next chapter. But already here we must sharpen the point and say that in the question to which values I am committed, that is, in the very act of choice, only the power of will decides, and no intellectual element is involved. As will be clarified below, this duality is connected to the claim that the content of the “good” is not given over to the decision of the will, but commitment to it, or alternatively to other values, certainly is.

From the brief discussion we have conducted, it emerges that thinking is carried out in the intellect, and its products are propositions of belief. These are examined on the axis of truth and falsehood. Such propositions do not obligate us in any way, and they constitute neutral and cold determinations. Even the determination concerning certain values, whether they are moral or not, is neutral.¹⁴ By contrast, the volitional determination whether to be committed to those values is carried out only through the power of will. Its products are commitments to norms. Commitments are not neutral propositions, but descriptions of a defined value-direction.

The difference between thinking and will finds expression in the linguistic difference between imperative sentences and indicative sentences. Indicative sentences are neutral, and they are the product of thinking or cognition. Imperative sentences are the result of determination, value-laden or otherwise, or of choice.

Below, in chapter 2 and especially in chapter 3, we will see that there is a great similarity between the structures of intellect and will as hierarchical structures. Both are composed of axioms and theorems, that is, derived propositions.

Nevertheless, Something on Consciousness: Who Is the “I”?

In the introduction we discussed the different parts of the soul. We divided them into three main parts: emotion, intellect, and will. We noted that there are additional functions of the human soul with which we will scarcely deal, such as consciousness. In this section we will try to touch briefly, in light of what we have seen thus far, on one aspect of this difficult question.

There is great confusion among psychologists regarding the definition of the concept “I.”¹⁵ It is not clear which part of the psychoanalytic map deserves this title. In fact, the question itself is not entirely clear. If the intention is merely a formal definition, then why is it important to ask which part may be called “I”? It appears that an essential question is present here. But at the essential level the question is unclear. Is there even such a part, “I”? And if so, why assume that it is one of the parts of the psychoanalytic map? Might it not be some other part of the soul?

Usually the intention in this question is to identify the element toward which a person’s self-consciousness is directed. When a person grasps themself, or attributes some feeling or mental intention to themself, to which part of the soul are they referring? On the other hand, one may also ask: who is the part that refers? When we deal with the question of the “I,” we stand at the same time on both sides of the divide: we are the ones asking, and we are also the object of the question. We are the observers, or the researchers, and we are also the object of the research or observation.

Yet it seems that even without entering the depths of the problem and its different shades, one can say that the question assumes a certain presupposition, and perhaps that very presupposition is the root of the whole confusion. At first glance, the “I” is the whole described by the psychoanalytic map, and not any specific part of it. This can be linked to the question of matter and form discussed in the second gate of the first book. We saw there that those of an analytic position tend to identify a thing with the totality of its properties. A person is defined for them as a totality possessing a collection of properties. By contrast, those of a synthetic position identify the being in question as a substance that bears the totality of the properties observed by us. We saw that the same dispute appears with regard to concepts; in that context we called it, in the second gate of the first book, essentialism versus conventionalism.¹⁶

Thus one can say something similar regarding the human being. The “I” is not any part of the psychoanalytic map. It is the entity that bears that map, that is, the entity described by it. The psychoanalytic map is a description of the form, that is, the properties, of the substance called the “I.” In Kantian terms, we would say that the “I” is the person as they are in themselves, or their essence.

An indication of this can be found in the discussion to be conducted in the fourth gate concerning categorical changes, or the concept known as “improvement of character traits.” When a person works to change their traits, we assume that the person remains the same person, the same entity, even insofar as they succeed in changing their traits. Hence it is clear that the person themself is not any property, but rather the object that bears those properties. We will see this in greater detail there; see also below in the note on repentance, and in the introduction to the fourth gate.

However, in light of the above, one may doubt this conclusion. The psychological description of a person deals only with the emotional-impulsive part. The part that chooses, and perhaps also the part that thinks, is not described within the framework of psychology, but by philosophy. If so, it seems more likely that the “I” is not necessarily the structure that bears the psychology as such, but the entity that acts within the psychological terrain. It may be that this terrain itself does not describe the person at all, but only that person’s peripheral environment. On this view, indeed no part of the psychological map describes the “I,” but this is not because the “I” is the whole, or the thing in itself; rather, it is because the “I” is a part that does not appear on the map.

But perhaps these two possibilities can be identified with one another. Schopenhauer pointed out that the only substance whose essence we can clearly discern, and not merely its outward appearance, that is, its form, is the human being themself. When a person looks inward, the person directly identifies themself as they are in themselves, and not any specific property of theirs. By contrast, their properties are observed by them in a manner quite similar to the way others observe them. Thus, when a person looks inward, the person can discern the thing in itself.

If we accept Schopenhauer’s very plausible claim, then inward observation, which reveals the part toward which our consciousness is directed, reveals the “I.” This is the part that is the thing in itself of the totality of properties that appear on the psychoanalytic map. But this is the appearance of our inner part, intellect and will, which we do indeed manage to observe directly; yet this does not mean that these are not the human being as they are in themselves. After all, according to Schopenhauer, a person can look into their own selfhood as it is in itself. If so, it is entirely possible that intellect and will are the human being as they are in themselves, namely the “I.”

The conclusion is that these two, intellect and will, cannot be described psychologically, but apparently not by any other description either. The reason is that nothing as it is in itself can be described by means of properties, by virtue of the very definition of the term; see the second gate of the first book.

If so, it may be that the two possibilities we raised above converge. Intellect and will are the human being as they are in themselves. When we look inward, these are mainly what we find. The psychological properties that appear on the psychoanalytic “map” are the form of the human being, namely the collection of that person’s properties. Our encounter with the strangeness of the will, its elusiveness, and its resistance to theoretical description, see on this the next chapter, is nothing but a reflection of the fact that only in inward observation do we succeed in directly discerning the being as it is in itself. That being is we ourselves.

This is the place to recall a point raised in the previous gate. We saw there that Descartes’s cogito principle proves the existence of the soul, not the existence of the body. “I think, therefore I am” means: I think, therefore there is one who thinks; that is, my intellect exists. In parallel one may say, “I will, therefore I am.” But one cannot say, “I feel, therefore I am,” unless one means awareness of our emotional part, which is located in consciousness and not in the emotional part itself, and not the emotion itself. As stated, the emotional part itself is only our periphery, not our true self. The self is the totality of the parts to which one can apply the Cartesian cogito principle.

Alongside all that has been said until now, it seems that there is another context in which one may seek the “I”: the map of the esoteric tradition, that is, Jewish mysticism. As we will see below, according to that map it is difficult even to relate to the human being as a unique creature defined separately from the rest of the world, and certainly not separately from the Holy One, blessed be He. Therefore it is difficult to distinguish between the human being as they are in themselves and their being, as it were, a property of being as a whole.

And indeed, the mystics discussed the question to which part one should assign human consciousness. Which part of the soul describes the layer of which we are aware? The author of Leshem Shevo Ve-Ahlamah, Rabbi Shlomo Elyashiv, for example, argues that in the well-known kabbalistic scheme that divides the human being into five parts, from lowest to highest: the lower soul, spirit, soul, living essence, and singular essence, consciousness pertains to the level of spirit.¹⁷ According to this, the lower soul is the lowest part of the human being’s spirituality, the more animal-like part, which we call emotion, impulse, or instinct. This is the part described by psychology. We already noted above that this part is more closely connected to the body, and here we see that from another angle. We will explain this map in greater detail in the final gate, as well as in the intermezzo that appears at the end of the present gate.

Summary

Let us summarize the picture presented thus far. The spiritual part of the human being is divided into three main components:

1. Emotion, in its various forms, is the lower part, and psychology deals with it. This is a periphery of the person, or a terrain surrounding the person, and it is what we call, in our language, their “character.” Cravings and impulses also belong to this part, and therefore assigning the term “will” to them is inaccurate and confusing.

By contrast, intellect and will belong to the higher part of the human being, and they may be the components of the “I” toward which self-awareness is directed and within which this awareness is also carried out. This is the human being as they are in themselves.

2. The intellect is composed of two parts: analytic, dissecting, which merely “thinks,” and synthetic, compositional, which also has dimensions of cognition. It is responsible for the distinction between truth and error, or falsehood, and between right and wrong.
3. Will is a separate power, responsible for free choice, and it bears primarily on values. We saw that this power creates commitment to values, but at its foundation stands an intellectual dimension, a dimension of thought, which decides and infers which values are correct and which are not; see on this the next chapter. Thus, within will too there are two parts: a thinking part and a choosing part.

From this map we proceed to the continuation of the gate. Since we dealt extensively in the previous books with thought, in both its parts, analytic and synthetic, we will focus the remainder of the discussion primarily on the will, and on its relation to thought. We will see that the structure of the will is very similar to that of thought, and perhaps there is even a part common to both. We will discover that the map described in this summary is not complete. At the end of the gate we will attempt to offer a more complete map of the human being’s spiritual part. As stated, the psychological map is a detailing of the lower part of that broader map.

Chapter 2: Will and Choice: Determinism

The will is, apparently, a uniquely human phenomenon. Intellect and emotion, by contrast, probably also exist among animals at one level or another. In this chapter we will deal in greater detail with the essence of the will, and with the nature of free choice, which is the primary characteristic that distinguishes it.

Determinism and Indeterminism¹⁸

In order to understand the deterministic outlook, we must first define the concept “determinism.” A deterministic process is a necessary process whose outcome is fixed in advance, and therefore can also be known in advance: given the present state, we can derive from it with certainty the next state.

Even if the state of affairs is very complex, and we do not know how to derive from it precisely the next state, it may still be that the connection between the two states is deterministic. Thus, when the present state determines with certainty and necessity the next state, whether or not we know and recognize the connection between them, we call the process in question a “deterministic process.”

The deterministic worldview believes that all processes in the world are deterministic in character. That is to say, at any given moment, if we know in exact and detailed fashion the state of the world, we can calculate from it the state of the world at the next moment, and by the same method, in theory, the state of the world at any future moment. As is well known, the French mathematician and physicist Laplace claimed that if he were given all the relevant data and the appropriate calculating ability, he would be able to describe the state of the world at every future moment.

In the inanimate world, governed by the laws of physics, it is commonly thought today that all processes are deterministic.¹⁹ The dispute between determinists and their opponents is waged with respect to human activity. Determinists claim that human beings too, as physico-chemical creatures, are subject to the laws of nature, and therefore their behavior is no exception in this respect. According to this approach, every human action or occurrence is a necessary product of the circumstances that preceded it. Their opponents, those who believe in freedom of choice, claim that the human being is an exception, such that there are non-deterministic aspects to human behavior and activity.

From the account presented here, there appears at first glance to be a necessary connection between materialism and determinism. But this connection is necessary only in one direction. From a materialist standpoint it is highly plausible that the human being will be viewed as acting deterministically, since, as a material entity, the person is not exceptional relative to the material world surrounding them. Like it, the person is subject to the laws of inanimate nature. By contrast, it is possible for someone to hold a dualist or idealist view and still be a determinist. According to such a position, spirit too is not free; there are laws of nature that govern its behavior.

The difference between these two deterministic positions concerns reductionism. According to the first position, the materialist one, the laws of psychology that govern human mental activity are merely a particular expression of the totality of the laws of physics. In other words, they can be reduced to the laws of physics. According to the second position, dualist determinism, there are indeed rigid laws that govern human conduct, but these are not necessarily the laws of physics. Spirit operates according to different laws, no less rigid.

By contrast with both of these positions, the position that advocates free choice is neither materialist, for it is accepted by all of us that matter is subject deterministically to the laws of physics, nor deterministic. According to this position, the laws governing the conduct of the human spirit are not rigid. This means that there are no laws that determine with certainty and necessity, on the basis of the present state, what a given person will do, or think, at the next moment. In other words, even if we were to know, theoretically, Reuven’s present state in all its details and precision, we still could not calculate or derive from that his state at the next moment. There is always a chance that our calculation will not correctly and accurately describe the behavior. This chance does not arise from lack of knowledge about the data of the present state or about the laws of nature governing reality. It arises from the fact that the future is not univocally determined by the present. The present circumstances are only part of what determines future states.

The arguments that lead to a deterministic view are usually based on the same lines of argument presented in the previous gate with respect to materialism. If we adopt a materialist position, it seems very difficult not to adopt determinism as well. But above we saw that a non-materialist outlook may still be deterministic. This outlook generally rests on the principle of causality. Since every event in our world, material or spiritual, has a cause, it cannot be that events occur without a cause. But if the cause determines the result in an unequivocal way, then in fact we arrive at a deterministic worldview. Thus, the principle of causality, which seemingly everyone accepts, is the basis of the deterministic conclusion, and apparently it follows from it necessarily.

It is worth noting that even if we adopt the alternative proposal presented in the previous gate, according to which there are actions and interactions of the spirit with the material body, the deterministic argument based on causality is not impaired. These actions too operate according to some laws that we still do not know, but according to the principle of causality those laws must be rigid. It cannot be that the cause exists and the effect that follows from it does not occur. Likewise, it cannot be that the cause does not exist and yet some effect occurs, as if a cause were present.

In another formulation: if there really occurs a human action that cannot be predicted in advance, essentially and not because of lack of knowledge, then it apparently occurred without a cause, for if there were a cause, we could calculate from it and know the character of the result. A process in which activity occurs without any cause, arbitrarily, is called an “indeterministic” process. We attribute such a property to the rolling of a die or the stopping place of a roulette wheel. All these are random and arbitrary processes, and in our language: indeterministic.

This last formulation of the deterministic consideration grounds determinism by way of negation. Since the principle of causality implies that an indeterministic occurrence cannot exist, it is clear that all activities, human and otherwise, are deterministic: they follow necessarily from a prior cause, and therefore they are fixed in advance.

By the way, it should be noted that in fact none of us knows of any process that is truly indeterministic. Throwing a die or spinning a roulette wheel are completely deterministic processes. If we knew the state of the winds in the environment, as well as the direction and force of the die’s initial throw, we could in principle calculate exactly on which face it would land. The same holds for the roulette wheel. Indeterministic processes are a fictive definition, by way of negation. In reality, we do not know any such processes at all.

The devices we use in lotteries, such as a die or a roulette wheel, are devices whose exact outcomes are very difficult to calculate, and therefore we use statistical tools for them. But in principle, one could also calculate them by exact deterministic computation.

Choice

The concept “choice” is elusive and very difficult to define. At first glance, freedom of choice means that there is no cause that brings about the result of the process.²⁰ For if there were such a cause, then the result would be fixed in advance and therefore not given over to our choice. One cannot speak about a deterministic process in terms of “deliberation.” Can one say, for example, that I deliberated and decided that my heart should now beat? This is an action imposed on me, and it is the result of prior physiological causes; therefore it is not given over to my judgment. Consequently, it is obvious that there is no room to judge me for the fact that my heart beats.

Thus, an essential characteristic of a process of choice is that there is no prior cause that brings about the result; otherwise there would be no free choice here, but rather a result fixed in advance. Two questions arise here: 1. How can some event occur without a cause? This does not accord with the principle of causality. 2. Even if such an event occurs, what is the difference between choice and indeterminism? Both describe events that occur without a cause that brings them about.

It should be emphasized that the question here is one of definition. Even if someone were to claim that no process of choice exists in reality, as long as that person recognizes the concept of choice, they must still define it and ask what differentiates it from indeterminism. Of course, one can say that in truth there is no such concept, and that this is a fictive option that appears to some of us to be different, while in fact it is merely a cover, a fig leaf, for indeterminism.

Our main and basic claim is conceptual: choice is a concept wholly different from indeterminism, and therefore a process of choice has a character different from that of an indeterministic process. As we will see below, coping with the question whether the human being has free choice depends critically on whether we are convinced that there really is such a concept. Most of those who deny the existence of freedom to choose do so because they see the concept “free choice” as a linguistic fiction that cannot be defined or understood.

A common argument in favor of the doctrine of choice is the argument that in a deterministic world a person has no responsibility for their actions. One cannot judge a person for something they do, whether good or bad, since the action is caused by the circumstances that prevailed in the moment before it and was not done out of the free choice of the person who did it. According to the deterministic outlook, the feeling of choice is nothing but our illusion.

Even before we discuss whether this argument is correct, it is obvious that if the concept of choice were equivalent to indeterminism, we still would not have found an alternative that would allow us to judge human actions. Even if a person acts arbitrarily, like a die roll or a roulette wheel, there is still no room to judge them for their actions. The reason is that no deliberation is involved. Deliberation is a condition for the possibility of judging any act, and therefore indeterminism, at least in this sense, resembles determinism. In both pictures there is no component of deliberation, and therefore neither allows value-judgment.

Thus, it is clear that when proponents of choice speak of processes of choice, they include in them a component of deliberation. They do not mean deterministic processes, nor indeterministic ones. This is a third kind of process, in which deliberation is involved, and therefore it is subject to judgment. By contrast, the claim of the determinist is that no such kind of process exists in reality.

We mentioned above the common argument presented against determinism, according to which in a deterministic world there is no place at all for value-judgment, and perhaps not even for a legal system. At first glance, this is a null argument, for two reasons:

1. According to the determinist, indeed there is no room for judgment. Why is the illusion that there is value-judgment any better than the illusion that there is free choice? Neither should move us to abandon deterministic truth. Beyond that, there is apparently a confusion here between what is and what ought to be. The fact that we would very much like human beings to be judgeable by value-judgments does not mean that this is indeed possible.
2. According to the determinist, the act of judging is also forced upon the one who judges another. Are judges, or people who witness some act, not subject to the deterministic system of laws? The judgment is imposed on us. Therefore, even if there is no room for genuine judgment, this is no argument against the determinist. The determinist will say that indeed there is no room for it, and the fact that we do it is simply because we have such a nature, and no more.

This claim can be significant if we present it in its “theological” clothing rather than in the “philosophical” formulation offered above. One can state it as follows: since we have a strong intuition that there is meaning to the value-judgments and legal judgments we make concerning others, it is clear that beneath the surface we hold a non-deterministic position. True, it may be that all this is merely an illusion, and therefore this is not a decisive argument against one who lacks that intuition, though it is quite clear that no such person exists. Still, it places the deterministic position on the defensive. If we are to decide that all our intuitions and our judgments are valueless fictions imposed on us by nature, the determinist bears the burden of bringing sufficient reasons to support that position. The burden of proof lies with the determinist. But the plain fact is that such reasons are not available; see also below.

Analytic thinking once again returns here to a strange and mystical mode of thought that does not accord with common sense. Here too, as in the previous questions, all this is done for no evident reason. As we will also see below, the considerations that lead to this position have no substance.

Let us now return to the main line of the argument. Everything said thus far yields that a person’s deterministic actions are actions necessarily derived from that person’s state, physical and psychological, at the moment before the action. Such actions cannot be grounds for judging the person, since the person did not really do them. A person’s hand rises and strikes someone when that motion is caused by physical and other forces acting upon it. One cannot judge the person for this action, because the forces that acted on the hand were not under the person’s control. The person did not deliberate before performing them, since they were imposed upon him, and therefore he has no share in their consequences.²¹

By contrast, a person’s indeterministic actions are actions done without any cause, in a random and disconnected fashion, lacking all regularity. As though a person’s hand suddenly jumped on its own and struck someone. Such actions too cannot be grounds for judging the person, since the person is not responsible for them. Here too, there is no deliberation preceding the act. The actions occur on their own, without any cause.

The question is: what is the character of actions of the third kind, those for which the agent can be judged? Is it even possible that there is an additional category, different from the previous two? At first glance, the most basic laws of logic imply that we must adopt one of two possibilities: either some action is done from a cause, or it is not. There is no third possibility; this is what logic calls the law of excluded middle. On the other hand, there is a strong intuition that there is a mental process we call “deliberation,” and there is human action that stems from deliberation. As we saw, a process involving deliberation falls under neither of the other two proposals.²²

The determinist, who usually proceeds from an analytic outlook, chooses here too the formal exit and ignores the intuition. By contrast, one who holds the synthetic position tries to ground and understand the intuition. A logical problem cannot be accepted even by such a person as legitimate, even if intuition supports it. But that person has a very strong motivation to examine whether there really is here a genuine logical problem, or whether some analytic fallacy lies hidden here. We will now propose a consideration that explains why there is no logical problem here at all. Such a consideration will allow us to continue holding our intuitions about free choice and remove the reasons the determinist raises for abandoning them.

The most important point for understanding the position that advocates choice is that according to it there are two different kinds of actions done without a cause: actions done indeterministically and actions done by choice. Thus, the law of excluded middle says nothing about the possibility of acts of choice. Not every action that is not deterministic is indeterministic. There are non-deterministic actions that are also not indeterministic, but rather actions performed by choice.

Here it should be noted that there is theoretical ambiguity regarding the distinction between these two kinds of causeless actions. This ambiguity underlies several philosophical perplexities, and a strong expression of it can be found among interpreters of the teaching of the late Yeshayahu Leibowitz. We will discuss this in detail in the appendix, and we will also see some of its broader implications.

The complication appears when one tries to propose a more explicit definition for this kind of action. One may ask what the cause is that led the person to do this action. If there was no cause, then this is an indeterministic action, and if there was a cause, then it is a deterministic action. But this division is not necessarily correct, since we saw that an action by choice is also a kind of action without a cause. Such actions can be either indeterministic or acts of choice.

All the logical complications are tied to the dichotomy between determinism and indeterminism, and therefore they disappear in light of the schematic picture proposed above, in which we divide non-deterministic actions into two different kinds. The main problem is that we still do not succeed in understanding positively what an action done by choice means.

The complication described here is based on the search for a positive definition of choice. But it is not clear within what conceptual system we expect to receive such a definition. Are we supposed to state the cause of this action, or to say that it has no cause? Before we search for a good definition of the term “choice,” we must ask ourselves in what conceptual system we ought to seek that definition, and what will count as a satisfactory definition.

It seems that the solution to this perplexity lies in returning to intuition. A definition of a concept is needed in order to clarify it for someone who does not know it. Such a definition also uses more basic concepts, and in the end there is always an entire array of basic concepts for which we have no definition at all. These concepts are self-evident to us and therefore need no definition. Out of them one can build concepts that are not self-evident, and define them by means of the basic concepts.

What, then, about the concept “choice”? We know it immediately from our everyday experience. It therefore seems to belong to the system of concepts that are clear to us, and hence there is no need to define it on the basis of other concepts. There are no concepts clearer to us than it that could be used to clarify it.²³

Beyond this, the search for a definition of the concept “choice” is conducted on the playing field of determinism-indeterminism. We seek a definition of “choice” within such a dichotomous conceptual system: either in terms of cause and effect, or in terms of the absence of cause and arbitrariness. Neither of these conceptual systems succeeds in describing the concept “choice,” and therefore we feel that it is nothing but a fiction.

But the conclusion arising from such a search is highly problematic, for two main reasons:

1. “Free choice” is a concept that does not belong to those conceptual systems, but to a third system of a different type, one that includes concepts such as “deliberation,” “responsibility,” “will,” and the like. Therefore there is no chance that we will succeed in finding it a definition within systems foreign to it. We will never find a cause for a free event, and we will never find a definition of absence of cause in the indeterministic sense that yields moral responsibility or deliberation.
2. There is an illusion as though the concepts “cause,” “determinism,” and “indeterminism” are more intelligible than the concept “choice.” This illusion causes people to run in circles and seek a definition of the concept of choice based on the use of concepts that are not clearer. As we already noted above, no one has ever experienced or observed a process that is truly indeterministic. By contrast, the experience of choice accompanies us at every moment, all the time. Why, then, should we assume that indeterminism is more intelligible than choice?

The first reason teaches us that there is no chance of finding a definition of free choice in terms of two systems foreign to it. The second shows that we have no need of such a definition, and therefore its absence should not lead us to any conclusion. On the contrary, this absence is expected and obvious by virtue of the nature of the concepts involved in this question.

From our experience we know that the principle of causality is observed and associated only with deterministic events, mainly in relation to inanimate nature, and therefore there is no point in projecting it onto a different conceptual world. If we do not try to project it onto actions done by choice, that is, if we do not seek explanations and definitions for the mechanisms of choice in terms of cause and effect, “what caused him to think or believe that?” then we will not get entangled logically, and we will not have to abandon the simple intuitions accompanying us by claiming that they are nothing but illusions.

The conclusion is that the search for a definition is what underlies the deterministic fallacy. The concept “choice,” which is self-evident to us and familiar from everyday personal experience, is held by each of us to exist. This is the primary intuition. Abandoning it requires good reasons. But we have not found such reasons. There is no reason to assume that the principle of causality is valid with respect to human choices. Just as we know that complete causality reigns in the inanimate world, so too we know, from experience no less certain, that acts of choice are not subject to this principle.

The synthetic method we have used here is based on finding a solution that allows us to leave the intuition intact and renders unnecessary the need to abandon it. Our words do not prove that there is free choice; rather, they shift the burden to the opposing side: let someone prove the claim that there is no free choice. The burden of proof lies on whoever asks me to abandon my primary intuitions.

The synthetic position acts here in accordance with its method and adheres to intuition. The analytic position likewise continues consistently in its own way: it abandons simple intuitions under the force of formal considerations, in favor of strange positions far removed from plain and upright common sense, and all this without any real reason.

Up to this point we have dealt only with the semantic-definitional question: does the concept “free choice” really express something genuine? Is there such a process? We now turn to the substantive question: do we in fact have free choice? Theoretically it is possible that the concept “free choice” is valid and coherent, but in practice we do not possess such an ability, namely the ability to choose freely. Yet now we can see that all the arguments in favor of determinism collapse on their own, and conclude that determinism is an entirely unjustified approach.

As we saw, all the considerations in favor of determinism are based on the principle of causality and on Occam’s razor, according to which one should not posit unnecessary assumptions. But if we indeed recognize the fact that processes of choice belong to a different, third type, neither determinism nor indeterminism, all these considerations fall away by themselves.

First, the anthropological argument arises here, see on this above in chapter 1 of the first gate. Success in preserving the meaning of this concept, and grounding the semantic claim that it has an independent meaning, even for one who denies it, also bears on the substantive plane: that we indeed have freedom of choice. If we did not, we could not even speak about it or understand others’ speech about it.

Occam’s razor, as we have already seen, is an argument of a parasitic character. Once there are good reasons to deny the existence of free choice, Occam’s razor can claim that there is no justification for assuming its existence. But if we directly apprehend that there is free choice, there is no place for an argument from Occam’s razor. The matter is analogous to the following: I see with my own eyes that there are chairs around me. A dissenter comes and asks why we should assume the existence of chairs when we already assume that there are tables here. One should not posit unnecessary assumptions, and the system with the fewest assumptions is the more justified one. Clearly this is a foolish argument. I simply see that there are chairs. Occam’s razor can enter only in a case where there is an explanation for everything I saw even without the additional assumption. In such a case one may claim that the additional assumption is unjustified. But where what we experience cannot be explained by fewer assumptions, there is no room for arguments from Occam’s razor.

These considerations cast the entire scholastic subtlety of the determinists in a rather ridiculous light and join it to the esoteric theories of materialism in its various forms, as presented in the previous gate. All of these are grounded in analytic thinking, and all flee in similar fashion from intuition and common sense into formalistic realms, as is the way of analytic positions.

Three Kinds of Choices

As an analogy that will further clarify our discussion, let us examine the concept of “elections” in its political context. We know of three kinds of political elections. For the sake of concreteness, we will illustrate them through the following headings: elections in Syria, elections in Switzerland, and elections in Israel.

In the Syrian election process, a person freely enters the polling station, freely and without constraint pulls out the only ballot slip lying there, and votes for the preferred candidate: Assad, the father, or the son, or perhaps the Holy Spirit, depending on which of them happened to be alive at the time. This is a deterministic election process, since the election result follows necessarily from the state of affairs that exists before the procedure begins. Even if the voter has the illusion of determining something, that is only an illusion.

In the Swiss election process, a person freely enters the polling station, freely and without constraint chooses one among several ballot slips lying there, and votes for the candidate preferred in that person’s eyes. These are perfectly democratic and completely free elections. Really. The problem is that metaphorical Switzerland has no issues that trouble it at all. These elections are not important, and there is no significance to the question whose body will occupy the prime minister’s chair. In fact, in such a situation one may hold a lottery by coin toss, because it is of no significance who is chosen. There are no policy alternatives, and no costs to any of the alternatives, because Switzerland has no problems. Therefore, in our terminology, this is an indeterministic process. De facto, what occurs here is an arbitrary lottery. There is no real difference between the candidates.

We now see that, de facto, elections in Switzerland are like those in Syria. In both cases there are not two alternatives. In Syria there are not two candidates, and in Switzerland there are indeed two candidates, but there is no difference at all between them. These are two candidates who in essence are only one.

An example of the third kind of election process is the one conducted in Israel. A person freely enters the polling station, freely and without constraint chooses one of several ballot slips lying there, and votes for the candidate preferred in that person’s eyes. These are perfectly democratic and completely free elections. But in Israel, unlike Switzerland, serious issues are on the table. There are costs, positive and negative, attached to each of the alternatives before us, and all of us will bear the consequences of the choice. It is important to understand that these costs are not determined by us. They are constraints imposed on us from outside. Even so, precisely these elections, and only these, are ones in which participation, that is, the choice itself, has real value. This is free choice, in which there are real differences between the candidates and between the states of affairs that will result from the various choices.

In our analogy, precisely this type of election is parallel to a process of free choice. At first glance, the person is less free, since various external constraints bear upon the person. The choice concerns only the way the person chooses to cope with those constraints.

The very fact that we distinguish between these three cases and see them as different from one another indicates that there really are three situations and not two: choice is neither indeterminism nor determinism. There are various considerations that the choosing person takes into account, but they do not dictate the result; they merely constitute the background of the choice. An indeterministic process is one in which actions are carried out without any constraints. A deterministic action is one whose outcome is dictated by the constraints. Choice is an action carried out within constraints, but those constraints do not dictate its outcome; they only dictate the prices the chooser must pay for that choice.

This point is closely bound up with the question of the relation between freedom and liberty, which will be discussed below in the fourth gate, and with questions of creativity and worship of God “for its own sake,” which will be discussed in the third and fifth gates.

The Role and Structure of the Will: The Intellectual Dimension Within Will

Beyond clarifying the distinction of choice from determinism and indeterminism, and perhaps precisely because of it, an additional conclusion emerges from this account. We saw that the existence of value-related “constraints,” from which costs are derived for each alternative, is what defines the value of freedom of choice. The more constraints there are, the greater the value of freedom of choice, even though this seemingly reduces the freedom in the process.

The act of choosing among alternatives is the essential role of our will. This is its uniqueness, and what distinguishes it from intellect. The intellect is subject to the truth revealed before it. The intellect has no essential possibility of choosing, since it cannot decide that something false is true, except in cases of error. The locating and determining of the very map of alternatives is not free, and it is done at an earlier stage. This is a task of the type called thinking, and it is carried out by the intellect.

As we saw in the Swiss example, an integral part of the value of choice is the fact that there are constraints. In the choice of an individual person too there is such a necessary dimension if the act of choosing is to have value. This dimension is a theoretical moral decision concerning what is good and what is not good. This decision determines the costs that will attach to every practical determination we later make. Will the step we choose be morally wrong, or will it be right? These costs are what give our act of choice its meaning.

We must therefore examine the nature of such a stage. At first glance, this is not a stage of choice, since the question what is a good act and what is not is not given over to our determination, though one can of course deliberate about it, as about any other intellectual problem. If so, this is a process of seeking and locating data imposed on us “from outside.” This process appears to be intellectual in character. Its criteria belong on the axis of correct and incorrect. This is the intellectual dimension within will, which we already mentioned above.

The difference between it and ordinary intellectual activity lies mainly in the fact that what is involved here is not an ordinary factual determination. Some action will be considered “correct” morally not because it corresponds to some state of affairs in the world outside us. The meaning of the term “correct,” or “truth,” in the moral context differs from the meaning we ascribe to it in the logical or ordinary intellectual context.

Thus there is here another point of contact between intellect and will. There is the ordinary intellect, which operates alongside the will and independently of it. Its role is to identify various truths, mainly factual ones. And there is the intellectual part within will, which operates as a preparation of the ground prior to acts of choice.²⁴ The precise meaning of this activity does not concern us at the moment, except that it involves no free determination. For now we will merely summarize by saying that it is an activity similar to that of the intellect and not to that of the will. For further detail on this topic, see below in the fourth gate.

Historical and Metaphysical Significance of Determinism and Free Choice

In this section we will try to sharpen the meaning of the deterministic view, and through it better understand the meaning and importance of freedom of choice.

According to the deterministic conception, the state of the world has been fixed since its creation. The initial conditions at the first moment determined every detail of everything that would happen in the future, down to the last detail. The fact that Reuven decides at 11:35 on the coming Tuesday to go buy three rolls at the grocery store is a necessary result of the state of matter at the moment of the Big Bang. So too Shimon’s determination to murder Reuven on the way to the store. All these are non-volitional acts, and they are not subject to judgment. In fact, the people who “play” in these situations are nothing but extras. They are not the real agents.

The whole movement of the world according to this approach is a prolonged static state. There is no real dynamism in it. True, there is motion, but all of it is merely an expression of what was already latent in the initial moment. According to Newton’s first law, an object on which no force acts will move at constant speed in a straight line. The whole world resembles such an object, since outside the totality of creation there is nothing at all. The total system is certainly a system upon which no external forces act, for its totality means that there is nothing “outside” it. If so, it continues moving all the time in a way predetermined and without any change. Since it is a very complex system, it appears alive and dynamic, but in fact there is no life here, and everything is fixed in advance. Everything depends on a blind, empty, and meaningless fate. According to the determinist, the illusion of life is the greatest illusion on earth.

All events at every moment in reality are merely the actualization of what already existed in the moment before. All events lie on a set of parallel causal chains that begin with the creation of the world and will end with its end. This situation resembles a group of slaves moving along while bound in chains.

Of course, this depressing account cannot serve as an argument against the deterministic picture. At most it is a description of it. As has been said several times above, one may not confuse what ought to be with what is. Even if we very much wish the picture to be different, that does not mean that it indeed is different. Therefore let us return again to the argument on the “theological” plane: does our intuition really hint and guide us in such a direction? Why assume such an unappealing picture at all? Are there good reasons for so blatantly abandoning what we believe?²⁵

The “theological” argument shows us that we do not believe in the deterministic picture, and not merely that we do not want to believe. For in such a world there would be no concepts such as “deliberation,” “responsibility for acts,” “judgment,” “meaning,” “choice,” and many others like them. This very fact is additional anthropological evidence against determinism. The fact that these concepts exist in our language and are understood by us all is itself evidence that they have a root in reality. Otherwise it is unclear how they could have arisen on their own, and how we all assume that they are understood by all of us in the same way, and therefore can serve us in our “illusory” discourse.²⁶

Against this bleak deterministic picture stands the alternative picture of a world in which the human being has freedom of choice. In this picture, the chains of cause and effect are not infinitely extended backward in time. At every point of human choice, an initial link is created, ex nihilo, since the choice has no prior cause that determines it, and this link opens and begins a new chain. All the rest of nature indeed obeys the deterministic laws of science, and therefore all of it is nothing but a set of parallel chains extending from the moment of creation to the end. New beginnings that “create” new chains exist only at those points where a human choice is made. From there onward an infinite chain of results produced by that act continues again, and the creation of the next links in the chain is also carried out by the laws of nature.

Thus every act of choice is a kind of creation of a new segment in the world. Choice is the power by which the human being resembles the Creator, in the sense of the “image of God,” for the human being alone can create worlds out of nothing. All the reality surrounding us is a prolonged static reality that rolls along willy-nilly from the moment of creation, or from the initial moments of earlier human choices, toward its dictated and predetermined ends.

If we add to this our conclusion from the previous gate, that the human spirit can act upon its body and through it upon material objects generally, the picture that emerges is the following. The human spirit acts upon the world by means of the will. The will creates the initial, spiritual energy, and this acts psychophysically on the body. The body, in turn, transmits the action to the world. In this way a new segment in reality is formed. Thus the psychophysical interface is the point through which the human spirit acts upon reality. The will is what actualizes this process. Human will is created ex nihilo, and that creation begins to transmit energies into reality itself, including its material part, by means of the psychophysical interaction.

The conclusion is that the will is the highest point in the human being, the point at which the person resembles the Creator. This is the capacity to create reality, parallel to the divine will that brought the whole of reality into being at the beginning of the world’s existence, at creation. From this follows the value-laden and spiritual importance of activating our power of choice and will, since this is the essence of who we are. It is important to note that this is not merely an enthusiastic hymn to human worth, but a claim with very important and highly controversial implications, educational and otherwise, and see more on this below.

Theoretically one could say that indeterministic actions too begin such new chains, out of nothing. If so, choice would seemingly not be exceptional. But this is a mistake, for two reasons. First, as we already noted above, we do not know of indeterministic actions in nature. Our lotteries are based on complex deterministic systems. There is no action, at least at the macroscopic plane of reality, that science today recognizes as indeterministic.

Beyond that, random creation has no value-significance. Instead of a coercive and predetermined process, there is a world no less blind, in which we are subject to the workings of blind and arbitrary forces, or absence of forces, that buffet us and the whole world without any visible reason and without warning. Thus we again see that determinism and indeterminism are two processes that apparently stand opposite one another in character, yet in many respects they are very close to one another. It is precisely choice that stands out among the three kinds of process.

Against this background, it is interesting to note that the Hebrew term commonly translated as “luck” describes two things that are seemingly opposite from end to end: on the one hand, fatalistic determination by heavenly influences independent of the human being, and on the other hand, uncontrolled randomness.²⁷ These two meanings correspond exactly to determinism and indeterminism. These two approaches, which at first glance appear as complete opposites, are both perceived as the antithesis of action under human control, what we above called the third mode of determination: choice.

In the following note we will see several Torah and legal aspects of the conception of choice as a process that creates something from nothing.

Note 4: The Problem of Retroactive Clarification: Will as the Creation of Something from Nothing

The notion of human will as creating something from nothing expresses the principle that the will is free, that is, not based on a prior cause. We will now see an interesting legal implication of this conception.

In the Talmud there is a difficult concept, very hard to understand, called retroactive clarification. Let us take an example from the laws of divorce. According to halakha (Jewish law), a woman who is divorced must receive a bill of divorce from her husband. The bill of divorce is a document that must be written for the sake of the divorcing woman, meaning that the scribe who writes it must think of and intend that particular woman.

Now the Babylonian Talmud, Gittin 25, discusses the question of a bill of divorce written for an undefined woman. The case in that discussion is a husband married to two wives, who decides to divorce one of them, but not a specifically defined one. For whom should the bill be written in such a situation? At first glance, the choice of which of the two women will be divorced is a kind of lottery. The Talmud describes a case in which the writer intends to write the bill for whichever woman will, in the future, go out the doorway first. At present, before the event, it is still unknown who that woman will be.

The Talmud makes the question of the validity of this bill depend on the general question whether or not there is retroactive clarification. “There is retroactive clarification” means that in the future, when Rachel exits first, it becomes clear retroactively that when the scribe wrote the bill, it was written for Rachel’s sake. Therefore, from the standpoint of Jewish law, the bill is considered as though it had originally been written specifically for Rachel, and it is therefore valid to divorce Rachel with it. “There is no retroactive clarification” means that, from the standpoint of Jewish law, matters cannot become clarified backward in time. Legal causality, too, points forward in time.

Nachmanides there in the discussion, and several other medieval commentators as well, notes that in the Torah there is another law, apparently entirely undisputed, namely the law of condition. A person may write a bill of divorce for the woman Rachel that will take effect on condition that she be the one who exits the doorway first. If she does not exit first, then the writing of the bill for her sake is nullified. Such a condition is effective according to all opinions. The question then arises immediately: how does the case described above involving two women, the law of retroactive clarification, differ from this case, the law of condition? Why is the concept of retroactive clarification disputed, whether it exists or does not exist, whereas the concept of condition is agreed upon? More than that: one can write a bill of divorce for each of the two women, with the condition that it take effect if that particular woman exits the doorway first. In that way the same result is achieved by slightly different means. Thus, Nachmanides asks, how can the law of retroactive clarification be disputed whereas the law of condition remains accepted and undisputed by all?

Nachmanides answers that when the condition concerns only one woman, it is a condition that works according to all opinions, but when it concerns two women, the matter depends on the dispute whether there is retroactive clarification or not. His essential intent is not entirely clear. Why should the fact that there are two women change the case? As we saw, one can write a bill conditionally for each woman separately, and the situation would be identical.

It seems that Nachmanides means to say that when one specific woman is under discussion, the question is whether one writes for her sake or not. In this case the object is designated, and the only remaining question is whether the condition attached to her will be fulfilled. That is, the act that renders the writing of the bill valid is performed now, and it is performed with respect to this woman, except that it can be nullified if the condition is not fulfilled.

By contrast, when the bill is written for one of two women, one cannot say that the act conferring the bill’s validity has already been performed now, for a bill of divorce cannot be written for two women. Therefore, in order to validate the bill in such a case, we must assume that the future designation of one of them already takes effect now, that is, retroactively, and the “for-her-sake” validity of the writing of the bill attaches to that woman already from now. At this point those who hold that there is no retroactive clarification disagree, and according to their view a future clarification cannot help designate a specific woman now, before the clarifying act, the exit through the doorway, has occurred.

The reasoning of one who holds that “there is retroactive clarification” seems at first glance very similar to the claim of the logical determinist; see the appendix to the first book. This is the type of thinker who maintains that it is already true now to say that Rachel is the one who will exit the doorway first tomorrow. That sentence is already true now, even though the act has not yet been done. As we saw there, the logical truth of a proposition does not depend on the time at which it is uttered. What changes over time is only the speaker’s knowledge of its truth. In other words, it is true that today I do not know that Rachel is the one who will exit first tomorrow, but the sentence stating “Rachel is the one who will exit first tomorrow through the doorway” is already true today, even though I obviously have no way of knowing this. It follows, then, that in principle Rachel may already today be considered designated, and therefore in principle the bill can be considered as though it were written for her sake, even though we still do not know for whom.

Accordingly it becomes clear why the law of retroactive clarification is stated only with respect to situations in which a designation is required between two objects. One can say that the truth of the designating proposition in such a situation already exists today, and this is precisely what is disputed, whether there is or is not retroactive clarification, that is, whether a designation can operate retroactively. By contrast, if what were at issue were an act that confers the bill’s validity, and not only a designation, and the act itself were to be done only in the future, then it is obvious that in order to confer the validity in the present we would have to regard the future act as though it had already been done retroactively. Such a thing is not accepted, according to Nachmanides’s view, by any tanna or amora in the Talmud.

Thus, in a situation where what is done in the future is only designation, there is no need to assume that the woman has as though already exited first today, and it is enough to say logically that already today it is true to say that the designated woman will exit first tomorrow. In such a case there is a dispute whether there is or is not retroactive clarification. But in a case where a stronger assumption is required, namely that already today it is regarded as though she actually exited first through the doorway, that is, retroactivity of the act and not merely of the designation, there is unanimous agreement that the bill of divorce is invalid.

Nachmanides, in his novellae there, offers another distinction in the laws of retroactive clarification, one that apparently does not depend on the previous distinction. He rules that if the future event is a matter of human will, whether that of the stipulator or of someone else, and not some other natural event, such as rain falling or some other natural occurrence, then even in a case in which the discussion concerns only one object, there will be a dispute whether the condition helps or not.

In light of our discussion above, the simple explanation seems to be that when one object is involved, one woman, everyone agrees that the stipulation helps because the object is already designated. But if the future event is really a matter of will, then one cannot say that the object is already designated today, because will, unlike other events, does not exist at all before it is created. That is, in order to determine the designation of an object already today, one must assume that even if the event has not yet occurred, the information exists in the world in principle, though we cannot yet access it. But when the future event is human will, even the information does not exist. Will is a beginning out of nothing, and before it occurs the information about its occurrence does not exist at all.

From this position of Nachmanides a far-reaching logical conclusion follows: the logical value of propositions that include human will does indeed depend on the time at which they are uttered. Only with respect to ordinary events can one assume that the information exists along the entire axis of time, and only we have no access to it. This is an example of a possible implication of the distinction between will, as creation out of nothing, and other events.

For a discussion of the existence of future information, see notes 28, 30, and 31 in the first book. There we saw that even the Holy One, blessed be He, cannot know information about the future if it concerns information bound up with human choice. Nachmanides’s general position in the question of retroactive clarification still requires much further clarification, and our purpose here was only to illustrate a possible legal implication of the conception of will as creation out of nothing.

Chapter 3: The Onion-Layer Model

Introduction

In this chapter we will examine a schematic model that will underlie several discussions later on. This model will sharpen chiefly the similarities and differences between thought and will. In addition, it will sharpen the essential resemblance between them, namely their being two categories that operate independently.

The Structure of Thought: The Onion-Layer Model

Let us begin with the structure of our thought. The description will be largely parallel to the description of an axiomatic system, and not by chance. But it must not be taken with the mathematical precision and sharpness of the concept “axiomatic system.” This is a schematic description of the theoretical structure of all logical thought.

Logical thought is usually based on a structure at whose foundation lie basic assumptions. These are called “axioms.” These assumptions have no logical grounding or proof, but as we saw in the first book, in chapter 3 of the eighth gate, they are not arbitrary. On the contrary, axioms are precisely those claims of which we are so convinced that we feel no need at all for proof.

The axiom of parallels in geometry, or the basic logical principles, the law of identity, the law of contradiction, and the law of excluded middle, are good examples of this conception. It is very difficult to say that the assumption that two parallel lines do not meet anywhere is arbitrary. We are convinced that it is true, and one who disputes it would be regarded as mad, and as for non-Euclidean geometries, see there in the first book.

Thus, at the base of thought stand axioms. In addition to these assumptions there are rules of thought by means of which we derive conclusions from the axioms. A logical proof means grounding the proven claim in the axioms, that is, reducing it to the axioms. Refuting some claim means finding a proof that this claim does not cohere with the axioms.

This sounds like a purely analytic description of thought. But we already noted in several places in the first book that the analytic way has an honored place even within the synthetic framework. A proof is necessarily accepted as correct even in a synthetic world; it is simply not the only and not the necessary way to reach correct conclusions.

We have already mentioned several times in the past that the differences between the analytic and synthetic pictures of thought are concentrated mainly at one point: non-sensory cognition. This is “evidence,” in Descartes’s language; “eidetic seeing,” in Husserl’s language; “auditory reasoning,” in the language of Rabbi David Cohen, the Nazir; and “the eyes of the intellect,” in Maimonides’s language. Those who hold the synthetic position are willing to adopt claims based, in their view, on direct and immediate apprehension of concepts, of principles, and also of facts. With respect to facts, those of the analytic position agree with them.

In the synthetic picture, the axioms of thought are grounded in this methodological assumption. We know them and do not merely think them, and hence the validity we ascribe to them. We believe them the way we believe anything we have seen. It is precisely here that the analyst disagrees, for the analyst takes axioms to be arbitrary and relative.

These cognitions do not necessarily appear at the beginning of the argument as the source of validity for the axioms. In practice, they can also take part in the course of the argument itself, when someone holding a synthetic position makes an inference from the axioms that is not wholly logical and analytic. For example, when a person infers that if a state is not democratic, then it does not have a proper structure. This is a logical leap, which the analyst will immediately correct, and rightly so, by saying that one must add the hidden assumption that only a democratic state has a proper structure. But there are often cases in which the hidden assumption cannot be justified, and perhaps cannot even be formulated clearly, and yet the inference from the premises seems correct to those of the synthetic position. Here they will not spell out the hidden assumption at all, but will rely on it implicitly.

These two ways in which such cognitions are integrated into thought are not essentially different from one another. They are merely two manifestations of these cognitions in study or in a real argument as it is actually conducted. In principle, one could present the sides in a systematic way, bring all these cognitions as basic assumptions, and reorganize the argument so that all these cognitions appear at the beginning of the argument as axioms.

Therefore, for the sake of simplicity, one may say that every process of inference is essentially a kind of axiomatic system. The axioms arise from cognition, not necessarily sensory cognition, and the theorems are derived from the axioms by means of the rules of logic.

The derivation is carried out by means of “rules of derivation”; see the first book, especially chapter 3 of the first gate, and also the eighth gate. These are our basic logical principles. For example, every student of geometry encounters the logical principle according to which “two magnitudes equal to a third magnitude are equal to one another.” It is not included among the axioms of geometry, even though it is used quite a bit in processes of proof. This is what is called a “rule of derivation.” It has no content of its own, and is nothing but an empty formal, that is, analytic, rule used for drawing conclusions from premises. The same is true of all the principles of deduction. Fundamentally and essentially, the rules of derivation are also claims, and in fact axioms; see on this the eighth gate of the first book. But they are formal claims, empty of specific content. This is pure analytic thought, which is also used by those of the synthetic position; see there in the first gate.

It should be noted that the process of derivation itself can be built of different stages, as we know from Euclidean geometry. There is a first layer in which the axioms are found. Above it there is a second layer, in which the initial theses derived from the axioms are found. There is a third layer in which theses appear that are derived from the axioms and from the theses of the second structure. And so on.

Such a structure can be described as a set of onion layers. The most basic layer is the axioms. These are the results of synthetic, non-sensory cognitions. From them there is derived, layer after layer, a series of theses, each built upon its predecessors.

In the next section we will describe all this from a Torah perspective and thereby better understand the difference between the analytic and the synthetic. Every reader is advised to read this section, even one who is not usually interested in Torah aspects. By contrast, the note that appears later in the chapter, after the discussion of will, is intended only for those interested in those aspects.

A Torah Perspective: Between Analyticity and Syntheticity²⁸

Above we saw two kinds of principles: axioms, which cannot be proven and emerge from direct cognitions; and theses, which are claims derived from the axioms by processes of inference and proof, that is, reduction to the axioms. Every claim of whatever kind, whether axiom or thesis, is called a “theorem.” And the totality of all these claims, that is, the whole body of knowledge, is called an “axiomatic system.”

In kabbalistic terminology, the primary propositions, namely the axioms, are called “Wisdom.” The emanation of Wisdom represents all knowledge that is known to us with certainty in a primary way and does not derive from some other, more basic knowledge. This is the most basic knowledge we possess, and its truth is not conditioned by other knowledge.

The rules of derivation bring out from the premises, whether axioms or some inner layer of the onion, the conclusions, namely theses belonging to a more external layer. These rules are called the power of “Understanding.” The sages say that “understanding” means “to understand one thing from another,” and in our case, to infer conclusions from premises. These rules give us conditioned knowledge, whose truth depends on prior knowledge. This is not basic knowledge, since it hangs upon prior knowledge. Sometimes the term “Understanding” refers to the theses themselves and not to the rules of derivation. In that case it refers not to the power of understanding, that is, the capacity for derivation, but to understanding itself, namely the theses.²⁹ Let us note that in kabbalistic language, Understanding is the power that brings Wisdom outward from potential into actuality.

As stated, the collection of theses and axioms together is called in logic “theorems.” In kabbalistic terminology this whole is called “Knowledge.” This is the totality of knowledge accumulated in our possession. The power of Knowledge includes the powers of Wisdom and Understanding together.

It is interesting in this context to consider the relation between the kabbalistic emanations of Wisdom and Understanding and what stands opposite them. It is well known that there are fifty gates of Understanding, and corresponding to them fifty gates of impurity.³⁰ The sages say, see Zohar Hadash at the beginning of Parashat Yitro, that when the children of Israel were in Egypt, the Holy One, blessed be He, took them out before the completion of the four hundred years of servitude foretold to Abraham our father, because there was concern that if He delayed, they would sink into the fiftieth gate of impurity, from which there is no return and no escape.

Rabbi Elyashiv, in his book Derushei Olam Ha-Tohu, which is the Da’ah section of Leshem Shevo Ve-Ahlamah, see there part 2, discourse 5, branch 2, section 5, elaborated on this matter and cited from the commentary of the Vilna Gaon on Proverbs 16:4 that there is no fiftieth gate at all among the gates of impurity, but only forty-nine gates of impurity. These words of the Vilna Gaon are difficult in several respects:

1. The author of Leshem Shevo Ve-Ahlamah wonders about the Vilna Gaon: according to his words, how are we to understand what appears in the above midrash (rabbinic homiletical teaching), that the children of Israel in Egypt stood on the verge of sinking into the fiftieth gate of impurity? According to his view there is no such gate at all.
2. Beyond that, one may also ask why the counterpart of the gates of Understanding should be the gates of impurity specifically, rather than, for example, “gates of foolishness.” At first glance, impurity is not the natural opposite of understanding.
3. Further, we generally assume that the two opposing sides, good and evil, stand exactly parallel to one another. But here we find that the gates of Understanding are fifty, whereas the gates of impurity are forty-nine.

In order to understand all this, let us reflect a little on the concept “gate.” A gate is something through which one passes, for example from room to room. By contrast, a “room” is a place in which we simply find ourselves. According to what we saw above, the gates of Understanding are the modes by which one infers one thing from another, meaning not to know something concrete but to understand how a conclusion is derived from a premise. In other words, Understanding signifies analytic thought: to understand one thing from another, or to infer, to derive, a conclusion from a premise. Therefore this mode of thought is symbolized by the metaphor of “gates.” As stated, gates serve for passage from room to room.

As we have already seen, unconditioned thought, which is parallel to being within a room and not to passing through gates between rooms, is symbolized by the emanation of Wisdom. Therefore the symbol of Wisdom is a room and not a gate: “The king has brought me into his chambers.”³¹

The purpose of passing through gates is to arrive somewhere. The purpose of all the passages through these gates of Understanding is ultimately to arrive at the “room” in which Wisdom is found. Just as every passage must lead to some place that is its goal, so every process of Understanding must end in a room, which is the dwelling place of Wisdom.

The onion-layer model that we described above is precisely a chain of gates connecting rooms. Let us describe it from the outside inward. There is the “street,” from which one enters the elongated palace. The first gate leads us to the first room. This means that the rules of Understanding of the outermost layer lead us from the outer layer to the next-to-last layer of the onion. From there there is another gate leading us to a more inner room. Again, this is a movement of Understanding, namely logical rules of derivation, that takes us to a more inner layer of theses.

In fact, we are looking at a chain of forty-nine gates, and between them various rooms. The question is: what stands at the end of the whole process, at the end of the chain, after the last gate? One can formulate the question mathematically: forty-nine gates are given. Each gate leads from one room to another. How many rooms are there in the chain?

To this question, which in mathematical terms is really a boundary-condition problem, there are only two possible answers:

1. The linear solution: at the end of the process there is a room, the fiftieth room, from which there is no further gate onward. In our terminology, we have reached “Wisdom.” This is the layer of unconditioned knowledge, from which everything emerges.³²
2. The circular solution: the last gate indeed leads to a room, room number forty-nine, and that room, surprisingly, also has a gate. But how can this be, since we have already counted forty-nine gates? The only way out is that we have returned to the first room, and from there again to the first gate. According to the picture offered by this possibility, the chain is circular, and at its end we find ourselves back at the point of departure.

These are the only two ways to conclude the process, and mathematically there is no and cannot be a third possibility. As we will now explain, the choice between these two possibilities is precisely the choice whether to adhere to an analytic position or a synthetic position.

The gates lead us from room to room. These are the rules of inference, or derivation, which lead us from one proposition to another. The analytic conception holds that only the rules of inference have the status of truth, but the axioms, and therefore also the conclusions derived from them, are arbitrary. We have already noted that a process of analytic derivation cannot lead us to any real knowledge unless it rests upon certain primary principles, namely Wisdom. If the axioms are arbitrary, then all the knowledge built upon them is also meaningless, and all the theorems are arbitrary and relative. For example, if the axioms of geometry are arbitrary, then the proposition that in every triangle the sum of the angles is 180 degrees does not make a claim about concrete triangles in the world, but only a claim of implication: if we assume such-and-such assumptions, then the conclusion we will have to adopt is that the sum of the angles in a triangle is 180 degrees. But after the entire process we still cannot truly say what the sum of the angles is in any actual triangle, see on this the first gate of the first book, and the second gate, chapter 5, of the second book. That depends on whether our axioms are true.

That is to say: the conception according to which at the base of the chain of Understanding, that is, the rules of derivation, there stands no unconditioned truth empties the whole chain of significance. For it is the Wisdom that stands at the basis of Understanding that gives it all its meaning.

By contrast, according to the synthetic position there is a room without a gate at the basis of this structure. The basic assumptions are true, even though we have no reasons for them. They are not derived from any other “room,” and no “gate” leads to them. Therefore the faculty called “Understanding,” which serves us in deriving various conclusions from those basic assumptions, does lead us to the acquisition of knowledge. In the synthetic picture, knowledge is not merely conditioned; it accumulates. This is the linear solution, solution 1 above. But a conception of Understanding without the layer of Wisdom at the end of the chain, the circular solution, number 2, is merely grinding water, or an intellectual game. It is a circular process of moving from premises to conclusions, but the results of the process have no meaning, at least not in the sense of accumulated knowledge.

In light of what has been said here, we can understand all the difficulties raised at the beginning of this section. If there are gates of Understanding without a root of Wisdom at their foundation, they lead nowhere, or in other words, they lead to destruction. These are precisely the gates of impurity into which the people of Israel were about to sink, with no ability to emerge, had the Holy One, blessed be He, not taken us out of Egypt, metaphorical Egypt and not necessarily the historical one.

An analytic conception is a kind of black hole. By nature one cannot escape it at all. The reason is that every change of position is based on some assumptions. Those assumptions are a solid fulcrum on which we can lean in order to alter our state. If nothing is solid, there is nothing to lean on. The matter resembles Baron Munchausen, who pulled himself out of the pit and ran home to bring a ladder in order to rescue himself from the pit. The expected sinking of Israel in Egypt, without any ability to escape, would indeed have been expected had they sunk entirely into the analytic picture of Understanding without Wisdom.

According to the Vilna Gaon, there are indeed only forty-nine gates of impurity, and sinking into the fiftieth gate means sinking into a vacuum from which escape is impossible. The fiftieth gate does not exist in analytic Egypt, but in practice it certainly does exist. The fiftieth gate of impurity is the conception according to which there is no fiftieth gate or room at all. Sinking into such a conception prevents the possibility of escaping the analytic circle. This is the explanation of difficulty number 1 above.

According to our account, the gates of impurity are not gates different from the gates of Understanding. It is the lack of belief in the existence of a room within all these gates, that is, the adoption of the circular solution to the mathematical problem, that turns those very same gates from gates of Understanding into gates of impurity. The room within the structure is what gives the whole its meaning, or its lack of meaning.

Thus the two structures really do stand exactly parallel to one another. Forty-nine gates of Understanding and forty-nine gates of impurity are the very same gates. The difference lies in the room and not in the gates. One’s relation to the room determines the meaning of the whole structure. This is the explanation of difficulty number 3 above.

Accordingly, it is clear that the fiftieth gate of Understanding is not really a gate at all, but a room. The most basic layer of theorems is essentially different from the rest of the theorems. The axiom is acquired by direct, non-sensory cognition, not by proof and reasoning, in contrast to theses, which are acquired by proofs from the axioms, that is, by derivation of Understanding from Wisdom. And indeed, Nachmanides, in the introduction to his commentary on Genesis, writes as follows:

Our sages have already said that fifty gates of Understanding were created in the world, and all were given to Moses except one, as it is said, “You have made him little less than divine.” … Their number was received by the sages through tradition: fifty, lacking one. It is possible that this gate consists in knowledge of the Creator, exalted be He, which was not given to a created being. And do not be troubled by their saying “were created in the world,” for they speak generally; that one gate was not created…

Thus, when Nachmanides presents the analogy between the gates of Understanding and the gates of impurity, he too distinguishes between the pictures in terms of their relation to the fiftieth gate. Our proposal above is a possible explanation of his words.

It remains for us to explain the term “impurity” as the opposite of Understanding. In Jewish law, impurity is an expression of death. A corpse is the ultimate source of impurity. A leper, who is also impure, is considered like a dead person. A woman after childbirth becomes impure because the life that was in her has departed from her. Impurity is absence of life, or death.

In a broader sense, impurity is something cut off from its root. It has no connection to that which gives it life. Therefore, the structure set over against the gates of Understanding is the gates of impurity. The analytic conception, according to which the whole chain of gates and rooms has no root that animates it, meaning that in its interior there is no room, is the disconnection of the structure from its root. Thought without a root of certainty and truth to animate it is a dead thing. It is impurity. Thus, the opposite of the gates of Understanding is precisely the gates of impurity. And with this the explanation of difficulty number 2 above is complete.

Analyticity is a blindfold disguised as an alternative to syntheticity. In truth it is an empty and meaningless structure. We have already seen many times over the course of the three books how bizarre and esoteric it is. It is not a genuine alternative, even if at times it appears wise and intelligent. Some would say: a wagon full of “alternative cargo.”

Impurity, like analyticity, has no solid foundation. Impurity is an illusion of life. An impure person appears to be alive, but in fact something within him has died. The analytic outlook is likewise an illusion of vitality, of an alternative truth. But because it does not end in a “room” at its far end, it presents no genuine alternative. Analytic postmodernism sometimes looks real, even wise. So too it appears as though there are alternative analytic values—equality, democracy, justice (see the sixth gate of the first book). Some have even turned analyticity itself into a value—tolerance in place of openness (see there, in the fourth gate). But in the end all of this turns out to be a collection of illusions. Mere illusion.

If so, the analytic outlook itself is the forty-nine gates of impurity. It is an outlook according to which there is no truth in the world at all, and each person may go with his own truth. Hence it is the evil at the root of all the other evils. Nothing is worse than this (see, for example, the two quotations in the first book, fourth gate, chapter 3).

We should note that even in the Passover Haggadah, the opposite of the wise son is not the foolish son, but the wicked son. Wickedness too is severance from the source of vitality and certainty, namely God. An analytic approach that comes without a synthetic root of certainty is wickedness, or impurity, because it has no root at all and is nothing but illusion. The opposite of wisdom is not foolishness but wickedness, or impurity. Foolishness does not pretend to be a true antithesis to wisdom, and therefore it is not what stands opposite it and fights against it.

This illusion itself is precisely the descent into the fiftieth, fictional gate. It is a descent into the view that the fiftieth gate is a gate and not a room. As we have seen, this is the root of all evil, and there is no way out of it. The fear that Israel would not leave Egypt in time and would sink into the fiftieth gate of impurity was a fear of annihilation. Once one has completed the first forty-nine gates of impurity and then thinks, mistakenly, that there is a fiftieth, the illusion has taken complete possession of that person, and he is lost. This is only an imaginary gate; the Vilna Gaon says the same in his commentary to the verse mentioned above in Proverbs. One who believes in analyticity as a genuine truth has almost no chance of being led to true beliefs. He does not believe at all in their existence. A considerable portion of our world is sunk in this metaphorical Egypt. In the next gate we shall see how, if at all, one can emerge from such a black hole.

Perhaps the analyticity that reigns today in our world may be compared to a highly impressive museum of effects and tricks, full of technological and other devices, all of it designed to present a single picture. When one enters deeper and deeper, gate within gate, until the innermost place in the museum, one discovers that this picture is a fata morgana. In that case, the entire museum, with all its accessories and mechanisms, “disappears” immediately. It ceases to be a museum and becomes a collection of props. Once one touches the fata morgana and realizes that it is only an illusion, the whole picture vanishes at once. It is the inner picture that gives the whole structure its meaning. When it does not exist, the whole structure loses its meaning.

These outer wrappings are precisely the onion skins described above. There is a hard core called “wisdom.” Around it are layers of understanding, rooms with gates between them. Every such layer is like an onion skin. If so, onion skins that do not wrap around a certain and firm layer are nothing but one great illusion, like mathematics as a tool of certainty, and like democracy and equality as alternative values.

The analytic onion is no less impressive than its synthetic brother, but inside it there is nothing but emptiness. Whoever reaches the inside will simply disappear. This is the Nietzschean prediction (see the first book, at the end of chapter 1 of the third gate) being fulfilled before our eyes. Nietzsche foresaw the end of false modernism, and the fact that it would lead to postmodernism, and in the end destroy human society in its present form.

The Onion of the Will: What Values Are

Up to this point we have dealt with the structure of thought, that is, the intellect. We saw that the intellect is built like an onion, whose layers wrap around one another around a core of unconditional certainty. We shall now see that the world of values and desires is also built like an onion. Here too we shall encounter the same parallel pictures: synthetic as against analytic.

In the first book (see chapter 2 of the fifth gate) we discussed the definition of the concept of a “value.” Let us briefly return to the essentials. Values are our most basic ideal aims. They are what we use in morally justifying our actions and our views. Whenever there is a justification for some view or action, that itself is proof that it does not reflect a value. A value is that fundamental thing that cannot itself be justified, but rather serves as the justification for every norm, or for every normative action.

Thus values are the axioms of the will. These are not axioms in the ordinary sense of the term, since they are not ordinary determinations of truth and falsehood, regardless of whether these are objective or relative determinations (see the fourth gate), but determinations of good and evil. Yet their status with respect to desires and actions parallels the status of axioms with respect to theses.

Thus desire, like thought, is also built in the form of an onion. There is a basic layer of unconditional good, and this is our system of values. From it one can derive various norms and value-laden actions by means of rules of derivation, much as understanding functions in thought. This process creates the second onion skin of the will. From these norms one can continue to derive additional norms, and create further onion skins. This is the fundamental structure of the onion of will.

According to the picture described here, one may formulate the following claim: a person acts according to the outer shell of his will, but when he later “peels” that shell, there are times when a more inner shell is revealed to him, from which it is clear that he did not truly want the act he performed, since it was not derived from his inner values. This state is described in Maimonides’ famous words (Mishneh Torah, Laws of Divorce 2:20):³³

If the law requires that a man be compelled to divorce his wife, and he does not wish to divorce her, a Jewish court, in every place and at every time, beats him until he says, “I want to,” and writes the bill of divorce; and it is a valid bill of divorce. So too, if gentiles beat him and say to him, “Do what the Jews tell you,” and the Jews pressured him through the gentiles until he divorced, it is valid. But if the gentiles on their own coerced him until he wrote it, then although the law requires that he write it, this is a disqualified bill of divorce [that is, disqualified by rabbinic law, though not null by Torah law]. Why is this bill of divorce not null, seeing that he was coerced, whether by gentiles or by Jews? Because one is called coerced only if one is pressured and constrained to do something that the Torah does not obligate him to do—for example, someone who was beaten until he sold something or gave a gift. But one whose evil inclination has overpowered him to cancel a commandment or commit a transgression, and who is beaten until he does what he is obligated to do, or until he distances himself from what he is forbidden to do, is not considered coerced; rather, he coerced himself by his evil mind. Therefore, in the case of one who does not wish to divorce: since he wants to be among Israel, he wants to fulfill all the commandments and keep away from transgressions, but his inclination has overpowered him. Once he is beaten until his inclination weakens and he says, “I want to,” he has divorced willingly.

We should recall that a parallel structure is also found in the aesthetic context. There is an intellectual dimension that discloses the criteria of beauty and aesthetics, and afterward comes the act of aesthetic judgment, which selects and sorts the beautiful and the unbeautiful. According to Maimonides here, the “evil inclination” is the factor that misleads a person into thinking, with regard to an act located on the outer shell of the onion, that it is his true will. When a person is beaten in order to peel that shell away from him, this should not be regarded as coercing an unwanted action, but rather as exposing his true will. For understanding how the inclination functions, see below in the discussion of “weakness of will.” For a clear and non-“mystical” understanding of these words of Maimonides, see below in the second Hasidic intermezzo, after the third gate.

An important clarification is required here. The structure described here is not a scale of values. A scale of values means an internal hierarchy among each person’s basic values (see chapters 1 and 2 of the ninth gate in the first book, and below in the fourth gate). The scale is needed in order to decide how to act in the event of a clash between different values.

When a particular value that belongs to layer 3 is derived from two values that belong to layer 2, this does not mean it is less important. On the contrary, it is probably an expression of those values, since it can be derived from them. An act that realizes the derived value will also implicitly realize both of them. Therefore its importance stands at the same level as that enjoyed by its “logical parents.”

When we speak of a scale of values, we mean a hierarchy among the basic norms, those that may be called values. All the rest stand in a logical relation to them. Within the basic values there are more important and less important ones, and the scale determines their hierarchy. This entire scale is the basic layer, or solid core—parallel to “wisdom” in the onion of the intellect—of the onion of will. From it one can derive secondary values, parallel to “theses” or “understanding” in the intellectual onion. Their importance is not determined by the number of the layer on which they stand in the onion of will. It is determined by the question on which rungs of the fundamental scale, within the core, stand the basic values from which they are derived.

The fact that this is a hierarchy among basic values and not derived ones is what creates the problem of constructing a scale of values, that is, the incommensurability of values. See the ninth gate of the first book, and below in the third gate.

Let us now return to the main line of the discussion. The line of argument presented above regarding the onion of thought—the chain of rooms and gates, with its two possible meanings, analytic and synthetic—applies in parallel fashion to the onion of will. Here too analyticity will maintain that the basic values have no meaning, and are arbitrary. Consequently, the entire structure of the onion of will has no meaning. There are no binding values whatsoever. This is an onion with no solid core inside it, and therefore it lacks all meaning and validity. By contrast, syntheticity will present here too a position that sees values, the basic layer of the onion of will, as valid and binding norms. At this point we arrive at the question of moral relativism, and at the question of the realism, or objectivity, of moral principles and values.

As stated, the synthetic position here parallels the one we encountered with respect to the onion of thought. There is a valid and binding layer of values. The justification of this position, and its meaning, will be discussed below in the third gate. Here we shall continue the description on the basis of that assumption.

As we saw in the sixth gate of the first book, values in an analytic society are means to other things. In the analytic picture there are no norms whose validity is unconditional. Therefore, in practice, the analytic picture contains no values that belong to the solid core of the onion. What we find there are relative and arbitrary determinations, just as in the core of the onion of thought.

We saw there that different movements whose aim is to attain something will disintegrate on their own once they succeed in attaining it. They also generally cannot justify and persuade others of the importance of that thing, and therefore they focus on the struggle to attain it. Once it is attained, the goal evaporates. For example, Zionism was founded in order to establish a state, and once it succeeded in doing so, it seems to be disintegrating on its own, at least its secular part. Now post-Zionism arises (see the third gate of the second book), along with demands for a change of identity, “a state of all its citizens,” and the like.

This process is symptomatic of an analytic world. When one arrives at the value itself, disintegration begins immediately. This is a mode of action concentrated on passing through gates, from room to room, and fearful of arriving at the goal. When one reaches the inner room, one sees that in fact one has returned to the starting point, that is, to the first room. This is the circular picture of the chain gate-room-gate.

As we saw with respect to the onion of thought, analytic culture is an impressive structure built on a vacuum, and once that is exposed, everything may collapse with a tremendous crash, just as all the great empires collapsed through internal disintegration after reaching their goals. As an experiment, the reader may try to imagine what all the members of the liberal-humanistic movements will do when complete equality and perfect freedom prevail throughout the world. These are the “analytic values” (see the sixth gate of the first book).³³ It seems that a dangerous value-vacuum will arise, one that will once again produce fascism and various ideological movements that will come to fill that void. There is no doubt that in such a situation many people will wish to end their lives.

Thus, at the end of the route, we again arrive—more forcefully than before—at the empty wagon, that is, the emptiness of the analytic, with which in fact we began the discussion. The analytic is an empty onion, whose every layer is only the illusion of an alternative to synthetic certainty in its various forms: religious, right-wing, and modernist—the genuine modernism, not the counterfeit one.

The connection made here between analyticity and evil and impurity sounds alarming at first glance. There is no doubt that this is not evil in its ordinary sense. Analytic movements were generally founded in order to attain important moral values, such as equality, liberty, and individual and civil rights. The people who founded them, and those who took part in their activity, are generally good and moral people. Usually, their errors lie mainly at the philosophical level, but this also has long-term effects on actual conduct.³⁴

The following excursus will illustrate more sharply the interpretation proposed in the body of the chapter, and will explain, in Torah terms, what “evil” is, and what the connection is between analyticity and evil and impurity. As with the other excursuses, this one too may be skipped, or its halakhic details ignored.

Excursus 5: The Secret of Azazel: The Two Goats of Yom Kippur

The Torah, in the portion of Aharei Mot (Leviticus 16:7-10), commands that two goats be taken, one of which is offered to the Lord and one of which is sent to Azazel. The decision which goes where is determined by lot. Ibn Ezra, in his commentary there, writes as follows:

Rav Shmuel said: “Although it is written of the sin-offering goat that it is for the Lord, the goat that is sent away is also for the Lord.” This is unnecessary, for the sent goat is not a sacrifice, since it is not slaughtered. If you can understand the secret that lies behind the word Azazel, you will know its secret and the secret of its name, for it has companions in Scripture. I shall reveal a little of the secret to you by hint; when you are thirty-three, you will know it.

Ibn Ezra comments on Rav Shmuel’s view that the goat for Azazel is not a real sacrifice, since it is not slaughtered like its companion. He also adds that there is a secret here, and hints at it obscurely. Nahmanides, in his commentary there, writes as follows:

Rabbi Abraham is “faithful in spirit and conceals a matter,” but I, the talebearer, reveal his secret, for our sages have already revealed it in many places… And this is explicit in Pirkei de-Rabbi Eliezer: “Therefore they would give Samael [that is, Satan] a bribe on Yom Kippur, so that he would not prevent their sacrifice, as it is said: one lot for the Lord and one lot for Azazel. The lot of the Holy One, blessed be He, is for a burnt offering, and the lot of Azazel is the sin-offering goat, and all the sins of Israel are upon it…” Thus he informed us of his name and his action, and this is the secret of the matter: those who worshipped other divine powers, namely the angels, would offer them sacrifices, and these were to them a pleasing aroma… The Torah absolutely forbade accepting their divinity and performing any worship for them. But the Holy One commanded that on Yom Kippur a goat be sent into the wilderness to the prince who rules over desolate places, and it is fitting for him, because he is its master, and from the emanation of his power come drought and desolation, for he presides over the stars of sword and blood, wars and quarrels, wounds and blows, division and destruction… The intention with the goat that is sent away is not, Heaven forbid, that it should be an offering from us to him, but rather that our intention should be to do the will of our Creator, who commanded us thus… And this is the reason for the lots, for had the priest consecrated them verbally to the Lord and to Azazel, it would have been as though he were worshipping him and vowing in his name. Instead, he sets them before the Lord at the entrance to the Tent of Meeting, for both are a gift to the Lord… Rabbi Abraham hinted to you that you would know its secret when you reached the verse, “They shall no longer slaughter their sacrifices to the goat-demons” [this verse appears thirty-three verses later, as Ibn Ezra hinted]… And I cannot explain it, for then we would have to stop the mouths of those who philosophize about nature and are drawn after the Greek [that is, Aristotle], who denied everything except what is perceptible to him, and arrogantly thought—he and his wicked disciples—that any matter his reasoning did not reach is not true.

I do not wish to enter into all the details of Nahmanides’ explanation, but only into several points that are important for our purposes. Nahmanides proposes an interpretation of Ibn Ezra’s secret, according to which the goat for Azazel is sent into the wilderness, to the demons and the powers of desolation and ruin. This is not a true sacrifice, but the fulfillment of God’s command that we send the goat to them. As Nahmanides adds, this explanation is meant to silence Aristotle and his wicked disciples, who believe only what they have sensed or understood with their intellect. This is, of course, precisely the definition given in our trilogy to the analytic position: certainty is acquired only through the senses or through rational proof. Opposed to it stands the synthetic alternative, which is prepared to accept other things as valid as well.

In the third gate of the first book we quoted the end of these words of Nahmanides. There we saw that the historical source of the analytic approach lies in Greece, and especially in Aristotle. To understand how all this is connected to the goat for Azazel, let us briefly follow several details of the laws that accompany the goat along its route, and observe the surprising end of that halakhic path.

The Babylonian Talmud, Yoma 62, states that one who slaughtered either of these two goats outside the proper place of sacrifice, before it was determined by lot which would go where, violated the prohibition of slaughtering sacrifices outside the Temple. As is clear to anyone with even slight familiarity with the relevant halakha (Jewish law), it follows that at this initial stage both goats possess sacrificial sanctity. That means they may not be eaten, used, or benefited from, like any other sacrifice.

The next stage in the path of the two goats is the drawing of lots. When the lots are drawn, the author of Gevurat Ari (Yoma 39, on the passage beginning “and the deputy”) writes that over the goat that goes to the Lord one says the words “for the Lord, a sin offering,” whereas over the one for Azazel one says nothing. It becomes identified on its own. Rashi there, however, wrote that both lots must be brought up, because this is not mere clarification but part of the sacrificial rite itself. According to Rashi, then, the goat for Azazel is still considered a sacrifice.

After the lot comes the stage of tying a scarlet thread to the horns of the goat for Azazel. The commentators asked how this could be permitted, since it involves making use of a sacrificial animal, which is forbidden.³⁵ In any event, for our purposes, the very fact that this question is asked shows that in their view this goat still possesses sacrificial sanctity, and in principle it is forbidden to use it.

After the lot comes the laying on of hands. The priest must lay his hand on the goat’s head. In Mikdash David (Laws of the Yom Kippur Service, no. 6), evidence is brought that this laying on of hands is of the same type required for all sacrifices. At this stage the goat for Azazel is still considered a sacrifice.

After that comes the stage of confession over the goat that goes to Azazel. In Rabbi Hayyim of Brisk’s novellae on the Talmud, in the stencil edition, in the section “On the Scarlet Thread,” he wrote that from this point on this goat no longer possesses sacrificial sanctity.³⁶ See, however, Mikdash David there, who showed that there is a dispute among the early authorities whether this confession belongs to the laws of repentance that the priest performs over the goat, or to the laws governing all sacrifices, which require confession. The root of that dispute too lies in the question whether at this stage the goat still possesses sacrificial sanctity, or whether it is no longer a sacrifice.

The next stage is the dispatch of the goat to the cliff. At this stage the goat is sent into the wilderness in the hands of an “appointed man,” that is, any person, not necessarily a priest. Several commentators wrote that at this point the goat is already no longer a sacrifice, and therefore the dispatch is not considered use of a sacrificial animal.³⁷

At the end of the route, the goat is pushed from the top of the high cliff, the Azazel, down below. This pushing is not indispensable to the commandment of the goat. That is, it is not part of the commandment of sending it away, and therefore even if the pushing was not done at all, the commandment of dispatch was nonetheless fulfilled.³⁸

After the push from the cliff, the limbs of the goat, which generally shatter, may be used for benefit (see Yoma 67). That is, all its sanctity, if it had such sanctity, has flown away, for with an ordinary sacrifice it is forbidden to derive benefit even after its death.

In the novellae of the Griz, Rabbi Yitzhak Ze’ev Soloveitchik, on Yoma 61, on the passage beginning “and behold,” it is proven that if the goat remains alive after the push, it is even permitted to slaughter it and eat it. Other commentators wrote similarly, and some even permitted eating it without slaughter at all if it had been pushed from the cliff, because its commandment had already been fulfilled and the pushing is like slaughter.³⁹

At this point nothing remains of the sacrificial sanctity that the goat had earlier. As noted, it is even permitted to eat it. It has returned to being an ordinary animal, as if the whole dramatic process we have described had never happened to it. All of this was as though it had never been. It returns to the starting point at which it stood before the lot and before the consecration. It is like Alice in Wonderland, who wakes up and discovers that all the fantastic events she went through were only a dream.

To summarize: at the beginning the two goats are two ordinary, simple animals. At the first stage they are consecrated with sacrificial sanctity. This sanctity remains in the goat for the Lord until its end, that is, until it is offered as a sacrifice. In contrast, in the goat for Azazel the sanctity remains through the stages of tying the thread, laying on of hands, and confession. At the stage of dispatch, some commentators already begin to hold that there is no sacrificial sanctity. At the stage of the push, everyone—perhaps except Rabbenu Tam—holds that there is no sacrifice here at all. From the perspective of sacrificial law, it is not even necessary in the first instance to perform the push. And finally, the commentators wrote that it is permitted to eat the goat, whether by slaughtering it if it remained alive, or even without slaughter at all. The appointed man could simply go down, slaughter the goat—even instead of pushing it from the cliff—and eat it.

Anyone with even a little familiarity with halakha sees that this is a very strange process. The goat for Azazel, which all along was holy and considered a sacrifice—its final stage being a matter of dispute, as we saw—suddenly becomes ordinary, just as it was initially, before the whole process began. Usually halakha establishes that the inherent sanctity of an object does not simply lapse on its own (see Babylonian Talmud, Nedarim 29). Sanctity that inheres in the body of the thing cannot simply evaporate or disappear. It is a reality that cannot just be altered. Only if some act is done is it possible for the sanctity to lapse, if at all. If so, it requires explanation: how does the sanctity of the goat for Azazel simply fly away on its own?

It seems that the explanation for this strange phenomenon lies on the conceptual level of the portion of the two goats. On Yom Kippur the two goats are meant to go to the end of the furthest possible route, in opposite directions. One enters to the place to which no one enters at any other time of year except Yom Kippur, the holiest place of all, the Holy of Holies. The other is meant to go to the end on the opposite side. It is dedicated to Satan and sent to him. This is the extreme side of evil and impurity.

But as we saw above in this chapter, going all the way in the direction of evil leads to a vacuum. Here we take one further step along that route: it turns out that evil does not really exist at all. There is no inner root to evil—there is no fiftieth gate, that is, no inner “room,” on the side of the gates of impurity. Evil is only the absence of good. As we saw, the belief that reality, values, and desires have no root is itself the evil.

Some Jewish thinkers formulate this differently. See, for example, Maimonides, Guide of the Perplexed III:10. Everything issues from God, and therefore true reality can only be something good whose root is in God. All the other figures in the system are nothing but illusion, without any genuine root in reality. These are gates of understanding with no inner room. There is not, and cannot be, a Holy of Holies on the other side. The forty-nine gates of impurity are onion skins with no inner core.

But if the entire problem of evil is based on the illusion that one can build an entire structure out of sheer nothingness, as though this were an alternative to real structures, then its solution is likewise simple: expose the fraud. We must uncover the illusory character of this conception. There is no need to destroy evil. The moment we truly try to touch it and expose its inner root, it simply disappears on its own, like a fata morgana.

That is exactly what we discover when we accompany the goat to Azazel. It begins as a simple ordinary goat. Then it is consecrated as a sacrifice to evil, and indeed enters “within the innermost” of evil, into the wilderness, the place of the destructive powers, in Nahmanides’ language that we cited. What it discovers there is precisely that everything is illusion, there is nothing there, and the whole road and route it has traveled until now dissolve on their own. It has reached the root of evil and discovered that there is no such thing. It finds itself standing at the starting point. Once again this is just an ordinary goat, exactly as it was at the beginning of the process. The whole process has left no mark on it. As stated, there is no fiftieth gate on the side of the gates of impurity. If we try to go all the way in, we discover the vacuum.

Throughout the first book we saw that postmodernism extracts the “hard core” from skepticism. It tries to create, ex nihilo, a substitute concept for truth in its classical sense. Its failure will bring down the whole analytic structure that developed from ancient Greece to our own day, with a still, small voice.

In the section of the two goats we see, from the halakhic perspective, the parallel relation between analyticity and evil and impurity. The root of evil is belief in a fictitious reality, and seeing illusions as a pseudo-certainty, as a substitute for true certainty. Evil itself is a fictitious reality without a root. It has no substance as an alternative. The only possible alternative is to live within illusions.

There is also an encouraging aspect to this. The war against evil of this kind is waged through books and ideas, whose purpose is to dissipate the analytic-postmodern illusion. There is neither need nor justification for a crushing and destructive war of annihilation. Once the clarification has been carried out, it will become clear to all that there is no one there to fight.

In the first book we noted in several places that even one who declares himself an analytic thinker is not really such a person. In fact, it seems that there is almost no true analytic thinker. Complete skepticism is an intellectual fiction that does not exist in reality. The very thought that can delude someone into imagining that he is an analytic thinker, and can repress the faculty called faith—both on the religious plane and on the philosophical plane—that itself is the evil.

Let us add yet another angle. According to the Torah’s outlook, the only entity with no real root in the world is Amalek. Therefore it is said of him, “and his end shall be utter destruction” (Numbers 24:20), meaning that in the future nothing at all will remain of him. Therefore the Torah commands that he be destroyed, because he is a real analytic thinker, not an imaginary one like those we generally know. The defining trait of Amalek, according to many commentators, is doubt. See, for example, throughout Rabbi Yitzhak Hutner’s Pahad Yitzhak on Purim. This is the well-known aphorism that “Amalek” has the same numerical value as “doubt.” In several places Amalek appears as one who believes in chance, see Deuteronomy 25:18, “who happened upon you on the way,” and not in a world guided by intention.

In Shemot Rabbah 27:5 there is a homily on the verse in Proverbs 19:25, “Strike a scoffer and the simple will become clever”: “Strike a scoffer”—this is Amalek; “and the simple will become clever”—this is Jethro. Rabbi Yitzhak Hutner, at the beginning of his Pahad Yitzhak on Purim, elaborates at length on the description of Amalek as a scoffer. For a fuller treatment the reader is referred there. Here I wish to explain only one aspect of scoffing relevant to our discussion.

Doubt is the foundation of scoffing. At the beginning of the portion of Toldot, the Torah writes: “These are the generations of Isaac son of Abraham—Abraham fathered Isaac.” Rashi, following the midrash, explains the repetition as follows:

Because the scoffers of the generation were saying that Sarah had conceived from Abimelech, since she had lived with Abraham many years and had not conceived from him. What did the Holy One, blessed be He, do? He formed Isaac’s facial features to resemble Abraham’s, and everyone testified: Abraham fathered Isaac.

The scoffer casts doubt on anything for which there is no proof. Since it is not known with certainty who the father of a newborn child is, one can cast doubt and say that Sarah conceived from Abimelech. It should be noted that, for those scoffers, the claim that the pregnancy was from Abimelech is itself not in doubt. In the terms of the first book, this is the phenomenon of Bokononism: the alternative idol, though born from casting doubt on everything, is itself accepted with absolute certainty.

We see a similar attitude in the Talmud. In the Babylonian Talmud, Shabbat 30, the fool is described as someone to whom one may not answer according to his folly:

There was a certain man who came before Rabbi Judah the Prince and said to him, “Your wife is my wife, and your children are my children.” He said to him, “Would you like to drink a cup of wine?” He drank, and his belly burst.

There was another similar case: a certain man came before Rabbi Hiyya and said to him, “Your mother is my wife, and you are my son.” He said to him, “Would you like to drink a cup of wine?” He drank, and his belly burst.

In both cases a man came and challenged the legitimacy of a respectable woman with a baseless claim. Since there is no proof either way, one can say anything. There is no point in opening an argument with such a person. One must brush him off with something trivial, here by offering him a cup of wine, and he collapses on his own. He is an inflated balloon, and the prick of a pin lets all the air out.

Rabbi Kook, in his book on Talmudic aggadah, Ein Ayah (sections 106-107), explains these episodes at length along these lines. He goes on to argue that a man’s trust in his wife and in the pedigree of his children is not based on rational proofs—what in halakha is called the presumption that the majority of sexual relations are with the husband—but on a simple, natural intuition of common sense. Doubt is the scoffing or foolishness that opposes that common sense and looks for proofs. This is a position that believes no fact without proof. In our terminology this is exactly the analytic position.⁴⁰ Usually skepticism is directed against various certainties and mocks them. The skeptical question, “How do you know?” expresses ridicule and scoffing.

This can be seen in another way at the beginning of Rabbi Yitzhak Hutner’s aforementioned work, where he explains that the essence of scoffing is lowering something from its importance. When the thing does not deserve importance, scoffing is a justified tool—”All scoffing is forbidden except scoffing at idolatry.” But when scoffing is directed at something whose importance is real, it serves as a weapon in the hands of doubt. Instead of substantive discussion, one reaches for the weapon of ridicule, which is very difficult to answer and to defend against.

The Amalekite posture, or scoffing, is pure analyticity, which thinks that each person has his own truth. Within it there is no room for development and open dialogue, nor for genuine tolerance. Therefore, to a challenge of this kind, according to the above passage in Shabbat, one does not answer at all. True analyticity, not the illusory kind, also has no root and no justification for its existence. Therefore, “his end shall be utter destruction.”

Our conclusion is that real evil, like real analyticity, does not exist at all. If such a thing did exist, we would arrive at the common idolatrous, non-monotheistic conception of two powers ruling the world, the good one and the evil one, instead of the one God. It cannot be that both powers have a true, unconditional root, for that would be dualism. The belief in divine unity teaches us that there is one root for everything, and therefore evil has no true root. It is an illusion that does not really exist. This is a two-way equation: evil is illusion, and illusion is evil.

As we saw, according to some commentators, at the stage of the lot the goat for Azazel needs no definition of its own. It is defined by being the opposite of the inner goat, the one for the Lord. Evil is not an essence in itself; it is the opposite, or absence, of good. When one wonders what its own essence is, one arrives, as stated, at emptiness. It may be that even Rashi, who requires a separate definition for the goat for Azazel, thinks so, but holds that during the journey to the wilderness we are commanded to treat the goat as though it had real substance, and as though it too were a sacrifice. The great revelation comes only at the end of the journey.

Nahmanides explains that, thirty-three verses later, there appears the verse, “They shall no longer slaughter their sacrifices to the goat-demons.” Once we have understood the secret of Rabbi Abraham Ibn Ezra, according to which the goat teaches that there is no real evil with a root in the world, then indeed we are in a position where we will no longer offer our sacrifices to the goat-demons, as Nahmanides writes. Goat-demons and demons, in kabbalistic terminology, are imaginary entities without a root. At the end of the journey we are meant to recognize this, and stop deceiving ourselves into thinking that they have substance.

It is not by chance that Nahmanides concludes that his words are intended to stop the mouths of the Greek and his wicked disciples, who arrogantly assumed that only what they arrived at through their analytic intellect has real existence. The truth is not only that there are other realities, but that precisely this part has no reality at all. It draws its apparent reality from the other realities, just as gates draw their meaning and reality from the inner “room” within them.

Let us briefly summarize what follows from this subsection. Thought and will are both built in a schematic onion structure. Such an onion is built of layers, one upon another, and of an unconditional core of assumptions—in thought, axioms; in will, values—that gives meaning to the whole structure. Analyticity sees both of these structures as layers without an inside, or as a circle with its tail in its mouth, and thus empties them of their content.

In the next subsection we shall make a more detailed comparison between the two onions, and discover what is similar and what differs between them. That comparison will refine and detail the picture of the complex relations between intellect and will.

Once Again, Intellect and Will: Master of Onions and Master of Garlic

The two onion-heads presented in the previous sections of this chapter are only an initial schema. When we enter into the details, we shall see that there is still much to clarify about them. The onion of thought was the main subject of the first and second books. In this subsection we shall try to apply what was said there to the onion of will presented here.

First, in the context of thought we distinguished between understanding and wisdom, or between axioms and derived theses. In the realm of will we distinguished between values, which are the basic and unconditional norms, and derived norms.

The process of deriving secondary norms from the basic values is an intellectual process. The methods are the rules of logic by which we derive one proposition from another. If so, this process is carried out by the intellect and not by the will. It contains no element of decision or choice, but only intellectual analysis of given propositions. Decisions are made with respect to the fundamental system of values, the core of the onion of will.

Thus only the core of the onion of will is created by exercising the power of will itself, that is, by decision and free choice. The rest is only ordinary intellectual analysis of propositions, and that is an intellectual process. The onion of will has a different core from the intellectual onion, namely the collection of axioms, but it is wrapped in normative layers by means of the very same methods used in the intellectual onion. In the context of will, the propositions derived by these methods are norms and not factual sentences, but the process is exactly the same.

Earlier we distinguished between two meanings of the term “understanding”: first, the rules of derivation, which express the power to draw conclusions from given premises; second, the results of those rules, namely the theses themselves. In the context of will, the onion layers have a distinct meaning only in the second sense. The tools are the same tools, the tools of the intellect. The results are norms, not facts or knowledge. Thus there is an onion of will, and it is wholly different from the onion of the intellect, but the tools used to wrap the different layers are the same tools.

We now turn to the way in which we reach the content of the initial core in the onion of will.

In the framework of the onion of thought, we saw that the only way to ground the validity of axioms is by recognizing a receptive faculty of “hearing.” The basis of the matter is the cancellation of the sharp distinction, so common among us, between thinking and cognition. We simply “observe” our axioms in a process that is quasi-cognitive rather than discursive. This is the synthetic dimension of thought, and it may be seen as concentrated in the axioms. As we saw, our attitude toward them radiates onto the meaning of the whole structure.

However, in the framework of the onion of will, the axioms are values. There we must reexamine the question of validity. What is the basis for the validity of the basic values, that is, the core of the onion of will? Why do these values obligate us? It is probably not cognition, for the essence of cognition is creating interaction with the world outside us. But such a relation can yield only knowledge of facts existing in the objective world outside us, and not obligation to norms. Norms, it would seem, are not real facts. If so, how do we apprehend basic norms, those that are not derived from other norms? How does value-obligation arise?

This point brings us back to the concept of choice. If we create the basic norms out of nothing, then this is an indeterministic process. But that cannot serve as a basis for the validity of values, at least not in their synthetic sense, which sees them as objectively binding. Indeterminism represents an arbitrary process, and it is hard to see in it a binding and enduring foundation.

The main problem is that on the normative plane there are no “external facts” that can force themselves upon us. This is what gives rise to the postmodern denial of the objective and binding significance of values.

This can be seen from another angle. Hume’s naturalistic fallacy (see the first book, at the end of chapter 2 of the thirteenth gate, and below in the third gate) states that values cannot be derived from facts. Facts are normatively neutral, and therefore there is no way to ground values on facts. To ground any norm, there must always be a bridging principle that connects the factual plane with the normative-evaluative plane. For example, when from the factual premise that the sky is blue we infer the evaluative, or in this case judgmental, conclusion that the sky is beautiful, we have smuggled in the background an additional premise, the bridging principle—for example, that everything blue is beautiful.⁴¹

At first glance, the inevitable conclusion is that we create values out of nothing. If they have no basis in reality, then there is no room to see them as objective and binding. Thus the fact that values are not created on a factual basis leads directly to the conclusion that they are subjective, and therefore devoid of binding force.

But we already saw above that there is a third process, between determinism and indeterminism, namely choice. Such a process indeed creates things without an external cause acting upon it and bringing them about. But it is also not random and arbitrary, and therefore it does provide a basis for judgment. At this point one can see that, at the logical level, the problem of the validity of values is actually equivalent to the problem of free choice. The same ambiguity that leads people to hold deterministic views—because the only alternative they see is indeterminism—is what leads those same people to advocate moral and evaluative relativism, that is, evaluative analyticity, or the absence of evaluative truth.

Just as there is one root for both problems, so too the solution to both is the same. In both cases we must recognize that there is a third type of process. The impossibility of observing facts as the basis of the evaluative system can lead to the conclusion that this is an arbitrary and subjective creation. But it can also lead to the conclusion that this is a valid creation, though not one based on an ordinary empirical process.

Our conclusion is that choice is the “auditory cognition” of the will. It is a cognition of values. Choice is what gives us awareness of the basic values, even without an ordinary empirical cognitive procedure, exactly as we saw with regard to intellectual axioms. Just as we were forced to relinquish the usual distinction between thought and cognition in the discussion of the intellect, so too we are forced to relinquish the sharp distinction between volitional decision and normative cognition in the discussion of the will.

In the third gate we shall expand on this important point. There we shall see that, when we formulate our evaluative system, we “observe” an abstract objective entity, the concept of “the good” as such. Observing it yields a description of a normative system, that is, of a theoretical system of principles telling us what is permitted and what is forbidden. Values are the characteristics of that entity as it exists in itself, as these are present in our consciousness.

Back to the Intellectual Dimension within Will

To summarize this short discussion, let us review all the aspects in which an intellectual dimension is involved in the process of will.

First, there is the onion of the intellect, which operates parallel to the onion of will. It is occupied with cognition of the facts and principles in objective reality. This plane too has an indirect relation to the operation of will. Choice is always made against some factual background. In every given state of affairs, a different choice is called for. Therefore intellectual cognition creates the factual background required for every act of choice.

Second, it is the intellect that analyzes the basic normative principles, namely the values, and derives from them the secondary norms. This is the understanding that creates the onion of will.

Third, there is an intellectual dimension in the will itself. As we have seen, the choice of the basic values is itself possessed of a cognitive dimension. We saw that cognition cannot be defined separately from choice; the sharp distinction between them must be abandoned. There is a decision here about whether values are correct or incorrect, worthy or unworthy, and that decision contains a cognitive-intellectual dimension. This decision is the intellectual dimension within will and choice itself, already mentioned in the previous chapter, and to be detailed further below at the end of this gate, and especially in the third gate.

In the next chapter we shall deal with an additional layer that we have not touched until now. Throughout the discussion so far we dealt with the question of how a person chooses his normative system, values and their derivatives. But values and norms are meant to be implemented. Therefore, once the theoretical system has been constructed, that is, once the onion of will has been built, the question of practical implementation arises. Is there also choice there? Apparently yes. The feeling is that even after our values have been determined, there still remains a struggle and a decision whether to act in accordance with them or not.

What is the nature of practical decision? To paraphrase Kant’s language, though not in his sense, we shall say that we now move from “pure reason” to “practical reason.” In the language of analytic philosophy, we are dealing with the problem of “weakness of will.” But before that, in the following excursus we shall present the relation between intellect and will with respect to Torah and its study.

Excursus 6: Torah—Between Intellect and Will

The word “Torah” derives from the root meaning instruction. That is, the essence of Torah is norms, the commandments. At the opening of his commentary on the Torah, Rashi cites the famous words of Rabbi Yitzhak:

The Torah should have begun only with “This month shall be for you,” which is the first commandment with which Israel was commanded. Why, then, did it open with Genesis?

From Rabbi Yitzhak’s question we see that the essence of Torah is its normative part, which begins in the portion of Bo. From his perspective, the preliminaries are seemingly superfluous. In practice, the Torah is divided into two parts: the factual part and the normative part, which is the main one.⁴² In other words, there are two kinds of verses in the Torah: imperative verses and declarative verses.

But this division is not so simple. Imperative verses instruct us regarding actions that we must do, positive commandments, or not do, negative commandments. Grammatically this is obviously a different sort of verse. But in substance it is not entirely clear what the added value of the command is, beyond the statement that this is a commandment that God wants us to perform, or a prohibition that He wants us to refrain from. At first glance, it would seem enough simply to inform us that this is a commandment, for us then to infer that we must fulfill it.

Put differently, the question may be formulated like this: every commandment has some reason or purpose for which it is intended. The commandment is expressed in the Torah by an imperative verse. The reason for the commandment is a kind of fact—for example, this commandment serves the positive goal X. Does the command contain something beyond informing us that an important goal is realized through performing the commandment under discussion? Seemingly, there is nothing in the commandment beyond the factual disclosure that achieving this goal is important, and that the way to achieve it is by fulfilling the commandment.

From the opposite direction, one may ask: what is the purpose of the declarative verses, the factual and narrative part of the Torah? Clearly they too are meant to teach us something; otherwise they would be superfluous, and certainly would not be included in the concept “Torah,” that is, instruction. But if so, then declarative verses too are imperative verses. Once again we must examine, at the substantive level, what the difference is between these two parts of Torah.

We may now formulate the dilemma in a third way. Commands are norms, and as such they have directional, charged, purposive content, and they address the will. The will is meant to accept upon itself the obligation to carry out those commands; a person must incorporate them into his onion of will. Declarative verses, by their very nature, are neutral, not directional and purposive. They address the intellect, not the will. In this context we can now ask: what is the added value of an appeal to the will beyond an appeal to the intellect? Does not the fact that there is a good reason to perform the act suffice to create an obligation to perform it? In effect we are asking a question that concerns the distinction between will and intellect: is the will no more than an aspect of the intellect? What the intellect determines to be a worthy value, the will ought to want to perform.

In analytic philosophy this question is discussed from the linguistic direction: is an imperative sentence something over and above a declarative sentence? That is, is receiving a declarative sentence as something worthy a sufficient reason for generating commitment to perform an action? Are these declarative sentences, after which a decision and determination of the will must still be made? Or are those sentences themselves already purposive in character, and therefore include within them the normative commitment to carry them out? In the standard formulation the matter is stated thus: when I say, “Doing X is unjust,” is this a descriptive statement, describing a certain characteristic of act X, or is it a prescriptive claim, that is, an instruction to the hearer as to what he ought to do and what is not proper for him to do? This topic will be discussed below in the third gate. Here we shall examine the question from a halakhic angle.

Maimonides prefaced his Book of Commandments with fourteen principles that explain his method of counting the commandments. In the fifth principle he rules that the reason for a commandment should not be counted as a commandment in its own right.

For example, the verse says of the king: “He shall not multiply wives for himself, lest they turn his heart away.” Maimonides explains that the second part is the rationale for the commandment stated in the first part. The command is “He shall not multiply wives for himself,” and the reason is “lest they turn his heart away.” That is, although the linguistic formulation is very similar, Maimonides understands the second part as a declarative verse, an explanation, and not as an imperative verse. The first part commands us, while the second teaches us a fact: there is a danger that multiplying wives will turn the king’s heart away. The fact serves as a rationale for the command, but it is still a fact. As such, it should not be included in the enumeration of commandments, which contains only commands.

Thus Maimonides understands verses of reason as declarative rather than imperative, and therefore they are not to be counted. Nahmanides, by contrast, in his glosses to the fifth principle, understands a large portion of them as imperative verses, and therefore has to provide other reasons why some of them are not counted as commandments.

There are additional principles among the fourteen whose subject is the distinction between declaration and command—see, for example, the eighth principle—but this is not the place to elaborate.⁴³

At first glance one could ask: why should the first part, “He shall not multiply wives for himself,” be taken as the command? The purpose of the prohibition on many wives is that they not turn his heart away. If so, what is actually forbidden is the turning away of the heart. Multiplying wives is only the fence intended to prevent that. These examples, and others brought there, illustrate even more forcefully the problematic character of the distinction between declarative and imperative verses.

Now there is a dispute among the tannaim as to whether one may expound the reason of Scripture. The dispute concerns whether the halakhic boundaries of the commandment may be formulated in accordance with its reasons. For example, in the previous case, if multiplying wives would not turn the king’s heart away, would there still be a prohibition against multiplying wives, or not? The accepted rule in halakha is that one does not expound the reason of Scripture. See the excursus in the second book on reason and definition. This is a kind of halakhic positivism that clings to the text as it stands.⁴⁴

Usually the understanding underlying this rule, both in halakha and in ordinary legal systems, is that we do not rely on the reason because we might err, and also in order to prevent disputes of interpretation. According to this, if we knew the true reason for the commandment, it would be possible to derive its law from that reason. The conclusion, then, is that apparently the reason is indeed a command in essence, and in principle can be used to define the command itself. It can be shown that halakha also contains other approaches to understanding the principle that one does not expound the reason of Scripture, but this is not the place to elaborate.⁴⁵

Without entering into technical details, what emerges from this is that, at least according to some commentators, commands in the Torah have a different status precisely by virtue of being imperative verses and not declarative ones. This means that the normative claim contains something that does not exist in the factual claim. Even if we know the reason for the commandment, we are still not obligated by it with the same force as one who was commanded.

About this the sages already said: “Greater is one who is commanded and does than one who is not commanded and does” (Babylonian Talmud, Kiddushin 31a). Usually one looks for a psychological explanation of this controversial statement, such as that when there is a command there is an inclination not to obey it, and the like. But here something new emerges: when there is a command, the fulfillment of the commandment has an added value beyond attaining the reason or goal of the commandment. A fuller account of this claim appears in Rabbi Elhanan Wasserman’s essay on repentance in his Kovetz Ma’amarim, and this is not the place to elaborate.

What follows from this is that a command is a statement addressed to the will, and as such it has additional content beyond the factual disclosure that some goal can be attained in one way or another. The command itself adds a normative dimension to the facts, a kind of coloring of them, according to the prescriptivist conception. This topic will be discussed further in the third gate, and in greater detail in the fourth book.

Chapter 4: The Problem of “Weakness of Will”: On Sin and Its Meaning⁴⁶

Introduction

Up to this point we have dealt with the choice of values and of the norms derived from them. In principle, once the description of the onion of will is complete, the description of the person’s normative system is complete as well. But we still need to examine how this system is brought into actuality and translated into action. A person must implement the system he has chosen, that is, decide how to act in practice in every specific situation into which he is drawn.⁴⁷ At first glance this is a practical stage that contains no dimension of choice, only the implementation of the values already chosen in the previous stage. He has only to scan his onion of desires, and derive from it, by means of logic, practical instructions for the situation at hand.

Take a simple, indeed simplistic, example: a case involving only one value. A person has chosen the value of equality, in the communist sense. Let us assume, for the sake of the discussion, that this is the whole of his onion of values. He now finds himself in a situation in which he identifies some inequality. Apparently he must act in accordance with the value he chose, that is, act to erase the inequality. There is no further process of choice here. At most he must use his intellect to decide what concrete step is required by the value he espouses: raising taxes, lowering tariffs, charity, and the like. But all these are, in principle, intellectual considerations and do not involve volitional decision and choice.

It seems that this would remain the basic picture even when the onion of will is more complex and more branched, as is usually the case. The difference is only quantitative; the complexity does not change the logical analysis. The conclusion is that choice deals only with values, while actual behavior is derived from the factual situation, which is determined by the intellect, and from the application of the theoretical value-system already chosen earlier, the onion of values, to that situation. This stage includes drawing evaluative conclusions from the onion of values, an intellectual clarification of the circumstances and their implications, and finally an intellectual determination as to the optimal way to implement the values under the given conditions. As stated, there is no dimension here of choice or evaluative decision.

Despite this smooth and comfortable description, there is nevertheless a feeling that something very important is missing from the picture. The simple intuition is that there is a dimension of choice even at the stage of implementation, even after the onion of values has been completed. In this chapter we shall deal with this practical component, after the theoretical, a priori onion of will has been completed. We shall see that there is indeed a dimension of choice and will even at the stage of implementing values.

The Problem of “Weakness of Will”

The beginning of our discussion lies in the problem that has been called in analytic philosophy over the last few decades “weakness of will.” The literature on this problem is vast and ramified, and as expected most of the discussion has taken place in the context of analytic philosophy. After the discussion to be held here, we shall be able to understand better why it is specifically analytic philosophers who are troubled by this problem.

In order to present the problem, I shall follow parts of the classic essay of the well-known American philosopher Donald Davidson, omitting detailed and wearisome sub-discussions that are not important for our purposes.⁴⁸ As we shall later see, beyond its elegance and precision, his mode of presentation gives us the key to the solution of the problem as well, though our solution will differ from the one he proposes.

The essay opens with the following definition: a person’s will is defined as weak if he acts consciously and intentionally, and without coercion, in a way that is not in accordance with his best judgment—that is, in his own view there is a better option in that situation, and it is open to him.

In such cases, he says, and also feels, that he did not have enough willpower. He failed, and therefore did not do what was proper according to his best understanding and judgment. Davidson defines actions in which weak will appears as incontinent actions.⁴⁹

Davidson opens by claiming that we have a strong intuition that such actions do in fact exist. In our language we would call such actions “sin.” But it should be stressed that the category of incontinent actions is broader than sins in the narrow sense. Even metaphorical “sins,” such as overeating or eating something fattening or unhealthy, will generally count as incontinent actions according to Davidson’s definition, since in these actions too a person acts intentionally and consciously against what seems to him the best way to act. Thus sin, in the religious or moral sense, is only a subset of such actions.

In all these cases, which are certainly familiar to us all, there is a situation in which a person “fails.” Because his will was weak, he did not do what, according to his own best judgment, he ought to have done. These are cases of weak will.

It is important to notice already here that this is actually the seam between evaluative decision and implementation. That is, a person derives the optimal directive for a given situation from his onion of desires or values, and nevertheless acts differently. Apparently, then, there really is a dimension of choice between the formation of the onion of desires and its implementation, and this is not merely a stage whose entire essence is technical logical derivation and nothing more.

Let us now return to Davidson’s argument. On the other hand, he claims, the existence of such actions conflicts with another strong intuition we have, namely that when a person acts intentionally and consciously, he usually acts in the way that seems to him best in the given situation.

To sharpen the contradiction, Davidson breaks this second intuition into two components:

1. If a person wants to do X more than to do Y, and believes himself free to do either of the two actions, X and Y, then if he acts intentionally and consciously, he will do X.
2. If a person judges that it would be better to do X than to do Y, then he wants to do X more than he wants to do Y.

Let us add to these the third intuitive claim mentioned above:

3. Human beings sometimes perform incontinent actions.

The reader should now examine himself. If he accepts all three assumptions together, then he simply lives in a paradox. On the one hand, when a person acts consciously and intentionally, he wants, and therefore also does, what he judges to be better for him. On the other hand, there are actions in which a person consciously and intentionally does what he himself judges not to be the best option for him.

Someone may wish to escape the paradox by claiming that the person does, in one respect, want to do X, but in another respect wants Y more, and therefore there is no problem. But this argument means that claim 3 is actually false. There are no incontinent actions, because whenever a person does something, he does what he most wants after taking everything into account.

From another angle: the term “best for him” in the claims above means the best after taking all aspects into account, that is, the totality of the values in the onion of desires. For example, if a person craves to eat chocolate because of its taste, but on the other hand does not want to eat chocolate for reasons of health, then he must weigh both aspects and decide which of them prevails. In such a situation there are two possible scenarios:

a. Suppose that in his case the desire for good taste outweighs the desire for health. If so, he judges that what is best for him, that is, most consistent with the totality of his desires, is to eat the chocolate. In such a case, if he eats the chocolate, he has not performed an incontinent action at all, because he has in fact acted according to his best judgment.

b. On the other hand, if we assume a person for whom the aspiration to health outweighs the aspiration to good taste, then when he decides intentionally and consciously to eat the chocolate, he performs an incontinent action.

Anyone who interprets every failure, every case of weak will, according to the first scenario, in fact does not accept premise 3. According to that interpretation, every conscious human action is continent. He is therefore not in the paradox, because he rejects the truth of claim 3. But one who believes, as I do, that situations like the second scenario are possible, cannot escape the paradox into which he has fallen unless he gives up one of our original intuitions.⁵⁰

The main claim that emerges from this, when formulated in terms of sin, in its broad sense—moral, personal, or religious—is the following: how is it possible that a person sins? Apparently the only coherent way to understand this is to say that he wants the pleasure involved in the sin more than the value involved in the correct act.

In fact, this description of weakness of will is nothing but locating it within a conflict of values, or conative conflict. One value, desire, or passion is displaced by another value, desire, or passion.⁵¹ This is a process of conflict between two values in the person’s scale of values. Therefore there is no problem of weakness of will here, but only a problem of the direction of the will, or its content. The person simply does not really want what he thinks he wants. He does want it, but he wants even more to heed his inclination.⁵²

Yet the feeling is that this is not always the correct description of reality. After we sin, a feeling arises in us: “How did I fall?!” How is it possible that I did something which I clearly do not want? How did I “fail”? Usually the understanding that this is a sin accompanies the very performance of the sin, though at that stage it may be repressed and pushed aside; but that fact is already part of the problem as we perceive it afterward.

It is very hard to free oneself from the clear intuition that there are situations of this kind. When a person eats something forbidden by halakha, it does not necessarily mean that he thinks eating something tasty is more important than keeping halakha. He simply failed. He had “too weak a will.” That is why this problem is called in analytic philosophy the problem of weakness of will. Are we merely deceiving ourselves in such cases? Do we in fact not think that this was the proper act to do?

Another solution that usually arises in the context of weakness of will involves the concept of inclination, not necessarily in the religious connotation of that term, where it is called the evil inclination. A person explains his failure in terms of an inclination that attacked him with great force, and which he was unable to overcome.

But it would seem that this solution too is unsatisfactory, since it is merely a reformulation of the problem from another angle. As we saw in chapter 1, the inclination is not part of the person himself, but belongs to his psychic environment, the one described in the “topographic map” of the soul, within which the person acts. Therefore the fact that the inclination tries to tempt a person to do something is not an explanation of why he did what he did, but an additional element in the environment within which he acts. The inclination is a phenomenon of temptation by an external factor.

But when an external factor tempts me to do something, the fact that I did it cannot be explained by the fact that I was tempted. At the end of the day, the act was done by me with awareness and consciousness, and there was a choice on my part to yield to that inclination. I could have resisted it and not yielded. Thus I did the act, not the inclination. I decided, intentionally and consciously, to yield to my inclination.

Once again we must ask: why did I decide to yield to the inclination? According to the argument about weakness of will, there is no explanation for this other than the assumption that apparently the good act was not more important to me than the sin. My judgment, once it took into account even the pressures of the inclination and the difficulty of resisting them, arrived in the final analysis at the conclusion that he prefers to commit the sin rather than refrain from it. Thus, in the final accounting, the act was the fruit of a decision of mine, as a person, which led me to perform it.

We now find ourselves in a state where intuition clashes with analytic analysis. This is a state very similar to the problem of determinism. There is here a sort of deterministic argument. According to the analytic analysis we have proposed, a person acts according to his principles in a quasi-deterministic way. He cannot “choose,” in a borrowed sense, to act against his judgment; rather, he is bound to act only in accordance with his choices. On the other hand, intuition certainly tells us that there are incontinent actions, in Davidson’s sense.

A priori we might expect the analytic thinker here too to tend toward adopting the quasi-deterministic thesis that fits the analytic analysis. But those who hold the synthetic position must seek a way out of the tangle, because on the one hand they want to preserve their intuitions, and on the other hand it is clear that one cannot adopt an intuition that contains an internal contradiction. Those who hold a synthetic position are no less committed to logic.

The conclusion is that, as holders of a synthetic position, we must examine under a magnifying glass the three assumptions that create the contradiction, and see what may be changed in them without giving up the intuition underlying each one. That is the heart of the problem: each of the three assumptions is highly intuitive, and therefore we do not want to give up any of them.

Solving the Paradox: The Choice to Choose⁵³

It seems that in order to dissolve this paradox, we must add another element to the map of the human spirit that we are trying to draw here. When a person sins, his feeling of weakness of will tells him that in fact he did not choose at all. He did not choose evil, in all the senses discussed above—moral, religious, personal—as one might conclude from the reasoning that produces the paradox. Rather, he did not choose at all. Or, more precisely, he chose not to choose. This is another layer in the process of choice, which introduces an additional decision-point into the picture: whether to choose or not.

When a person chooses, he always does what seems to him best. When he fails, when he sins, the feeling is that he simply does not choose. He knows what is best, and usually he also knows that what he is doing is not the best thing for him. Yet he chooses not to choose, but to let himself be dragged after his inclinations.

This description differs from what we have seen until now. True, the inclination cannot be the complete cause of a person’s action, for he can also choose not to answer its call. From this we concluded that at the root of sin there is also a dimension of choice. On the other hand, every sin is accompanied by a feeling of failure, and as such it seems that the action was not the result of choice. The way out that we propose here is that the person did indeed choose, but he did not choose evil. Rather, he chose not to choose. Once he chooses not to choose, the inclination succeeds in “dragging” him to regions that do not accord with what follows from his onion of desires.

At the beginning of the chapter we noted that the act of choice, as described so far, is carried out in a detached and theoretical way, before the moment at which one has to act and implement it. The conclusion there was that at the moment of action there is no dimension of choice, only implementation of the complete onion already in our possession. According to that description, the component that operates at that moment is only the intellect. Yet already there we noted the feeling that an important component was missing from this pastoral picture. There is a feeling that an element of choice exists even at the moment of implementation, perhaps especially at that moment. Indeed, in light of what is said here, a new element has been added to the components of human choice: the choice whether to choose. This choice is made precisely at the moment of action.

The basic choice, which creates the a priori onion, is a different power from the choice whether to choose. The former belongs more to the intellectual-cognitive world. The choice whether to choose belongs more to the world of personal and spiritual strength, or the world of behavior. It may be more accurate to give this element a name other than “will,” if we use the name “will” in the first sense as well. These seem to be powers that are fundamentally different.

We must now sharpen the way in which this additional element solves the paradox of weakness of will. If the paradox is indeed solved, this means that at least one of the three claims above is no longer valid according to the updated picture. We shall now make use of Davidson’s important theoretical split of the claim opposed to the existence of weakness of will, that is, the claim opposed to claim 3. As noted, he split the opposing claim into two claims, 1 and 2, which together compose it.

Claim 3 must remain valid, for it is precisely what we are coming to defend: that there are actions expressing weakness of will, incontinent actions in Davidson’s definition, or “sins” in our terminology. Claim 2 also remains valid. The link between judgment and will has not changed in the new picture. Therefore, when a person judges that one action would be better than another, he indeed wants to do it more than the other. The difference between the new picture presented here and the problematic picture lies in claim 1. According to the present picture, it is not necessary that a person who wants to do X more than Y, believes that he is free to do both, and acts consciously and intentionally, will in fact do X. It is entirely possible that he will choose not to choose, and will be dragged, through yielding to the inclination, into not actualizing his a priori desire. Thus the implementation of our evaluative decisions also includes a dimension of choice.

What emerges from this description is that Davidson’s argument contains a hidden assumption: that the only choice in the process takes place while the onion is being built. Our addition of another element of choice at the stage of practical implementation of the onion’s values solves the paradox, and allows us to remain faithful to the intuitive feeling that there are sins in the world, that is, cases of weakness of will.

Back to the Topographical Map: The Intensity of Choice

There is another aspect that changes with the addition of the new element of choice we have introduced into the picture. Choice in its primary sense, as the power that builds the onion of values and shapes the will accordingly, seems to yield a binary result: a person either chooses a certain value or does not choose it, aside from the element of establishing a scale of values, where there is a dimension of quantity, though not in the same sense as what will be discussed here. See the third gate. But the process of choice at the time of implementation has a continuous spectrum of values. A person can decide to choose in a certain direction with many different degrees of intensity.

Let us sharpen this point by returning to the psychological map presented above in chapter 1. There we saw that the pressures and psychological drives under whose influence a person stands are described as a kind of topographical map. It is a contour that constitutes a very intimate environment within which the person acts. We emphasized that this contour is not part of the person himself. The person himself is that entity that threads its way through this contour, and must decide in which direction to turn.

As an example, we mentioned there the simplistic principle that a person who was abused in childhood tends toward violent reactions in adulthood. We described this in terms of mountains and slopes in his topographical map. The direction of a nonviolent, moderate, and tolerant reaction is for such a person a high and steep mountain, and therefore it is very hard for him to climb it, even if he wants to and decides to do so. By contrast, the direction of a violent reaction is in his “map” a slope down which it is very easy and very natural for him to slide.

The question that remained open there was this: on what does such a person’s success in realizing his evaluative determination depend? When he decides on a nonviolent response, against his natural psychological inclinations and drives, will he always succeed? Once we decide to climb a mountain, is the struggle over? Do we always succeed? If not, on what does it depend?

In light of the updated picture we are now presenting, it seems clear that it depends on the intensity of the choice at the time of implementation. The process of implementation is not necessarily momentary; it may consist of many moments, throughout a person’s life. If that person chose, within his a priori onion of values, the value of patience and nonviolence, this means that in principle he has decided that he ought to climb the mountain. That is his ideological, a priori direction. But the practical success of that person still depends on whether he will decide to be choosing when he finds himself in a situation that requires such “climbing.” Even if he does decide to be choosing and not to be dragged, the question remains: how much intensity is he prepared to invest in realizing his choice? If he invests sufficient intensity, relative to the steepness of the “mountain,” he will probably succeed in climbing it, that is, in responding with tolerance. But if he does not invest sufficient intensity, or if the matter is in any event beyond his ability—what we there associated with the legal concept of an irresistible impulse—then he will not succeed, despite his will and his a priori values.

Incidentally, even being dragged after the inclination is better explained in the new picture. The dragging is not rooted in a choice to turn toward the “slope” and roll downward. The dragging is a choice not to choose, and thus to let the slope roll you downward. The person makes himself passive, like water or a little ball, regarding which—unlike a human being—we saw that the terrain of the map dictates with one-to-one necessity how they behave within it. Thus there is here a second-order choice: a choice to be dragged rather than to be choosing, a passive choice not to resist the force exerted downward by the slope.

Our conclusion is that identifying inclination with will conceals a failure to distinguish between being dragged, or yielding, and deciding. Analytic-determinists identify these two processes with one another: to be dragged downward, that is, to yield to the inclination, is a kind of will, just like the will to perform kindness toward another person. We have already seen above the confusion they create between craving and inclination, on the one hand, and will, on the other. From this follows the paradox of weakness of will, since it too does not recognize this distinction. Those who hold analytic positions do not acknowledge the additional element of choice we have introduced into the picture, and therefore they become entangled in the paradox.

The Problem of Weakness of Will, Between Analyticity and Analytic Philosophy

At this point we can see clearly why the problem of weakness of will particularly troubled analytic philosophers. First, because in practice they are the ones who analyze every intuition. That is their craft.

But we already noted in the first book that analytic philosophy is usually not merely a profession or a method of philosophizing. It is a worldview, expressing to one degree or another an analytic approach to the world. Once one performs an analytic analysis of a problem, and this is generally done precisely in those contexts where the intuition seems problematic—for otherwise the analytic philosopher would have no “livelihood” in the relevant issue—the analysis shows that there is no solution. It is a paradox, because there is a contradiction between the intuition and the results of logical analysis, that is, analytic analysis.

In such cases, analytic thinkers are “forced” to give up the original intuition and to look for an alternative formal way out, one that is generally quite remote from common sense and from simple intuition.

As we have already demonstrated several times, this is usually unnecessary, and it is almost always possible to justify the simple intuitions. What must be done is to place basic trust in them. Then there is motivation to search for a solution that leaves them intact. When there is enough motivation—and this depends on the intensity of the choice with which we chose to believe the intuition—one usually discovers that the intuition is indeed correct, and can even be understood. In this way, those who hold the synthetic position often succeed in solving analytic paradoxes. Of course, when there is no solution, one must take the logical contradiction into account, for we are all equally subject to the laws of logic.⁵⁴

It is important to note, by contrast, that this discussion also demonstrates the importance of analyticity as a method.⁵⁵ It is indeed a very important and useful methodological instrument for locating problems, and through them arriving at a more precise and complete map of the problem and of the subject under discussion. The conclusion is that analyticity as a method is an important and very useful thing, but great care is required in drawing conclusions from it.⁵⁶ The basic trust in intuition is generally justified. The following excursus will illustrate the importance of credit as a condition of progress in learning and knowledge. After it will come an excursus dealing with weakness of will in halakha.

Excursus 7: On the Usefulness of Argument, or: The Meaning and Importance of “Scriptural Decree”

In the first book, in chapter 1 of the thirteenth gate, and also at the beginning of chapter 3 of the third gate there, we noted that the possibility of learning from someone depends on the basic credit that the learner grants his teacher. If he grants his teacher credit, he will make an effort to understand his words even if at first glance they do not seem persuasive. By contrast, if the student does not grant his teacher credit, it will be very difficult for him to learn anything from him. Without credit, any claim of the teacher that does not seem right to the student will be rejected out of hand. He will not bother to examine it, because he has no reason to assume that there is anything in it beyond what he already sees.⁵⁷

One should notice that such a student, who does not trust his teacher, will not learn anything new from him. Everything the teacher says will be examined in the student’s mind. If it seems right to him at first glance, it will be accepted. But then it will not constitute any real novelty for the student, because if he already accepted it at first glance, then in one way or another he already knew it. Anything that does not sound persuasive will not be accepted by the student. Yet it is entirely possible that it sounds unpersuasive to him precisely because he himself does not yet understand sufficiently. Those very points with which he disagrees are exactly the most important points that he can learn from his teacher. But without initial credit, points of this kind will never be adopted by him, because after the first glance he will dismiss them out of hand. Thus credit toward the teacher is a condition of learning.

By the same token, as we saw in the last paragraphs, trust in intuition is an instrument of analytic progress. Those who hold a synthetic position, who trust their intuition even if at first glance it seems problematic, and perhaps even if it seems to contain paradoxes, will tend to examine more deeply whether those paradoxes and problems really are insoluble. But those who hold an analytic position, who do not trust their intuition, and certainly not at those very points where they believe it is bound up with paradoxes and problems, will dismiss that problematic intuition out of hand, and prefer to it alternative theories, however fanciful or bizarre they may be.

It is important to stress that the point is not that those with a synthetic position should accept things blindly, nor that they are obligated to place trust in someone unworthy of trust. A student should go to learn only from a rabbi or teacher in whom he has basic trust. In the language of the Talmud: “If your rabbi seems to you like an angel of the Lord of Hosts, seek Torah from his mouth.” But even once such a teacher has been found, there is no reason to accept his words blindly. Rabbi Shimon Shkop, who champions this principle, is certainly not to be suspected of demanding such a thing from his students. Still, it is certainly worthwhile to make the effort and try to decipher his meaning, even if his words seem problematic at first or even second glance. Because we grant him credit, we assume initially that the rabbi, or the teacher, is not speaking complete nonsense.

This is a simple principle, but its importance is immeasurable. Let us now see another implication of the same type; see also the first book, toward the end of chapter 3 of the fourth gate. When a person argues with his fellow, there is an ingrained human tendency, the evil inclination, to try to win the argument no matter what. Even if he senses that his fellow is right, he may still try to act in distorted ways in order to prove his own “rightness,” and in any case to avoid admitting his mistake.

But it is important to notice that beyond the moral problems involved in such conduct,⁵⁸ there is also a purely utilitarian problem here. It is simply not worthwhile to “win” such an argument. The “winner” is in fact the loser, and this for reasons of utility alone, not only for reasons of morality and character.

The reason is that the points at which a person gains, that is, learns, something in an argument are precisely those points where the argument teaches him something he did not know beforehand. To win an argument means that we have wasted our time. We have not learned anything we did not know beforehand. What we knew turned out to be correct, and therefore we have not advanced at all by this argument. Of course, there is altruistic value in argument, if it helps the losing friend advance and learn new things, but for us no benefit has been produced here. By contrast, in an argument that a person loses, something becomes clear to him that he did not know earlier, or something he thought he knew turns out to have been mistaken. Here there is a real gain from the argument. There was a point in holding it, because the knowledge and understanding of the loser grew relative to where he stood before the argument.

Thus we arrive at a surprising conclusion: the egoist, the one who acts only on considerations of utility—inclination?—should specifically try to participate in arguments that he loses. The altruist, who wants to help others, may allow himself to participate even in arguments that he will win and in which his fellow will be defeated.

This point is similar to what we saw earlier regarding the relations between rabbi or teacher and student. The gain is always located at those points where something becomes new to me, that is, where something I thought beforehand turns out now to be mistaken, or where I learn something I did not know. Whenever I “lose” an argument, or turn out to be wrong while the rabbi is right, that is precisely where the real gain for us lies. Food for thought for the utilitarians among us.

From here we can move to another, similar aspect.⁵⁹ In halakha there is a concept that the sages call gezerat hakatuv, a scriptural decree. When we do not know the reason for a certain law, we treat it as a scriptural decree.

There are different schools in the Torah world. Some tend to magnify the role of scriptural decrees, while others tend to try to get rid of them as much as possible, by attempting to understand every law or by trying to ground it in a clear reason. Deep and very fundamental assumptions are involved in this dispute regarding the understanding of Torah and its role. Is Torah meant to clarify our own lives for us, or is it meant to raise us to a much greater height, far above our own eye level?

This is a broad issue, and not the place for it. We shall note here only one point, as a continuation of our previous remarks. All the laws whose rationale seems obvious to us do not in fact teach us anything fundamentally significant. We were already aware of them beforehand, and perhaps would have observed them even without a command—for example, “moral” laws. The true novelties we derive from Torah are specifically the scriptural decrees. Those are the points at which we “gain” the most.

But here there is a catch. Since we do not understand the reasons for scriptural decrees, we have no way to advance by means of them. The way to advance is to try to decipher their secret and finally understand them, and thus apply them in additional contexts. In that way we can reach insights of which we had not been aware before. But if scriptural decrees truly cannot be understood, then the path to progress is entirely blocked to us.

Now in the Babylonian Talmud, Sanhedrin 70a, we find a homily establishing that the law of the stubborn and rebellious son does not apply to daughters, but only to sons. The Gemara itself says that this is a scriptural decree, because reason would suggest that this law should apply to daughters no less than to sons.

And yet we find several of the early authorities who nevertheless gave a reason for this law. See Sefer HaHinukh, commandment 248, and Maimonides, Mishneh Torah, Laws of Rebels 7:11: it is not the way of a woman to be drawn after eating and drinking as a man is.

Up to this point, we have before us a phenomenon that appears several times among the early authorities. They seemingly do expound the reason of Scripture, offering a reason of their own for a certain law. But this is a non-binding reason; it does not claim to provide the full or entirely true reason for the law in question.

The Meiri on the sugya there, Sanhedrin 69a, on the passage beginning “and thus he expounds,” also brings this reason, but he refers directly to the Gemara’s statement that this is a scriptural decree, and he writes as follows:

And thus he expounds it: “a son” and not a daughter. That is to say, a daughter is not judged at all by the law of the rebellious son, for the Torah was strict only with one whose way is to be drawn after his appetites and to become immersed in them, and this is not the case with a daughter but with a son. For although these matters are scriptural decrees, all of them are drawn toward this matter, even if at the beginning of the inquiry some particulars appear, to a degree, to point in the opposite direction.

The Meiri explains that although this is a scriptural decree, it nevertheless has a reason. True, at first glance the law appears incorrect, but after proper inquiry one understands that it has a sound reason.

It seems that in the Meiri’s words there is a revolutionary proposal concerning the understanding of the concept of scriptural decree. The Meiri argues that, at least in certain cases, the Torah introduces to us a law that is a scriptural decree, and yet we can understand its reason. If so, it is not clear why the verse had to be written at all, or why it is called a scriptural decree.

It seems that the Meiri means the following. Sometimes there is a situation in which, had there been no verse, we could not have understood the reason for the law, and therefore without the command we would not have observed it on our own. The command obligates us to observe the law despite our lack of understanding. But precisely that obligation causes us to try again to understand what this law means. If there is motivation arising from obligation and from credit granted to the Giver of the Torah and to His Torah, there is a good chance that we will arrive at a new understanding that we would not have been aware of without the verse. In the end we understand the law by force of reason, but we would not have arrived at it without the credit and trust in the rationality of the laws of the Torah.⁶⁰

If so, a scriptural decree is a verse, or command, whose reason we can understand only after it has been revealed to us. Had it not been written, we would not have known it, or perhaps we would have remained in doubt between two possibilities. A scriptural decree is not necessarily a verse that is totally incomprehensible to us, as people tend to think. The path of progress is not closed before us; indeed, it begins specifically with scriptural decrees. Through them we can discover understandings we would not have reached in other ways. This is parallel to the phenomena we encountered above.

One final point in this connection is the meaning of revelation itself. Embedded in the point under discussion in this excursus is an important meaning of the very concept of revelation. The significance of the fact that God reveals Himself to us and gives us Torah is that there are insights there that we could not have reached in any other way. Revelation is a kind of learning from a “rabbi” in whom we all place trust, that is, to whom we grant credit. That is what enables us to advance beyond what is naturally and innately present within us. Torah, specifically because of its external, non-human source, is what can draw us upward. This stands in contrast to insights that are the product of the human intellect, which cannot raise our frame of reference above our own height. Such progress is dependent upon the credit and trust granted to the “ladder” that leads us upward.

Excursus 8: Legitimacy for Weakness of Will in Halakha

The usual attitude in halakha toward a person who sins is to regard him as someone who failed. That is, sin is understood as weakness of will, not as lack of desire to serve God. The Jerusalem Talmud, Berakhot 4:2, brings the prayer of Rabbi Tanhum bar Iskolastika, which says as follows:

May it be Your will, Lord my God and God of my fathers, that You break and abolish the yoke of the evil inclination from our hearts. For thus You created us: to do Your will, and we are obligated to do Your will. You desire, and we desire—so who prevents us? The leaven in the dough, that is, the evil inclination. It is revealed and known before You that we have no strength to withstand it…

This prayer was copied, in various versions, into different prayer books—see, for example, Babylonian Talmud, Berakhot 17a, and many other places—and it serves as a motto for Judaism’s attitude to the state of sin.

First, we see from here that sin is perceived as the influence of the inclination, and this is the standard Jewish description of failure in transgression. According to this picture, the inclination causes a person to behave contrary to his true will. It is a factor that stands outside us and incites us, as we saw: psychology and inclination are not the person himself, and we are unable to withstand it.

In this excursus we shall focus on another aspect of the inclination. Clearly, as a general matter, halakha does not recognize the legitimacy of sin. It does allow us to repent and atone for sin, even to erase it from the ledger—see below in the third gate, in the excursus on repentance—but obviously there is still a sin here, and we neither compromise with it nor recognize it. Yet surprisingly, there are several contexts in which halakha nonetheless seems to grant legitimacy to weakness of will. We shall briefly describe them now.

In the Babylonian Talmud, Berakhot 8, there appear two contradictory sayings. One says: “A person should always dwell in the place of his teacher,” while the other establishes the opposite. The Talmud resolves this contradiction by saying that the first concerns a case where a person is submissive to his teacher, while the second concerns a person who is not submissive to him. “This one is submissive to him, that one is not.” Rashi explains there: “If he is submissive to his teacher, to receive his rebuke, let him dwell near him. And if not, it is better to distance himself from him, and let him be inadvertent rather than deliberate.”

We see from the Gemara that instead of demanding that a person who is not submissive to his teacher refrain from sin and bend himself before his teacher, who rebukes him for his sins, it is preferable to advise him to keep away and dwell far from his teacher, so that even if he sins he will do so inadvertently and not deliberately. If his teacher rebukes him and he does not obey, the transgression he commits is deliberate. This determination seems to contradict the most basic Torah demand of a person: to subdue his inclination and not sin. Here the Talmud tells a person that it is better for him to yield to the inclination, and at least cause himself to be an inadvertent sinner rather than a deliberate one. Usually the statement “better that they be inadvertent rather than deliberate” is said to someone who wants to warn transgressors that they are sinning. In that case the Talmud advises him to consider whether they will accept his rebuke and repent, or whether they will ignore him, in which case he has only worsened their state by causing them to become deliberate sinners. But here we see a much more far-reaching statement: here the person himself conducts the calculation for himself, that “better I should be inadvertent than deliberate.”

At first glance, in such a case the Talmud ought to tell the person not to commit the transgression at all, not to commit it inadvertently. By the same logic one might conclude that a person ought not to study halakha, so that he will not know when he transgresses. We see here an exceptional degree of halakha’s consideration for weakness of will. When a person does not heed his teacher, these Talmudic sages apparently assess that this is a situation in which one should not demand of him that he stand firm and overcome his inclination and not transgress. Rather, one should allow him to yield to his weak will. Of course, these words are directed only to a person who is in a state where, to the best of his own judgment, he will be unable to withstand it. Only for such a person is the approach of “better inadvertent than deliberate” recommended.

This passage is very reminiscent of the famous halakha in Babylonian Talmud, Kiddushin 40a: “Rabbi Ilai said: If a person sees that his inclination is overpowering him, let him go to a place where he is not known, wrap himself in black, dress in black, and do what his heart desires.” Here too it appears, at first glance, that Rabbi Ilai permits a person to commit a transgression instead of requiring him unequivocally to overcome his inclination and not commit it.

However, with respect to the parallel sugya in Mo’ed Katan 17a, the Rif and the Rosh wrote in their halakhic rulings that we do not follow Rabbi Ilai. They justify this by saying that it is an established halakha in our hands that “everything is in the hands of Heaven except the fear of Heaven.” Their intention is to say that when a person stands before the choice whether to sin or to refrain from sin, the choice is clearly in his hands. It cannot be said that he is unable to withstand such a test. Every test that confronts a person exists because the person can stand up to it. God does not impose impossible demands upon His creatures. Therefore there is no legitimacy to failing in transgression and trying merely to minimize the damage. Halakha obligates us to confront the matter, not to yield.⁶¹

In any event, we see here that halakha is ruled in accordance with a conception that sees weakness of will as something one must overcome. Probably the Gemara in Berakhot as well, which holds that a person should not live near his teacher if he is not submissive to him, follows Rabbi Ilai’s view, and it too is therefore not brought as practical law in the codes.

It is interesting to note that the reason offered by the Rif and the Rosh for rejecting that approach from the halakha hints that Rabbi Ilai himself thought that everything is in the hands of Heaven, including fear of Heaven. That is, a person has no choice at all, and even the performance of commandments lies in the hands of Heaven. Such a deterministic conception within the world of Jewish halakha is indeed strange, and perhaps the understanding that negates choice should be limited, even according to Rabbi Ilai, to certain cases only.

Rabbi Elhanan Wasserman, in his Kovetz Ma’amarim, in the section “Explanations of Aggadot according to the plain sense,” in the passage entitled “Everything is in the Hands of Heaven Except the Fear of Heaven,” discusses this briefly and brings another Talmudic passage from which a deterministic conception emerges, and the words of Maimonides, who rejects that passage from the halakha precisely for that reason. This is not the place to elaborate.

In any event, determinism of this sort points to a legitimacy that halakha grants to a condition of weakness of will. There is a recognition that the will is weak, and that we may not test it by demanding too much of a person. Usually halakha does not recognize the legitimacy of sin, but here we encountered several contexts in which, at least according to some opinions, such legitimacy exists.⁶²

Choosing Evil

According to the model we have presented, it would seem that there are two ways to fail through sin:

1. Being dragged along, which leads to an act of weak will, that is, acting against values whose importance I myself recognize.
2. Choosing evil, namely that the values in my onion are themselves evil.

This is a failure at the stage of building the a priori onion, not necessarily at the stage of implementation.

If so, precisely in light of the picture described above, the question arises whether anyone really does choose evil. According to the original picture, it seems we almost have no choice: we must assume that when a person fails by performing an unworthy act, he simply consciously chose the evil direction. He is thoroughly wicked. But according to the updated picture we presented above, we may ask ourselves whether specifically the mechanism of sin through being dragged along is the primary mechanism, perhaps even the only one. That is, perhaps no person is truly wicked in the full sense of the word, with all the negative connotations that accompany it.

When we try to imagine a state in which a person freely and consciously chooses evil, it is very hard to do so. In fact, it seems that almost always, when a person fails, he explains it, at least to himself, as being dragged along. Sometimes we may tell him, or ourselves, that he is deceiving himself. But do we really imagine that a person knows with certainty that a certain act is absolutely evil, and nevertheless willingly decides to do it?⁶³

Even in extreme cases, such as a premeditated murderer, or even in the case of the Nazis, there is a tendency to interpret this as an act that required a great deal of self-deception. It is known that they themselves often had to drink wine and get drunk in order to be able to carry out the atrocities imposed upon them, and that they “believed” in their correctness, perhaps even in their morality. The atmosphere in Nazi Germany was saturated with relentless propaganda. It seems that without propaganda and brainwashing it would not have been possible to drag people into performing such acts. Does this not point to the fact that in every sinful act there is an element of abandoning choice, of being dragged along?

In this issue of choosing evil we do not reach clear conclusions here, and the question whether there is a state in which a person chooses evil in the full sense remains open. See also the next gate, in the excursus on repentance.

This is the place to add another possible mechanism for the commission or formation of sin, one fundamentally different from the mechanism of weakness of will described above. This mechanism too seems fully compatible with our intuitive feelings about sin. But first, two excursuses.

Excursus 9: Angels as Human Beings: More on the Meaning of Inclination

An illustration and sharpening of the problem of weakness of will can be found in the context of understanding the concept of the angel. There is a rather broad consensus that angels do not sin. In biblical language, an angel is a messenger. In principle, an angel always fulfills its mission, for that is precisely its definition.⁶⁴ It is usually assumed that an angel is a creature lacking choice, unlike the human being. It was created for a specific purpose, and therefore is not capable of sin.⁶⁵ Yet in several sources we find conceptions according to which angels are creatures with choice like us. The fact that they do not sin is attributed to their lack of an evil inclination, since they have no body or any material dimension.⁶⁶

These approaches assume that an angel never sins, but not because it lacks choice, rather because it lacks the evil inclination. Some formulate this by saying that an angel sees truth and the proper course so clearly and without distortion that there is simply no possibility for it to sin. If a human being were in a state where he had choice but no inclination, he could not sin at all. For such a person, as for an angel, Davidson’s first two claims would be true, but not the third: he would never perform incontinent actions.

Similar explanations are also given regarding Adam in the Garden of Eden. Some understand that he saw the truth with such clarity that, despite having choice, it was impossible for him to sin.

According to these conceptions, the inclination is the barrier that separates between the person’s cognition, both intellectual and volitional, and his practical decisions and actual behavior. It is what is responsible for the fact that Davidson’s claim 1 is false.

It is clear that the picture that emerges from this is that there is no possibility of failing through choice, that is, of choosing evil. One can only choose not to choose, that is, to yield to the inclination and be dragged after it. When a person chooses, he always chooses the good, at least what is good in his own eyes. Thus the theoretical debate about the nature of angels is only the reflection of another debate, more relevant to us, about the nature of human beings: is what causes human evil the inclination, or are there among us some who choose evil freely and consciously? The angels here are an abstract example, useful for sharpening the theoretical dispute and showing its implications for human nature. It is a picture of a state of pure choice without any interference from inclination, and the question is whether in such a state sin is possible.⁶⁷

Whether every sin is being dragged along, or whether there are also sins committed through conscious choice of evil, it is clear that even being dragged along—and all the more so where the consequences are terrible—is a very grave sin, for two reasons:

1. The “slope” in the topographical map of the soul against which one must struggle in such a case is gentler, because there is a natural tendency in the soul to resist an immoral act. If someone fails and is dragged along in a situation where the emotional layer itself helped him not to fail, that is, in a situation where it is very hard to fail, then his guilt is more severe.⁶⁸
2. Beyond that, even on the level of choice itself, independently of the emotional-psychological environment, the fact that the consequences are so severe ought itself to create a greater weight for the state of choice, and a greater severity in being dragged along. That is, even if the psychic environment were not affected by the severity of the consequences, and there remained a natural tendency to fail, that very severity should nevertheless have caused the person to invest more energy in fighting the natural tendency, in order to remain choosing and not dragged.

Excursus 10: The Evaluative Importance of Choice: Adam’s Sin and Its Consequences

The discussion in the last passage underscores the importance of the choice to choose, a point on which we already dwelt above. In light of what we have said, the process of choice may be viewed as built in two stories. On the first story, a person is required to be choosing and not dragged along. On the second story, he is required to choose a certain content, namely the good. Theoretically, a person can fail on either story, and both are important. The importance of choosing the good is clear, since the apparent goal of the whole enterprise is to do good. But even in the discussion of the second story we must note that doing good does not exhaust the matter. A person must choose the good, and not merely do good.

Accordingly, the importance of the correct determination on the first story, the determination to be choosing, exists on two planes:

1. There is importance in the very fact that a person is choosing. In this he expresses the unique image of God within him, independently of the content of the choice.
2. There is also importance to choice from another angle: usually, once a person is truly choosing, rather than being dragged, he chooses the good. As we noted above, it may be that there is no such state as conscious choice of evil at all.

Above we discussed the question whether sin is always a matter of being dragged along, weakness of will, or whether there are also sins committed through direct choice. If all sins are of the type of weakness of will, then clearly once a person chooses to choose, he will certainly also choose the good. Thus the determination on the first story leads to a good result on the second story as well. Even if there are sins that are committed through conscious and intentional choice, that is, in continent actions, it still seems clear that most sins are not of that type. Therefore even if that is true, the determination to be choosing and not dragged along still leads, with high probability though not with absolute certainty, to doing good.⁶⁹

Thus there is very great importance, perhaps decisive importance, to a person’s choosing to choose. The focal point of the struggle, if not all of it, lies on the first story, and not on the second, the question whether to choose the good. Below, in the first Hasidic intermezzo, we shall see this picture in a much sharper and more detailed form.

Let us now widen the scope a bit. In light of our discussion, being dragged along by the good inclination is not an entirely positive state. In certain respects it is even worse than choosing evil, if such a thing exists. One who chooses evil is at least choosing, whereas one who is dragged toward the good does indeed do good, but it is not really he himself who does it; rather, his inclination does it. See in the first book, Excursus 16, the discussion of halakha’s attitude toward actions performed under coercion. Thus there is an angle from which choosing evil is better than being dragged toward the good. This is a more autonomous person, who gives expression to the image of God within him, though in an improper form.⁷⁰

The conclusion that follows is that the good inclination too is still an inclination, and as such it is not desirable that a person be dragged by it. Human actions are evaluated not only by their content, but also by the degree of autonomy expressed and embodied in them.

Indeed, in Etz Hayyim, compiled by Rabbi Hayyim Vital from the teachings of his teacher, the Ari, in the section on Kelippat Nogah, it is written that the good inclination too belongs to the instinctual dimension of the human being.

In fact, the kabbalistic concept of Kelippat Nogah itself expresses this. In Kabbalah there are four shells, of which the first three are absolute evil, while the fourth, Kelippat Nogah, is evil mixed with good. These shells are the outer dimensions of a person, the shell that wraps him from around, namely the instinctive and emotional drives that surround him, as the topographical map of the soul describes. Kelippat Nogah is evil mixed with good, and yet it is still entirely considered a shell. It is an inclination, that is, it belongs to our emotional, psychological layer, and it contains both good and evil. In other words, both the good inclination and the evil inclination are inclinations, and neither of them should decide for us. We ourselves must decide to do good, by our free choice.

Incidentally, Kelippat Nogah is called in Aramaic mashka de-hivya, the skin of the serpent. The Ari explains that this shell is the very filth of the serpent that the sages in the midrash say entered the human being after the sin. See Genesis 3:21, where God clothed Adam and Eve after the sin with garments of skin. According to our account, after the sin the instinctual shell entered into the person, and from then on he feels as though it is part of him.

Above we saw that this is a mistake. The “I” refers to the higher parts of the person, and the inclinations are his periphery. But after the sin, when the periphery entered into the person, he has the illusion that it is part of him. In such a state a person feels that he himself “wants” to sin, rather than being “drawn” by an external factor, which is the true state of affairs. The person has lost the sense of being dragged along, the sense of weakness of will, and this is part of the problem. This mistake is what brings philosophers to discuss the problem of weakness of will. The very discussion of, and entanglement in, that problem are themselves consequences of Adam’s sin.

Before the sin, Adam was apparently in a state in which the inclinations remained outside him. The serpent, that is, the evil inclination, tempted him from outside. Therefore Adam’s sin was a sin of choosing evil, and not a sin of being dragged along. Before the sin there was no concept of being dragged along, because it was clear to the human being that the inclination was an external factor, and that he himself was deciding to sin.

The fact that a person in such a state can sin at all depends on the question we raised above, in the previous excursus, whether a person without inclination, or an angel, can sin. Adam sinned before there was any inclination inside him, indeed before the concept of inclination, as we know it today, had been created.

Perhaps for this reason the author of Midrash Tanhuma explains that Adam’s sin was preplanned and in fact forced upon him. The author of Leshem, as noted above, calls this the “governance of the awesome plotter.” The midrash says that when God decreed death upon the human being, Adam protested against Him: “You are dealing with me on a pretext.” It is like a man whose wife spoiled his dish, whereupon he pulled a prepared bill of divorce out of his pocket and handed it to her and divorced her. Of course she would protest: “You are dealing with me on a pretext,” for the bill of divorce was already prepared in your pocket before you even tasted the dish. Therefore the spoiled dish was clearly not the real cause of the divorce. So Adam argues against God that the sin had been “tailored” for him in advance, because already in the Torah—which according to the midrash preceded the world by many generations—it is written, “when a man dies in a tent,” meaning that the fact that man would die had been planned long before the creation of the world, and certainly before the sin.

The explanation is that there are junctures in history at which God takes away a person’s choice and conducts him according to the governance of the “awesome plotter.” Perhaps all of this was done to Adam solely so that through the “punishment” a state would come into being—planned in advance and desirable in itself—in which the inclination would enter him and give him the illusion that he himself wants to sin.

Both Maimonides at the beginning of Guide of the Perplexed I:2, and Rabbi Hayyim of Volozhin in his Nefesh HaHayyim I, chapter 6, in the gloss, explain Adam’s sin and its punishment in a way similar to what is described here.

God forbids Adam to eat from the Tree of Knowledge of Good and Evil, in Genesis 2:17. And when the serpent, that is, the inclination still outside, persuades Eve to eat from the fruit of the tree, he tells her, “and you shall be like God, knowing good and evil” (Genesis 3:5). And indeed, after eating, they become knowers of good and evil (Genesis 3:22), and death is decreed upon them.

The verb “to know” in biblical language expresses connection—”And the man knew Eve his wife” (Genesis 4:1), and many other places. According to this, “knowers of good and evil” means that good and evil become attached to the human being. According to the sources cited above, this means that the inclinations enter into the person and become attached to him. Thus our psychological periphery was created. This itself is the filth of the serpent, in the language of the sages in the midrash, or Kelippat Nogah in the language of the Ari, or mashka de-hivya in the language of the Zohar, compounded of evil and good—the evil inclination and the good inclination, the whole instinctual dimension of the human being—which are now, as it were, “inside us.”

In the end the sin caused, apparently as part of an earlier plan, the death of the human being, that is, the fact that he became mortal. Once there is a body containing lower, emotional-instinctive dimensions, it is formed of matter, and therefore destruction is decreed upon it. A material body cannot live forever.⁷¹

Let us now return to our main line. We saw that there is importance to the choice to choose, irrespective of the content of the choice, whether one chooses evil or good. We saw that in certain respects it is preferable to choose evil than to be dragged after the good inclination, which, as we saw above, is still nothing more than an inclination.

This is a claim that may well be received unsympathetically, especially in the religious world, and more broadly in the ideological world. In such worlds much importance is attached to the contents themselves, and the importance of choice as such is sometimes not sufficiently emphasized. It is difficult to find a religious person, certainly an educator, who notices that there is importance to the fact that a person chooses, even if he chooses evil. Or, alternatively, one who does not settle for educating toward doing good, but insists on choosing the good. Precisely for that reason it is important to note two Torah sources that express this surprising scale of values.

1. Rashi on the verse “The children struggled within her” (Genesis 25:22) cites the sages’ midrash. According to the midrash, while our matriarch Rebecca was pregnant, she felt that whenever she passed houses of study, the fetus in her womb wanted to come out, and whenever she passed idolatrous shrines, it again wanted to come out. She was troubled, and therefore went to the academy of Shem and Eber to inquire into the meaning of the phenomenon. There she received the following reassuring message: “Two nations are in your womb, and two peoples shall be separated from within you…” Rashi explains: “Separated already in the womb, this one to his wickedness and that one to his innocence.” Rebecca thought she had one fetus in her womb, who wanted to emerge both at houses of idolatry and at houses of study. From Heaven she is told that there are two different fetuses in her womb, each going in a different direction, and Rebecca calms down.

Many wonder what troubled Rebecca before this answer, and what calmed her after it. There is a well-known answer: at first, when she thought she had one fetus with such a problematic character, she did not understand the point of being pregnant at all—”why then am I thus?” But when she was told that there were two in her womb, one wicked and one righteous, she calmed down. In her eyes, a situation of two fetuses, one wicked and one righteous, is preferable to a single fetus who is confused and dragged after whatever is around him. The conclusion is that, in a certain respect, one who chooses evil is preferable to one who is dragged toward good.⁷²

2. Some may classify the previous example as homiletic only. But in Elijah’s encounter on Mount Carmel there is a stronger and more direct statement, already at the level of plain meaning. Elijah says to the people, who had worshipped idols (I Kings 18:21): “How long will you limp between two opinions? If the Lord is God, follow Him; and if Baal, follow him.” And the people answered him not a word.

There is a tendency to interpret his words as a demagogic ploy, meant only to press the people into a corner. But it seems to me that, according to the plain sense, Elijah means exactly what he says: it is better to choose evil than not to choose at all, but rather to be dragged and to sway each time in the direction in which the wind happens to blow.

Let us conclude this excursus with a very important point, also connected to this discussion. There is an old and overworked problem of the existence of evil in the world. The problem is formulated in various ways. For example: how is it possible that in a world whose entirety flows from and draws its vitality from divinity, there are also evil components? Another formulation: how can it be that everything occurring in the world is nourished by God’s will, and yet things happen in it that are not in accordance with His will, and even contrary to His will?

In light of what we have said here, it is important to add the following point. The very fact that a person has the ability to choose is wholly good. But at every junction of choice, there must necessarily be two opposite alternatives, good and evil. If God did not allow the possibility of choosing evil, there would be no junction, and no choice. But we already saw above that God wants man to choose the good, and not merely to do the good. If so, the very existence of choice-junctions in the world, branching toward good and evil, is absolute good, and of course it is entirely in accordance with God’s will. But from this follows the necessity of placing at the junction two opposite paths—evil and good—for otherwise there would be no junction there. The person’s choice to walk in the direction of evil is the evil element, and that indeed does not flow down from above, but is created ex nihilo by the person’s own choice.

The principal novelty in granting human beings the power of choice is that they can do things against the will of their Creator. If so, in creation itself everything is good, including the existence of junctions that can lead toward evil directions. The human being, by choosing to go in those directions, can create evil, and that evil is created ex nihilo. This follows from what we already saw: the choice given to the human being is, as it were, God’s own power. The human being is the only creature in creation endowed with the power to create worlds ex nihilo, the power of will and choice. The image of God.

This brings us back to the starting point of the excursus, namely the importance of the very use of this power as an expression of the image of God, and of course also the importance of using it correctly.

As we saw in this excursus, both stories are important, each in its own right. Even the first, the very determination to be choosing, is important in itself, even at the possible price of harming the second story, for the existence of the junction allows sin, which apparently harms the value of doing good. The conclusion is that the complete good that God desires is the doing of good out of choice—not choice alone, and not doing good alone.

And Yet, Another Type of Sin

Up to this point, without noticing it, we have used the concept of the onion of will, or the onion of values, in a double sense. First, the onion of will as an entity existing in objective reality outside us. This is a structure that contains and expresses the correct values and the correct hierarchy among them. This onion is not built of different layers. It is an abstract entity: the concept of “the good” as such.⁷³ As we saw in the second gate of the first book, the concept as such has no characteristics that can be described in our language. These arise only after observation through our instruments of perception, thought, and analysis. Thus observing this moral entity, the concept of “the good” as such, yields within our consciousness a description, namely the onion structure defined above, and that structure exists within us. We shall return to sharpen this point in greater detail in the next gate.

In any event, it is clear that the onion structure we create is within us, not in objective reality. We observe the concept of “the good,” and from it build a theoretical structure of principles that are connected with one another, and that guide us as to how it is proper for us to act.

But now, in light of this distinction, another possible mechanism of sin arises. We observe the concept of “the good,” but the theoretical system that describes it in our consciousness is not in fact a faithful description of it. We construct for ourselves an imaginary onion, which does not correctly describe the entity we are observing. Sometimes there is a state of self-deception, which allows us to build an onion whose content is closer to our wishes or our inclinations, and which does not necessarily describe the objective onion with precision.

This is another type of sin. There is no weakness of will here in the sense discussed earlier. This is another kind of weakness, which causes us to build an onion that does not reflect our true observations. We, as it were, deceive ourselves. But after that self-deception, we have in our hands an onion that “guides” us in the direction we wish to go. We feel, as it were, that we are doing the good, although in the background there remains a sense of sin, because our self-deception can never be entirely complete.⁷⁴

As noted, this model accords with intuition, since very often the sinner feels that he is deceiving himself. He explains his actions to himself as justified, on the basis of sophistries built on crooked logic and distorted morality. Above we noted that even wicked behavior such as that of the Nazis made use of techniques of self-deception as well, and that this is why they needed wine, intensive propaganda, and the like. This is required in order to create the gap between the results of observing the objective entity and the illusory onion that we construct for ourselves.

In the note on teshuvah (repentance) in the next gate, we will return to these two kinds of sin and examine the different processes of teshuvah appropriate to each of them.

The Problem of Awareness of Sin

To conclude, we must explain what is novel about the model of sin that has now been presented. There is a basic problem in the concept of sin, and it accompanies the problem of weakness of will. When a person behaves in a certain way, it is implausible to say that the problem begins only from some particular layer of the onion outward. Any problem must begin at the very root, in the core, or in the foundational values. As we have seen, the transition from one layer to another is an analytical process, and therefore it cannot begin in the middle. Each layer is merely another expression, a result of the logical-analytical derivation of those that precede it, much like the theorems of plane geometry. If so, the problem of sin must already be present in the core of the onion. This is merely a different and more detailed presentation of Davidson’s assumption that a person always wants what he thinks is good.

Yet if that is indeed so, then a person cannot be aware that he is sinning, for his entire onion identifies with this decision. From his perspective, this is the correct decision. By what system of standards does he examine himself? Apparently he acts in accordance with his onion of desires, and there is nothing besides it. On the other hand, it is difficult to deny that in some cases we do have a sense of sin, that is, a sense of mismatch between our act and the objective system of values. It is clear that already at the moment of the act itself, in one way or another, we know that we are sinning.

Here lies the main novelty of our second proposal. In fact, this model of sin upholds all the assumptions of the theory of weakness of will at once. We distinguish between what a person knows and what he wants. What he “knows”—in the normative sense, that is, the intellectual dimension within the will—derives from observation of the concept of “the good” in itself. The true values are embedded in that concept. But what a person wants is located in the onion, which is the result of that observation of the concept of “the good,” and that result exists only in his consciousness.

Self-awareness is possible because the actual moral truth is known to the sinner as well at the time of the sin. Yet it is not what he feels that he “wants.” Moral principles are an objective truth that exists “outside” us, in some world of ideas, and a person recognizes it through observation. That is the meaning of the intuition that already tells him, at the moment of sin, that he is sinning. But a person’s will, by definition, is a human function that exists within him, and it is part of his subjective spirit. Its contents are derived from observation of the objective concept, and if the true contents are selected, when the will is not weak, then they will be largely identical for all of us.⁷⁵ Thus a person indeed does only what he wants, as Davidson assumes, except that what he wants is expressed in the onion as it exists within him, and not in the true values.

The conclusion is that the onion is indeed rotten from the root, and the rot in the layers is only an analytical consequence of the rot in the core. All this is true. Yet even so, it is possible that at the same time he also has knowledge of the true moral truth, through observing the concept of “the good” as such.

This description also explains clearly why an analytic philosopher would not notice this possibility, and is therefore prone to become entangled in the paradoxes of weakness of will. The reason is that he does not recognize the objectivity of values, that is, the concept of “the good” in itself. He treats values as a subjective, or intersubjective, decision that takes place entirely within the person and contains no component of cognition. Therefore he cannot distinguish between the concept in itself and the onion that describes it. Put differently, he cannot distinguish between values and desires.

Summary: Two Mechanisms of Sin

To summarize the chapter: for the problem of self-awareness of sin, which accompanies us already while the act is being performed, we proposed in this chapter two explanations:

1. One explanation proceeds through weakness of will. The onion is within us, but we have the possibility of not acting in accordance with it. Awareness of sin arises in light of the onion that exists in our consciousness, and from comparing the act we perform to the guidance that emerges from it.
2. The other explanation speaks of the creation of an illusory onion. We create an illusory onion that supposedly guides us. This is the form in which we are dragged after the impulse, which is external to us but behaves as though it were our own onion. Awareness of sin arises from the comparison between the illusory onion that guides us and the real onion, which still exists in our consciousness in a dimmer form.

It should be noted that these two mechanisms are not necessarily two alternatives. A person is dragged along by means of self-deception, whose expression is the construction of a fictitious onion that supposedly guides him to sin, as if it turned the sin into a worthy act relative to his values. Sometimes it really is a mistaken choice, but in such cases there is no room to impose moral responsibility upon the person. He thought his step was the correct one. At least in the cases in which we are speaking of moral failure, the construction of the alternative onion is only a mechanism of repression that helps a person to sin. Therefore a different onion is not an alternative philosophical explanation for the very possibility of sin, for if it really does correctly describe what happened, then this is not sin in its full sense. On the philosophical plane, at the basis of moral failure there is only the mechanism of weakness of will as described above: the person chooses not to choose. On the psychological plane, he makes use of an imaginary alternative onion that supposedly “licenses” his act.

These are two parallel explanations, each existing on a different plane, one in philosophy and the other in psychology, and therefore both can be adopted simultaneously. We discussed this phenomenon at length in the second book, and also above.

Summary of the Discussion in the Second Gate

In the previous gate we dealt with the relation between body and soul, and we arrived at a dualistic conclusion. We also dealt with the question of the relation between the two components in this dualism, the body and the soul, and we arrived at an interactionist conclusion. In the present gate we opened the discussion of the soul against the background of the previous gate. Here we examined the schematic structure of the human soul and the complex relations among its various components, or functions.

We saw that it is divided into three parts: emotion, intellect, and will. Emotion is the periphery of the person, described by the map that his psychology draws, or more accurately, tries to draw. Intellect and will are the supreme human functions, and as such they constitute the core of the human essence. This is the person himself, insofar as essence can be described in terms of functions.

This is the reason for the value-based importance of the power of choice. It expresses the image of God in man. As we saw in the note, the expression of this essence has intrinsic value, irrespective of the actual content of the choices themselves.

We saw that intellect and will operate in parallel, the former on knowledge and factual principles, and the latter on norms. Both are described by hierarchical models of onion layers. The core of the onion of will is values, and the core of the onion of intellect is axioms, that is, wisdom. In both onions, one reaches the layers from the core by logical derivation, which is part of the intellect, namely understanding.

We saw that intellect and will are each divided into two parts. Intellect is divided into an analytical part, today attributed to the brain’s left hemisphere, which is responsible for understanding, and a synthetic part, attributed to the right hemisphere, which is responsible for intuitive-hearing perception and recognizes the axioms. Will is divided into choice, which recognizes and decides regarding values, and into understanding, the analytical part of the intellect, which derives from them the outer layers, that is, the secondary norms.

The blurring we found in the first and second books between thinking and cognition, in the context of the intellect’s activity, appears in parallel form in the will as well. There we saw a blurring between will and cognition. This too will be discussed in the third gate.

We also saw a complex relation between intellect and will. In both there is a mixture of domains that we are traditionally inclined to separate: in intellect, thinking and cognition; in choice, will and cognition. Both have a parallel and independent dimension of activity. In addition, there is an intellectual dimension within the will, both in understanding the background of its activity of choice and in deciding on the correct onion. More on this will be seen in the fourth gate.

At the end of the gate we noted that choice appears in two contexts: first, in the choice and construction of the onion; and second, in choice at the point of implementation, that is, the choice whether to choose. This distinction explained for us the concept of weakness of will, and we saw that the intuitive understanding of sin as failure, or as surrender to impulse, can be explained and understood through it.

Here we dealt only with the principal structures of the soul’s powers. Other important topics in the context of choice, especially those that lie outside these structures—for example, the relation between building an onion, using it, and changing an onion—will be discussed in the fourth gate.

We will now take a brief time-out in order to sharpen several important contemporary aspects of everything said here. We will do this through a short and highly timely discussion that emerges from chapter 9 of the book Tanya.

First Hasidic Intermezzo: The Animal Soul and the Divine Soul

The Analytic-Synthetic Axis and the Confrontation between Intellect and Emotion

Introduction

In the last gate we dealt with the relation between intellect and will on the one hand, and emotion on the other. An excellent illustration of this subject and its implications is found in the book Tanya (Likkutei Amarim), written by the Alter Rebbe of Chabad.⁷⁶ In this section we will deal with one chapter from that book, one that some define as the central chapter of the entire work: chapter 9, which is apparently an interpretation of the section “Kelipat Nogah” in the book Etz Chaim by the Ari. As background to the discussion, it is recommended to note what we saw above in note 10. It should also be noted that this discussion is important to the course of the argument in the book, and the reader is advised not to skip it. No specifically Torah learning, or knowledge of Hasidism, is required here.

We begin with a full quotation of chapter 9 in Tanya:⁷⁸

Now, the dwelling place of the animal soul, which derives from Kelipat Nogah in every Jew, is in the heart, in the left chamber, which is full of blood. As it is written: “For the blood is the soul.” Therefore all desires, boasting, anger, and the like are in the heart, and from the heart they spread throughout the body. They also rise to the brain in the head, to think about them, brood over them, and devise clever ways for them—just as blood originates in the heart, and from the heart spreads to all the limbs and also rises to the brain in the head.

But the dwelling place of the divine soul is in the intellect in the head, and from there it spreads to all the limbs, and also to the heart, in the right chamber where there is no blood, as it is written: “The heart of the wise is to his right.” It is the love of God, like fiery sparks, blazing in the heart of those who understand and contemplate, with the knowledge in their minds, matters that arouse love. So too the rejoicing of the heart in the glory of God and the splendor of His majesty, when the eyes of the wise man in his head, in the wisdom and understanding of his brain, gaze upon the King’s glory and the magnificence of His greatness, which is beyond all inquiry and without end or limit, as explained elsewhere. Likewise, all the other holy traits of the heart derive from wisdom, understanding, and knowledge in the intellect.

But it is written: “Nation shall become mightier than nation,” for the body is called a small city. Just as two kings wage war over one city, each wishing to conquer it and rule over it—that is, to lead its inhabitants according to his will, so that they obey him in all that he decrees—so too the two souls, the divine soul and the vital-animal soul derived from the kelipah, wage war with one another over the body and all its limbs. The divine soul desires and wills that it alone rule over him and guide him, and that all the limbs obey it, be wholly subordinate to it, and serve as a chariot to it; that they become a garment for its ten faculties and its three garments mentioned above, which will all clothe themselves in the limbs of the body, so that the whole body will be filled only with them, and no alien element will pass among them, heaven forbid.

That is, the three faculties of the mind in the head shall be filled with the wisdom, understanding, and knowledge of the divine soul, which is the wisdom of God and the understanding to contemplate His greatness, which is beyond all inquiry and without end; and from them, by means of knowledge, there shall be born fear in his mind and awe of God in his heart, and love of God like a burning fire in his heart, like fiery sparks, so that his soul longs and expires with desire and yearning to cleave to the blessed Infinite One with all heart and soul, and with great intensity from the innermost depth of the heart in the right chamber, so that its interior is paved with love, full and overflowing, until it spreads also to the left chamber to subdue the Other Side, the element of evil water within it, which is desire deriving from Kelipat Nogah, to change it and transform it from the pleasures of this world into love of God. As it is written, “with all your heart”—with both your inclinations. This means that one will rise and attain the level of great love and an affection greater than the level of intense love like fiery sparks. This is called “love of delights”: delighting in God, a foretaste of the World to Come. Delight is in the mind, in wisdom and intellect delighting in the apprehension of God and the knowledge of Him according to the reach of one’s mind and wisdom. This is the aspect of water, and the seed of light sown in the holiness of the divine soul, which transforms into good the aspect of water in the animal soul, from which desires for the pleasures of this world originally came. As is written in Etz Chaim, Gate 3, chapter 3, in the name of the Zohar, that evil is transformed into complete good, just like the good inclination itself, when its filthy garments are removed from it, namely the pleasures of this world in which it is clothed.

Likewise, all the other traits of the heart, which are offshoots of fear and love,⁷⁷ shall be for God alone. All the power of speech in the mouth and thought in the mind shall be filled only with the garments of thought and speech of the divine soul, namely thoughts of God and His Torah, so that his speech is all day long and his mouth never ceases from study. The power of action in his hands and the other 248 limbs shall be engaged only in the performance of the mitzvot (commandments), which are the third garment of the divine soul. Even the animal soul derived from the kelipah desires, on the contrary, for the good of the person, that he should overpower it and defeat it, like the parable of the harlot in the holy Zohar.

Explanation of the Meaning of These Words

Let us begin with a short background. The author of Tanya deals with man’s struggle with his impulses, with his choosing good or evil, and through these with his picture of the soul. This picture unfolds before us in three ascending arenas.

The first arena: Usually the struggle between good and evil in the human soul is described as a struggle between the good inclination and the evil inclination.

However, as we already saw in the note above, the good inclination too is an inclination. Moreover, if these two inclinations are the ones fighting each other, who is the person situated between them? Does he himself have nothing to say in the matter? As we saw above in chapter 1, the inclinations are the periphery of the person, not the person himself. Therefore a person’s decisions cannot be made by the inclinations. They constitute the environment within which the person acts, and they are not a description of the person himself.

The second arena: Precisely for these reasons, the author of Tanya offers a completely different description of the struggle in the human soul: a struggle between a divine soul and a vital-animal soul. Instead of a description of a struggle between two sides, that is, the two inclinations, we have here a description of a struggle between the higher and the lower. As we shall see below, the animal soul is not necessarily evil; it is primarily lower. The question of good and evil will be derived from the place that the animal soul occupies in our soul.

As is explained at length in the quotation above, these two souls fight one another for everything, like two kings fighting for rule over an entire city. Each wants full control, that all the limbs—that is, the parts of the soul—submit to his authority. There is no room for any division between them; one must rule the other. Each has a place in functioning, but not in sovereignty. Of this the Sages already said in the midrash (rabbinic exposition), albeit there in a negative context: “Two kings do not make use of one crown.”

Yet the picture is still vague. What is the struggle over? What are these souls, the divine and the animal? And again, it is not clear who the person himself is, the one within whom the struggle is taking place. Is he not the one who makes the decisions? What is the relation between this struggle and the familiar concepts of good and evil in standard descriptions?

It seems that a first hint for solving the riddle lies in the terminology. The animal soul is also called the “vital” soul. The reason is that our vitality, our aliveness, is found specifically in the animal soul. What is meant here is apparently those things that we feel in the metaphorical heart, the heart that expresses emotion. Emotion is something alive, and it arouses us far more than intellect or will, which are detached from our vitality. The divine soul is apparently an expression of intellect and will, which in us are seemingly detached from vitality. To illustrate: when a person has values or desires with which he identifies in his heart, he finds within himself enormous energies to act for them and by them. But values that he believes in only intellectually, without emotional identification, are usually realized only with great difficulty. Therefore the animal soul, which is bound up with emotion, is also the vital soul. It is what gives a person vitality.

If this is indeed a correct interpretation, then the struggle here is between a life of impulse and emotion and a life of intellect. Emotion is alive, powerful, and attractive, whereas intellect is weak and detached. A person does not act with great force for ideas that he is convinced are true if he has not internalized them on the emotional plane as well. Hence, at first glance, the struggle is over who will rule the entire picture: emotion and impulse, or intellect.

In the terminology we defined above, the struggle here concerns whether to choose—that is, to follow the divine soul—or to be dragged along, to act in accordance with the directives, impulses, and pressures of impulse and emotion. The struggle described here is the second type of choice that we saw in chapter 4: whether a person will choose to be a chooser or to be dragged along.

At first glance, this also explains the description in the quotation above, according to which the dwelling place of the divine soul is in the brain, that is, in intellect and will, the higher parts of the person, whereas the dwelling place of the animal soul is in the heart, which is full of blood: “for the blood is the soul,” and from there come vitality and the feeling of vitality.

At first glance, then, the author of Tanya offers us a description of a struggle between intellect and emotion, or between wisdom and instincts, that is, animality, instead of the standard description that speaks of a struggle between good and evil.

But even this is still only a very partial picture, and therefore it constitutes only the second of three arenas. We have already mentioned that the animal soul is not necessarily something evil—for if it were, the author of Tanya‘s description would overlap with the standard one. This is also evident from the mention of the concept Kelipat Nogah at the beginning of the chapter as the dwelling place of the animal soul. As we noted in note 10, Kelipat Nogah is the fourth kelipah, in which good is mixed with evil, unlike the other three kelipot, which are wholly evil.⁷⁸ Emotion, which originates in this kelipah, is not in itself evil. Good and evil depend on the outcome of the struggle described above, or on the question of the status of this soul. Will it control the whole body, that is, the whole soul, so that the person becomes more emotional and emotion rules the intellect? Or will the divine soul control everything and subordinate even the animal soul to its authority, so that intellect rules emotion? In such a state, the animal soul, that is, emotion and impulse, will be an inseparable and even vital part of our good totality. That is its original destiny, were we not to allow it to take over the whole.

The author of Tanya describes metaphorically the process to which the divine soul aspires, and the opposite process to which the animal soul aspires. He explains that the dwelling place of the animal soul is in the heart, in the left chamber full of blood. That is where the feeling of vitality is, which in the biological parable as well is generated and carried by the blood. But the animal soul is not static. It does not remain there. Rather, it tries to rise from there to the brain: the desires and impulses operate like actual biological blood.

By contrast, the divine soul aspires to the opposite process. Its basic dwelling place is in the brain, but it too has “imperialistic” ambitions. It wants to spread into the heart, into the right chamber, where there is no blood, that is, no excessively powerful impulse and emotion, and therefore it can enter there.

This is the description of the war of the two kings, the two souls, over the whole totality. Neither is content with its natural place; each aspires to rule everything. But what is the meaning of this war? What is the meaning of this spreading of emotion into intellect, and vice versa?

A hint to this can be found in the words of the author of Tanya himself, who writes at the beginning of the chapter that the animal soul, which includes impulses, desires, and emotions, “rises to the brain in the head, to think about them, brood over them, and devise clever ways for them.” In other words, emotion, impulses, and desires put on an intellectual garment. Here we arrive at the third arena, in which the picture of the soul unfolds in full.

The third arena: As we already mentioned, at first glance this is a struggle between intellect and emotion, that is, between wisdom and stupidity. But this is a simplistic and inaccurate description. Every person operates on all these planes together. Emotional people use their intellect as well, and intellectual people use their emotions as well. The question is what lies at the root. From where does the entire system draw its power? Who rules the city? Is it emotion or intellect?

Among people of intellect, the source and root lie in intellect, and from there things pass to the heart. Among people of emotion, the movement is the reverse: the source and root lie in the heart, and from there things pass to the intellect, in order to “outsmart” them in various thoughts.

Thus we are not speaking here of a struggle between wise people and fools. There are wise people and fools in both camps, among people of intellect and among people of emotion. The focus of the struggle is the question of who leads whom: intellect leading emotion, or the reverse. The question is who rules, wisdom or emotion, not who is wise and who is foolish. There are wise people whose behavior is ruled by emotion, and foolish people whose behavior is ruled by intellect.

Let us now return to the question of who the “I” is that makes these decisions. It is the divine soul itself. This is not a struggle between surrounding forces, the inclinations, but a struggle between myself, as chooser, and my environment, which seeks to drag me, whether to good or to evil. The divine soul is itself the “I,” just as we saw above that intellect and will are the “I,” at least at our human level, unlike the kabbalistic picture, which sees even them as layers, though more inward ones. The question is whether I will rule the inclinations, that is, the map that surrounds me, or whether they will rule me, so that I will be dragged after them rather than choosing my path independently.

An Example from Moral Philosophy

Let us bring a principled example, which in fact belongs more properly to the third gate, in order to sharpen this important point.⁷⁹ In moral philosophy there is a central field of inquiry that tries to define the character and theoretical content of the moral imperative. There is a common pattern in discussions of this question. At the first stage a theory of morality is proposed, for example: do what will bring the maximum benefit to the maximum number of beings. That is, in order to decide on the proper act in a given situation, we must define a measure of benefit and good, and examine which act will maximize it.

Up to this point the theory has only been proposed; the discussion has not yet begun. We must now examine the proposed theory in order to “validate” it, that is, to determine whether it is valid, and when necessary refine it until it becomes a valid theory. To do this, we examine what guidance the proposed theory would yield in various situations. For example, when ten people find themselves on a deserted island with nothing to eat. It may follow from this theory that they should slaughter—kosher slaughter, of course—the one in order to give him to all the others as food. The author of the theory, or anyone else examining it, must now decide whether the theory is indeed “correct,” that is, whether it gives the “correct” instructions. Anyone to whom such an instruction does not seem right, for whatever reason, is forced to abandon the theory, or at least to amend and repair it, so that it will produce the desired, or correct, results.⁸⁰

Thus the discussion proceeds in a manner similar to empirical scientific research.⁸¹ We propose a hypothesis and then test it in light of data that are “measured” through experience in the field. In light of the data we correct the theory until we succeed in arriving at a theory that fully explains all the facts, that is, that fits the results of all possible experiments.

We must now ask ourselves what, in principle, the role of this moral theory is, and from where the “facts” are drawn.

At first glance, once the process is completed we possess a full theoretical description of our moral duty. If so, the moral theory seems to be a kind of command, or set of commands, that guides us in our moral decisions. True, this is not a theory dealing with facts but with norms, but assuming our norms are something like facts, the theory provides the full description of the “correct” norms, at least for us.

But here one must note a decisive difference between ethics and empirical science. The question is: what is the source of the moral “facts”? How do I know that when we are on a deserted island it is proper, or improper, to slaughter one of the companions in order to feed the rest? How can such an unfounded “fact” direct our theoretical research?

Plainly, the natural moral feeling, or emotion, is what stands at the basis of this moral “fact.” If so, we examine our theory by the yardstick of natural feeling, or what is today called “conscience.” More on this in the third gate. But whereas in scientific research the facts are sense data, about which we have no doubt at all, here the facts themselves are in doubt. Why do we assume that they are really correct? Is emotion a reasonable yardstick for moral conduct?

It is very important to notice the outcome of this process and its significance. Even if moral research were someday to be completed, so that we would then possess a perfect theory of moral duty, what would we actually have in hand? A complete intellectual description of our collection of emotions. We refine the theory with every trial, until in the end it accurately describes everything that we had already felt naturally, that is, what we already knew before it and without it.

This process is nothing but giving intellectual form to our collection of emotions and instincts. The emotions are raw, and when we try to describe them in a precise and generalized theoretical form, we keep refining the description until we possess an intellectual-theoretical description of the totality of our moral emotions.

This is exactly the process described by the author of Tanya. The origin of the emotions, that is, the animal soul, is in the heart. Afterward they rise to the brain in order to devise cleverness around them and think thoughts about them, that is, to give them an intellectual form. At the end of the process we have a theory, sometimes very refined, intelligent, and sophisticated, that is nothing but a description of our emotions. Considerable talent and impressive analytical ability are invested here. Therefore we are not speaking of fools or of creatures lacking intelligence. And yet emotion alone determines our moral and value-laden conduct. Intellect contributes nothing to guiding our decisions. It is only a fuller and more complete form that serves us to describe the totality of our emotions. Our emotions are what guide us in our path of values.

This is a description of the process by which emotion takes over the whole personality. We are not speaking of stupid people, for such people would not succeed in formulating a sophisticated moral theory. Great intelligence and talent are required. But in the end these are people who act on the basis of their emotions. Emotion is what rules the whole totality, both heart and intellect. In this picture there is an extremely clever intellectual aspect, but intellect is subjugated to emotion and serves it. In the language of the author of Tanya, it serves as a “chariot” for it.

By contrast, people of the divine soul act in the opposite way. For them, if the theory truly instructs them to slaughter one of the companions and give him as food to the others, that is exactly what they will do. with them the intellectual theory dictates behavior, even if it runs against natural feeling. On the contrary, the goal is to create the reverse picture: “Know this day and take it to your heart.” One must internalize on the emotional plane the directives of the intellect, so as to identify with them on all planes of personality. In such a person, emotion is subjugated to thought and intellect, not the reverse.

The purpose of this subjugation, that is, the role of emotion, is to provide the power that intellect lacks. As we have already noted, intellect and will, that is, the divine soul, are detached. They do not have strong motivating power over the person. The animal soul is the “vital” one, meaning that it activates the person with intensity and vitality. Therefore one must create emotional identification with the directives of the intellect in order to give them practical force. This is the role of emotion.⁸²

The question is: from where does this theory grow? If it is not based on empirical experience, its source is unclear, as is its validity. Here an external factor is needed to give us the correct theory. In the second book we saw that, from a parallel difficulty with regard to scientific theory, analytic thought arrives at a relative, “actualist,” conception of scientific theories. They do not say anything about the world; they are merely a refined description of particular facts.

A similar process takes place with regard to morality. In an analytic world there can be no external factor that serves as a source of validity for moral values, and there is no moral datum other than what is found in the person himself. Therefore behavior must necessarily be emotional rather than intellectual. Only emotion is an independent source of values. On this see also the sixth gate of the first book, and more extensively in the next gate. But from here there also follows, of course, a relative conception of values and moral principles. Each person with his own principles. There is no way to objectify moral principles.

The Flaw in the Argument Above

In what I have said so far there was a certain amount of cheating, or at least disproportion, employed for the sake of the illustration. The discussion of moral theory as described above can undergo a slight shift and become a description of a synthetic intellectual discussion. The natural feeling that says that a certain act is forbidden is not emotion in the affective sense, but intuition. It derives from the synthetic, that is, auditory, part of the intellect or of the will. On this description, moral research is empirical research in every respect, just like scientific research. The only difference is that the experience is conducted through the “thinking sense,” not through our ordinary five senses. Such a description assumes the existence of such a sense, and therefore it is a synthetic description.

According to this correction, we can resolve the difficulty that accompanies the line of argument here. A person of the divine soul was described here as someone who ignores moral imperatives. He acts in a detached way, against the command of conscience, according to cold intellect. In light of what we have now said, the situation is not exactly like that. A person of the divine soul does employ control over his theories, but a control rooted in the synthetic part of the intellect, not in emotion. When he raises the argument of the ten people on the deserted island against the proposed theory, what occurs is an articulation of the theory. On this see the second gate of the second book, in the context of scientific theory.

Of course, anyone who does not accept the validity of intuition and classifies it as mere emotion does in fact operate on the emotional plane, and even grants it legitimacy. With regard to such a person, the description above is indeed a true description. Below we will see further characteristics of emotional activity in the analytic world, which will strengthen the claim made here.

Admittedly, it is very difficult to distinguish between a person who acts from emotion and one who acts from intuition. Yet every person, with respect to himself, can become convinced that there are two such modes of operation. This will be a good indication for classifying himself: whether he belongs to the analytic or the synthetic pole of the moral map, or in the terminology of the author of Tanya, to people of the divine soul or to people of the animal soul.

The “cheating” I spoke of above ignored this possibility in order to sharpen the distinction and show the existence of such a process. There are analytic moral philosophers who do recognize a moral sense, “a sense of justice” in Rawls and others, and from their perspective the process can indeed be synthetic. Still, it seems that the dominant correspondence in our world between moral decision and emotion, in the affective sense, indicates that in many cases the moral source is emotion rather than intuition.

The Connection to the Analytic and the Synthetic

In order to create an objective theory not based on emotion, we must adopt one of two possibilities: either an external source that gives us the “correct” theory in some sense, or trust in intuition that will draw correct values, in the ordinary sense, from some objective source. But even the second possibility presupposes the existence of some objective plane of values, and in addition our ability to interact with it in some way, to discern it and recognize it, to “observe” it with our auditory sense. In the next gate we will expand on this point.

Therefore it is reasonable to conclude that the analytic thinker is a person of the animal soul, that is, a person of emotion, who treats morality and truth as relative claims. Sometimes even when he reports a moral sense, it may mean nothing more than a subjective emotion. By contrast, anyone who does not treat moral principles in that way necessarily holds a synthetic position.

We thus learn that these two theoretical types, the person of the animal soul, the person of emotion, and the person of the divine soul, the person of intellect and will, are in fact the analytic thinker and the synthetic thinker who accompany us all along the way. Here we have merely exposed another aspect of that confrontation.⁸³

From this description it emerges that within a person there is a struggle between his psychology and his choosing will, that is, intellect and will. The “good” state is when emotion is subordinate to intellect, for then the person chooses and is not dragged along; and the “bad” state is when intellect is subordinate to emotion, for then the person is dragged along and does not choose. There is no objective good and evil within man. These are two states in which a different relation appears between the two souls. Nor are the two souls themselves good or evil in essence. Good and evil are different states of relation between them. In a common turn of phrase, based on the kabbalistic association of soul with the brain, spirit with the heart, and desires with the liver, people say the following: when the intellect leads from the top, one has M-L-K—brain, heart, liver—spelling “king.” But when the heart leads from the top, one has L-M-K.⁸⁴

As we shall see in the note below, the most fundamental process of teshuvah is in fact to return to being a person who chooses rather than a person who is dragged along. In the present description this means that teshuvah from the bad state is the restoration of the rule of thought over emotion, when the choosing will takes control of psychology and does not allow it to delude the person into thinking that it is his “I,” as after the sin of Adam in the note above. The choice to return to being a chooser is the foundation of teshuvah. The description given by the author of Tanya here is basically a description of the struggle over the second type of choice, the choice at the stage of implementing the onion of desires: whether to choose, or alternatively to be dragged along after our psychological stratum, which here is called the vital-animal soul.

We now encounter another context in which the analytic-synthetic confrontation appears: the analytic tends toward emotion and the synthetic toward intellect. Like several of the correlations we encountered in the two previous books, this connection too seems to contradict the insights commonly accepted today. Usually people assume that analyticity is connected to intellect and creativity to emotion, whereas here we seem to be turning the whole matter upside down.

But one must remember that the connection to which we are pointing here is not between analytical thinking, or analytical ability, and emotion, but between an analytic stance and emotion. As explained in the first book, see there in the first gate, analytical thinking can characterize people who hold synthetic positions as well, and it is certainly not unique to analytic thinkers.

A look at the world around us shows that it is indeed highly emotional, that is, driven by the vital-animal soul. As stated, this is not a claim about stupidity or lack of intelligence, but a claim about a philosophical stance. As we described in the two previous books, in our contemporary world there is a strong analytic tendency, even among those who do not define themselves as analytic thinkers or as postmodernists. Such a tendency expresses despair of the ability to reach truth, or even of the very concept of truth. It is no wonder that such despair leads to the domination of emotion.

This tendency has expressions in many diverse aspects of our contemporary world.⁸⁵ The first of them, see the second book, in chapter 2 of the fifth gate, is the definition of multiple intelligences. From now on emotion too is a talent, and there is no advantage to intellectual intelligence, even analytical intelligence. We are all geniuses, or at least all possess high intelligence. As we saw in the second book, this is an expression of analyticity, and sometimes even an expression that was established consciously and programmatically.

The second characteristic is linguistic expressions. After someone visits an exhibition or a concert, reads a book, or sees a play and the like, the ultimate expressions of evaluation are that it was “moving.” Every journalist who reports on such an event or interviews someone else in the field of art immediately asks whether it was moving. Cognitive expressions of appreciation in the arts are almost nowhere to be found. The search for thrills, so widespread in our time, is also an expression of this phenomenon.

Another characteristic is the emotional treatment of various psychic occurrences, with disregard for the intellectual dimension involved in them. In the third gate we will see such treatments with respect to states of soul such as love and more. The same holds with regard to morality, which is also conceived as an emotional imperative, “conscience,” rather than as part of the intellect. As we shall see below in the third gate, this too is another analytic characteristic. Let us now illustrate this through the description of an event that took place several years ago.

Examples of the Analytic Conception That Morality Belongs to the World of Emotion⁸⁶

Several years ago the newspapers reported a case that allegedly occurred in Bnei Brak. A woman went to immerse in a ritual bath, and on leaving she was raped by someone. Since her husband was a priest, and the halakha (Jewish law) requires them in such a situation to divorce, that is what the halakhic decisors instructed them to do. In the case as reported, the couple had a good and happy home, and of course the divorce was a severe blow for them. Needless to say, neither of them wanted it.

When the matter became known, a great outcry arose in the public and the media. How could anyone obligate a couple who love one another and want to remain married—especially when they have children who desperately need their parents—to divorce against their will? More than that, the public was enraged because, after all, no one really cared if they stayed married. Everyone would be happy about that, except, several malicious tongues added, the halakhic decisors. Who cares if they remain married? Whom does it disturb?

In the end it turned out to have been a journalistic hoax intended to raise this painful issue. Immediately a cry arose in the religious public: how can people try to defame religion, stir up strife among the people, and so on?

But the fact that it was a hoax is irrelevant to the matter. There really is such a halakha, and if such a case were actually to occur, the halakhic instruction given to them would indeed be to divorce. Thus the hoax did achieve its purpose and aroused a discussion on a painful halakhic issue. It seems that it was the religious public’s attempt to evade the problem that dictated such an irrelevant response.

But our main concern here is a different point. At first glance, there is here a dispute between religion and morality: different starting assumptions leading to different conclusions. Yet the main expression heard in that debate was: “Where is their heart?” or “Do they have no heart?” That is, people felt there was a moral injustice here, and that whoever ruled this way had no human feeling in his heart. The response was not to a value-based or ideological dispute. The halakhic decisors and the halakha were not accused of stupidity but of evil and wickedness, or more precisely, of lacking emotion.

After all, anyone understands that these two cultural-intellectual systems, Western liberalism and Jewish halakha, proceed from different fundamental assumptions. Each of us knows how to cope with situations in which there is a dispute between people with opposed positions or contradictory assumptions. Anyone can at least try to understand the motives and considerations of the other side, at least according to its own view. But here the feeling was that there was not even an attempt to do this. Everyone was certain that this was simply wickedness, nothing more. Why did things really proceed in this way?

In the expressions quoted above there is a grave misunderstanding. There is no doubt that the hearts of the halakhic decisors, in this case virtual ones, may be flesh and blood like the heart of every person, perhaps even more so. Likewise, it is obvious that that flesh-and-blood heart would have ached greatly, like the heart of anyone who heard about the case, perhaps more than that of anyone else, since they confronted the case itself and not merely its newspaper or television report. But those decisors act according to an intellectual-normative decision, not according to the heart. This is the main root of the misunderstanding.

The halakha that instructs us to behave in this way presumably holds that the value of preserving priestly sanctity outweighs the value of preserving domestic wholeness. It is hard to suspect the halakha of not caring about the preservation of the home. Usually the accusations go in the opposite direction, regarding the difficulty that rabbinical judges create for couples who want to divorce. Even someone who does not accept this scale of values should focus on the reasons and on the dispute over the values themselves, and at the very least understand that what we have here is a dispute between positions, not a confrontation between moral people and wicked people. Sometimes it seems that almost no one understands this simple point.

Hence one can understand that there may be people who do not accept this decision for reasons of intellect. But such people would try to persuade or argue about the logical unreasonableness of this decision. Claims about lack of feeling are based on a simple and crude mistake. They have nothing whatever to do with the degree of heartache in the hearts of those decisors. They were compelled to act that way by the command of their intellect, which instructs them to observe the halakha even when they do not understand the specific reasons for each of its directives, and it is clear that they acted against their “conscience,” in the emotional sense of that term.

The fact that almost the entire public appealed to the hearts of the decisors shows that everyone assumes that a person is supposed to make his moral and value-based decisions according to the feeling of his heart, not according to intellect. This is a postulate that no one even thinks requires justification. It is self-evident. The critics did not even bother to examine whether there is room for acting other than in accordance with the feeling of the heart, or whether there might be someone who acts that way. The criticism simply assumed as obvious that even if the premises differ, the conclusion should be uniform, since here the heart had spoken clearly. Therefore the critics concluded that this was sheer wickedness.

But people of halakha are supposed to make their intellect rule over their hearts. In Judaism, halakha has an element of extreme rationalism, so much so that it sometimes seems entirely detached from the emotion in the heart. A significant part of the misunderstandings of the secular public toward the world of halakha is connected to this point. The broader public cannot grasp rationalistic behavior, especially when emotion opposes it.

This opposition is a sharp expression of the confrontation between the vital-animal soul and the divine soul. This is what we said: the secular world is emotional at its root, and the root of this lies in its analyticity. The religious world is synthetic, and therefore far less emotional. It has not yet despaired of objective truths.

Another striking example is the attitude toward the Palestinian problem. In this case it seems that both sides suffer from the same failure, and we shall try to clarify the root of the matter. The treatment will be brief, since this is only an example not directly connected with our topic.

There are two planes of relation to the Palestinian problem. One is the plane of the personal suffering that many Palestinians have undergone, and still undergo. The second is the political-security plane: how should one behave politically? Should one compromise? Should one give them territories? And so forth. Broadly speaking, one may say that in the public discussion of these matters, both the Right and the Left confuse these two planes. The Left repeatedly raises arguments explaining that the Palestinians have suffered greatly, and that we are to blame, and therefore we should adopt political compromise. To do so, various emotional manipulations are used, sometimes consciously, in order to generate empathy with a suffering person and thereby influence the political plane.⁸⁷ Identification with the suffering can produce a tendency toward a political decision of compromise. This is a manipulative attempt to create an influence of emotion upon intellect.⁸⁸

On the other hand, the Right wing in the debate makes the opposite mistake. Because it tends toward a more militant political decision and opposes compromise on the political-ideological plane, it often also does not identify with the suffering undergone by some Palestinians as individuals, among them many innocents. Sometimes perhaps there is no choice but to cause suffering even to innocents, but that does not preclude emotional identification or a moral effort to avoid causing such suffering as much as possible. Nor is it necessary to classify such feelings as mere emotion; they too should be given weight in moral decision-making.

There is no necessary connection between these two planes. The ideological-political plane is connected with normative decisions, and people on the Right act according to it. The plane of private suffering is connected with emotion and the heart, and people on the Left act mainly according to it.

It is not surprising to discover that the Left behaves in its usual manner as the vital-animal soul, for already in the first book, mainly in the third and fifth gates, we saw the connection between analyticity and a Leftist, political and social, outlook. The Right, by contrast, tends more to make intellect rule over emotion, that is, it acts according to the divine soul. Therefore it is often accused of alienation from natural feeling and from morality, because morality is mistakenly identified with emotion.

As stated, the connection between the political plane and the emotional plane is a failure. One should indeed make intellect rule over emotion, but there is nothing to prevent taking suffering into account and trying to minimize it, even if one’s political ideology is militant and uncompromising.⁸⁹

These examples express an emotional tendency that is highly characteristic of our world. It stems from despair of intellect, or at least of its objective dimensions.

In our analytic world there is no point in asking whether some work of art was “wise” or “deep,” in the intellectual rather than emotional sense, since “each person has his own depth” or “his own wisdom.” In a postmodern world there is no objective wisdom. True, there is no objective emotion either, but in the realm of emotion subjectivity and relativism are legitimate. This is precisely what the people of today’s world are seeking.

On Religion, Emotion, and Rationality

Another important point that emerges from these remarks concerns the common identification of religion with the world of emotion. The connection we have made here between syntheticity, which we have seen characterizes the religious world, and the dominance of intellect together with the minor role of emotion, also does not fit the accepted assumptions of our world. Today it is commonly believed that religion is an emotional, esoteric, mystical affair, connected more to emotion than to intellect.

This is a conception Christian at its root. Christianity associates religiosity with emotion and irrationality. In Christianity, paradox is perceived as a distinctly religious characteristic.⁹⁰ Beyond the abandonment of logic, Christianity also emphasizes the importance of emotion. As a result, the widespread conception today is that religiosity is characterized primarily as a kind of emotional experience and contains clear irrational dimensions.

But in this series of books we have seen that this is not true, at least not with regard to the Jewish religion. Throughout its history, at least in the mainstream of the last two thousand years, it expresses a highly rationalistic stance. See my remarks in the first book, at the beginning of chapter 1 of Gate 12, regarding the empty notion of the “unity of opposites,” and especially in note 50 there. More than that: as we have seen all along, the only possible foundation for a rational position in science, philosophy, and in general is a religious, or more precisely theistic, foundation. We have seen that the alternatives to this foundation end up in utterly bizarre views and claims, all in order to preserve “rationality.”

Back to the Orthopedist: A Look at Kierkegaard

One of the epigraphs on the title page is Dov Sadan’s joke about the Jewish orthopedist. The meaning of that joke becomes very clear in light of what we have said here. The world keeps lowering the root point of its culture. It began in the brain in the head, passed to the emotion in the heart, and continues downward to instincts and drives, which are located lower still.

Abraham our father and Moses our teacher were people of the divine soul, people guided by intellect. Jesus was a person of emotion, guided by the heart. Freud hung everything on man’s lower drives, and today many think that this is the main source from which the soul draws. These are those whom we have called here people of the animal soul.

This does not mean that the world has become less intelligent or more stupid. What is at issue is the fundamental motor-point from which everything draws, intellect and emotion alike.

In fact, we will deal with this point further on as well. There is a parallel between this process and the stages described by Soren Kierkegaard, whose thought divides human modes of action and thought into three kinds: the aesthetic, the ethical, and the religious. See the epilogue to the first book, and below in the sixth gate and note 22. The aesthetic person is one who acts on the basis of his natural instincts. He is a hedonist, and he determines his values according to feelings and interests. This is a person of the animal soul. The ethical person determines his thought and actions in a way that overcomes his naturalistic tendency. This is the conquest of impulse and self-mastery, which Kant placed at the top of the moral pyramid. In the terminology of the author of Tanya, this is the person of the divine soul.

The religious person, in Kierkegaard’s eyes, is a person who lives above intellect, in paradox. See the beginning of Gate 12 in the first book. Abraham our father was for him the symbol of such a life.⁹¹ This is a Christian conception, one with no real source or foothold in Judaism.

Instead, Judaism presents another model, in which man refines his intellect through revelation and the giving of the Torah from above. Only in this sense does he indeed act above human intellect. As we constantly repeat, the synthetic person too is subject to the laws of logic.

Footnotes