What Does Moses Our Teacher Have to Do with Kant’s Philosophy? – Ki Tisa

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What Does Moses Our Teacher Have to Do with Kant’s Philosophy?

Michael Abraham*

In our portion, Moses our teacher stands in the cleft of the rock and carries on a dialogue with God (Exod. 33:18-23):

And he said, ‘Please show me Your glory.’ And He said, ‘I will make all My goodness pass before you, and I will proclaim the name of the Lord before you; and I will be gracious to whom I will be gracious, and will show mercy to whom I will show mercy.’ And He said, ‘You cannot see My face, for no human being may see Me and live.’ And the Lord said, ‘Behold, there is a place by Me, and you shall stand on the rock. And when My glory passes by, I will place you in the cleft of the rock and I will cover you with My hand until I have passed by. Then I will remove My hand, and you shall see My back; but My face shall not be seen.’

This is a very puzzling dialogue. Did Moses not know that God cannot be seen? Why can God’s back be seen, but not His face? What is the difference between seeing His face and glory and seeing His back? I would like to connect this to a fundamental issue in philosophical epistemology and to suggest a possible interpretation of these words.

I will begin with a well-worn question, one that may perhaps sound a bit foolish: if a tree falls in a forest and no person is present to hear the sound of its fall, is it still correct to say that there is a sound there? At first glance, a positive answer seems obvious. A person’s presence does not create the sound; at most, it experiences it. But that answer is apparently mistaken. In the world there are physical phenomena, such as acoustic waves (the movement of air due to changes in pressure). When such an acoustic wave strikes our eardrum, electrical currents are produced that pass from the ear to the auditory center in the brain, which converts those electrical currents into a psychological or mental phenomenon that we call ‘sound.’ Sound does not exist in the physical world; it exists only within our consciousness. It is not a physical phenomenon but a mental one, brought about by physical processes. Hence, if no person inclines an ear to the tree’s fall, there is indeed no sound there. There is an acoustic wave there, but without the presence of a human eardrum for that wave to strike, the phenomenon of sound cannot come into being.

The same is true of light or colors. In the world itself there is no light, no yellow, no red, nor any other color. In the world there are electromagnetic waves at different frequencies, which, when they strike our retina, generate electrical currents that pass to the visual center, which converts them and produces what we call ‘light’ or ‘color.’ Light and color, like sound in its various ranges, are mental representations of physical phenomena, but they are not the physical phenomena as such.

All these are insights that have become clearer and clearer in the framework of modern neuroscience. But already in the eighteenth century, the philosopher Immanuel Kant understood that a human being cannot know reality as it is (the world as it is in itself, the noumenon), but only its reflection in consciousness (the phenomenon). There are objects and phenomena in reality, but we have no direct access to them. What we can grasp are only their properties, as they appear in our consciousness, or more precisely, representations of them in our consciousness. Human consciousness uses certain tools in order to operate (eyes and ears, a nervous system that carries neural inputs to the brain, and a brain that processes them), and these are what shape and create the picture of things that is received in our consciousness. It follows that if our consciousness had a different structure, we would experience the world in a completely different way. For example, if we were to connect the nerves that emerge from a person’s ears to the visual center of his brain, he would ‘see sounds’ rather than hear them. Likewise, a person whose eyes were connected to the auditory center would hear the color of flowers rather than see it. Such a person is not disabled, nor is he in any way inferior to any ordinary person known to us. He is simply constructed differently. There is no right and wrong here, because these are different representations of the same phenomena and the same objects, like two descriptions of the same content in different languages.

This Kantian picture is taken by many as a description of a human limitation: because we are human beings, we are limited in our ability to know things and phenomena in the world, since we are bound to our human cognitive tools and therefore have no ability to know things as they are in themselves. But on further reflection one can see that this is not correct. If we had different tools, we would indeed see a different world (we would see sounds or hear sights, or perhaps represent these phenomena in some other way entirely unfamiliar to us), but it is quite clear that one cannot apprehend the world without tools at all. The tools of perception are not a limitation on our perception but a built-in condition of the very operation of consciousness. There is no consciousness without some cognitive tools. I do not mean to say that our senses are not limited. Our eyes are limited to certain wavelengths and to a certain range, and so too our ears, but the very fact that we represent physical events and translate them into our subjective language is not a limitation. A creature devoid of cognitive tools that observed some phenomenon would feel or apprehend nothing whatsoever.

Accordingly, if I ask what color the flower is, I am not dealing with the flower but with its image in our consciousness. There is an implicit assumption here that the person being asked is also observing the flower by means of eyes (because color is the representation of a message sent from the eyes). The flower as such has no color at all, but only a certain crystalline structure that produces in us the sensations of color. In the same way, every question about the properties of an object presupposes a system of a certain kind that is observing it. The answer to the question will likewise be given in the terms of that same cognitive system. From this emerges a far-reaching conclusion: Kant’s ‘limitation’ is no limitation at all. Perception is always the creation of representations of things, and this is our encounter with things as they are in themselves. There is no such thing as seeing or hearing the thing in itself, not because we are limited but because to see or hear something means to create a representation of it.

In the passage from our portion quoted at the beginning, Moses our teacher asks to see the glory of God, and ostensibly his intention is to form a representation of Him through sight. But God has no visual representation, nor any other sensory representation. Why not? Because He does not emit rays of light or sound waves, and therefore our senses cannot receive information that will be processed and create a representation of God. We can apprehend various actions or manifestations of His in the world, with which our senses can interact, and perhaps this is the meaning of seeing God’s back. What is involved is the apprehension of some effect of His that is accessible to our senses. The mental representation that will be formed may perhaps be some image or sound, but that is of course not a representation of God Himself; it is a representation of some effect of His (=His back) that is accessible to our senses.

The conclusion that emerges from the picture Kant presents is that, in this respect, there is no difference between human perception of a physical object, such as a table or a cloud, and our perception of God. In both cases, we cannot see the thing as it is in itself, since sight always deals with a mental representation and not with the thing as such. And yet there is a difference between the cases: a table is a physical object that sends visual information to the eye, and the eye creates from it a mental representation in consciousness. By contrast, God is not apprehended through our senses, not even through the creation of representations of Him. For us to apprehend Him, He must produce effects of Himself in the physical world that our senses can encounter and from which they can form a mental representation. But effects that are available to sensory apprehension cannot be part of Him, but at most things that He creates. Prophets, however, can grasp abstract effects of God, what are called His names and attributes. When Moses our teacher asks to see the glory of God, he is answered in the negative. This is not necessarily because he is unworthy of it, but because it is impossible. According to the suggestion I am offering here, this is the meaning of ‘and you shall see My back.’ What can be ‘seen’ of God is at most the Lord’s back, that is, His names and attributes. Is this interpretation the author’s own innovation (and if so, on what basis does he make this claim?), or is it an existing interpretation (and if so, it would be appropriate to indicate its source or sources)? And even this is probably not sensory sight, but an apprehension accessible only to one who has attained the level of prophecy.

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