Faith That Is Like Heresy: Conceptual Conventionalism

Opening post by the rabbi

Faith That Is Like Heresy: Conceptual Conventionalism

Posted on 21/9/2005

| |

Faith That Is Like Heresy: Conceptual Conventionalism

To this holy community, I wanted to raise a troubling philosophical-theological question.

There is a common joke in Bnei Brak to the effect that there is much fear of Heaven at ‘Merkaz HaRav,’ but the question is: which ‘heaven’ do they fear there? When I told this to my friend, who teaches at the seminary in Yeruham that combines religious study with army service, he was astonished and told me that the source of the remark is… in the writings of Rabbi Kook, where he writes his well-known passage:

“There is heresy that is like faith, and there is faith that is like heresy…” (Arik, please provide the source and full wording).

Rabbi Kook, of course, intended here to describe the old community he encountered in Jerusalem, where the heaven they feared was very constricted and far removed from the true heaven in its fullness, which was the object of Rabbi Kook’s faith. In other words, this saying originated with Rabbi Kook (= the founder of ‘Merkaz HaRav’) about the ultra-Orthodox (= the people who tell the joke today).

Rabbi Kook’s intention is that faith in a constricted heaven is like heresy, since this is faith in the wrong heaven. By contrast, heresy with respect to that constricted heaven is like faith, since it means that the heretic expects the heaven worthy of being the object of true faith to be full and not constricted.

After some time, I thought that the basis of the matter is found in Rambam’s parable of the elephant in Moreh Nevukhim (Riv, please provide the source and exact wording). There Rambam explains that one who errs regarding the divine attributes is a complete heretic, since the object of his fervent faith is not the true God, but another, false god. The parable for this is someone who says that the elephant has wings and a hump. That person indeed calls his animal an ‘elephant,’ but he means a flying camel. This is nothing more than sharing a name.

Yet despite the similarity, it seems to me that there is a difference between Rabbi Kook’s words and Rambam’s. Rabbi Kook is speaking about an evaluative attitude toward that faith and heresy. It is unlikely that he means that, for purposes of a prayer quorum, one should count specifically those who deny that heaven and not those who believe in it. He means to say that the heresy here is less severe, and that the faith there is less worthy of appreciation. By contrast, Rambam seems to be making a sharp philosophical claim, according to which whoever believes in a corporeal God, or in one who does not exercise providence, and the like, believes in other gods—in other words, he is a heretic.

Rambam seems to be consistent with his own position when he writes that one who believes that God is corporeal is a heretic, and Raavad disagrees with him and writes that many great and worthy people believed this (see below).

I do not agree with this far-reaching claim on the logical level (see Shtei Agalot, Gate Two). It seems to me that Raavad’s intention is that a dispute about characteristics of an entity or concept does not necessarily mean that we are dealing with two different concepts/entities. There may be a situation in which there is a dispute about characteristics, yet both sides are dealing with the same concept/entity. My intuition is that one who attributes corporeality to God is speaking about the same God, only mistakenly. There can be a dispute about the characteristics of an entity or concept.

In order to make such a claim, we must assume that the concept or entity is not the sum total of its characteristics. There is something in the concept/entity beyond the totality of its characteristics. There is an essence (in Kantian language: the concept/entity as it is in itself). If concepts do indeed have an essence, then a dispute over characteristics can certainly revolve around the same concept. If concepts have no essence, and are nothing more than a linguistic definition of a collection of characteristics (= the conventionalist—that is, agreement-based—approach, as opposed to the essentialist approach), then every dispute over a characteristic changes the definition, and therefore we are dealing with a different concept. A dispute about concepts is impossible, and a change in the definition of concepts is impossible as well. A change of definition means a different concept. This is the crux of Rambam’s view in the parable of the elephant, whereas Raavad disagrees, as explained above.

Of course, one must distinguish between essential and accidental properties (and that is how I recall it from Milot HaHigayon—Riv?), and one can say that only disagreement about, or change in, accidental properties is possible. But if the disagreement/change concerns an essential property, then we are dealing with a different concept, not the same concept itself. According to this, it is possible that Rambam too agrees with the basic approach (namely, that concepts have an essence).

All this raises at least two boundary questions:

1. When do we say that the change is so essential that we are dealing with a different entity?

2. What is the difference between Rabbi Kook’s approach and Rambam’s (apparently, even in Rabbi Kook, who seems to me a convinced essentialist, one can see a certain conventionalism)? What is the meaning of Rabbi Kook’s statement, if he is not actually a conventionalist? Can one evaluate faith and heresy in this way even if one does not accept the conventionalist philosophical basis? Here too there is some kind of boundary question.

Thus far my remarks.

Source (forum ‘Stop Here, Think’): http://www.bhol.co.il/forums/topic.asp?topic_id=1582251