Only the Servant of God Is Free: 3. A Second Look at Rabbinicity and Sovereignty (Column 128)
Why autonomy alone is not enough: even the “sovereign” Jew must be judged from outside
The essay opens with the example of a hired killer in order to show that autonomy alone does not make a way of life worthy. Even if a person “legislates” his own path, one can and must still say that his path is evil. From here, the evaluation of a person or a way of life always rests on two conditions: that he choose for himself, and that his choice be measured against an objective standard that is not the product of his own will. If the person himself also determined what counts as good and evil, no one could ever be judged negatively. Therefore, the ideal figure is not sovereign instead of rabbinic, but sovereign and rabbinic together: autonomous in choosing, yet subject to an external standard regarding the content of the choice.
The real dispute between secular and religious Jews is about the content of the framework, not its existence
From here the rabbi argues that the gap between a moral secular Jew and a religious Jew is not whether there is an external factor that binds them, but what that factor includes. Ari Elon himself is not willing to say that murder or theft become good merely because someone chose them; therefore, even on his own view there is binding morality that is not legislated by the human being. The moral secular person, then, is also “rabbinic” in the broad sense: external norms apply to him. The religious person adds halakha to that framework. Elon’s mistake is that he built only two types — rabbinic but not sovereign versus sovereign but not rabbinic — and ignored two additional ones: someone who is both, and someone who is neither. Once those are added, it becomes clear that the identification religious=rabbinic and secular=sovereign is arbitrary.
Freedom is not a value; liberty is, and that is why both the moral secular Jew and the religious Jew are potentially free
In the terms of the previous essay, a “sovereign but not rabbinic” person is free in the sense of lacking constraints, like the voter in Switzerland: nothing substantial depends on his choice, and so the choice has no value. Freedom of that sort is a state or an asset, not a moral ideal. By contrast, both the moral secular Jew and the religious Jew act within a binding framework that they did not create, and so they are not “free”; but precisely because of that they can possess liberty, that is, decide for themselves whether and how to act within that framework. They resemble the voter in England, not the one in Switzerland. From here the rabbi argues that Ari Elon confused freedom with liberty: he described the secular person as free, while what he really meant was a person of liberty; and he described the religious person as lacking liberty, while what he had really pointed to was only the fact that he is not free of constraints.
The double demand and the partial failures: it is not enough to comply, and it is not enough to choose
The model constructed here places a double demand on the person: to be sovereign — to choose his own path rather than merely be dragged by education, biology, society, and habit; and to be rabbinic — to choose the correct path, namely morality, and for the religious person halakha as well. That is why there are two distinct failures. Someone who keeps halakha only out of inertia, submission, or social pressure is rabbinic but not sovereign; his deeds may be perfect, but from the standpoint of liberty there is a basic deficiency here. Someone who chooses autonomously but rejects morality and/or halakha is sovereign but not rabbinic; this too is a failure, but a partial one, because there is a human success in the very independence. In both cases, the essay refuses to identify perfection either with obedience alone or with autonomy alone.
Libet’s experiments sharpen the difference between a meaningless selection and a value-laden choice
To sharpen the point further, the rabbi turns to Libet’s experiments. In the classic experiment, a readiness potential, RP, appears in the brain before the subject reports that he decided to press a button. Many saw this as proof that conscious decision is a deterministic illusion. The rabbi does not enter here into all the criticisms, but offers a basic distinction: there are actions of picking — arbitrary taking or a meaningless decision — and actions of choosing — a decision that has reason and deliberation behind it. Pressing a button in the experiment, when it has no consequences at all, belongs to the first type. Therefore, even if the RP precedes the decision, this does not prove that liberty does not exist; it may show only that in a meaningless situation the person simply does not veto the impulse, because he has no reason to do so.
Switzerland reconsidered: without norms there is not even “sovereignty,” only inner determinism
From here the essay returns to the analogies of Switzerland and England and deepens them. Earlier it was argued that Switzerland represents freedom without meaning; now it turns out that in a vacuum of value there is not even real choice. When there is no substantive consideration in favor of one option and against another, what decides is the impulse, not the person. That is picking, not choosing. Therefore, the “free” person who is bound by no external standard is not truly sovereign; he is simply subject to inner determinism, analogous to the way North Korea involves outer determinism. Precisely here the essay offers its sharpest conclusion: the category Elon builds, of a sovereign Jew who is not rabbinic, turns out to be an almost entirely empty figure.
This is how Judah Halevi becomes clear: “slaves of time” are ruled by their impulses, while the “servant of God” can be free
Against this background, Judah Halevi’s words receive a new interpretation. “Only the servant of God is free” means, in the essay’s language, that only someone who lives within a binding normative system can possess liberty, because only then does his decision carry meaning. And “the slaves of time are slaves to slaves” is not an Orwellian slogan but an exact description of someone who lives without an external standard: he is not independent but ruled by impulses, RP, fashions, or circumstances. Liberty, then, is not the rival of serving God but the condition of every religious and moral value; without liberty, neither religious obedience nor moral action has meaning. That is why it is no surprise that both Judah Halevi and Rav Kook see liberty as a foundational value.
The Exodus gave freedom; Sinai gave the possibility of liberty
The ending returns the discussion to the Exodus from Egypt. Leaving the house of slavery removed Pharaoh’s external coercion and gave freedom. But only the giving of the Torah, fifty days later, provided a normative framework that makes liberty possible — that is, the possibility of becoming truly free. Passover by itself releases from bondage; Sinai turns that release into the basis for meaningful choice. From here the essay continues in later columns to the collective dimension, but the conclusion already reached here is that genuine human sovereignty does not abolish yoke; it needs one.
With God’s help
In the first column I presented Ari Elon’s distinction between the rabbinic Jew and the sovereign Jew. Having in the previous column defined the concepts of freedom and liberty, we can now return to that distinction and see that it is really nothing more than a conceptual confusion.
Completing the Picture Presented by Ari Elon
Ari Elon presented the sovereign Jew as one who legislates his own path and values for himself. He is the one who determines for himself what is to be done and not done, which thoughts and opinions are correct, and so forth. By contrast, the rabbinic Jew lets other factors (Jewish law, rabbis, halakhic decisors, society, etc.) legislate all these things for him.
To understand why this is a misunderstanding, let us consider a person who legislates for himself the “noble” way of life of a contract killer. He has set goals and values for himself and realizes them with devotion and consistency. From Ari Elon’s point of view, is this an ideal figure worthy of imitation? Is this, in his eyes, a possible model of the sovereign Jew? Would he prefer such a person to the rabbinic Jew as well? I assume not. The reason is that although this Jew has indeed legislated his own path for himself and chosen it autonomously and independently, it is an evil path. Murder is evil, even if one legislates murder for oneself as a way of life. That is a fact imposed upon all of us. Who determined it? I do not know, but one thing is clear: not the person himself. When we judge a person, it is not enough for us to examine whether he autonomously chooses his own path; we also want to examine whether the path he chose is worthy of appreciation. This means that there is some standard that does not depend on the choices of that sovereign Jew, and that determines what is good and what is evil. It is by that standard that I judge him, for better or worse.
Thus we learn that judging a path or a person requires two components: a. that he himself choose his path, that is, that he be sovereign. b. that the path itself be worthy. The judgment regarding the path is made according to some external standard that does not depend on the person himself. If he himself were to legislate for himself what is good and what is evil, he would always come out righteous. By definition, a person does what he has decided to do, and if his decision determines what is good and what is evil, then there are no evil people. Any judgment, and any presentation of people as ideal models, requires an objective standard independent of the person being judged, by which he is judged. Translated into Ari Elon’s language, what is required of the ideal figure is that he be both sovereign and rabbinic at once. That is, that he choose his path freely and autonomously (sovereign), and that the path accord with what is dictated to him by the external standard (rabbinic).
The difference between the secular Ari Elon and the religious Jew committed to Jewish law is not the distinction between rabbinic and sovereign, but the question of what the rabbinic standards are. Ari Elon advocates a purely moral standard, without the religious-legal components. The rabbinic Jew, by contrast, holds that the standard includes the religious norms as well, and not morality alone. Therefore, the relevant distinction is not between sovereignty and rabbinicity. On both sides there are sovereign Jews and non-sovereign Jews. But on both sides these are rabbinic Jews, in the sense that what determines for them the proper and improper is some external factor, and not that they themselves legislate good and evil for themselves. They can only decide whether to behave according to the proper norms or not, but the norms themselves are not in their hands. For Ari Elon, the external factor determines the norms of morality (the prohibition of murder, theft, harming another person, the obligation to help and care about him, and so forth). All of these obligate him not because he legislated them for himself and to himself. These are the correct values because they are correct regardless of him. What is in his hands is only the decision whether to act according to them or not.
For some reason, Ari Elon chose to describe a rabbinic Jew who is not sovereign, as against a sovereign Jew who is not rabbinic. He did not notice that he omitted two other important types that complete the picture: a Jew who is both rabbinic and sovereign, and a Jew who is neither sovereign nor rabbinic. Once these are added to the picture, it emerges that the distinction between secular and religious has nothing whatsoever to do with rabbinicity in the sense described by Elon (that there is some external factor that determines for you what is right and what is not). The difference lies only in the question of what rabbinic framework they are committed to and acknowledge (not in the very existence of such a framework). The identification he made between secular and sovereign (non-rabbinic), and between religious and rabbinic (non-sovereign), is completely arbitrary.[1]
The Connection to the Picture Described in the Previous Column: Freedom and Liberty
In the terminology defined in the previous column, the condition of a sovereign Jew who is not rabbinic reflects a state of freedom. A person decides his own path, and there is no external standard that determines good and evil for him beyond his own decisions. But as I explained in the previous column, this is precisely the situation in Switzerland. A person there chooses his path freely, but because he acts in a vacuum, his choice has no evaluative significance. I explained there that freedom is a condition, and therefore it is not itself a value. A free person is not worthy of appreciation, and his choices are arbitrary. If he really thinks that there are no values imposed on him and obligating him, then his choices to act or think in one way or another have no significance or consequence whatsoever.
A secular Jew with moral commitments does accept a binding value system whose content was not determined by him. In that sense he is rabbinic and not merely sovereign, since there is an external system of constraints that does not depend on him and that determines for him what is good and what is evil. He acts like an English voter and not a Swiss one. What is in his hands is only the decision whether to act according to that value system or not (what ballot to put in the box). Such a secular Jew is, of course, not a free Jew, since there are constraints around him that do not depend on him. He is a Jew possessed of liberty, just like his religious counterpart. The religious Jew is a rabbinic person, since he believes that beyond morality there is also a religious framework that establishes the external standard, but he too can choose autonomously whether to act in accordance with it or not, that is, whether to be sovereign or not.
Thus, the religious Jew and the moral secular Jew are both rabbinic (both have an external framework that determines what is good and what is evil), and only for that reason do both of them have the possibility of deciding whether to possess liberty or not. They must decide whether to choose their path within the external framework and act according to it or not. Of course, they can also let go of the reins and allow themselves to be dragged along by society and by the standards accepted within it, letting those constraints and limitations shape their conduct, whether in the case where they act according to the binding norms or where they do not. The difference between the religious and the secular Jew is not the question of sovereignty and rabbinicity, but only the question of what system of norms and values is dictated to them from outside: morality alone, or morality together with Jewish law.
In his distinction, Ari Elon in fact confused freedom and liberty. He presented the secular person as free, whereas what he meant was that he possessed liberty (and therefore he is indeed rabbinic, in the sense that binding standards are imposed upon him). And he presented the religious person as lacking liberty, whereas what he meant was that he lacks freedom (because binding standards are imposed upon him). The truth is that both are rabbinic (in the broad and general sense I defined above), and both can decide whether to be sovereign or not.
The Significance of the Double Model
Ari Elon assumes that there is value in freedom, but as noted, freedom is an asset and not a value (freedom from morality is of course neither a value nor a legitimate asset). What he probably meant was liberty and not freedom, that is, the value in making decisions with our own hands. The decisions are whether and how to realize morality, and by what means, but the moral values themselves do not depend on our decisions. The relevant demand to which Ari Elon was probably also referring is to possess liberty and not merely freedom, since liberty is indeed a value (whereas freedom is only an asset). But this is also the demand made of the believing Jew. He is indeed not free (just as the moral secular Jew is not), but he too is required to possess liberty within that framework. He must choose his path: whether he acts in accordance with moral norms and the norms of Jewish law, in what way, and according to which interpretation. The norms themselves are not in his hands, just as the norms of morality are not in the hands of his secular counterpart.
In fact, the significance of the model I presented is that what is demanded of us as believing and committed Jews is twofold: a. sovereignty – to choose our path ourselves and not be influenced by circumstances (social norms, education, environment, biology, etc.). b. rabbinicity – to choose the correct path (to act in accordance with morality and Jewish law). This is exactly what Ari Elon would demand of a secular Jew according to his own values (morality without Jewish law). And in our terminology here, the demand is to possess liberty and not merely freedom. To live like England and not like Switzerland.
The conclusion is that when we look at a Jew and want to judge him, we must examine him on two planes:
- A Jew who observes Jewish law out of inertia, or out of submission to his surroundings and constraints, is rabbinic but not sovereign. This is really a kind of failure, even if his deeds can be utterly perfect (he is meticulous about every minor point no less than every major one).
- A Jew who chooses his path independently, but decides not to be committed to morality and/or to Jewish law, is sovereign but not rabbinic. This too is a kind of failure, but it seems to me that here the failure is only partial. There is a success here on the human level, since that Jew decides his path autonomously. He possesses liberty (he is sovereign). True, the path as such is not correct (he is not rabbinic), and therefore this is not a perfect model.[2]
Back to Yehuda Halevi
We are now ready to return to Yehuda Halevi’s words. If I translate his words into my own language, what he is basically saying is that the slaves of time, that is, those who are not subject to evaluative constraints, are slaves of slaves. From the picture I have described here, it follows that their freedom has no significance (this is Swiss freedom). Only the servant of God, that is, the rabbinic Jew, meaning a person who acts within a system of evaluative and normative constraints, is alone free, that is, possessed of liberty.[3] In order to possess liberty, constraints dictated to us by an external factor are required.
The interpretation of the latter clause (“A servant of God alone is free”) is clear and entirely reasonable (I think there is a fairly good chance that Yehuda Halevi himself even intended it. But even if not – I am proposing it here in his stead). However, the interpretation I proposed for the first clause of his words (“Those who are servants of time are slaves of slaves”) still requires clarification. The slaves of time are indeed not possessed of liberty, but they are free. It is hard to accept that the term Yehuda Halevi uses, slaves of slaves, means “free.” To understand this better, I will need one further introduction, this time from the field of neuroscience.
Libet’s Experiments[4]
At the end of the 1970s, an American neurologist named Benjamin Libet began a series of experiments whose purpose was to examine whether we have free will. Until then this had been a philosophical question, and Libet tried to move it onto the scientific plane. He based himself on a phenomenon discovered about twenty years earlier: before we perform any action, a readiness potential, RP (readiness potential), appears in the brain – basically an electrical signal that rises and falls. Its appearance can be detected using an EEG device that measures electrical waves in the brain. Hence, in principle, someone who follows the EEG can predict in advance that a person will perform an action even before he sees it being carried out.
The RP of course appears before the person acts (which is why it is called a readiness potential). The person also of course makes the decision to act before the action itself. The question Libet asked was whether the RP appears before the decision or after it. In other words, is the sequence: RP -> decision -> action, or: decision -> RP -> action. Why is this important? Because if the RP appears before the decision, then it is possible to predict that the person will decide and act even before he has actually decided. In other words, the person’s feeling that he is deciding is an illusion. If, by contrast, the decision precedes the RP, then the person himself decides, and his decision arouses the RP, which subsequently brings about the action.
Without going here into the details of the experimental apparatus, I will say only that Libet seated a person in front of a table on which there was a button and told him to press the button whenever he wished. The subject had to say exactly when he decided to press. The experimenter sees the actual moment of the press with his own eyes, and he measures the appearance of the RP with an EEG. The information about the moment of decision comes from the subject’s own report. These three pieces of data are placed on a timeline, and then one can examine whether the RP arrives before or after the decision. To his astonishment, Libet discovered that the RP precedes the decision by several tens of milliseconds. It should be noted that Libet was a libertarian, that is, he believed in free will. The findings surprised him, since they essentially showed that we do not really have freedom to choose. The feeling of choice is an illusion, and in fact the electrical activity in the brain determines that the action will occur even before we consciously decide upon it.
The results of Libet’s experiments caused an uproar among philosophers and brain researchers, and hundreds of critical articles were written proposing various interpretations and pointing to many possible problems at every stage of the experiment and of the interpretations of it. In the period that followed, down to our own day, dozens and hundreds of additional experiments have been and are being carried out, seeking to refine the experiment and give the findings greater validity. There were experiments that demonstrated a gap of more than 5 seconds between the RP and the decision – an enormous time gap in neurological terms. It is difficult to doubt that the RP does indeed appear significantly before the decision.
In order to save his libertarian conception, Libet argued that although an RP appears before every action, it is not true that after every RP an action is carried out. There are situations in which an RP appears, but the person places a veto upon it and does not perform the action. Libet saw the ability to impose a veto as an expression of our free will. The RP pushes us to do something, and we decide whether to comply with it or to veto it. Therefore, it is indeed true that before every action an RP appears (there is no action without an RP preceding it), but even if an RP has appeared, we still have the ability to veto it and not carry out the action. The veto thesis, too, aroused many criticisms and further attempts that put it to empirical tests. Some of the critics claimed that Libet did not interpret the data correctly, and that in fact he did not really observe any veto by the subject.
For our purposes here, let us assume that there really were no vetoes in Libet’s experiment. Even so, in my book I showed that the deterministic interpretation can be rejected in several ways. Here it will suffice for me to explain only one of the criticisms, that is, one argument that reconciles the findings obtained with the libertarian worldview.
Picking versus choosing
The claim is the following. Suppose an RP signal appeared in the subject that pushes him to press the button. Suppose, for the sake of argument, that we never saw a veto being imposed, that is, that whenever an RP appeared, a press always followed. And let us further assume for the sake of argument the libertarian picture, that is, that the subject has free will and can veto the signal and not press. Let us now see whether the findings Libet obtained (that the RP precedes the decision and that no veto was ever imposed upon it) refute that picture.
In the libertarian picture, the subject deliberates whether to impose a veto and postpone the press or to press now. What considerations could he have in one direction or the other? In fact, quite apart from the veto, one can ask what considerations the subject is weighing at all in order to decide exactly when to press the button. After all, there are no relevant considerations in favor of one moment rather than another. One must remember that nothing depends on this press, and therefore there is no significance – certainly no evaluative significance – to pressing at one time rather than another. In such a situation, it is highly plausible that when the RP appears, the subject will comply with it and press the button. Why should he struggle against that impulse?! He has no reason to do so. The consideration that led him to press was the RP itself. The RP precedes the decision and also causes it, but it does so not because the subject is incapable in principle of vetoing it, but because in the situation of the experiment he had no reason to do so.
To understand this better, let us think of another situation in which pressing the button has consequences of evaluative significance, for better or worse (it gives someone an electric shock, or saves a person from death). In such a situation there are evaluative considerations in favor of one moment and against another. Therefore, if in such a situation an RP were to appear at a time that did not fit the subject’s considerations, then perhaps he would decide to impose a veto and not press, or to postpone the press to another time.[5]
The difference between the two situations is that in the case of Libet’s experiment there was no choosing (choice), but rather picking (an arbitrary taking). Pressing a button is just an action devoid of any significance, and no considerations accompany the decision about it. In the second situation, we are dealing with an evaluative decision, that is, with a genuine choice or decision. The English terminology expresses the distinction between choosing a garment from a closet full of clothes on the basis of aesthetic considerations (choosing), and simply taking some garment from it arbitrarily (picking).
Back to Switzerland
An act of picking is basically the act of the voter in Switzerland. There too there are no considerations for or against one candidate or another, and therefore the decision whom to choose is arbitrary. This is arbitrary picking, not a genuine decision or choice. By contrast, the act of the voter in England is an evaluative decision in favor of one candidate or another, since much depends on that choice. Therefore, here we are dealing with choosing.
Notice that the picture I described above has now changed. Earlier we thought that in Switzerland there is freedom, except that because there are no problems and no constraints or limitations, such freedom has no evaluative significance. It is freedom and not liberty, and therefore the voters could have drawn lots instead of choosing. But the distinction between choosing and picking teaches us much more than that. The voter in Switzerland in fact does not choose at all. He is driven by impulses (his RP), and he has no reason to impose a veto on them. What possible consideration could he have in favor of Yankel and against Muhammad as president? Neither of them is any better or worse than the other, since neither will really change our condition. The voter could have drawn lots, but in fact he did not do so. He simply decided to choose Muhammad and put his ballot in the box, just like that. So why did he really do it, if there is no consideration in favor of this candidate? Presumably, this happened because he had an RP in his brain that pushed him toward it. As we have seen, acts of picking are performed as a response to an arbitrary impulse (without imposing a veto) and not as a genuine decision. If so, the choice of the voter in Switzerland is not a free action devoid of evaluative significance, as we thought above. It is not a free action at all, but rather a response to an impulse. The voter in Switzerland does not decide; he is driven.
The conclusion is that, contrary to what we thought above, it has now become clear to us that if a person is not rabbinic, then he is necessarily not sovereign either. In fact, we have discovered that there is no category of a sovereign person who is not rabbinic, as Ari Elon presents it. This is a hypothetical figure that reflects the conceptual confusion underlying his distinction.
The surprising conclusion we have reached here is that if the elections in North Korea reflect a deterministic mechanism and the elections in England reflect liberty, then the elections in Switzerland do indeed reflect freedom – but in a state of freedom our actions are not produced by decision but by yielding to some internal impulse. Therefore the voter is not free in his actions; rather, this is a kind of determinism like that of North Korea. The difference is that here the determinism is internal (the impulses produce the election result), whereas in North Korea it is external (the regime produces the election result).[6] In any case, in both of these situations the voter’s free decision is not involved.
It is important to understand that my recourse to neuroscience is intended only to sharpen the argument. This description could have been clear to any intelligent person even without knowing the updated findings of neuroscience. Even someone who lived hundreds of years ago could understand that if I have no considerations one way or the other, my decision is not the result of deliberation but of one impulse or another. He would not have known to call it by the name RP and give a scientific description of it, but this fundamental insight could have been understood clearly by him as well.
Back to Yehuda Halevi
We can now return and understand the first clause of Yehuda Halevi’s statement. We saw above why “A servant of God alone is free”. I explained that only someone who has a system of constraints and limitations that determines for him what is right and what is not, what is fitting and what is not, can be considered a person possessed of liberty. Only if he is rabbinic can he be sovereign (that is, possess liberty). But the first clause of his statement, “Those who are servants of time are slaves of slaves”, seemed unintelligible to us. Someone who is a slave only to time and who has no binding external normative system in his world (he is not a servant of God; sovereign and not rabbinic) may not be possessed of liberty, but he is a free person. I asked why Yehuda Halevi calls such a person “a slave of slaves”?
Now the matter is self-evident. A person who has no evaluative considerations determining for him what is right and what is not, his decision is not free. If above we thought that this was a free (sovereign) decision, but one devoid of evaluative significance (because it was not rabbinic), we now understand that in such a situation the decision is not his at all. He does not choose at all, but responds to his impulses. His RP determines everything he does. He engages only in picking, and the internal constraints dictate his path and his thoughts, and therefore he truly is a slave of slaves. By contrast, in the world of the servant of God there are external values and norms that he is supposed to take into account and make decisions on evaluative, moral, and halakhic grounds. He is rabbinic, and if he chooses to be sovereign as well, then he resembles the English voter, and therefore in his case we are dealing with choosing. Only such a person possesses liberty.
It is no wonder, then, that as we saw in Column 126, Yehuda Halevi and Rav Kook regard the aspiration to liberty as legitimate, and indeed apparently as a supreme value that is not set aside before other values. Without it, none of our decisions has any significance. If our service of God and our moral conduct are carried out in a non-sovereign way, they have no value. Liberty is the foundation of all the other values. Therefore, even from a religious point of view, liberty is a necessary evaluative foundation, and it is really not surprising to discover that religious thinkers do not oppose it. But now we have also understood that Yehuda Halevi is not even preaching Orwellian slogans to us, but is explaining this very point: why liberty is important, and why only the servant of God alone possesses liberty. Now his words are self-evident, and there is not even a trace of Orwellianism here.
The Significance of the Exodus from Egypt
I will conclude this column with the point with which I opened the first column (126). In the Exodus from Egypt, we left the bondage of Pharaoh (determinism in which the circumstances determined for us what we would do and think; a slave mentality) for freedom. The constraints were removed, and we could breathe a sigh of relief and begin to feel free. But until another fifty days had passed and we reached Mount Sinai, where we received the Torah, we did not become people possessed of liberty. If on Passover we received freedom, then at the giving of the Torah we received liberty, or more precisely the possibility of being people possessed of liberty.
In the following columns we will also deal with the collective dimension created in the Exodus from Egypt, and we will understand why it too does not contradict our liberty. There we will see further implications of the distinction between freedom and liberty, both with respect to the collective and with respect to secular Jewish identity, and finally we will also see a parallel distinction between freedom and liberty in the realm of art.
[1] In Column 72 I used this picture to explain the contradiction that many commentators see in Kant’s moral doctrine. On the one hand, Kant, as the father of humanistic (and secular) morality, speaks of morality as the product of legislation by the human being himself, who decides to heed the categorical imperative. On the other hand, Kant himself brings proof for the existence of God from morality (see the fourth notebook, where I also explained this contradiction), and it seems that God is indeed required in order to ground morality. Where did Kant’s secularity go? Some wanted to say that he changed his mind, or that there is a contradiction in Kant’s ethical doctrine. But in my opinion they are making the same mistake as Ari Elon. Kant does indeed see liberty and autonomous human decision as the basis of morality and moral behavior. But at the same time, he sees the determination of what is moral and what is not as a determination whose validity derives from an external factor and not from any human legislation. The framework is determined by God, and without Him it has no validity or significance. The decision whether to act according to it is entrusted to the human being himself. Contrary to what many think, Kant’s humanism (and in fact humanism in general) is not secular. On the contrary, humanism requires a religious basis, just as liberty cannot appear within a framework of mere freedom.
[2] See more on this at length in Column 36, especially toward the end.
[3] As I explained, my definitions in the previous column are not dictionary definitions. I said that in many sources the terms freedom and liberty are used interchangeably. Yehuda Halevi here writes A servant of God alone is free, and I interpret him as meaning a person possessed of liberty.
[4] The experiments and their interpretation are discussed in detail in Chapter 14 of my book The Science of Freedom. I propose there several criticisms, one on top of another, so that in the final analysis, in my opinion, no refinement of Libet’s experiments will be able to decide the question of freedom of the will and determinism. The first level of the critique is described here below.
[5] In this connection it is interesting to think about the Milgram experiment.
[6] In the previous column I mentioned that at the beginning of my book The Science of Freedom I explain that both of these mechanisms are deterministic, and I showed that many people err with respect to one or the other of them.
Discussion
Thank you very much for the fascinating line of argument. I would ask for your response to a few points:
1. You assume that Ari Elon is also committed to a moral system whose source is external to man. You put assumptions similar to your own into his mouth, and from there you go on to claim a flaw in his words.
Your view of what “morality” is and what “values” are is known. I am not sure that Elon agrees with you. It may be that he holds that a person derives his own “values,” and, sure enough, he will always come out “righteous.” If we think this way, we will not see anything wrong with a person who is sovereign rather than rabbinic.
2. From reading Elon’s words, I understood that one of the things that bothers him is that the restrictions are accepted by collective society. He writes: “In those days, apparently, Manasseh saw to complete freedom of worship, and all the Jews, men and women alike, worshipped as they wished various and sundry gods and goddesses—the Baal, the Asherah, Peor, YHWH, the whole host of heaven, and many more besides, believers, male and female, in diviners, sorcerers, soothsayers, mediums, and necromancers. None of all these male and female believers disqualified anyone else’s Jewishness, and they were all considered Jews.”
That is to say, he is speaking about freedom and not liberty. True, “freedom” is not a value according to your definition, but even you agree that taking away another person’s freedom is a non-value act. Elon is not complaining about the restrictions that people imposed on themselves when they believed in this god or that one. He is arguing against coercion by some part of society, or even by the majority, upon the minority. And later he also mentions the “ban” by means of which the rabbis ruled over their flock. In his view, society should coerce the minority insofar as its behavior tangibly threatens society, as with crime. Everything else should be left in the hands of the other person. Will you address this later on?
I do not know Elon or his views, and I am using him to express my own views.
3. Regarding Libet’s experiment, I did not understand how it is possible to measure when the decision was made based on self-report. After all, the very act of self-report also takes time; it too involves a considered decision, and a system of neurons and muscles that operates in parallel and requires its own time.
Pil,
There is indeed some limitation here on freedom, since there are determinations in your world that do not depend on you. This certainly limits thought (what is good and what is bad), but also action. If you now want to do the good, you have to do דווקא that and not something else.
A person without a conscience will apparently not act according to the moral standard. Why should he do so? He does not feel at all that this is what ought to be done, so why would he oppose his RP? Conscience is what discerns that good and evil also tell you “do” and “do not do” (which is why conscience is a cognitive faculty and not something subjective. It is responsible for ethical cognition). After that, you have the ability to decide whether to do it in practice or not.
I already wrote that even a person who is in complete freedom can have the soul of a free person (if in another situation where there are constraints he would act as a free person). But in his current situation this cannot find expression.
Aharon,
1. Indeed, correct. But if he places the contract killer on his side of the equation, then I think i rest my cas. By the way, from familiarity with things he has written, it is clear to me that he does not place him there (that is, he does in fact advocate morality and does judge others).
2. That is exactly what I wrote. He talks about freedom and means liberty. His illustration is from freedom of worship, and I argue against him from the example of moral freedom (the contract killer). My claim is that he too means liberty and not freedom, except that his system of constraints includes only morality and not cultic restrictions (the prohibition of idolatry). That is exactly my point.
And regarding the latter part of this section, I will go on to ask whether Elon is in favor of imposing coercion on someone who behaves immorally. I assume so. And once again we return to the original distinction.
3. Not for nothing did I avoid going into the details of the experimental apparatus. It aroused quite a few objections. What Libet did was place before the subject a clock with a hand moving at quite a high speed (which gives better resolution at the level of tens of milliseconds). The person looks at it the whole time and notes the position of the hand at the moment he made the decision. After he pressed the button, he reports to the experimenter where the hand was when he decided.
If so, this is a “theological” argument in your terminology. I do not believe in a set of values but in needs and utility, and when I say that it seems preferable to me to be sovereign rather than rabbinic, I have not fallen into any contradiction whatsoever. Right?
An additional point: I very much enjoyed the argument that a person who does not act according to values but according to his desires does not possess choice but merely responds to impulses.
Even so, it seems to me that there are also conflicts and choices among needs and preferences. Suppose my initial impulse is to eat one more cube of chocolate, and I overcome that impulse because of another impulse (because my pants no longer fit me). One could think that, biologically speaking, there was an RP here that did not operate because of an opposing desire. No?
It seems that even in Libet’s experiment itself one can say that as long as he did not choose to press the button, he was in fact choosing not to press it. From the moment he chose to press, the RP appeared, and from that moment there indeed was no longer any ability to choose not to press (and to escape the pressing) until the action was carried out. It seems to me that this is a phenomenon people experience: there are moments when, from the moment a decision has been made, even though there is time until the action, there is no longer any choice to refrain from it and impose a veto. Something in the vein of “his impulse clothed him” or “his impulse compelled him.”
In my humble opinion, this is a miniature appearance of the famous phenomenon of the “removal of choice” from the wicked that Maimonides spoke about, and that appears in each of us. Someone who becomes addicted to doing evil (in both senses) expands and lengthens the “time of loss of choice” until in the end it becomes all the time, and the wicked person simply becomes an animal. The word “becomes addicted” in this context of course recalls the “slave of slaves.”
By the way, although it is clear that R. Yehuda Halevi and Rav Kook meant something deeper (they spoke about “the servant of God”—that is, that the external system was determined by God, unlike morality, for example, which let us say was determined by the name Elohim), and the rabbi’s words are a kind of homiletic reading of them, it seems to me that this is a true homily. And his understanding of R. Yehuda Halevi is like silver settings in the understanding of Maimonides regarding the parables in Proverbs (“golden apples in silver settings”). I know that the rabbi thinks Proverbs could have been said by Socrates, but if there is such a thing as divine inspiration and Proverbs was written with it, then it is clear that the meanings of Proverbs are something more than Aesop’s fables or La Fontaine. (Torah and not just wisdom.) That is, Proverbs is Torah (in the broader sense) in settings of wisdom. And the rabbi’s explanation too is the wisdom that wraps the Torah within R. Yehuda Halevi.
If you believe in needs and utility, then in your world there is no such concept as “sovereign,” at least not in the sense that I am talking about. And if it has some other meaning for you, then it seems to me not interesting at all and not a subject for philosophical discussion (after all, even this discussion itself is being conducted only for reasons of utility and needs).
The relevant RP is the bottom line of all the impulses. In the end, after all the considerations, the brain “decides” to issue an instruction to press and produces an RP. Therefore there is no veto here in any relevant sense, but rather an electrical process of producing an RP that is a weighting (and not “preferences,” as you put it, which is a concept that belongs to the world of free deliberation) of many electrical circuits. You can of course call it a biological veto, but from my point of view that is not very interesting. Electrical circuits, however complex they may be, are not a matter for philosophical inquiry.
This is a debate about the experiment and its interpretation that, as I said, I will not enter into here. But an unconscious choice, even if it exists, is not relevant to the moral discussion. It is hard for me to call it a choice at all, but that is already merely a semantic question.
I actually would not compare this to the removal of choice, but to an oath or a vow of inducement whereby a person binds his own hands so that he will not sin or will not do something in the future. But that is only a side remark.
Fine.
By the way, the three long essays the rabbi wrote are simply an elaboration of a generally known yeshiva intuition: that in the absence of morality or commandments there is not really freedom, because then a person is a slave to his impulse—that is, driven by urges and not acting to achieve goals (values, not just achievements).
Correction: “they are simply an elaboration of the yeshiva intuition (or statement, or simply indoctrination, since I’ve known it since sixth grade) …” Not that the elaboration is unimportant, but it is worth noticing that this is something every person who has had a religious education (and was not a zombie) knows, even if he does not know that he knows it.
Almost every philosophical argument is a conceptualization and grounding of intuitive feelings. This helps solve problems and resolve contradictions. But whether it has value or not—I leave that to the readers.
With God’s help, 12 Nisan 5778
The term “cherut” in the sense of non-enslavement exists only in the language of the Sages. In the Bible there is “he shall let him go free,” “and he shall make his father’s house free in Israel”—release from burden and bondage; and there is “and proclaim liberty throughout the land to all its inhabitants,” which can be interpreted as permission to move anywhere without restriction, like the free-flying bird.
In the Bible the expression “ben chorin” appears in Ecclesiastes: “Happy are you, O land, when your king is a son of nobles,” whose plain meaning is “son of aristocrats,” akin to the “officials and nobles,” the nobility of the land, whose freedom is not merely release from burden, but the capacity to influence society. Nobility enables many things, but on the other hand obligates elevated patterns of conduct, and as the English say: Nobles obliges.
Liberty requires greater responsibility. A “ben chorin” is not enslaved to flesh and blood, but takes upon himself, out of self-discipline, additional restraints, as Ramda correctly defined.
With the blessing of pleasant liberty, S. Tz. Levinger
1. Where does the RP come from??
2. In the conclusion of your remarks I lost track of you. In the end, on Passover do we celebrate freedom or liberty? On the one hand, in the first installment of this series you emphasize that the problematic issue lies in Passover, and that on it we went out from slavery to *liberty*; but on the other hand, at the end of this installment you write that on Passover we attained only freedom but not liberty. So is Passover a negative holiday in which we have no liberty, only freedom (which in itself has no value significance)??
Freedom is an asset, not a value. But acquiring an asset is also a reason to celebrate. Is escaping a threat that hung over us or over our property not a reason to celebrate? The process is freedom followed by liberty, and the celebration is of the entire process.
As for the RP, if we are talking about a non-volitional action, then it is the result of previous electrical processes. If we are talking about a value-driven action, then it depends whom you ask. Determinists think it is the result of previous electrical processes. I think it is a product of the will.
By non-volitional action do you mean a reflex, or do you mean picking?
In other words, in picking, where does the RP come from? From the will or from previous electrical processes? On the one hand it is not a reflex, but on the other hand it is also not a value-driven action.
Both. I explained where the rp comes from. In picking it is an electrical reaction according to all views.
If I understood correctly, liberty is accepting the yoke of the commandments autonomously, and that is what we celebrate on Shavuot, right?
Potential liberty already existed on Passover (when we became God’s autonomous servants). It reaches its completion on Shavuot with the giving of the Torah.
Why is the servant of God (the religious person) “alone” free (a ben chorin)? After all, the secular person can also be free (that is, a ben chorin) by choosing his own secular path, can he not?
Because he himself chooses his shackles.
See the essay on faith and morality, that without God there are no valid values, and therefore no liberty either.
You write here that judging a person contains two stages: first, whether he chose his path autonomously; and second, whether his path accords with an external objective standard (for example, that of halakhah or of morality).
But in essay 372 you explain that judgment of the person (the gavra) should be made according to his own outlook, and not according to an external objective standard. Is there not a contradiction here?
No. The judgment is conducted on both planes. It is true that a person who does wicked deeds because he thinks they are good is not wicked, but it is hard to regard him as righteous. He is coerced, with good intentions. Or a person who does good deeds even though he thinks they are bad—it is hard to see him as wicked.
I didn’t understand. If we analyze it:
The first layer—whether he chose autonomously—there is no problem with that.
Regarding the second layer:
– someone who erred about the facts (he indeed thinks murder is bad, but in the situation as he understood it, he thought he had to murder) is not wicked either by his own lights or if we judge him according to the external-objective value system (in fact they are identical in this case)
-someone who erred morally (he holds that murder is moral), that is, his value system does not accord with the external-objective value system—what is he, wicked or not wicked? [You write here explicitly, “the judgment regarding the path is made according to some external standard, one that does not depend on the person himself. If he himself were legislating for himself what is good and what is bad, he would always come out righteous. By definition, a person does what he decided to do, and if his decision is what determines what is good and what is bad, then there are no wicked people.” This contradicts what you wrote in essay 372, according to which there is weakness of will and the domination of impulse, which cause a person to do things that he himself thinks are bad. And you also explain there that one really has to judge the person (the gavra) only by his own lights.]
Someone who erred morally and thought murder is not immoral—the act is still wicked, because values are objective. But he himself, as a gavra, is not wicked, because his intention was not bad. If he thinks it is actually a moral act (and not merely not immoral), then his intention is genuinely good. And still, the judgment of the act as between good and evil is determined according to an objective scale, and murder is evil.
If a person acts according to his impulses and does something that even in his own opinion is bad, then this is of course a bad person. However, if it is an impulse that cannot be overcome, he is exempt as one acting under duress.
It is still not clear to me why the slaves of time are slaves of slaves, for at the moment of choice everyone has the possibility of choosing his path [assuming one accepts that there is free choice]. I chose to be a person committed to values, and the slaves of time chose to be committed to the electric current [RP]?
They chose not to choose. That is a one-time choice, and then handing yourself over into the hands of something else. See essay 172-3.
Thank you very much.
I would be very glad if you would address the following comment:
It is not clear to me why the existence of an external standard that determines what is good and what is bad should be considered a limitation on freedom at all. (Freedom, not liberty.) After all, the existence of this standard is a neutral fact; in what sense does this fact limit my actions? It seems to me that, if anything, only the psychological urge (or conscience), insofar as it exists, to act in accordance with the external standard might be considered a limitation on freedom.
If this comment is correct, then one can certainly act out of liberty even in a state of freedom (= absence of constraints). Assuming, for example, that someone has no conscience at all, then an action done out of liberty (= autonomous action) that accords with the moral standard is an action of value.
I of course agree that in that case it would be impossible to determine whether this really was a practical expression of liberty (because there is no way to know whether this action would also have been done in the face of constraints), but I think that, as I argued in my comment on the previous post, this is no more than a technical problem.