Between Intellectual Optimism and Pessimism: A. The Fracture (Column 494)

Dedicated, with appreciation, to my friend Rabbi Yom Tov Cheshin.

Wishing you success in your just battles.

This past Shabbat I finished reading Hillel Zeitlin’s book, The Good and the Evil According to the Views of the Sages of Israel and the Sages of the Nations. There he offers a general historical survey of the development of moral conceptions in the world. The book later contains two additional parts: the second is From the Abysses of Doubt and Despair – On the Great Striving of Lev Shestov’s Heart, followed by Thirst – A Vision of the Heart, which poetically describes a thirst for the Almighty after the death of anything of value outside of Him.

As I read, I recalled that the first person who drew my attention to Zeitlin’s description of Lev Shestov and the parallel to my own thought—especially regarding the meaning of Kant’s philosophy—was Rabbi Yom Tov Cheshin of Breslov. Many years ago, after he read my book Two Wagons, he directed me to Zeitlin’s On the Border of Two Worlds, to the chapter “The Search for God of Lev Shestov”.[1] The same themes recur here as well.

I decided to take the opportunity to address several points in Kant’s thought, and in particular the paths from it to belief in God. Among other things, I wish to distinguish between Zeitlin’s approach and my mode of argumentation, and—as I will try to show—this is the difference between intellectual pessimism and optimism.

Intellectual Optimism and Pessimism in a Nutshell

I must say that when I read Zeitlin—especially his remarks about Lev Shestov and about Kant—the resemblance is indeed striking. And yet, the reading suggests that Zeitlin likely does what is common among many religious thinkers, and what is very distasteful to me: to build one’s faith upon the ruins of rational thought (science and philosophy). I, by contrast, see God as the One who rouses and constitutes rationality out of its ruins. His claim is that reason is dead, and therefore faith must be put in its place. Superficially, this looks very similar to my claim that faith is the only possible basis for the use of reason. But I think that despite the similarity there is a significant difference, and not only in tone.

Zeitlin’s claim and those of his peers (Hasidism is the poisonous root of these infuriating conceptions) is not an argument, but at best a rejection of refutations. If you have objections to faith on rational grounds, let me show you that reason is worthless. Consequently, the refutations collapse and you must adopt faith (why? just because!). Many religious thinkers delight in pointing to the limitations of rational thought, and for some reason they see this as an argument for faith. In the halcyon days of Yated Ne’eman I saw people exult whenever a weather forecaster erred. I have written more than once that in my eyes this is a Christian conception: beginning with Tertullian (one of the Church Fathers) who declared, “I believe because it is absurd,” and continuing with Nicholas of Cusa, who is directly responsible for the lazy and foolish mental muddle that employs the expression “unity of opposites” (faith is above reason and therefore is not challenged by contradictions). From there it was sucked into Hasidism, Rav Kook, and other thinkers who love ambiguity and are lazy to think. These thinkers idealize this “conception,” imagining great depth in it and assuming it solves difficulties. In their view, when reason collapses, faith is the obvious conclusion. This is Zeitlin’s intellectual pessimism and that of those who follow his path.

By contrast, I begin from a starting point that trusts reason—that is, science and philosophy—and it is precisely from within them that I arrive at faith. One of my claims is that without faith, reason and rational thought have no existence. This is the essence of the “exposing” or “theological” argument pattern that I defined in the fourth conversation of my book The First Being. Thus, for example, for me evolution is not a threat to faith but a support for it. To strengthen faith there is absolutely no need to weaken rational thought or confidence in science and philosophy. On the contrary, they only reinforce it. Arguments of the “exposing” pattern maintain that precisely in order for rational thought to have force, or for morality and philosophy to have validity, faith is necessary. This is the approach I call here intellectual optimism.

It is no accident that I repeatedly encounter critiques of my arguments, as though I see God as the ultimate solution to every philosophical problem (see, for example, in Column 456 David Enoch’s claim that God “doesn’t do the job” I am trying to do with Him). In my view these critiques mistakenly identify my claims with the apologetic pattern I described above (intellectual pessimism). But no—I mean very different claims, optimistic rather than pessimistic like Zeitlin’s. My arguments are very concrete logic, in which I derive a conclusion from premises, not by collapsing an alternative and thus “proving” faith by way of elimination. On a superficial glance the resemblance between us is great, and it might seem to be only a difference in accompanying tone.[2] But that is a mistake. The main difference lies in the logic of the arguments; the tone is only the result.

Thirst

The last two parts of Zeitlin’s book revolve around one theme: the necessity of arriving at faith out of the ruins of science and philosophy. As a natural preface to this column, I bring here the first section of the first chapter of Zeitlin’s vision (the third part of the book), which sums up the entire arc:

I wandered astray. I sought my God. I asked passersby:

• Have you seen my God? Where is my God?
• His honorable rest is among the easy-going gods, in the place of Baal, Jupiter, Brahma—great and small gods—there too is your God. Your God fought battles with Olympus, with all the gods, yet the end of every god came upon Him as well…

Thus one answered me, a youth with black eyes and golden curls, surrounded by radiant blossoms and graceful maidens…

There among the zalim trees, beneath the mountain, your God is buried. It is a fresh grave. Under the scalpel of men of science He died. The philosophers buried Him, the poets eulogized Him…

Go to the right and turn to a narrow path, and before you will see grave after grave: the grave of alchemy, the grave of astrology, the grave of angels, the grave of demons, the grave of spirits…

And you will go further and see a new row of graves: the grave of idealism, the grave of “the thing-in-itself,” the grave of the “world reason,” the grave of “the unknown,” the grave of the “world will,” of “beyond knowledge,” the graves of all the saints of metaphysics…

And you will go further and see solitary graves holding the remnants of metaphysics: the burial of “entelechy,” the burial of “vital force,” the burial of the “one” and the “all” and “cause” and “infinity” and “eternity,” the burial of every spirit…

And you will turn a little aside and see a cairn and a shadow hovering over it, and flowers of death, and poets wandering among the trees picking the flowers, and mystics conversing with the shadow…

And beneath the cairn—your departed God…

His journey continues through deserts and visionary worlds of seeking souls and disappointed souls, until at the end of the journey—which begins at the graves of all the gods, and proceeds to the graves of rational alternatives (philosophical and scientific systems), among the ruins and graves of all human thought in its shades and branches—he understands that the seeking itself is the sole and highest thing a person can reach on the way to God. That is the only thing left to us.

The description that appears in the first part of the book as well—of the development of morality in Israel and among the nations—also brings him to the brink, and there too he concludes similarly from amidst the rubble:

Among those who see the terrible abyss between the required perfection and the baseness of actuality, there are those who despair completely and are extreme pessimists, and there are those whose love overcomes all. An example: in Israel—the prophets, R. Yisrael Baal Shem Tov, and R. Nachman of Breslov; among the nations—the early Christians, Tolstoy on one side, and Nietzsche on the other.

And there is no path, no escape and refuge for you, O man, from all the vanity and smallness, the sorrow and suffering you see, except through ideal, exalted love. If “he shall look to the land, and behold distress and darkness, gloomy with anguish,”[3] there is another path before a person: “and he shall look upward”…

Thus, the journey through the moral systems developed in human history brings him as well to a cemetery and to despair, whose only exit he sees is a turning upward—to the heights, to faith.

The vision I extensively quoted above is, of course, an autobiographical depiction of Zeitlin himself: he began his life as a boy studying Torah in a cheder, abandoned his faith and became a positivist-modernist who pinned his hopes on philosophy and science, and ultimately realized that all these have no real standing. At the base of every rational domain there is a vacuum that cannot be filled. Therefore, at the end of his life he returned to faith (in a Hasidic-Kabbalistic hue) as the alternative to all that lay in ruins. It should be noted that he does not entirely abandon the path he traversed (including ties and great esteem for major reformist thinkers, philosophers, and various writers), but he uses it in a negating (pessimistic) way: it is the only alternative he sees to the intellectual rubble among which he finds himself walking.

Thus, unlike conservative, closed thinkers, Zeitlin in fact cares to be conversant with all these fields and to use them to sharpen what they do not provide and why there is nothing substantial in them. He does not abandon them, but he builds upon their ruin. As I explained above, this is a proof by negation: if rational thought has collapsed, nothing remains for us but this Torah. Unlike other pessimistic thinkers, Zeitlin at least knows the rubble and can point to the difficulties in order to build from them—and yet he clearly belongs to the pessimistic party. And since we are speaking of pessimism: in 1942 Zeitlin was loaded onto a cattle car—according to the account, wrapped in tallit and tefillin, holding a copy of the Zohar—and was ultimately murdered at Treblinka. He left us his books, most of them Hasidic-Kabbalistic thought saturated with philosophical and literary contexts, some written as poetry.

Kant’s Place in This Trajectory

Zeitlin often refers to Lev Shestov (the pen name of the Jewish Russian philosopher and literary critic Yehuda Leib Schwarzmann).[4] Zeitlin saw in him—and in his critical essays on great figures of literature—a philosophical system that expresses a search for God (recall that his conclusion is that the seeking is the only human “finding” of God possible). The focus of Shestov’s fracture, as Zeitlin describes it, lies in his difficulties with Kant’s philosophy—and not by chance. Beyond being regarded as the greatest philosopher of the modern era, Kant’s thought sits precisely at the junction of the deepest philosophical fracture. Kant sharpened the break (raised mainly by David Hume) regarding our knowledge of the world and of rational and scientific thought itself; he was also the one who proposed the only exit ever suggested in the history of philosophy for this fracture—and as Lev Shestov shows, in the end Kant’s heroic journey fails. His solution does not hold water. This is the essence of the fracture of philosophy as a whole, and these are the ruins and graves that, according to Zeitlin, inevitably lead us to belief in God.

I will now enter somewhat more into the philosophical arc and the fracture that Zeitlin describes. Some of this appeared in Columns 363–364, but here I will approach them from a slightly different angle. In Column 363 I laid out the background to the discussion: the historical tension between empiricism (the view that only the senses and empirical observations are legitimate tools for knowing the world) and rationalism (the view that the intellect is also a legitimate means for knowing the world). In Column 364 I presented my own proposed solution to the problem, and in the present column I will sharpen its meaning, particularly against Kant’s proposal and the arguments raised against it. In this column I will present mainly the fracture and the ruins. In the next column I will discuss Kant’s proposals. Afterwards I will move to God’s role in this trajectory, and finally I will return to the relation between intellectual pessimism and optimism.

The Epistemic Fracture: David Hume

Epistemology is the branch of philosophy that deals with our knowledge of the world. Its fundamental question is how we come to know the world, and what justifies and underlies the epistemic toolbox we use. It is obvious that this is one of the most fundamental philosophical questions, if not the most fundamental. And yet, as we shall see, throughout the history of philosophy no reasonable answer was ever offered.

David Hume was an 18th-century British philosopher (1711–1776), part of the British empiricism of that period. It is no wonder that his thought sees observation as the only legitimate means we have to know the world. This school opposes rationalism, which sees the intellect as a legitimate means of knowing the world. But Hume realized that if one focuses only on observations and refuses to add any rationalist dimension (elements of thought beyond observation), one is led straight to the abyss (this is the epistemic fracture). The two main problems he pointed to were causality and induction.

Hume wondered whence we derived the principle of causality (that every event must have a cause). As an empiricist, his tendency was to think that we derive it from observations of the world, since our reason is not a legitimate means for claims about the world. But Hume understood that observation does not really provide this. As he showed—quite rightly—there is no observational way to discern that event A is the cause of event B. At most, we see A occur and afterwards B occurs, but we have no scientific way to state that A is the cause of B. Hence we have no way to establish the principle of causality, namely the general principle that every event must have a cause. Hume argued that this principle is the product of mental templates embedded in us, but as an empiricist he was unwilling to accept it as a claim about the world, since it lacks an empirical source. He claimed we merely impose our mode of thought on the events we observe. But we are not to regard the principle of causality as a property of the world itself.

So too with the principle of induction. Scientific induction (which has nothing to do with the mathematical induction you learned in high school) takes a collection of particular cases we have observed and generalizes them into a law. Among other things, it assumes that what held true for the cases we observed will hold for the rest (in the future or the past—contrary to common belief, induction is not necessarily about the future). What is the empirical or philosophical justification for this principle? Hume claimed there is none. He thus saw induction as a mental template embedded in us that we impose on the world we observe.

Kant lived and worked in Hume’s era (a bit younger and longer-lived: 1724–1804). He knew Hume’s thought and wrote that it awakened him from his dogmatic slumber. Hume showed that what seems to us all self-evident is not really so. The most fundamental principles of thought and science, and of course all the laws of nature we discover by using them, are products of using those very principles and their ilk; thus Hume places a big question mark over empirical science as a whole. When we read Hume, we must awaken and seek an answer, since the entire modern scientific and philosophical worldview—which came to replace ancient rationalism (that is, it grew from its rubble)—ultimately does not hold water and collapses from within. At the base of empiricism itself stand principles with no empirical basis; therefore an empiricist approach does not really hold water. Rationalism, which was considered rejected since the dawn of the modern era with the flourishing of modern science, actually returns to us through empiricism’s back door.

The Epistemic Fracture: Kant’s Formulation

As a first step toward solving the problem, Kant offered a renewed, more general and principled formulation of Hume’s epistemic fracture. To this end he formulated two categorical distinctions among types of propositions:

• On the epistemic plane, he distinguished between a priori and a posteriori claims.
• On the logical plane, he distinguished between analytic and synthetic claims.

A priori claims are those we know without observation (they precede observation). For example, the claim “Reuven the bachelor is unmarried,” or “this ball is round,” are claims that need not be based on observations. To say that Reuven the bachelor is unmarried does not require knowing Reuven and empirically checking whether he is married. From his being a bachelor it follows that he is not married. We can even generalize and say that every bachelor is unmarried, and this too is a priori. Opposed to a priori claims stand a posteriori claims—claims whose knowledge is based on empirical observation. For example, “the planet Earth is round,” or “book X held in mid-air will immediately fall to the ground.” Observation is required to know such claims.

As noted, the distinction between a priori and a posteriori belongs to epistemology, since it concerns how we know the claims in question. Kant’s second distinction—between analytic and synthetic claims—belongs to the logical plane and ostensibly has no connection to epistemology. Analytic claims are those for which it suffices to analyze the subject of the sentence or the concepts involved; no additional information is required. You can see that “Reuven the bachelor is unmarried” is analytic. Anyone who understands the concepts “bachelor” and “married” can state this without any information beyond the definitions themselves. By contrast, “Yosef ben Shimon is married” is synthetic. It does not follow from the definitions of the concepts involved, and additional information is needed to assert it. From another angle, a synthetic claim says something about the world (it contains information about it beyond what is included in the definitions of the concepts composing it), whereas an analytic claim adds no information about the world beyond the definitions of the concepts involved.

Ostensibly these are two independent distinctions: one on the epistemic axis, the other on the logical axis. We would thus expect all claims to fall into four independent categories: synthetic-a priori, analytic-a priori, synthetic-a posteriori, and analytic-a posteriori. But if you test a few examples, you will very quickly discover that in fact there are only two kinds of claims: analytic-a priori and synthetic-a posteriori. You will not find analytic-a posteriori claims, nor synthetic-a priori claims. In other words, every analytic claim is a priori and every a priori claim is analytic (hence every synthetic claim is a posteriori, and every a posteriori claim is synthetic).

At first glance this may surprise you, but there is a very simple reason for it. An analytic claim follows from analyzing the concepts that compose it; if such analysis suffices, then obviously no observation is required. Therefore the analytic is necessarily a priori. But the a priori is necessarily analytic as well: if some claim is known to us a priori, that means we did not use observation to know it. From where, then, could we have drawn our knowledge of it? Only from an analysis of the concepts that compose it (it issues from processes of thought rather than of cognition). That is, the a priori is necessarily analytic. Likewise you can see the connection between the synthetic and the a posteriori (claims that issue from processes of cognition and observation rather than thought). If a claim contains information beyond the definitions of its composing concepts, then clearly we needed observation to know it. And if a claim requires observation, then clearly it is not analytic.

The conclusion is that there are not, and cannot be, four categories of claims—only two: the analytic is a priori, and the synthetic is a posteriori. Further reflection reveals the root of this picture: a synthetic claim states something about the world (beyond what is included in the definitions of the concepts it contains), but information about the world must be obtained from observation. Thought alone cannot yield new information about the world (at most it can arrange existing information, find connections among bits of information, and the like). Here you can see why Kant’s abstract definitions lead us straight to an epistemic fracture. The thesis is that we have no way to accumulate information about the world other than by cognitive and observational tools. Thought cannot add information about the world. Behold empiricism at its best (or worst).

The problems Hume pointed out—what I have called here the “epistemic fracture”—arise when we consider, for example, the laws of nature, or any general claim about the world. A general claim about the world is never the product of observation alone, since the number of our observations is finite. We have seen some particular cases, but a law of nature concerns all such cases. That is, the laws of nature are a priori in that sense (they involve observation, but observation alone cannot yield them in full). At the same time, the laws of nature are obviously synthetic—they do not follow from the definitions of the concepts involved. For example, the law of gravitation does not follow from the definitions of mass and distance. If it did, physics would be a branch of mathematics. The conclusion is that the laws of nature formulated by science are synthetic-a priori propositions. But from the analysis above it follows that such a category cannot exist. This is the epistemic fracture in a nutshell, and it clearly touches the foundations of thought and science. It is unclear how we accumulate scientific and general information about the world (beyond the cases we directly observed).

Kant argues that the whole set of problems Hume presented, and many others, are particular instances of a single general and principled problem: whether and how synthetic-a priori claims are possible. Note that both the principle of causality and that of induction are principles that do not derive from observation yet are applied to the world. That is, both are synthetic-a priori principles. In other words, Kant claims that the laws of nature contain information about the world, much of which is not gathered from observation. The question is how it is possible that we gather information about the world by thought alone, without observation. This is precisely the return of rationalism from within empiricism. I remind you again that the basic empiricist thesis is that thought cannot yield information about the world. Thought is an internal structure with which we are born, and there is no reason to assume that the products of thought contain correct descriptions of the world—unless confirmed by observation. Here science slaps the face of the empiricist philosophy that served as its foundation, for we are surprised to discover that the findings of science are rationalist in nature. Science is information about the world that is indeed based on observations, but observations alone do not suffice to reach all the information contained in the laws of nature. Generalization (induction) and further assumptions (such as causality) are required. Embedded within the laws of nature that science formulates are components of thought beyond observation; therefore science is not a pure empirical structure, as many have deluded themselves to think even to this day.

The Solutions

Hugo Bergmann, in chapter 9 of his book An Introduction to the Theory of Knowledge, titled “The Rationality of the World,” surveys the solutions offered to this fundamental problem throughout the history of philosophy. The question is: how is it that the world’s conduct fits our reason? How can we rely on the laws of nature we have reached also by thought (beyond observation)? He shows that none of the solutions proposed to this problem really holds water. No such solution truly solves the problem; at best it offers a different formulation of it or moves us a step back, yet still leaves us with assumptions that cannot be justified empirically and rationally (not rationalistically). This is the epistemic fracture, and as I wrote above, throughout the history of philosophy no real solution has been offered.

At the end of the chapter, Bergmann is left with the grim conclusion that the principles and laws of science are methodological rules rather than claims about the world. We have no way to say that the laws of nature are truly correct. It is simply our way of arranging the information we have collected, and that is all. Note, this is not the trivial claim that science is not certain and that we may always discover corrections to the laws we hold. That is obvious and no one has ever disputed it. Bergmann’s claim is that science is not true in any sense (not merely inexact). Put differently: science does not make claims about the world at all, but about us and our mode of thought. The laws of nature discovered by science are the most useful and effective way for us to arrange and organize the information we have gathered. And that’s it. One cannot seriously assert any claim about a fact we have not observed—even if it seems that a law of nature tells us what will happen there.

You can understand on your own how absurd this is. It is clear to every reasonable person that the laws of nature are (albeit non-certain) claims about the world. When we think about a case we have not observed but a law of nature tells us what is expected to occur in it, we are highly confident that this is indeed what will happen. Imagine someone holding a Tolstoy novel and wondering whether it will fall to the ground when released. So far he has only tried this with Dostoevsky’s books or with his pencil case. Would any of us not bet on the outcome? Can one seriously claim that this is merely a hypothesis about us and not about the world itself? This thesis only expresses despair—the intellectual ruins before which philosophy and science stand in the wake of Hume and Kant, down to our day. If we have no way to justify our collection of information about the world, we can return the keys of rational thought to where they came from. All our science and philosophy are worthless. These are mind-games based on structures embedded within us, and there is no reason to see them as “true” in any sense (that is, as matching states of affairs in the world). It is no wonder that Zeitlin, like many others, sees the state of thought and science—rational thought in general—as ruins and a collection of graves. As noted, Zeitlin argues that once rational thought has been buried and shown to have no resurrection, what remains for us is only faith.

Note: Is This Ordinary Philosophical Skepticism?

Many see Hume as a skeptic. Some have pointed out that it is odd to identify an empiricist conception (which champions science and observation) with skepticism, but Hume apparently shows us that this is not so. Whoever clings to the senses and empirical observations, by nature, doubts anything beyond them. Thus empiricism, by definition, has a built-in skeptical dimension. But it is important to note that this is not skepticism like that found among philosophers labeled skeptics. Those cast doubt on every assumption, claiming that perhaps it is not true. They ask: who told you so? Do you have proof? And so they can doubt anything. Moreover, one cannot answer such skeptical claims, since any answer presupposes assumptions of some sort, and the skeptic can always doubt those assumptions themselves. What characterizes philosophical skepticism is that the doubt it presents does not, in its view, require justification. Any claim may be as true as its negation, and that suffices to cast doubt on it.

David Hume was certainly not a skeptic in that sense. He accepts the results of observation without dispute and does not doubt them. He doubts only those things that truly lack justification. His doubt is also well reasoned. He merely argues that it is unreasonable to expect mental structures embedded in us to yield reliable descriptions of the world. He does not doubt our senses and sensory observations, but rather the fit between our thought and the world. Today, in the scientific age, it is easy for us to understand someone who is unwilling to accept claims about the world that are not backed by observation. That you think in a certain way is because that is how you are built. But from where do you derive the assumption that this also fits what happens in the world itself?! As Mark Twain famously put it: the world owes you nothing; it was here first. Aristotle thought that a heavy stone falls faster than a light stone. Had he performed a simple experiment (no particle accelerator needed), he would have discovered that this is false: they fall at precisely the same rate. It may seem very reasonable to us, but observation shows us that this is not what happens in the world itself. To know what happens there, we must rely on observations. And that is without mentioning relativity and quantum theory, both of which contradict our simplest and most basic mental intuitions—yet observation shows they are correct. The popular science writer Michio Kaku says that quantum theory is a foolish and nonsensical theory; its only advantage is that it works (it is true).

Today we are well aware of the deceptions of our thinking (and even of our senses and cognition), and of the importance of observational confirmation for our hypotheses about the world. Therefore, in our day it is hard to treat wholesome doubt like Hume’s as mere skepticism and dismiss it with a wave of the pen without a substantive answer. One who doubts the senses and tells me that even if I see a wall before me that does not mean there is really a wall—I will treat him as a skeptic and feel exempt from answering substantively. I simply see a wall, period; don’t confuse me. But if there are arguments showing that our senses or our thought are not authoritative regarding the world, that cannot be dismissed out of hand. This is not mere philosophical skepticism but an epistemic fracture—and a fracture demands an answer.

In the next column we will proceed to discuss Kant’s response to this fracture.

[1] See on this in my book The Spirit of the Law, p. 435, as well as in my book Truth and Not Stable, end of chapter ten,

[2] Somewhat akin to the common distinction between the Gr”id (pessimist) and Rav Kook (optimist). I don’t recall its source; here I am dealing in the purely intellectual plane.

[3] Isaiah 8:22.

[4] For years I have wondered why there is no renowned Russian philosopher in the first rank of the global philosophical gallery, in contrast to the many great novelists, playwrights, and poets. If you ask someone of Russian cultural background this question, you will receive a list of figures who are mainly writers (like Tolstoy, Gogol, Dostoevsky, and others). They treat writers as philosophers—which in my view is unjustified. One can find philosophical layers in any literary work, even the lowest, but that does not make the creator a philosopher. A philosopher is one who conceptualizes his ideas, not one who is nourished by ideas and expresses them in literary or cinematic forms. I suspect this stems from a Russian character that tends to realize ideas in the practical world. Hence the communist revolution took place there, even though the birth of communism was in Germany. Perhaps this is why the soil there is not fertile for the growth of philosophical thought with no direct connection to reality (philosophy that is not ideology).