Gate Three: Analyticity and Syntheticity — Historical Perspective
From the book Two Wagons and a Hot Air Balloon by Rabbi Michael Avraham. Translated from Hebrew using gpt-5.4 (reasoning_effort=high, batch API).
The Analytic and the Synthetic: A Historical Perspective
This gate contains two chapters:
- Chapter 1: A Historical Overview
- Chapter 2: Jewish and General Classicism: The Decline of the Generations
Introduction
In this gate I will begin the current, practical part of the discussion, with which the entire second unit is concerned. The purpose of this gate is to provide a historical perspective for the claims that will arise later, and that will deal mainly with the history of the last hundred years.
The basic idea is the analogy presented here between the intellectual development of a private individual and the development of Western society as a whole, a development that includes three stages. This analogy will stand in the background of the discussion that follows, and the reader is advised to examine his relation to it before continuing, and to return to it afterward as well.
Chapter 1: A Historical Overview1
From Syntheticity to Analyticity: An Analogy Between the Individual and the Collective
A description of humanity’s intellectual history parallels, if one may be forgiven a certain degree of overgeneralization, the process of intellectual maturation in an individual person. I would like to describe this double process of maturation as composed of three stages: “childhood,” “adolescence,” and “adulthood.”
When a person is a child, his capacity for thought and criticism is still weak, and he accepts many things as self-evident.2 Later he begins to ask questions and seek more precise definitions, and in effect to discover critical thinking, or a certain skepticism. Some, following this skepticism, arrive at a state in which nothing seems true, or even reasonable, unless it has unequivocal proof. This is the meaning of the provocative demand heard from adolescents toward adults: Who says so? Prove it! An adult generally understands that things without a definition, or without precise proof, can still exist, be true, and perhaps even be binding. Ostensibly, this is a return—though a more mature and ripened one—to the position that characterized him in childhood.
The adolescent, in this intermediate stage, looks at the adult as a dogmatic and weary person who has surrendered to convention—someone who has lost the strength to rebel. There is indeed a certain truth in this view as well, but when that adolescent matures, he is supposed to understand that the third, adult outlook is not mere surrender. Not every truth is mathematical and precise, and more precisely, as I shall argue below, there is no such truth at all. The adolescent mistakenly takes the adult’s position to be the same position he himself held in childhood. His mistake lies in not yet knowing the adult conception, which indeed appears dogmatic, but is in fact different and more mature. The adolescent does not perceive it that way because he has not yet passed through the third stage, and therefore has not yet experienced it. He attributes it to despair and a return to the childish-dogmatic stage, which he knows from his own personal experience.3
There are, in principle, two possible ways to emerge from adolescence into adulthood. After raising doubts and questions, and after the pretension of proving every truth and accepting nothing without proof, there comes—much to that adolescent’s dismay—the awareness of the sad fact of life that nothing significant has proof. At that point the adolescent may decide to remain faithful to the innocence of youth, and exchange optimism for skeptical pessimism. He accepts no proposition as true, because none has proof. He remains with the adolescent conception that only proven things can be considered certain, and therefore despairs of certainty altogether. Such an adolescent chooses to remain a skeptic all his life. The second possibility for breaking out of the shell of adolescence is to mature and understand that there are truths without proof—or more accurately: all truths are like that. There are no others. This way out is, of course, not skeptical at all; in fact it looks more similar to the first, childish-dogmatic age.
Later we shall see that the confrontation between adolescence and adulthood described here schematically is the essence of the relation between analytic and synthetic thinking. This confrontation is sometimes described as though it were conducted between what is called “rationality” and certain kinds of beliefs classified as “mythic.” The “rational” person sees, for example, the religious person—even the modern one—as living and functioning as in the mythic, pre-rational age. The analytic “rationalist” stands vis-à-vis the synthetic approach and challenges it: Who told you that? Prove it!—like the cry of that adolescent in the intermediate stage against the adult world, as described above.4
Our main claim in this book is that modern religion is not a return to primitive mythic thinking, but a mature and ripened conception, and therefore also a more rational and reasonable one. It is progress toward adulthood, not regression back into adolescence. It is precisely the demand for extreme “rationality” that is unreasonable. It stems from immaturity, and in the terms of our comparison here: from adolescent thinking.
To illustrate the parallel between the development of the individual and that of the collective, we shall now offer a parallel three-stage description of Western intellectual history up to our own day. This description does not at all pretend to exhaust the entire historical unfolding, for our main concern here is not with such detail. Our aim is to provide the background and historical perspective for the contemporary claims that will be presented below. For that reason, the description will only indicate general directions, and at times it may seem guilty of generalizations that are not entirely justified. It indeed does not take account of exceptions—sometimes important ones—that accompanied each such tendency.
Let us also note that the goal is only to demonstrate the very existence of the parallel described above. In the next unit we shall continue to argue that the adult conception is not necessarily dogmatic surrender, but is more reasonable and more correct. There we shall show the rebellious adolescent, or the extreme “rationalist,” using tools drawn from his own world, that it is specifically his position that is plainly unreasonable.
Western Culture: The Passage from the Analytic to the Synthetic
The human culture known to us begins in the period that historians of culture call “the mythic age.” In that period, people’s beliefs were shaped—and at times even controlled—by various myths. Mythological legends, generally idolatrous, determined the modes of conduct and action of both society and individuals. Dealing with a situation in which rain did not fall, or with a severe plague, involved various rituals of worship, or alternatively a fatalistic resignation to these conditions. The gods usually had human traits, to the point that in such cultures it is sometimes difficult to distinguish between gods and human beings. This is the stage parallel to childhood in the development of the individual: the childish-dogmatic period.5
After that, religions began to appear in their more modern sense. Here divinity is conceived more abstractly and less as possessing human characteristics. Even so, this period too is generally classified as part of the mythic age, owing to the modern scholarly treatment of religions as a certain type of myth. This attitude was shaped also by the secular worldview that generally characterizes modern scholars, a matter to which we shall return later. In any event, it is true that modern religions, even monotheistic ones, share something with the myths that preceded them. Their approach to situations like those described above is not devoid of ritual aspects.
Most of the important scholars of the nineteenth-century “Science of Judaism” took great pains to prove that monotheism is not a myth, like the myths of the pagan age, but an anti-myth. The beginning of Israelite faith is described by them as a struggle against myths. More recent scholars do not agree with so sweeping a claim, and present more moderate formulations for describing the monotheistic revolution. The classification of this stage, in parallel to the development of the individual as presented above, is certainly problematic.6
Let us return to the description of historical development. At the end of the mythic age, the sciences began to develop—especially mathematics and its branches, astronomy, and medicine—as did philosophy. Philosophy is rooted in wonder and doubt regarding truths that until then had seemed self-evident. This is in fact the stage parallel to the beginning of adolescence in the development of the individual. The first philosophers, mainly in ancient Greece, operated within the mythological-idolatrous world, and at least in the early stages they lived at peace with it. The questions concerned, among other things, the mode of action of the various gods. Some philosophers arrived at answers that seemed satisfactory to them, and others, as a result of these doubts, adopted a skeptical position, sometimes even an extreme skepticism. The Pyrrhonists, active from the third century BCE for some six hundred years, are known for just such an extreme skeptical position.7
Skepticism, in a certain sense, is an expression of the maturation of the rational age. Once one begins placing basic truths under a question mark, one may indeed reach a state in which no satisfactory justification can be found for them. According to the Pyrrhonists, we have no justification at all for any proposition—or in other words: no proposition is more reasonable, or better justified, than the proposition opposite to it. This is the essence of the skeptical position.
One may regard the Greek age as the beginning of the analytic age in Western history. When people began seeking more precise definitions, and trying to understand in a more “scientific” way what was happening around them, skeptical schools naturally arose as well. In the first gate we already noted that analyticity leads to skepticism. The same thing appeared in the description of the development of the individual.
Throughout history, from then until today, the struggle with the questions and arguments raised by skeptics has continued. The form in which the arguments are presented has changed, and the formulations are generally more precise and more sophisticated, but the positions themselves have remained essentially the same. Even so, one should not ignore the fact that the overwhelming majority of philosophers over the generations did not advocate extreme skepticism. This was not always because convincing answers to skeptical arguments had been found, but usually because the conclusion was assumed from the outset.
For example, in the first gate we presented Hume’s skeptical argument regarding induction and causality, and in more general terms, regarding the synthetic a priori.8 When Kant approached this question, as I mentioned there, he formulated it differently. Kant did not ask, “Are there synthetic a priori propositions?” but rather, “How are synthetic a priori propositions possible?” This is a classic example of a philosopher who assumes the truth in question and asks only how we justify it. He does not doubt at all the very existence of these truths. This is begging the question in the bluntest possible way.
In the modern age, following the achievements of science and technology, human beings began to feel themselves masters of their fate, and there developed anew a position—dogmatic?—that viewed science as the ultimate means of acquiring knowledge about the world. This is in fact the height of the rationalism described in the first gate.9 Here Western culture reaches the peak of the worldview that began with the Greeks. In fact, the entire long period that passed from the Greeks almost until our own day corresponds to what I have called here “the age of adolescence.” In the modern period the outlook whose foundations were already laid in the Greek period merely came to full maturity.
Positivism
In the last century, following the most recent scientific revolutions—the theories of quantum mechanics and relativity—which showed that the earlier confidence in the achievements of science had been exaggerated, scientific pretension was somewhat moderated.10 As a response to these processes,11 the positivist approach dominated the first half of the twentieth century. This approach held that only things that can be precisely defined or observed—by the senses or by instruments—have meaning, and therefore only they are worth discussing. Things that are not well defined were classified as baseless and meaningless mysticism, about which there is no point in making claims at all.
In science this had a blessed effect, leading to better definitions of fundamental concepts and processes, as well as greater control over the process of scientific progress and the prevention of errors.12 This was especially true in light of the fact that the laws and conceptual world of modern physics had moved very far from ordinary intuitive human understanding, and in fact there was no real alternative to positivism in dealing with such laws and concepts. Common sense could no longer serve as a reliable criterion for scientific theory,13 and it became necessary to define scientific concepts carefully so that they could be used correctly.14
This is the place to emphasize that positivism is usually understood as a position prepared to deal only with reality. The desire to work only with sharp definitions and distinct principles in explaining reality—which is what ties it to what we call the analytic position—is ostensibly secondary. Analyticity is a tool for avoiding deviation from statements about objective reality. The analytic position, by contrast, was presented in the opposite order: first, one should discuss only clearly defined and distinct ideas and concepts. Afterward we broadened this position, and included under the heading “distinct and defined” also elements derived from empirical observations. This was presented as an ad hoc generalization, that is, an addition to analyticity that does not necessarily follow from its essence, though for some reason it characterizes most analytic thinkers.
Therefore it must be emphasized that analyticity is a theoretical idea, which according to the interpretation proposed here underlies positivism. Its appearance in reality indeed occurred in the opposite order, but the motivations were analytic motivations. In the end, what emerged here was an approach that advocates both principles: exclusively analytic thinking, and recognition of empirical results as valid—even though they are not analytic.15
The positivist approach was also extended to areas outside science. This extension found important expression at the beginning of the twentieth century in the sharp turn of philosophical thought in the analytic direction. Our concern in this book is with a critique of this positivist extension, which completely paralyzed the world of thought and philosophy, and turned every synthetic claim into mysticism. We shall now pause in order to clarify, as briefly as possible, what analytic philosophy precisely is, and what assumptions underlie it.16
Analytic Philosophy
Analytic philosophy was born at the beginning of the twentieth century as a protest movement directed against the philosophy that had dominated Europe in previous centuries. Its central claim was that most of the great philosophical problems are problems that cannot be seriously discussed, and some are even illusory. One of the central claims of Russell and Wittgenstein, regarded by many as among the greatest analytic philosophers, was that there is not necessarily a connection between the grammatical structure of a sentence in natural language and the logical structure of the content that the sentence represents. Hence, analytic philosophers conclude, most of the philosophical problems that have occupied thinkers throughout history are rooted in imprecise language. Russell, who was one of the founders and most prominent figures of this philosophical movement, aspired to establish a precise language in which the grammatical structure of sentences would correspond to their logical structure, and thus all philosophical problems and paradoxes would disappear of themselves.17
Metaphysical claims such as “God exists” are considered by analytic philosophers—at least among the more extreme of them—as a collection of words that cannot be assigned any truth value whatsoever; they can be neither true nor false. The basic concepts in such claims cannot be defined, and therefore cannot be understood. It is therefore clear that there is no point in discussing whether some metaphysical proposition is true or not. Thus the focus of discussion in analytic philosophy shifted to linguistic discussions.
For example, philosophers have always dealt with the question whether anything about the world can be known with certainty. A well-known analytic philosopher, Norman Malcolm, argues that this question is meaningless, because the use we make in ordinary conversation of the expression “know with certainty” allows us to claim, with all the justification required, that we know various facts with certainty—for example, how many fingers we have, and whether we are now feeling any pain. In his view, and in that of his colleagues, all philosophical failures result from deviating from the standards of natural language.18
The assumption behind these approaches is that language must be free of contradictions or errors; otherwise it could not be used, and in fact would have no meaning at all. The basic assumption is that the meaning of the concept “know with certainty” is derived from the way it is used in language. It has no real content standing beyond its use. The use of language does not reflect a meaning of the concept in itself; rather, it is itself that meaning. In our terminology, we would say that in analytic philosophy concepts have no substance, only form. They have use—in language—but not meaning. It should be noted that Malcolm himself finds it necessary to apologize for this way of solving philosophical problems by saying:19
“This is indeed a tautology, but it is nonetheless illuminating.”
Here one can discern the approach that we called in the previous gate “conventionalism.” We again encounter the connection between analytic philosophy, analytic thinking—which uses only “illuminating” tautologies of this sort—and conventionalism.
Essentialism, by contrast, treats concepts as existing beyond their characterization and use in language. Its treatment of sentences using those concepts is also different. Just as a linguistic term represents a concept that exists in itself, so too a sentence in language, which uses such terms, represents a proposition that exists in itself and is composed of concepts. It is the meaning embodied in that proposition, and not the grammatical sentence, that is scrutinized in philosophical inquiry. If we find a problem or paradox, its root may very well lie in the world itself, and not only in language. Everyone agrees that there are also problems that are problems of language and of our use of it; the dispute is whether there are problems of another kind. In the essentialist approach we do not examine correct usage in language, but correct ideas about the world, which are expressed by means of language. Even if we have no good and precise way of expressing these ideas in natural language, it is the only tool we have with which to deal with them. The essentialist argues that a genuine philosophical problem cannot be solved by linguistic manipulation. On the other hand, there is no doubt that a philosophical problem cannot be solved without the use of language, even if that use is not necessarily precise. The essentialist will also agree that some philosophical problems may indeed be illusory—that is, they stem from mistaken and misleading uses of language. The essentialist’s central claim is that not all philosophical problems are like that. There are also real problems, and these require substantive philosophical treatment. Linguistic manipulation alone does not suffice.
Even if Russell had succeeded in creating the logical language of which he dreamed, it would have been an impoverished language, incapable of expressing many subjects touching the basic foundations of thought, cognition, and human activity. Such a language would not solve philosophical problems but bypass them by simply not allowing them to be expressed. The rules of that language would prevent it.19 It might have been quite amusing to encounter poetry written in such a fossilized language with so rigid a structure.
Wittgenstein presented a more moderate approach, claiming only that there is no point in speaking about vague concepts and propositions, not that they have no existence or meaning at all.20 Even such a moderated version, essentialism argues, is not faithful to our plain and healthy intuition that these expressions do in fact have meaning. The essentialist reaches the conclusion that he must seek a solution to some philosophical problems on the substantive-philosophical—that is, synthetic—plane, and not only on the logical-linguistic—that is, analytic—plane.
The process described here constitutes the maturation of the skeptical-“rational” stage—analyticity—in intellectual history, a stage that in practice reaches the point where the only legitimate kind of thought is analytic activity. In such a situation, every philosophical problem is supposed to be solved by analyzing the concepts and claims that represent it, and not by philosophical criticism of the propositions represented by those sentences.
As a result of this philosophical revolution, which increasingly took over the contemporary Western world of thought, a situation emerged in which the philosopher does not dare to make metaphysical-synthetic claims, because he cannot define thoroughly the concepts he uses, and therefore cannot prove his basic claims. Philosophical activity became sterile, turning into a kind of mathematical game of analyzing the claims of others—usually from earlier periods, when it was still permitted to make synthetic claims.
Many feel that today there has been some sobering up from the analytic intoxication, even among analytic philosophers themselves. Kasher, for example, writes:22
The aversion of Carnap and his associates to metaphysics has vanished from the world. The literature of analytic philosophy is full of discussions of the classical metaphysical questions of philosophy, such as determinism and free will, knowledge and skepticism, empiricism versus rationalism, realism versus idealism, and many more. Among the recognized fields of analytic philosophy one finds not only what one would naturally expect on the basis of the history of this movement, such as philosophy of science or philosophy of language, but also philosophy of art and philosophy of religion, for example.
And if one asks, then why is this philosophy still considered analytic? Kasher does not answer this at all. It seems that the answer lies in the fact that even today the discussions generally do not advance claims, but rather criticize various opinions expressed by philosophers of different dogmatic schools, often specifically those that preceded the analytic period. Indeed, anyone who looks into the analytic literature will see that the topics of discussion are certainly loaded with metaphysics, but the mode of discussion remains analytic. That is, it still does not advance claims, and is concentrated more on examining the consistency or inconsistency of various positions. Discussions of realism and idealism, for example, will ask what positions the idealist must adopt on various questions in order to remain consistent. Few philosophical articles dare to put forward metaphysical claims—for example, to argue in favor of idealism or realism. The main occupation today is philosophical research, not the creation of philosophical doctrine. This is also the difference between the professors of philosophy who now crowd the halls of academia and genuine philosophers—those who advance claims—who are almost entirely absent from them. Such people are often denounced as dogmatic, mystical, and the like.
The analytic approach has not moderated at all at the principled level. There may be some concession regarding the distinctness of the concepts used in discussion, for otherwise it would not be possible to conduct even an analytic discussion of metaphysical topics. But in the aspect of actually asserting claims, no significant change has occurred. The minor change that did occur derived from the fact that the analysts realized—to their dismay—that without genuine philosophical claims there are no subjects left to analyze. For that reason, those who are unwilling to claim anything began to occupy themselves with those who did dare to claim, whom they themselves classify as dogmatic. They perform analysis on claims raised in earlier periods. The dogmatists—the synthetic thinkers—supply the material for analytic discussions, which have taken upon themselves the role of clarifying the meaning of those claims.
The clarification of claims is undoubtedly a blessed activity when it comes in the second stage, after the claims themselves have been advanced. But when it comes in place of the assertion itself, it becomes sterile and emasculates all philosophical discussion.21
For comparison and sharpening of the point, it is worth noting a similar phenomenon in science. The philosopher of science Hans Reichenbach distinguishes between the stage of discovering a theory—which in our terms is synthetic in essence—and the stage that follows it, the stage of its empirical justification—which is analytic in essence.22 In the stage of justification, scientists seek which experimental claims are consistent with the proposed theory and which are not, and accordingly attempt to confirm or refute it by various experiments. An analytic approach in philosophy parallels a science occupied only with justification and not discovery. When one contents oneself with justification without discovery, from a certain point onward there is no longer anything to justify, and the analysts among the scientists, as among the philosophers, are left unemployed.
Thus far, a concise description of the phenomenon called “analytic philosophy.” We shall still need it later.23 We now return to the description of the historical unfolding.
The Emergence of Postmodernism
Up to this point we have described the maturation of the analytic approach that began to grow in the Greek period. Its peak comes in the extreme rationalist—positivist—age of the early twentieth century, which forbids speaking about things that are not well defined or well proven. In the terminology of the analogy presented at the beginning of the chapter, this is in fact the peak of a mode of thought belonging to adolescence.
At the end of the first gate we saw that a direct derivative of the analytic approach is the conception that anyone who is consistent with his premises is as legitimate as anyone else, even if his premises are the opposite. There is no way to examine premises within an analytic framework. The premises are where the actual—synthetic—claims of the theory are expressed, and one can only examine what follows from them, not the premises themselves. Examination of premises entails advancing a claim, and that is illegitimate within an analytic framework. This is a practical expression of what we saw at the end of the first gate: the analytic is empty. Within the analytic framework, only the consistency of conclusions with the claimant’s premises can be examined, not the premises or conclusions in themselves.
Here we begin to see the roots of postmodernism. It is the next stage, and almost a necessary one, in the historical development described here. In the first half of the twentieth century, the modernist feeling still held sway—the feeling that the world progresses over time, that is, that it becomes more rational, in contrast to the dogmatism that characterized earlier periods of history. This progress could be manifested in culture, morality, science, good governance, and so forth.
At a certain stage there began to seep in the insight that this feeling contains an implicit assumption: the claim that the world today is in a better condition than it was in the past implicitly assumes the existence of an objective, trans-temporal criterion for comparing states of affairs. Such a criterion would make it possible to determine which of two situations is preferable or better. At that point the postmodern reaction arose, claiming that one cannot examine cultural or artistic states, and the like, objectively, since anyone who examines them is himself located within a particular cultural and conceptual context. Even the criterion for determining which state is better is culture-dependent. In other words, the postmodernist asks: by what rational criterion can we determine who is more rational? How can we examine what is better or more beautiful when the concepts of good and beauty themselves are what is under examination?24
Therefore, postmodernism claims, every culture, state, or period must be examined, if at all, in light of its own premises. At the very least, the examiner must be aware that the examination is carried out from within his own cultural context. That is, this is the full maturation of the analytic approach, which says that basic assumptions—or claims in general—cannot be examined on the philosophical plane. One can only examine consistency with the assumptions, that is, the analytic plane. Thus a nihilistic equality arises among all ideologies and cultures. The only thing required of them is, at most, internal consistency with their assumptions, not correspondence to any objective criteria. Every culture creates the criteria according to which—and only according to which—it can itself be examined.
The core of the argument should be emphasized here: the roots of postmodernism are already planted within positivist modernism. One who seeks only defined and distinct things, and treats the world solely with mathematical and scientific tools, is necessarily led to realize that no such tools can provide an answer to any of the substantive questions. The analytic is empty. Precisely from the demand for proof and precise definition one arrives at a state in which every system of assumptions supplies an explanation whose standing is equal to that of its parallels. Positivism is the cultural father that led directly to postmodernism—and not, as historians of culture usually describe it, as though postmodernism were a reaction directed mainly against positivism.25
It is important to emphasize that positivism specifically assumed the existence of objective norms and conceptual systems, and in fact permitted us to speak only about them. And yet it underwent the strange reversal described here. This reversal stems from the mechanism described at the end of the first gate. Such an analytic approach allows dialogue only with those who live within the same normative and evaluative system—the same system of assumptions, or axiomatic system—as mine.
Because the assumption was that speech between people can be based only on distinct and objective concepts, and because there was a clear feeling that human speech must contain more than that, the only possible way out was the complete reversal: total relativism. Positivism created a world of monads, or bubbles disconnected from one another, within each of which lives a society of people who understand one another, but cannot be understood by the inhabitants of the neighboring “bubbles.” Communication arises between people and cultures only when it presupposes an explicit cultural context in the background, so that it can nevertheless be understood. In the postmodern world, to understand me you must know the assumptions within which I operate, even though of course they have no objective meaning whatsoever. At best they enable communication—in a very limited sense—between people with different basic assumptions, or people belonging to different cultures.
Here we see in full force the emptiness of the analytic “wagon.” Whoever wishes to be completely analytic should advance no claim at all. Or at least, when he does claim something, he must first declare that there is nothing in his claim that can obligate his fellow, who differs from him in his assumptions. His entire claim derives from, is grounded in, and is valid only from within and within his cultural system—his “narrative,” his discourse, if we use the terminology beloved of postmodernists. In logical language one may say that in a postmodern world legitimacy belongs not to claims but only to arguments—that is, to drawing conclusions from premises.
In our time the modern and postmodern approaches are mixed together. It is hard to find someone who is wholly modernist or wholly postmodern. This stems from the fact—already pointed out by Nietzsche—that if one takes modernity all the way, one is forced to arrive at postmodernity. On the other hand, total postmodernity is an inconsistent position, and no one can truly adopt it fully. A detailed discussion of this point will be conducted in the sixth gate, and in the third unit.
Let us return for a moment to the analogy between the development of Western civilization as a whole and the development of the individual. We saw that an adolescent can mature in one of two ways: either become a skeptic—preserving the basic stance of adolescence—or return to an apparently dogmatic but more mature position. Postmodernism parallels the first process, on the general cultural-social level. Later we shall point also to parallels to the alternative maturation process, which is only beginning to sprout in our own time.
Interim Summary: East and West
According to the picture presented here, the current stage in cultural history is still parallel to the second developmental stage, adolescence. The skepticism of youth has taken on a more mature form. The naïve analytic approach ultimately leads necessarily to positivism, and in its wake to postmodernity. This is nothing but a softer and more sophisticated form of ancient skepticism. Below we shall see that even on the social level, equality—which is the central myth of contemporary Western culture in all its branches—is merely an inevitable conclusion of the analytic position. It is only natural that such a value should dominate at a time when the age of adolescence in Western development has reached maturity.
Here it should be added that alongside the development described here there is another part of the world, which in our terminology may be classified as possessing a persistently synthetic approach. Such a mode of thought, and such an approach to the world, is generally attributed to the Far East and the various lands of the Orient.26 These are cultures generally called—at least in the modernist age, before the takeover of postmodernity—primitive. In such places history generally did not pass through the stages described here, but proceeded more placidly. Myths in their older form usually still dominate the thought and conduct of the people living in these societies.
In the Western world there is a certain tendency to look down on these cultures—before the rise of the terror of political correctness—mainly in light of their lack of technological and scientific achievements, though this is no longer necessarily true today, as East Asia demonstrates. According to the description given here, we would say that these societies are synthetic societies, preserving more significantly the ancient mode of thought, and not necessarily lagging behind the “enlightened” world. It seems as though these parts of the world are waiting for the West to return and reconnect with them as thesis and antithesis in the dialectical historical process.
In light of this description, it is natural to expect that the final state toward which we are heading will be one parallel to the stage of adulthood in the individual. This is a dialectical synthesis between those two poles, described in the concluding chapter of our book as “constructive postmodernism.” This is the great joining of West and East, whose first signs, as hinted above, can already be seen today.
Let us now summarize the lines of development as described so far. We have described the intellectual history of the West in parallel to the intellectual maturation of an individual. This is a dialectical passage from synthetic thinking to analytic thinking that proceeds gradually throughout history. Below we shall see that ideologies that appear as distant from one another as East from West participate in it side by side. It is a long process of maturation: it begins in the mythic-synthetic childhood stage, continues in the analytic-skeptical stage of adolescence that lasts down to our own time, and is expected finally to reach a stage of adulthood that we have not yet fully attained.
Nietzsche and Postmodernism
As we approach the end, let us refer the reader to the enlightening article by Roni Aviram,27 in which a very similar development of culture and thought—from modernism to postmodernism—is described in Nietzsche’s teaching. Nietzsche’s words, and his futuristic descriptions of our current condition after Aviram’s reconstruction, appear astonishing and almost prophetic. His conclusion was that culture would destroy itself in the search for a cultural-intellectual coordinate system, which, according to Nietzsche, it would find very difficult—if not impossible—to locate. Since Nietzsche himself lived in the heart of the modernist period, he already saw within it the seeds of postmodernity that were hidden there from the beginning, as we explained above, and it was clear to him that this course led almost certainly to total extinction.
Nietzsche’s analysis of the necessary transition from modernity to postmodernity parallels the one we have made here. He discerned that modernism is an unstable age that must pass into postmodernism. Once one “kills God,”28 that is, once one kills the possibility of certainty in general, and pretends to present a “rational” alternative—the stage of adolescence—one is compelled to arrive at the conclusion that there is no absolute alternative coordinate system whatsoever—the nihilistic-postmodern adulthood. It was also clear to him that there can be no certain truth without such a coordinate system. Therefore Nietzsche foresaw the end of history as following modernism.
This forecast rests on an earlier point at which one may dispute his words: the absurd thesis of the “death of God.” Nietzsche understood, in light of the intellectual climate of his time, that this “idea” had passed away never to return. That means that since we have no rational—that is, analytic—proof of His existence, He is not, and from the standpoint of human history He is “dead.” Only in mythic-dogmatic ages did people accept the fact of His existence without sufficient evidence, and those ages have passed away for good. Along with Him died the possibility of any certainty whatsoever, and we are condemned to be extreme analysts with no clear, preferable, or true coordinate system in any sense. This is the reason Nietzsche foresaw a tragic end to human culture.
As stated, one may dispute Nietzsche’s conceptions and his dark prediction of “the last man” as the end-point of human existence. In our terminology here, Nietzsche chose one of two possible paths of maturation. He chose the path that ends in nihilistic and destructive skepticism.29 Above we pointed out that there is an alternative path of maturation that can come after the end of adolescence. If we look forward from within the postmodern age, it appears that there is room for a more optimistic future for humanity. The alternative stage that can come after present postmodernism is a stage that may be called “constructive postmodernism.” This is a renewed cultural revival after the postmodern age, which, as Nietzsche claimed, must itself perish.
The process of return to religion and mysticism that we are witnessing today, with all its distortions and oddities, is the beginning of a departure from the Nietzschean path. Further discussion of the current condition and of the trends now emerging as a forecast of the future will be conducted in the fifth gate.
To summarize this chapter, one may point out that a secular, ostensibly “modernist” position that says God is dead actually pulls the ground from under the possibility of any certainty whatsoever. It therefore must ultimately abandon its false “modernism” in favor of a postmodern position that was already hidden within it from birth. The very willingness to ask questions already contains the fact that there will be no binding answers.30 The inevitable conclusion is that the stable state toward which a secular society is drawn, almost necessarily, is postmodernism.
The inevitable conclusion is that the modernism that dominated the West until roughly the middle of the present century was a false condition. In reality it was disguised postmodernism. In the third unit—and also in the fourth—I shall try to show that there is no basis for genuine modernism other than faith in God, exactly as Nietzsche thought. A modernist conception that believes in an objective system for comparing cultures requires an objective, trans-temporal coordinate system. This is a position synthetic in its essence, and it cannot be grounded in the idea of the “death of God.” If He is dead, then, ironically, modernism—which ostensibly “killed” Him—dies with Him.
As Nietzsche predicted, then, we have arrived at postmodernism. But, as Nietzsche himself argued, this is not a stable condition. Therefore, in the end, the world will apparently be forced to stabilize itself in a synthetic position that recognizes certainties of one kind or another. This is one possible interpretation of the messianic era and the religious concepts of redemption.
In this chapter we have begun to discern the connection between secularity and postmodernity, two ideas grounded in an analytic meta-ideological position. The relation to the outlooks of the social Left will be discussed in the fifth gate. Before continuing the discussion, however, we must complete the historical perspective by describing a parallel historical process taking place within the Jewish house of study.
Chapter 2: The Decline of the Generations
Interpretation and Canonization in the History of Halakha
In the world of halakha (Jewish law), that is, within the Jewish house of study, there is a process parallel to the historical unfolding described in the previous chapter. When the Written Torah was given at Mount Sinai, the rules of interpretation that form the backbone of the Oral Torah were given with it. Together with interpretation that developed through a very complex process over the generations, the Oral Torah took shape as we know it today. One may view the development of halakha as a chain of links, each composed of interpretation and canonization. Every period is characterized by the canonical texts produced within it, which generally serve as interpretations of those that preceded them and at the same time as binding precedents for those who come after. In each such period, the interpretations were first created, and only afterward was a canonical corpus formed from them, which became a precedent and an object of interpretation for future generations.
After the closing of the Mishnah, it was established that the Amoraim—the sages of the Talmudic discussions—had no authority to dispute the laws found in the Mishnah. Likewise, after the closing of the Talmuds, Babylonian and Jerusalem, later generations accepted upon themselves not to dispute what is found in them. The next stage comes at the end of the period of the early commentators and decisors—usually referred to simply as the early authorities—which is generally seen as the body of works that preceded the Shulchan Arukh, composed in the sixteenth century. The current period is called in present Torah terminology the period of the later authorities.31
The rules determining that one may not dispute canonical works belonging to an earlier period were set from a temporal perspective.32 In transitional periods there were exceptions to these rules, because naturally one who lives on such a seam is not aware that a period is ending. Only from a retrospective point of view can these borders be fixed as sharp boundaries. The logic of these rules is usually explained by the claim that there is a decline in the capacity for Torah understanding the later the period in which one lives; in standard Torah terminology, this is called “the decline of the generations.” This claim seemingly contradicts the feeling of modern man, who senses specifically an increase in the wisdom and ability of the later generations as compared to their predecessors.
In the Torah world this feeling of contradiction is usually understood as stemming from a distinction between “the wisdom of Torah” and “external wisdoms.” The claim is that there is a continual decline in our ability to grasp the wisdom of Torah, even though in the world of external wisdoms the situation appears to be the opposite. This schematic division is not entirely convincing, as will become clear below, but in any event it plainly demands explanation. What is the difference between these two kinds of wisdom? Why is Torah specifically on one side of the divide, while all the other kinds of wisdom, which ostensibly differ greatly from one another, stand on the other side?
In this chapter I wish to characterize these two kinds of wisdom and distinguish between them by trying to characterize the criterion by which periods in the unfolding of halakha come to a close. To do that, we must try to understand the process that in the Torah world is called “the decline of the generations.” Through analysis of that process we shall try to understand in which kinds of wisdom there is decline, and in which there is increase.
The Process of Codification in Halakha
Anyone familiar with the central texts of the Torah and halakhic world can notice an ongoing process of codification. In the period of the Hebrew Bible there is almost no mention of halakhic discussions of the sort commonly found in the two Talmuds. It would seem that the halakhic world in the biblical period was based on an intuitive understanding of what is written in the Five Books of the Written Torah. It does not appear that detailed and formal halakhic rules of the kind familiar to us today yet existed.33
The Mishnah is a text written in a form somewhat closer to a law code, although the resemblance is still rather faint. The text is concise, not very well organized, and at times difficult to interpret. The Gemara is already fuller of halakhic give-and-take, involving proofs for and against the various positions, with an attempt to reach a rational decision.34 Even so, one can clearly state that the Talmud is not built in the form of an ordinary legal discussion, either in structure or in content. The associations are associative, and the proofs are not always clear to the contemporary reader. Topics are scattered throughout the Talmud without orderly thematic arrangement. The Talmud is also interwoven with narrative passages that ostensibly do not directly contribute to its functioning as a legal text. The interpretation of the halakhic midrashim—rabbinic legal expositions—that derive laws from the Written Torah is scarcely understood at all by the contemporary reader, including those who sit in the study hall themselves. The early commentators conducted their discussions of the Talmud in a manner closer to our present mode of thinking, but only in the period of the later authorities, and especially in the last century, do we find attempts to formulate sharp legal-formal definitions of the various laws.
Parallel to this, a codification of the halakhic world was created by the decisors. After the Talmud, this process began with Rabbi Isaac Alfasi—the Rif, in the eleventh century—who extracted only the laws from the Talmud, with very little editing, and still according to the Talmudic order. The process continued with Maimonides in the twelfth century, who changed the basic conception and introduced modern codification, gathering the laws from all the texts that preceded him and reorganizing them according to the subject matter of the laws. The continuation appears in the Tur in the fourteenth century and in the Shulchan Arukh in the sixteenth century, which followed Maimonides’ path, though only with respect to the laws relevant to their own times. It should be noted that the process of codification was accompanied by various objections, both in Maimonides’ period and in the period of the Shulchan Arukh and afterward.35
The Meaning of Codification: Formality and Analyticity
In both of these parallel tracks—interpretation and legal ruling—we can discern movement in a more formal and less intuitive direction. Interpretation becomes increasingly analytic, and legal ruling increasingly formal. From the biblical stage, in which ruling seems to have been done from an intuitive understanding of what was written in the Torah, we have reached a situation in which there is almost no Orthodox decisor or interpreter who dares to propose an original interpretation with practical implications for the Written or Oral Torah. Legal ruling is carried out through adherence to earlier texts and to halakhic generalizations made by sages of previous generations, with an attempt to derive as analytically as possible the required law from those generalizations. Reliance on the decisor’s own judgment declines dramatically.
Rabbi Hayyim Soloveitchik of Brisk, at the beginning of the twentieth century, brought halakhic analytics to its peak. The contemporary yeshiva world, shaped mainly by Rabbi Hayyim and his students, does not ask—and even forbids one to ask—why a certain law was stated, but only what was stated in it.36 The effort is to define, not to interpret. The definitions themselves become more and more formal, and also more distant from common sense. The attempt to force an intuitive concept into a formal straitjacket sometimes yields convoluted definitions that do not accord with simple reasoning.
This is a phenomenon very similar to the attempts of some analytic philosophers to force into a formal frame concepts and claims that are perfectly clear at the intuitive level. This attempt, like its counterpart in the study hall, also leads to twisted definitions that do not accord with common sense.37
The student in the study hall today does not decide, and usually cannot decide, between two opposing opinions. For each of the two views an explanation—or more precisely, a definition—is offered that is no less persuasive than the explanation offered for the second view. A famous story about Rabbi Hayyim, who was rabbi of Brisk, tells that he sent a halakhic question to Rabbi Isaac Elhanan of Kovno, who was then regarded as the greatest decisor, and asked for an answer of only “forbidden” or “permitted,” without reasons. His assumption was that for every reason one gives, an opposite line of reasoning can be raised; therefore Rabbi Hayyim wanted to know only Rabbi Isaac Elhanan’s halakhic conclusion, relying on his halakhic intuition.
The very expectation that Rabbi Isaac Elhanan would decide what the law is stems from the fact that he truly belonged to a different type of Torah greatness. In the Torah world this type is called a halakhic decisor. The “analytical scholar” knows how to establish every line of reasoning on its own special definition, and when you ask him who is right, he will generally find it very hard to decide, nor will he necessarily wish to do so. This does not always stem from ideology—that is, from fear of error in light of the decline of the generations—nor from lack of will. Often it is a genuine inability to decide between two positions that the analytical scholar has set up “too persuasively” against one another. Each has different assumptions, and so its conclusions differ. When one understands both sides too well, one loses the ability to decide between them.38 Unlike the analytical scholar, the halakhic decisor is one who succeeds in deciding the halakhic question: which decisor is correct, or at least according to whose opinion I must act; to what precedent a certain halakhic-real situation should be compared; and so forth.
To be sure, even among contemporary decisors there are few who rule on the basis of their own judgment. Often they adopt the more stringent position in order to satisfy all opinions. This phenomenon too does not always stem from rigidity or conservatism, as it is sometimes described, but from a genuine inability to decide between two persuasive positions. Something like the process undergone by the analytical scholar also passes over the halakhic decisor. Since a rift has emerged between understanding and decision, halakha becomes, on the one hand, very passive and closely attached to the words of the early authorities, and on the other hand very analytic and precise, in a way similar to mathematics.
The description of the world of study presented here parallels the postmodern condition in many respects. No position is preferable to another; all are equivalent. If an approach is consistent with its assumptions and well defined, there is no way to criticize it. Even in the world of legal ruling, which ostensibly should decide among the different positions, the common practice is to adopt the stringent course so as to satisfy all views, in order to avoid the need to decide among them. This is natural behavior in a postmodern condition. If everyone is right, it cannot be that we should act in a way that fails to fit someone’s method.39
It is important to note that the division between the type of halakhic decisor and the type of analytical scholar, contrary to what people usually think, is a product of the modern age. In earlier times, decisors were analytical scholars and vice versa. The traditional distinction between decisors and commentators, already present in the period of the early authorities, is a distinction between texts more than between different personalities. Most of the great early commentators are also regarded as decisors, and vice versa. Only the texts they wrote are divided according to the classification of halakhic texts—legal rulings—or interpretive texts—study.40
Let us summarize the picture so far. The high analytic ability of the later generations succeeds in placing every halakhic or interpretive method on clear and intelligible foundations, analytically, from within its own context. It is specifically the increase in the power of analysis that causes an inability to decide among the various positions, and therefore also a tendency to stringency so as to satisfy them all. In earlier periods we can discern interpretation and legal ruling that appear less sophisticated and less analytic in character. The decisor rules on the basis of his own understanding, and does not try to understand and justify the dissenter. It seems that he also has less ability in that regard—analytic ability—than the sage of our own generation.
This situation also recalls what occurs in science. There too thought increasingly distances itself from common sense, and for that reason the mode of thought becomes increasingly formal-mathematical. Phenomena are grasped as particular cases of laws possessing general validity, and the explanation of a specific phenomenon is given in terms of reduction to general laws rather than by common-sense explanations.
That is why one of the characteristics of scientific genius, in the eyes of many scientists, is the ability to grasp various phenomena intuitively. His colleague, the ordinary scientist, can prove and explain them, if at all, only through an effortful formal solution of mathematical equations. The more abstract the matters become, the more the work of most scientists becomes formal and remote from common sense, whereas the genius, even in such a situation, can follow the process by means of his intuition.
Here we begin to see specifically a parallel between Torah wisdom and scientific wisdom, and not the opposition between them implied by the claim about the decline of the generations. More than that, I would say that analytic ability goes on improving in the Torah world just as it does in the worlds of thought and science. Therefore it seems that the decline of which one may speak in Torah wisdom does not stem from the objects of study but from the method. In one sentence: throughout history there is a decline in synthetic ability and a rise in analytic ability, both in the Torah sphere and in the sphere of the “external wisdoms.”
It seems that the difference between scientific wisdom and Torah wisdom stems from what is apparently a side issue. Science, and even more so mathematics, requires analytic thinking, and therefore our understanding of it improves. Torah also requires—and perhaps primarily requires—a kind of wisdom that is synthetic. And that is precisely the capacity in which we are declining.
The Language School Parable as an Explanation of the Decline of the Generations
One may compare such a process to the process of learning a language.41 Some learn the language as a mother tongue, while others, natives of other lands, learn it in a language school at an older age. Learning in the language school proceeds through the formal rules of the language. Learning one’s mother tongue proceeds intuitively, without rules. A child—or an adult—who never learned the rules of grammar does not know them at all, even if he speaks the language perfectly. On the other hand, it is obvious that the language-school student, even if he has virtuoso mastery of all the rules he learned, will not attain the level of control possessed by one who speaks the language as his mother tongue.
This difference can be explained in two ways:
- There are things that are easier to learn from particulars to the general rule, and not through rules, for pedagogic and other reasons, and language is one of them.42
- The rules of a language are only an approximation to correct and perfect speech. A language has its own rhythm, and non-formal rules that are no less important than the formal rules. We all know that almost every linguistic rule has a great many exceptions. This phenomenon stems from the fact that language did not develop according to rules, but naturally. The rules come only afterward to describe formally—as accurately as possible, yet still approximately—the final product of that natural development.43
Note 12: Using Formal Rules versus Understanding a Language — The Chinese Room
The well-known analytic philosopher John Searle offered an example that illustrates in an extreme way the difference between understanding a language through rules and understanding it intuitively.44 His concern there is to distinguish between semantics and syntax, a topic we shall not discuss here. We shall use the Chinese Room example in order to sharpen the difference between learning in a language school and learning a language as a mother tongue, and to push it to absurdity. Here is a quotation from his words:
Imagine that you are locked in a room in which there are several boxes full of Chinese symbols. Imagine that you do not understand a word of Chinese, but that you have in your possession a rule book in English for manipulating those Chinese symbols. The rules specify how to manipulate the symbols in a completely formal way, in terms of their syntax and not in terms of their semantics. For example: take a sign from box number one and place it next to a sign from box number two. Suppose that several other Chinese symbols are passed into the room, and you receive further instructions to pass Chinese symbols out of the room. Suppose that, unknown to you, the people outside the room call the symbols passed into the room “questions,” and the symbols that come out of the room they call “answers to questions.” Suppose also that the programmers are very successful in designing the programs, and that you are very successful in manipulating the symbols, so that before long no one can distinguish between your answers and those of a speaker of Chinese. You are locked in the room, moving your Chinese symbols back and forth, and sending out Chinese symbols in response to incoming Chinese symbols. In the situation described here, where your activity is limited to such manipulation of formal symbols, there is no possibility that you will learn even one word of Chinese.
What we see here is an extreme example of the fact that the use of a system of formal rules can appear from the outside as an understanding of Chinese, while not containing the slightest trace of such understanding. This is syntax—form—without semantics—meaning. Learning in a language school, unlike the Chinese Room, of course does succeed in conferring understanding of the language being learned, but that understanding is limited.45 According to this example, it seems that one can describe a language by means of rules unlike those actually used by native speakers, and by their means bring the learner to the ability to use the language. Native speakers use unformulated linguistic intuitions, whereas the language-school student uses the formal rules he learned. The inevitable conclusion from the description here is that using a language is not identical with understanding it.46
In a similar, though less extreme, way one may understand the process of the decline of the generations. Throughout the historical process we move to the use of formal techniques, the use of syntactic rules—like linguistic rules and the like—of which it is sometimes clear that they have nothing whatsoever to do with the original intention of the author of the text. This is the only path open to us, as language-school students, for arriving at correct decisions. The generations that preceded us did not need these analytic-formal techniques, because they had intuitive understanding; that is, they were like speakers of Torah and halakha as a mother tongue.
In keeping with the parable of language learning that we brought above, one may say that when the Torah was given to Moses at Mount Sinai, he learned it as a mother tongue. He reached a state in which he intuitively sensed the correct halakha for every situation, without needing to use formal rules. Such too was the situation in the biblical period. As the process of transmission of Torah advanced, and the distance from the giving of the Torah at Sinai grew, intuition diminished. As a result, it became more and more necessary to use formal rules. Therefore the process of codification grows more sophisticated as time passes, and at the same time the derivation of halakhic rulings becomes more analytic: the law is derived by means of rules from general formal laws. Halakhic thought itself also becomes more formal and more remote from common sense, as noted above. We pass gradually from understanding Torah as a mother tongue to the use of syntactic rules, as in a language school.
The Language School Parable as an Explanation of the Delimitation of Periods in Halakha
Disappointing though this may sound, it seems that this process has no substitute. It parallels exactly the process—entirely to be expected, as we saw in the previous chapter—by which postmodernity emerges out of positivism.
Because of this phenomenon, and since the sages of the halakhic world do not wish to live in a wholly postmodern world, the approach arose that every generation must approach the Torah given at Sinai through the mediation of all the generations that preceded it, because it does not “speak the Torah language” as a mother tongue. That language is external to it. This is the problem called in criticism and philosophy “the hermeneutic problem.” The farther the reader is from the period and world of the writer, the farther his interpretation of the text may be from the original intention. In order to bridge these gaps, one must approach the text through mediators who lived and worked closer to the time of its writing.
This applies not only to the Torah given at Sinai, but also to other texts that precede the learner’s own period within the process of transmission. The sages of the Mishnah spoke the language of the Torah as a mother tongue relative to the sages of the Talmudic discussion, who needed their mediation. The sages of the Talmudic discussion spoke the language of the Mishnah as a mother tongue, and therefore the early authorities require their mediation both in the study of the Written Torah and in the study of the Mishnah. This is the essence of the transmission of Torah from generation to generation and from teacher to disciple down to our own time.
This is the difference between the Torah world and the postmodern world. In the Torah world, out of doubt, one tries to cleave to earlier generations, to learn in their “language school,” and to reach a certain degree of intuitive understanding. In the postmodern world, one does not believe in anyone’s ability to advance toward truth, or alternatively one assumes that there is nothing toward which to advance—that is, that there is no truth.
From the picture described here one may derive the criterion that determines the closing of a halakhic period, from which point onward one may not dispute the sages of the preceding period.47 When, in retrospect, there comes a point at which people of a certain generation feel that their predecessors in the process of transmission no longer “spoke their language”—that is, no longer thought in ways familiar to them—then there already exists a significant hermeneutic problem with respect to what was written in that period. In such a case a boundary line is declared, marking that period as an age that already constitutes binding halakhic precedent; in other words, another step of codification is taken. From that point onward one may not dispute what was ruled in the closed period, and we are occupied only in analyzing it. This is an activity analytic in essence, and halakhic ruling from texts belonging to the previous period is carried out according to “mathematical” rules of decision.
From then on, the people of the current age are language-school students of the previous generation, who still “spoke”—relative to them—the Torah as a mother tongue. There is no point in disputing with someone whose language you do not speak, especially if it seems reasonable that his intuitive understanding of the Torah is superior to yours.
The same is true in the language-school example. If the language-school student goes out into the street and meets people who have spoken the language from infancy, and their sentences do not conform to the rules he learned in school, it is better that he listen to the spoken usage and not correct them on the basis of his rules. It is very likely that they are the ones speaking correctly. They possess a clear intuition for the natural rhythm of the language, and the rules learned in the language school are only an approximation to it, at times a poor one.48
Such is the situation in the world of Torah and halakha as well. This is the meaning of the apparently arbitrary rules—which also lack any formal halakhic source—that forbid disputing the sages of earlier periods. And from here too comes the criterion that determines the delimitation between periods.
Note 13: The Hermeneutic Problem in Halakha — The Primary Categories of Damages
In light of the previous discussion, it might seem that halakhic study has no connection at all to the original intention of the authors of the texts, and is merely the use of formal rules, as in the example of the Chinese Room. Indeed, among students of Torah there are some who feel this way about the accepted mode of Talmud study in the yeshivot. Such an attitude is found especially with regard to study by the method of “understanding,” following Rabbi Hayyim of Brisk and his successors. I will bring here one example, out of very many, to show why it is impossible to relate so extremely to yeshiva-style halakhic study.
At the beginning of tractate Bava Kamma, the Babylonian Talmud discusses the issue of the four primary categories of damages and their derivatives. The Torah speaks of four different modes of damage by which a person, or a person’s property, can cause damage to another. These are described in the Torah in four passages dealing with damages caused by an ox, a pit, fire, and a human being.49 The primary category of ox is itself divided into several primary categories, which also appear in the Torah and are therefore also called primary categories: horn, tooth, and foot. The Gemara understands from the Mishnah at the opening of Bava Kamma that these are primary categories of damage, archetypes of the various forms of damage, and it immediately tries to determine what the derivatives of those categories are. In other words, according to what criterion should forms of damage not mentioned in the Torah—the derivatives—be compared to those that are mentioned there—the primary categories? How can one decide, regarding a form of damage not mentioned in the Torah, whether it belongs to one of these four categories or not?
The practical difference, in the jargon of the study hall, concerns the differing laws applying to these modes of damage. For example: one who damages another’s property by fire is exempt if the burned object was hidden inside something else. One who causes damage by means of a pit is exempt if the damaged objects are utensils. One who causes damage by “foot” is exempt in the public domain, and so on.
Let us consider an example from the discussion conducted in the Babylonian Talmud, Bava Kamma 2a. The Gemara initially assumes that damage caused by kicking is a derivative of the primary category of foot, since it too is done by means of a foot. It follows from this that if my animal kicked my fellow’s animal in the public domain, it would be exempt, just like an animal that causes damage by its foot. Then the Gemara says that kicking is not a derivative of foot, but of horn. The reason is that resemblance between the primary categories of damage is not determined by the limb with which the damage is done, but on the basis of substantive characteristics of that primary category. The relevant characterization of an animal that damages by horn is not that the damage was done with a limb called a “horn,” but that the animal intended to cause harm. This is not the case with damage by foot, which usually occurs without intent to harm: while the animal is walking, it causes damage with its feet. If that is the criterion, then kicking, though done with a foot, will clearly be classified as a derivative of horn, since it involves intention to cause damage.
Similarly, when the Torah commands the prohibition of selecting on the Sabbath, the simple assumption is that this applies to all types of objects, and what matters is only the mode of selection—for example, taking food from refuse, what is wanted from what is not wanted, or the reverse. That is, in order to learn from a case discussed by the Torah, or by any other text, to cases not explicitly mentioned, one must use a criterion for comparison between cases. That criterion itself, of course, is not explicit in the text. If so, it is clear that when the Torah, like any other text, expects us to use such a criterion as guidance also for cases not explicitly mentioned, there is an implicit assumption that the criterion is known to us by our own reasoning. Formulating a criterion always rests on an understanding of the concept in question that is not drawn directly from the text.
In the example of the primary categories and derivatives of damage, the essential characteristic of the primary category of horn is determined to be intention to cause damage, and not, for example, damage by means of horns. There is no hint of this in the text. This characterization is entirely the product of our understanding, which says that in liability for damages the limb by which the damage was done is irrelevant; what matters is the essential characterization of the act.
Even the most hard-line Briskers—students of Rabbi Hayyim—who ostensibly do not try to understand, to ask “why,” but only to describe what is written in the Torah and the Talmud, cannot ignore the fact that the criterion according to which one uses rules and compares one situation to another is the fruit of their understanding, and is itself not learned from the text. Since the Torah did not hand us the formal rules, it is clear that even one who wishes to use such rules must create them from the written examples, according to criteria grounded in understanding. The unavoidable conclusion is that the rules we use are based on synthetic understanding. It is impossible to derive halakhot in a purely analytic way.50 In summary, the hermeneutic dilemma is a particular aspect of the broader analytic-synthetic dilemma. Even the most analytic approaches, which do their utmost to avoid using human understanding, are unable to ground the understanding of a text on analytic processes alone.
Let us further note that in this issue and others like it a second hermeneutic problem arises. Regarding the understanding of the Torah itself, it was the sages of the Mishnah who overcame the hermeneutic problem for us. But regarding the Mishnah and the Gemara, which describe the conclusions arising from the interpretations of the Mishnah and Talmudic sages, we—who come later to study these texts—face a second-order hermeneutic problem: how to understand the rules of those sages, and how in light of that to understand Scripture itself. This is not the place to expand on that.51
Implications for the Mode of Study: Apprenticeship and Study
The Babylonian Talmud, Berakhot 7b, says:
“Greater is attending upon them than studying from them.”
The intent of this statement is that in order to learn Torah, the student must not only receive information from his teacher, but also attend upon him—serve him—in order to learn his way of life, grow up in his house, and only then will Torah become for him too a mother tongue.
Informational learning is the language school; learning as a mother tongue is done by physical presence near speakers of the language. The transmission of Torah is composed of the combination of information with a Torah mode of thought—the “Torah head.” This is a concept of “teacher” closer to what is found in the East, as opposed to the “lecturer” more typical of the Western world of learning.52
This seems to be the meaning of the prohibition against writing down the Oral Torah: “Matters transmitted orally you are not permitted to put into writing” (Babylonian Talmud, Gittin 60b). The reason for the prohibition is the desire to force the learner not to learn from books but from living teachers, who can convey to him also the intuitive dimension of Torah. To learn Torah one must “attend,” not only “study.” Rabbi Judah the Patriarch, who made the historic decision to write the Mishnah—the Oral Torah—because “It is a time to act for the Lord; they have violated Your Torah,” took a revolutionary and extreme step out of fear that Torah would be forgotten from Israel. The consequences of this step find expression in the process of transition from synthetic learning to analytic learning, and in the apparent ossification of the Oral Torah, as described above. The gain from writing down the Oral Torah exacts from us a very heavy price.
Implications: The Decline of the Generations and the Rise of the Generations
Let us now return to some of the implications of the process described so far. As a result of this mode of transmitting Torah, a historical process of dialectical structure is formed. The more the capacity to understand things on the intuitive—synthetic—level declines, the more higher analytic ability is required as compensation. This ability nevertheless enables us to use the language as “language-school students,” by means of formal laws and rules. This explains the phenomenon that as halakhic intuition declines, analytic ability improves. The decline of the generations in one sense brings about the rise of the generations in another sense.
This is a mechanism similar to the one responsible for developing, in a person disabled in one limb, greater skills in the use of other limbs. It is obvious to anyone who has ever engaged in Torah study that the powers of analysis and definition of the current generations surpass those of the generations that preceded them by far, and yet they continue to speak of the decline of the generations. The dialectical process described here is the explanation of the claim made above: analytic ability improves over time, whereas synthetic ability declines. The two processes depend on one another.
Here too there is a resemblance to the scientific world. As we saw, the scientific genius does not need complicated computational processes in order to grasp the meaning of a phenomenon. He can reach it by activating his intuition—his synthetic ability. Here too, the weaker the intuition, the more we require, and therefore develop, stronger analytic ability.
Much is said about the Western person’s alienation from nature and from natural thought.53 This phenomenon causes a parallel process in thought and in general culture. There is a decline in simple and natural intuitive ability—the synthetic ability—and in the capacity to absorb spiritual reality. It is specifically in societies classified as primitive that the connection to mystical phenomena is better preserved. All Western seekers of mysticism go in search of it in non-Western societies. That is why there is much talk of the “ancient knowledge” of old sages, who generally sit in remote places. Such knowledge is usually not acquired in lessons, in ways to which we are accustomed. In these settings the relation of teacher and student is very common, not only in the sense of transmitting information, but also in a more spiritual sense. Here too, “Greater is attending upon them than studying from them.”
To summarize: there is no principled difference between Torah wisdom and external wisdoms regarding the question whether we are improving in our understanding of them. The question is whether the required thought process is synthetic or analytic, and that is what determines whether our condition is improving or declining. Humanity’s sense of progress stems from looking at subjects that are analytic in their essence, while the sense of decline in the Torah world stems from looking at subjects that are synthetic in their essence.
Torah and External Wisdom
It seems that the root of the distinction made above between Torah and the other wisdoms called “external” lies in the definition of the concept “Torah wisdom.” This definition is in fact broader. Any synthetic understanding of the world is Torah. Any analytic understanding is science. That is, the difference between Torah and the external wisdoms is not a matter of subject matter, but of the character of the inquiry and its methods. This is also the reason for the term “external wisdoms.” They are external because they confer external understanding. Internal understanding is understanding from within the things themselves: sensing them and truly grasping them. This is called internal wisdom. Intuitively understanding the phenomena of nature is also Torah. And understanding externally the discussions of Abaye and Rava, or Scripture, is likewise external wisdom.54
This is the meaning of the common view in the Torah world that all science is included within Torah. It is included there in a primordial way, through inner understanding. This is no substitute for science, nor can one produce technological products from such wisdom. In the same way one may say that science is included in reality. It is equally obvious there that the intention is not that anyone who knows reality can launch missiles to the moon. A lengthy analytic labor is required in order to extract, order, and organize scientific information out of the data of reality, so that it may be convenient for scientific and technological use.
Points of Encounter Between the Two Parallel Processes
Up to this point we have described parallel developments in the general intellectual world and in the study hall. The process of moving from the synthetic direction to the analytic one occurs in both worlds in parallel, and at times without any visible influence of one on the other. Even so, throughout history there are junctures at which these two processes meet and affect one another. There are also interesting parallels that arise without visible influence. For example, the positivism that took over the Western world from the beginning of the twentieth century parallels, in the world of the study hall, the beginning of study by the method of conceptual understanding from the school of Rabbi Hayyim and his colleagues and students. They too were unwilling to leave concepts undefined to the end, like their positivist counterparts in the general world of thought.55 Both processes ended in a quasi-postmodern state, expressed in the inability to decide between positions. Above we also hinted at another parallel, though a less clear one, between Greek Pyrrhonism and the period of the Mishnah and Talmud.
These processes do not occur as a result of direct influence; in fact it seems they occur despite a desire to detach and not be influenced at all. In the next note we shall point to a very central example of such a parallel process. The domination of Greece and its thought over the world is historically—and essentially—parallel to the beginning of the age of the Oral Torah. There, unlike in the examples above, the processes actually met, and apparently ended in a sharp confrontation. The answer to the question who won in that cultural encounter is very complex. Unlike in physical war, it seems that all sides won. This note describes a central historical juncture in the two processes described here.
Note 14: Between Greece and Israel56
In this note I wish to point to an important historical landmark in the overall confrontation between the analytic and synthetic approaches, especially as it relates to Torah matters. Further discussion of this issue may be found in Rabbi Isaac Hutner’s book Pahad Yitzhak on Hanukkah.57
In the middle of the Second Temple period, the Land of Israel was conquered and ruled by the Greeks. The victory of the Hasmoneans over the Greek conquerors, commemorated in the holiday of Hanukkah—which is religious in origin—also lies deep within the new Israeli-secular myth as a kind of national festival. In that national holiday people usually focus on the Hasmoneans’ military victory and the casting off of Greek domination. In the religious holiday, by contrast, as it is described in the Torah sources, there are additional aspects. There one receives a picture of a spiritual struggle between Greece and Israel, whose victory—symbolized by the miracle of the flask of oil—is celebrated by lighting candles on Hanukkah. As many have already argued, from this aspect of Hanukkah the approach that apparently suffered defeat was the secular one as opposed to the religious one represented by the Hasmoneans. From that perspective, the people of humanism, science, and enlightenment should specifically be in deep mourning over the lost opportunity to introduce a little of the light of Greek culture into the people of Israel. I would like here to offer a somewhat deeper view of the spiritual layer of that struggle, from the standpoint of “in those days, at this time.”
Anyone who examines the Torah sources sees that there is an ambivalent attitude toward Greek culture. On the one hand, there is a description of the forceful spiritual and physical struggle waged against the Greeks and the Hellenizers. The Talmud also forbids the study of Greek wisdom—as in the discussion in tractate Sotah 49b—as a sort of antithesis to Torah wisdom. This too is the attitude expressed in the midrash:
“‘And darkness was upon the face of the deep’—this is Greece, which darkened the eyes of Israel” (Genesis Rabbah 2:4).
On the other hand, the only language into which it is permitted to translate the Torah is Greek—as in the Babylonian Talmud, Megillah 9b—as was done in the well-known Septuagint translation. And more than that, the Talmud there says in this connection: “The beauty of Japheth shall dwell in the tents of Shem.”
There is a unique historical phenomenon—at least in its scope and influence—that we find among the people of Israel under Greek rule: the phenomenon of the Hellenizers. A rather large public within the Jewish people was drawn after Greek culture, something that did not happen under the rule of other nations. Even if the Bible describes idolatry practiced by Jews under the influence of various peoples, there is no parallel term comparable to “Hellenization.” We do not find terms such as “Egyptianizers” or “Babylonianizers,” and the like.
These two phenomena—the historical and the linguistic—point to a deeper Greek influence than the influences of other peoples and conquerors. From this it is also clear why the phenomenon of Hellenization aroused grave concern among the Jewish spiritual leadership.
There are several interesting historical correlations between the Greek conquest and other phenomena in the sphere of Torah development. The Book of Maccabees and similar works are the first books not to be included in the Bible. Greek rule marks the beginning of the age of the Oral Torah. The first recorded dispute between two sages of the Mishnah, concerning laying hands on festival offerings, also occurred during the “conflict of the Greeks.”58 That is, the Greek conquest parallels the end of the age of consensus and the beginning of the age of Torah dispute.
Another thing that occurs parallel to Greek rule is the cessation of prophecy in Israel.59 An interesting remark hinting at this correlation appears in Rabbi Nissim Gaon’s introduction to the Talmud.60 There, within his description of the transmission of the Oral Torah, and in the midst of his account of Rav’s descent from the Land of Israel to Babylonia, he writes:
“And his descent to Babylonia was in the five hundred and tenth year after the cessation of prophecy, which is the beginning of Alexander’s rule, for then his kingship began.”
There is no doubt that Rabbi Nissim Gaon did not intend merely to note an accidental historical coincidence—if indeed there are such things. It is clear that his purpose was to point to a connection between the beginning of the reign of Alexander of Macedon, founder of the Greek empire, and the end of the age of prophecy.
In the Babylonian Talmud, Yoma 69a, there is a story about Alexander the Great arriving in Jerusalem, and all the Jewish dignitaries, among them Shimon the Righteous, going out to greet him. When Alexander saw him, he dismounted from his horse and bowed before him. When those around him asked why, he explained:
“The image of this man goes before me in battle and leads me to victory.”61
A situation is described here in which Shimon the Righteous is, as it were, paving the way for Alexander the Great to victory and to the building of the Greek empire.
Shimon the Righteous, in many respects, represents the beginning of the Oral Torah. He is the first sage whose saying is brought in his own name in the Oral Torah, at the opening of tractate Avot. Opposed to him stands Alexander, disciple of the Greek Aristotle, who as is well known was his teacher in his youth at the court of his father King Philip of Macedon. Alexander the Great, as is well known, aspired to spread Greek wisdom throughout his kingdom, and this was one of the motivations for his wide-ranging conquests. He was in fact the primary agent in the dissemination of Greek wisdom throughout the world.
From this angle, it appears that Greek wisdom spreads through the wider world in parallel to the beginning of the Oral Torah within the study hall. The Talmudic legend we cited teaches, in its own way, that the Oral Torah is what paves the way—as an end that precedes its means—for Greek wisdom. On the theological plane, the purpose of the spread of Greek wisdom is that Torah may succeed in moving to its next, more rationalist phase: the Oral Torah.62
The transition from the Written Torah to the Oral Torah has already been described above as a transition from a synthetic to a more analytic mode of Torah study. The dominance of Greek wisdom represents the analytic wisdom that is the root of the external wisdoms—the sciences.63 The spread of Greek wisdom and the transition from the Written Torah to the Oral Torah are two aspects of the same process. One aspect is found within the study hall, and the other outside it.64
This description is the inner meaning of the spiritual struggle between Greece and Israel. It is a struggle between external-analytic wisdom and internal-synthetic wisdom. In this sense, unlike the national sense, today’s secular Judaism stands in the second camp of the equation, on the Greek side. In certain respects one may view the result of the spiritual struggle as a victory for analyticity and its introduction into the Torah world as well. Apparently Hellenism won here. Yet in the end this process contributed to the survival of Torah wisdom, and perhaps even to its very formation, as we shall see below.
It is interesting to note that in Pirsig’s famous book Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance,65 its protagonist, Phaedrus, seeks a definition for the concept of “quality” and fails to find one. The insight he eventually reaches is that this concept is not definable. In addition, he understands that the very attempt to seek a definition for every concept, and the assumption that there must be one, was introduced into our way of thinking by the Greeks. They were the ones who introduced the exclusivity of analytic thinking into Western history. This is a claim completely parallel to the interpretation presented here of the significance of Greek thought and of its encounter with Judaism. The antithesis to this mode of thought is Eastern thought. Such thought, of course, stands on the synthetic side of our meta-ideological map. We have already hinted, and shall discuss further, the relation between West and East in light of these distinctions.
We saw above the expression of the sages: “The beauty of Japheth in the tents of Shem.” The meaning is that Greek wisdom is in itself a positive tool, provided it is not understood as exclusive, and is willing to sit within “the tents of Shem,” that is, within the study hall. The struggle was only over the exclusivity of analytic wisdom, not over its use as such. This is precisely the struggle between analyticity and syntheticity. As we defined at the end of the first gate, the synthetic position recognizes analytic thinking and uses it, but refuses to see it as exclusive, as the analytic position itself does.
Let us return to the historical process. With the end of the age of prophecy, which is the peak of synthetic capacity, the study hall was forced to develop analytic abilities as compensation for the weakening of direct and immediate intuitive understanding—the synthetic capacity. Therefore Greek wisdom had to begin spreading in the world in order to pave the way for the Oral Torah. At this point in history, as noted above, the first disputes among the sages of the Oral Torah also begin. This is a necessary result of the analytic conception. As mentioned above, an analytic conception necessarily leads to the recognition of several parallel truths, all equally correct. Already here we see the seeds of the halakhic postmodernism described above.
It thus turns out that the struggle between Israel and Greece in the Hasmonean period took place on three principal axes: a political-national struggle, a struggle over forms of thought in the general world of ideas—the analytic-synthetic axis—and a struggle over the mode of Torah study, which is also conducted on the analytic-synthetic axis. The historical struggle between Greece and Israel is in fact a most important juncture on the axis of analytic-synthetic historical development, both inside and outside the study hall. At this point in time, the external world is already in a more advanced analytic condition, and the Torah world follows it and develops analytic approaches to Torah study as compensation for its expanding synthetic weakness.
If one may continue in a historiosophical interpretation, this encounter was intended to equip the study hall with the tools needed to cope with the crisis caused by the end of prophecy. In Rav Kook’s conception, every encounter between the world of Torah and another ideology or philosophy has a divine-Torah purpose. The study hall must adopt and “convert” the positive core in the conceptions it meets, and give them a Torah coloring. The aim of absorbing this core is to equip the study hall with tools essential to itself, in order to improve and refine Torah study itself.
One may say that the results of this historical struggle remain visible to this day. The study hall, as stated, adopted analytic methods that continue to grow more sophisticated over time, down to our own day.
It is very important to understand that despite the apparent adoption of the analytic direction, at least in part, within the world of the study hall as well, the struggle over the exclusivity of analytic thought remains exactly where it was, perhaps even with greater force. The Torah claim regarding the importance and centrality of synthetic thought for the process of thought and knowledge becomes more relevant than ever specifically when the study hall becomes in certain respects similar to the academy, and even in the eyes of those who inhabit it the differences grow blurred.66 The distinction between things that resemble one another—two poles on one axis—is more important and more meaningful than the distinction between things that have no connection at all.67
We have tried here to focus the meaning of the struggle between Israel and Greece, both for those within the study hall and for those outside it. In the thirteenth gate we shall see that analyticity indeed penetrates the study hall over a long historical period and strengthens it, but analyticity itself, which has recently been struck several hard blows—especially by Gödel’s theorems, see the ninth gate—requires synthetic reinforcement. This is the reason for the interpretation proposed here, according to which history is moving toward a renewed analytic-synthetic union, which we above paralleled to the third stage of maturation—the stage of adulthood.
In the fifth gate we shall also discuss the combined influence of Greece and Israel on contemporary Western culture, and the contradictions and paradoxes that arise from these mixed influences.
Descent for the Sake of Ascent: A Speculation About the Future
The religious conception tends to see historical processes as possessing significance for the repair and elevation of the world. It may be that the purpose of the historical process described here can be interpreted as the development of humanity’s analytic capacity, so that at the end of the process there will be a repaired intellectual-cultural-religious world—the messianic era? In this world there will be a dialectical union between the synthetic thesis of childhood and the analytic antithesis of adolescence. The result that will emerge in the third stage will be a state in which the developed analytic capacity will merge with an intuitive-synthetic capacity that has been embedded in us, as a society since the dawn of history and as individuals since birth. This latter capacity is presently rejected by us in an artificial way, when we classify it as “primitive” and “irrational,” like the adolescent who rejects the adult mode of thought because it appears dogmatic to him.
According to the interpretation proposed here, the goal of this historical course is, as stated, to arrive at the stage parallel to the intellectual adulthood of the individual. At that stage we shall cease ignoring common-sense intuitions and our inner-intuitive feelings, and we shall join them to the analytic part of the intellect that has grown more refined throughout history.68
It is worth noting here that there is a clear asymmetry between analytic and synthetic ability. Analytic ability once acquired by a person or a society can hardly deteriorate or be forgotten. Mathematical or scientific knowledge that has been accumulated is not forgotten. It can all be exhausted in a textbook summary that remains for future generations. This is not true of synthetic ability. Anyone who has not “attended upon” sages possessing such ability has not acquired it, and will not be able to acquire it. That is its very essence. The reason that such apprenticeship is necessary is, as stated, that we are not dealing merely with information, but with methods and modes of thought, which are almost impossible to learn from books. What is required is a living teacher, and an encounter with all aspects of that teacher’s personality.
The process of developing both synthetic and analytic ability must take place specifically in this order. It is impossible to construct the reverse process—that is, to begin with developed analytic ability and afterward reduce it and create a synthetic substitute as compensation. The reason is that, as we saw above, analytic ability cannot diminish. Therefore it is clear that one had to begin with syntheticity and diminish it in order to develop analyticity.
One may understand this another way by continuing the comparison to language learning. If language had begun developing in the academy or in a language school, and only afterward people had tried to turn it into a living language, this would not have been possible. In the eleventh gate we shall see that in order to use the formal rules of the language school, a person must already have in the background some initial intuitive understanding that precedes understanding of the rules.
The same is true of art. Art too is not created in the academy. More than that: the artist usually does not need to learn the rules of artistic analysis in order to create. Only the attempt, after the fact, to pour the work into defined patterns—to grasp it by means of rules—can be done in the academy. One may generalize and say that a living thing is not born and developed according to rules, but through dynamic and free development. The rules come only afterward, and often viewing things through them even obscures understanding.69
The Babylonian Talmud is perceived in many respects as more analytic than the Jerusalem Talmud, which appears more synthetic in its essence. In Rav Kook’s teaching this is the main difference between “the Torah of the Land of Israel” and “the Torah of the Diaspora.” The return to the Land of Israel is supposed to awaken the synthetic capacities that we lost over the years and combine them with the analytic capacity that developed throughout all the years of exile and life outside the Land.70
I would like to conclude this chapter with a statement from the Babylonian Talmud, Ketubot 75a:[^73]
Abaye said: One of them is better than two of us. Rava said: But one of us, when he goes up there, is better than two of them, for Rabbi Yirmiyah, when he was here, did not know what the Rabbis were saying, but when he went up there he called us foolish Babylonians.
In this passage a Babylonian sage, Abaye, says that one of them—the sages of the Land of Israel—is equal to two of us, the sages of Babylonia. But when one of us goes up there, to the Land of Israel, he is equal to two of them. The example is the Babylonian sage Rabbi Yirmiyah, who when he was here did not understand what the Babylonian sages were saying, but when he went up to the Land of Israel he called us Babylonians fools. In our terminology I would formulate this as follows: synthetic wisdom is superior to analytic ability. But when Babylonian wisdom—the analytic dimension—is combined with synthetic wisdom—the wisdom of the Land of Israel—that is the perfect state. It is better than the perfect state of each type of wisdom by itself. The Land of Israel, in itself, represents the stage of dogmatic childhood. Babylonia, which comes after it, represents the rationalist-analytic rebellion of adolescence. Their combination expresses the maturity of adulthood. The return to the Land of Israel, which will take place also in the messianic era, is not a return to dogmatic childhood, but a fuller maturation, expressing synthetic adulthood. We are proposing here an intellectual explanation for the necessity of exile.
Summary
To summarize: in the general world of ideas, as well as within the Jewish study hall, there is a dialectical process of transition from synthetic thinking to analytic thinking. The classicist approach—and in Jewish terms, “the decline of the generations”—describes a decline in synthetic capacities, while “the rise of the generations,” a romantic approach, describes improvement in analytic capacities. The interpretation proposed here is that both processes are meant to affect one another and in the end create a more complete state: more complete analytic and synthetic capacities. Perhaps in such a state the constant confrontation between Torah study and other wisdoms—the external wisdoms—will cease. Perhaps then all wisdoms will be in the category of “Torah.”
Summary of the Discussion in This Gate
In this gate we compared the development of Western civilization to the developmental process of an individual, who moves from a synthetic stage to an analytic one, and finally stabilizes in one of two possibilities. The first stage, the dogmatic one, is childhood, which is historically parallel to the mythic age. After it comes the stage of adolescence, the rational stage, which corresponds to the historical period from ancient Greece until the twentieth century. Finally, in the development of every individual we recognize two possible exits from adolescence: synthetic adulthood or analytic skepticism. The corresponding stage in Western culture takes place in the twentieth century, which is postmodern—at least in its latter part. We pointed out that the mature synthetic alternative may still arrive, and we shall return to this below.
We also saw a parallel process taking place in the Jewish world, expressed in the form of Torah study and halakhic decision. Here too there is a continual transition from the synthetic to the analytic, which for the time being appears stabilized. We proposed an interpretation of redemption—at least of its intellectual dimension—according to which synthetic ability will return and join the analytic ability that has in the meantime developed.
This gate formed part of the background required for the fifth gate, where we shall see the implications of this unfolding in the contemporary world. But before that, in the next gate, several further preliminaries will be presented, dealing with social ideas such as equality, tolerance, and the like.
Footnotes
The Greek Empire did not collapse as the result of a struggle against the empire that followed it; it collapsed of itself, and in a relatively short time. An ideology that is wholly analytic and secular cannot endure even when it has no enemies from outside. Its emptiness, in the senses described above, causes it to collapse from within. Kingdoms, as well as other ideologies, usually collapse over a far longer time and generally with more active “help” from outside. It seems that many people today would do well to pay attention to this phenomenon. Analytic ideologies devoid of God cannot survive for long, even if at a certain stage they appear to rule the world. Of course, rational explanations can be offered for the collapse of these ideologies or empires, and many historians have indeed done so. The explanation above is one of the deeper layers underlying those rational explanations of these events. From the standpoint of rational scenarios, the exact opposite could also have happened, and rational explanations no less plausible would then have been found for that as well; this is another indication of the hollowness, again in the same sense, of the analytic-scientific mode of explanation. The retrospective rational explanation is only a description of the mechanism that implements the meta-history. That meta-history operates according to its own laws.
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This chapter deals primarily with the history of the world of Western ideas. Even when history is discussed in general, the intention is the history of the West unless stated otherwise. ↩
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Einstein’s remark is well known: his ability to look critically at the concepts of space and time stemmed from the fact that he matured late. Every child learns the concepts of space and time when young and accepts them as self-evident. Einstein learned these concepts only when he was older and already possessed a more developed analytical capacity, and therefore he was able to relate to them far more critically. ↩
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There are additional reasons why the adolescent does not perceive the adult correctly. These reasons are rooted, among other things, in his own processes of mental and intellectual maturation. For our purposes here, there is no point in taking this analogy too far. ↩
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I do not mean to claim that this generalization is fully valid on the sociological plane. In actual reality there are many religious people, right-wingers, and modernists who do in fact think in a mythical way parallel to childhood. They indeed accept the principles of myth as self-evident truth, as in the first, pre-rational stage. My claim toward the left-wing, secular, postmodern camp is only that this is not a necessary view, and not all of them are like that. On the other hand, toward the right-wing, religious camp I wish to claim that it is indeed proper to belong to that camp, but from the mature outlook of the third stage, not from a childish fixation on the first stage. ↩
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The Torah describes an earlier period that is clearly superior, or higher: the period of the first human being in the Garden of Eden. This is connected to the general conception that will be discussed in the fourth unit, according to which all learning depends on the student already “knowing,” in some sense, the material being learned. Similarly, every ascent and spiritual advance depends on there once having been, in some sense, such a state already. This is also the process described in esoteric teaching as the first expansion of the higher light before the creation of a lower world. The purpose of that expansion is to prepare the way for the creation of the lower realm while making possible the ascent and repair of the lower world, and its integration into the higher one. ↩
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See David Ohana and Robert Wistrich, Myth and Memory, Van Leer Institute and Hakibbutz Hameuchad, Jerusalem, 1997, especially the introduction. ↩
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Pyrrho was the philosopher who gave this movement its name. For a discussion of the skeptical philosophy of Sextus Empiricus, who was among the last members of that movement, see Adi Parush, Trends in the History of Skepticism, Magnes, Jerusalem, 1974. It is interesting to note that at the same period the foundations of the Talmud were being laid in the Land of Israel, and later also in Babylonia. Later on we shall draw a parallel between these processes. ↩
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On Hume’s skepticism, see Adi Parush’s Trends in the History of Skepticism. ↩
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The intention here is not specifically rationalism in the usual philosophical sense, which believes that truths about the world can be derived from reason alone. What I mean here is the general faith in the human capacity to add to knowledge. ↩
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It should be noted that the philosophy of science usually lags behind the progress of the sciences themselves. Since it has not yet succeeded in providing convincing answers regarding the success of science and its rationality, philosophers of science generally perceive science somewhat more modestly than scientists themselves do. ↩
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Some claim that this was the cause of these processes rather than a response to them. One can understand positivism either as a skepticism designed to prevent errors, or as an optimism rooted in the romantic period at the beginning of the century, which believed that every term under discussion could be defined precisely and every claim proved. This is not the place to deal with that issue. ↩
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Russell, already mentioned as one of the fathers of analytic thought in philosophy and mathematics, applied such an approach in mathematics as well. It turns out that even in this non-scientific field, problems arose because basic concepts were accepted without precise definition. The clearest example is Russell’s paradox in set theory, which led to a formal definition of the concept of a set and thereby removed the paradox. Thus the analytic age, which begins roughly at the start of the present century, found expression in science, mathematics, and philosophy. Later we shall see that analyticity also has expressions in the fields of ideology, morality, and culture. ↩
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This is actually the focal point of the dispute between Einstein and Niels Bohr at the beginning of the development of quantum theory. Contrary to what is usually thought, relativity theory—certainly according to Einstein—was still considered compatible with common sense and understandable through it. Quantum theory, by contrast, seemingly shattered several concepts even at the most basic logical level. ↩
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Very often the problem in modern physics is the opposite. The concepts and laws are well defined. The problem is how to translate them into the real empirical world, or into the concepts of common sense. That is, the real and experiential meaning of various variables is unclear, even though their theoretical meaning is entirely clear and their value can be calculated within one physical theory or another. For example, the concept of time in relativity theory is well defined as a mathematical variable, but how it is connected to what we call “time” is, to the best of my understanding, a question that currently has no clear answer. Another example is the concept of “electric current,” which at first glance seems less problematic than the concept of time, yet even today in quantum physics it is not entirely clear what it means or whether it has a fixed and clear meaning. ↩
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Some of the critical arguments against analyticity that will follow deal with the coherence of the connection between these two principles, and therefore this two-way description must be kept in mind. Zeev Bechler, in his book Three Copernican Revolutions, offers a similar interpretation of positivism, and even of its connection with postmodernity. ↩
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See, for example, the collection Philosophy, especially Rauch’s general introduction and Kasher’s introduction to the first part there. ↩
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He was not the first to aspire to this. In this context one may also mention Leibniz and Frege. ↩
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See Kasher’s introduction to the first part of Philosophy. ↩
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A classic example of Russell’s analytic mode of operation can be found in the introduction to his monumental work Principia Mathematica. There Russell tries to solve the collection of paradoxes arising from self-reference that leads to circularity. He does this by defining a linguistic rule that establishes a hierarchy among propositions. This hierarchy does not allow a proposition belonging to a certain level in the hierarchy to refer to a proposition not located at a lower stage than itself in that hierarchy; this theory is called the “theory of types.” This is a formal rule that cannot solve any real philosophical problem, but can only create a language that deliberately ignores such real problems. See the discussion of this in the third unit. ↩↩
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There are interpretations of Wittgenstein claiming that the whole purpose of his investigations was precisely those areas about which one cannot speak. The proper way to deal with those areas is to go right up to them and mark their boundaries. This is a certain version of the theory of negative attributes of the medieval philosophers; see below in gate twelve. ↩
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Some analytic scholars create insignificant problems for themselves in order to continue finding justification for their work, and in fact for their very intellectual existence. This is one of the important reasons for the endless quantities of pointless and useless discussions that currently fill philosophical journals. ↩
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The distinction between the context of discovery and the context of justification appears in every introductory text on the philosophy of science. See, for example, Gad Freudenthal, Introduction to the Philosophy of Science, Open University Press. ↩↩
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In the appendix at the end of the book we discuss an ostensibly synthetic attempt to make metaphysical claims, which encounters philosophical opposition to the very attempt to do so. We shall join the opponents, but for a different reason. Our argument there is that the attempt itself is analytic rather than synthetic, and therefore it too is doomed to fail. Clearly, despite the objections, such an attempt is a very useful contribution to analytic philosophy, for it at least attempts to make claims that can then be tested and refuted by various analytic methods. ↩
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Many also connect the awakening of postmodernity with the world wars that took place in this century, which placed a great question mark over that clear sense of the world’s progress. This is a different plane of explanation, which does not necessarily contradict the other one. ↩
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This is an example of a phenomenon that will be discussed later, in gate five: analyzing reality through correlations found on the surface, a kind of cultural behaviorism characteristic of many historians of culture. By contrast, we try to examine the philosophical roots of the phenomena, and there it sometimes becomes clear that we must reverse the description. ↩
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This too is a generalization that is not entirely justified. For example, the form of philosophical debate customary in India was formalist-analytic in an extreme way. See, for example, Scharfstein, Biederman, Daur, and Hoffman, Philosophy in the East and Philosophy in the West, Yahdav, Tel Aviv, 1978, especially chapter four there. Nevertheless, the East, at least as perceived through Western eyes, is synthetic rather than analytic. In gate two we gave as an example the Zen practitioner’s connection to the world without using his senses. An example mentioned there was shooting an arrow at a target without looking at it, as described by Eugen Herrigel in his book Zen in the Art of Archery. Islam too has an impressive analytic intellectual history, especially in the Middle Ages, when there were Muslim thinkers and philosophical sects that left their mark, among other things, on the Christian and Jewish scholastic rationalism of the Middle Ages. ↩
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Roni Aviram, “Secularization as an Introduction to the Growth of the Last Man: Friedrich Nietzsche’s Critique of Modernity,” in Between Religion and Morality, ed. Daniel Statman and Avi Sagi, Bar-Ilan University, Ramat Gan, 1994, p. 75. ↩
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The references to God throughout the book require clarification, at least on the terminological and orthographic level. In principle, there is a halakhic (Jewish legal) prohibition on writing and pronouncing His Name, and therefore the term I use is “God” in a deliberately altered spelling. However, when I deal with the “God who died,” what is at issue is not the God in whom I believe, and there is no prohibition on pronouncing that name; therefore the term there will be “God” in its ordinary spelling. In this way I also resolve the dilemma of whether it is religiously and halakhically permitted at all to write and speak about statements concerning the death of God. See also my remark beneath note 25 below, which continues this point. ↩
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There are interpretations of Nietzsche that understand even his analysis as laying the foundations for a renewed construction of certainty and rationalism. According to this interpretation, the prophecies of extinction refer to the state that will arise if humanity does not properly address the process of the “death of God.” ↩
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See below in gate five for a discussion of the concept of “value.” In the quotation we bring there from Yeshayahu Leibowitz, he argues that once one begins to ask about the validity of a value and its limits, it is nullified of itself. In our language here one might perhaps say that a value is a kind of mythical concept, one that cannot have a “rational” grounding. The demand for such grounding is adolescent. ↩
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There are also other sub-periods in the development of halakha, such as the periods of the Saboraim and the Geonim, which do not have a sharp marker of closure like those mentioned in the body of the text. ↩
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For a broader discussion, see my article “Hermeneutics of Canonical Texts,” Akdamot, issue 9, Beit Morasha, Jerusalem, 2000, and the references cited there. ↩
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The description in this chapter is based on halakhic history as it is commonly understood in the classical Orthodox world. The whole subject of biblical criticism and the gradual formation of the Hebrew Bible, as well as parts of the historical study of the Talmud and halakha, are not discussed here. ↩
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A comparison between the definition of rationality in halakhic give-and-take and the mode of operation of modern science, as described in modern philosophy of science, may be found in Menachem Fisch, Knowing Wisdom, Hakibbutz Hameuchad and Van Leer Institute, 1994. ↩
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On the controversies over codification, see for example Menachem Elon, Jewish Law, third edition, Magnes, Jerusalem, 1992, especially chapters 32–38 in volume 2. ↩
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Similar statements already appear in the Talmud, which rules as halakha that one should not derive law from the reason of the verse; see, for example, Babylonian Talmud, Sanhedrin 21a, and Encyclopedia Talmudit, entry “the reason of the verse.” That is, we do not decide halakha on the basis of the Torah text’s rationale, but only on the basis of the formal legal definition as it appears from our interpretation of Scripture. The criterion for distinguishing between rationale and definition is bound up with a complex hermeneutic problem that I do not wish to enter here. Clearly, extracting a definition from the law written in the Torah also requires and relies upon a certain understanding of it. For a brief discussion of this, see my article “Between Greece and Israel: Aspects of Torah Study,” MiMidbar Matanah no. 104, Yeshivat Hesder Yeruham, Hanukkah 2000. ↩
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See, for example, Russell’s article on denoting, mentioned above at the end of gate two. His formal definition of the concept of denoting is not directly connected to the intuitive understanding we have of that concept, which is very simple. ↩
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Many in the yeshiva world today would say that trying to decide which of the early medieval authorities is right is presumptuous, because we cannot penetrate to the depth of their thinking. But in fact, once the two positions have been well defined, the learner generally feels that it is truly very difficult—and often, in his eyes, impossible—to decide between them. As noted above, more than fear of presumption, what we have here is inability. ↩
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There is indeed a significant difference between the situation in the halakhic world and the postmodern situation, because in the halakhic world everyone is right, whereas in the postmodern world everyone is not right—there is no truth. In the postmodern world the conclusion is that one may do whatever one wishes, whereas in the halakhic world the conclusion is that nothing can be done. Despite the abyss between them on this plane, on the principled plane the two approaches appear very similar. On the relation between the yeshiva outlook and postmodernity, which many tend to identify with one another, see my article “Hermeneutics of Canonical Texts.” ↩
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It should be noted that there are approaches that describe this formal mode of ruling and study as a second-best situation, stemming from our inability to penetrate the full intent of the early medieval authorities, all the more so that of the sages of the Mishnah and the sages of the Talmud—the “decline of the generations.” There are even those who regard such a state as ideal from the outset, since the laws of the Torah have no rational reasons, at least not in our concepts, and nothing remains for us but to act formally. A detailed discussion of this issue would require treatment of the entire question of the reasons for the commandments, and this is not the place for that. ↩
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I heard this apt parable from Moshe Koppel of the Department of Mathematics at Bar-Ilan University. See his article “Hillel the Elder and the Foundation of Halakha,” in Higgayon, vol. 3, Aluma Press, Jerusalem, 1996, p. 42. See also his “Moses in the Study Hall of Rabbi Akiva: On Torah from Sinai and the Theory of Numbers,” in Higgayon, vol. 2, Aluma, Jerusalem, 1993, p. 66. ↩
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This is true of many people even when they study mathematics and science, that is, analytic disciplines. Every teacher of these subjects wrestles with whether to teach them systematically from the general to the particular, or from the particular to the general—that is, to present examples and only afterward generalize from them. ↩
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As for the sacred tongue, the language in which the Torah was written, the commentators disagree. If God Himself wrote it, then this is a special case of a language created artificially and intentionally from the outset, rather than spontaneously. It is reasonable that such a language would not be arbitrary, and its rules would not be mere approximations. Therefore the common view is that the sacred tongue is not conventional like other languages; rather, every expression and structure in it is non-arbitrary and meaningful. From this derives the common tendency in Jewish thought and in legal and aggadic interpretation to hang various ideas on the proximity between roots and between words, and on their numerical values. The ridicule that such approaches evoke in the contemporary person stems from the fact that all languages known to modern man are conventional, and therefore there is no reason to assume that such connections are meaningful. A brief discussion of this can be found in Rabbi David HaKohen’s book The Voice of Prophecy—Rabbi David HaKohen being the “Jerusalem Nazir”—Mossad HaRav Kook, 1970, first essay, section 26. ↩
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John Searle, Minds, Brains and Science, Afakim Library, Am Oved, 1989, chapter 2. ↩
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The question of how study in a language school manages to do this at all seems, in light of the example of the Chinese room, extremely difficult. This question is connected to Wittgenstein’s arguments about rule-following and to Chomsky’s arguments about innate patterns for understanding language; see the beginning of gate eleven. ↩
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There is more than a hint here against the famous statement attributed to Wittgenstein that he is interested only in use and not in meaning. Does he wish to claim that the person sitting in the Chinese room really understands Chinese? It seems that some of Wittgenstein’s colleagues and students would answer that question in the affirmative. Wittgenstein himself, however, probably intends only the question: what is worth talking about, and what can be talked about—not the question: what is really happening. Against this background it is interesting to note Rabbi Hayyim of Brisk’s well-known statement that he is not interested in why halakha says something, but only in what it says; see above. It should be noted, for anyone unfamiliar with the contexts of these two statements, that the parallel drawn here is entirely precise: both statements mean the same thing. We shall see further parallels between these two tracks as the discussion proceeds. ↩
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On this see Shammah Zevin Havlin, “On ‘Literary Closure’ as a Basis for Division into Periods in Halakha,” Studies in Talmudic Literature (presented to Saul Lieberman), Israel Academy of Sciences, 2003. ↩
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I do not wish to enter here into a discussion of the existence of errors in language use among native speakers from infancy. Such a discussion also involves ideological positions: whether one ought to correct mistakes in spoken language or whether this has no significance at all. For my purposes it is enough to point out that such a phenomenon exists. That is, there are situations in which the natural speaker does not conform to the rules and yet is still the one who speaks correctly. A person who studied in a language school and tries to correct native speakers often appears quite ridiculous. The same applies to someone who tries to dispute a halakhic matter with the early medieval authorities. ↩
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There are different approaches on this matter, and this is not the place to detail them. Our aim is only to illustrate the argument about the impossibility of extreme formalism, or in other words to demonstrate the necessity of understanding. ↩
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The argument presented here is reminiscent of Mill’s challenge to deduction and Wittgenstein’s challenge to rule-following. See the discussion in gates eight and eleven. ↩
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For a discussion of the hermeneutics of Talmudic texts, see my article “Hermeneutics of Canonical Texts,” mentioned above. ↩
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In gate eleven we shall elaborate further on this topic. ↩
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See, for example, Daniel Shalit, Face-to-Face Conversations, Tuvai, 1995, especially the section called “Signposts.” At the end of that section Shalit speaks of post-atheism as the next stage after the present one. This is a kind of version of our argument in the above chapter against Nietzsche’s prophecy of extinction. ↩
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Non-Jews who study Torah cannot attain an internal understanding of it, even if they know the entire Talmud thoroughly. Academic study of Torah is also sharply criticized at this point. It deals only with the external understanding, not the internal understanding. In our formulation here, it does not deal with Torah at all but with the academic science of Torah. See my above-mentioned article “Hermeneutics of Canonical Texts.” ↩
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See my note above comparing Rabbi Hayyim’s statement with Wittgenstein’s. ↩
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The main points in this example were those that first directed me toward the overall thesis presented in this book. Most of them are not my own. I first encountered these ideas while studying Rabbi Yitzhak Hutner’s Fear of Isaac on Hanukkah, Gur Aryeh, 1989. Some of the points in that book will be mentioned and discussed below. In addition, there are also points here that I heard orally, mainly from Rabbis Michel Zilber and Moshe Shapiro of Jerusalem. The working out of those ideas, and their integration into the framework presented in this book, are mine. ↩
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See especially essays 4 and 6. In fact, anyone who examines the foundations of the matter will see that most of the book is devoted to this point. ↩
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The dispute is between Yose ben Yoezer and Yose ben Yohanan. See Babylonian Talmud, Hagigah 16a, in Rashi under the lemma “Yose,” and in Tosafot there in the name of the Jerusalem Talmud; likewise Temurah 16a, in Rashi under the lemma “blemish”; and essay 3 in Fear of Isaac. ↩
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See Seder Olam Rabbah, chapter 30, and the parallel Seder Olam Zuta, which describe the death of the last prophets during the reign of Alexander. ↩
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It is printed in most editions of the Babylonian Talmud before the beginning of tractate Berakhot. ↩
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Among scholars it is widely held that such a meeting between Simon the Just and Alexander the Great is chronologically impossible. This strengthens the view that it is an aggadic story intended to convey the message described here concerning the connection between Greek wisdom and the Oral Torah; see, for example, the Hebrew Encyclopedia, entry “Simon the Just.” ↩
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It is worth noting that the actual spread of Greek culture and wisdom throughout the world was carried out mainly by the Roman Empire. Even after the Romans ceased being pagan and became Christian, they continued to disseminate Greek culture alongside Christian culture. We shall discuss this phenomenon in the following gates. Here I wish to point briefly to the point that a wholly analytic ideology, one that does not include God, cannot survive. The dissemination of such an ideology can be carried out only by those who added to it the transcendent-divine element. We witnessed such a collapse in our own time as well, when the communist idea collapsed almost by itself. In my view, that too happened only because it lacked a component of divine idea. ↩
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The terminology of “external” and “internal” in this context was discussed above and will also be discussed in gate thirteen. ↩
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We have already pointed to the parallel between the transition to the Oral Torah and the Pyrrhonian skepticism that occurred in the same period, and to the parallel between the positivist period and the imposition of the approach of understanding and analysis in the yeshiva world by Rabbi Hayyim of Brisk and his students. It is interesting to note that these processes occur alongside one another, in the same period, even though at times no overt influence seems visible between what takes place within the study hall and what takes place outside it. Sometimes this happens despite the fact that the study hall rejects and strains to oppose what is happening outside. This was true in the time of the Greeks no less than at the beginning of the present century. ↩
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Robert M. Pirsig, Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance, Zmora, Bitan, Modan, 1978. ↩
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See my article “Hermeneutics of Canonical Texts,” and the references cited there. ↩
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Every pair of opposites must have a common denominator; otherwise they are not opposites at all, but simply different creatures. Rabbi Hutner, in his Fear of Isaac on Purim, explains in this way the halakha that the two goats on the Day of Atonement must resemble one another as perfectly as possible. Only then can one be sent to Azazel and one to the Lord. This is also the meaning of the halakha that a person must intoxicate himself on Purim until he no longer knows the difference between “cursed is Haman” and “blessed is Mordechai.” Only from within a sense of the similarity between Mordechai and Haman can one arrive at perfect distinction and separation. See also the discussion of opposites in gate twelve, as well as the discussion above in gate two about disputes over the meanings of concepts. There too we pointed out that every dispute between opposing positions presupposes, at its foundation, agreement on a more basic plane. ↩
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It seems to me that even in the development of the individual, the reason for the successive existence of these stages is similar. In order to create a mature person who identifies with his common-sense feelings, yet also possesses a developed critical faculty that joins them, the Creator leads the developing individual through the dialectical process described here, just like the process undergone by Western culture as a whole. ↩
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This is the meaning of Berkeley’s well-known remark about philosophers who raise dust at their feet and then wonder why they cannot see anything. The reader may note in this connection that the appendix to this book, in which I criticize Steinitz’s book The Tree of Knowledge, is titled The Tree of Life. ↩
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See gate eleven, and also gate thirteen, where we shall discuss analytic and synthetic thinking in Torah study today as well. ↩