Introduction to Part Two

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).

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Second Division: Analyticity and Syntheticity in Historical Perspective: Ideology, Culture, and Philosophy

This division contains an introduction and four gates:

1. Introduction to the Second Division
2. Gate Three: Analyticity and Syntheticity: A Historical Perspective
3. Gate Four: Analyticity and Syntheticity: Social Worldviews
4. Gate Five: Analyticity and Syntheticity in Western Culture: The Postmodern Age
5. Gate Six: Genuine and Counterfeit Modernism: Postmodernism

This division deals with the socio-ideological aspects of the two worldviews that were described in the previous division on the philosophical plane. At its beginning stands an introduction necessary for the division as a whole.

In the introduction to the book, I noted that, to the best of my understanding and belief, at the foundation of every socio-ideological process there lie abstract ideas, philosophical forms of thought, which are sometimes clearly and openly visible on the surface, and sometimes embedded behind ideological ideas. In this division, that principle will be illustrated through a discussion of the meta-ideological implications of the two forms of thought presented in the previous gates. We will point to a broad tendency in the intellectual-cultural history of the Western world, sometimes called, because of its cultural roots, the Judeo-Christian world, and sometimes the Hellenic-Christian world. In our terminology, this tendency is described as a transition from synthetic thought to analytic thought. We will try to see where this tendency leads, and we will identify a similar process taking place in parallel within the traditional Jewish world of study.

The purpose of this division is to point to the great relevance and contemporaneity of the distinction between the two abstract forms of thought described thus far. Here we will see the connection, established in the introduction to the book, between the left, secularism, and postmodernity, which express an analytic stance, on the one hand, and the right, religion, and modernity, which express a synthetic stance, on the other.

In this division we will touch on current issues, and not only on abstract philosophical ones. By its very nature, a discussion of contemporary matters requires very great caution, and therefore two very important preliminary remarks are necessary for anyone about to enter the gates of this division.

First Remark: The Meaning of Generalizations

The identifications and associations that will be made here among different ideas are, by their nature, broad and general. For example, despite what I will say below, it is quite clear that there are secular people who are not really analytic in their philosophical position. The same is true of the other connections that will be presented here. Problems of this kind may arouse in the reader feelings of doubt regarding the entire network of connections proposed here, and therefore we must offer two preliminary clarifications:

1. The goal of the discussion is to deal with analyticity as such, and not with each of its implications separately. It is clear that every generalization has exceptions, and sometimes there are quite a few of them.
2. Beyond that, as I will try to show in the pages that follow, many secular people, or people on the left, do not identify themselves as holding an analytic position, yet nevertheless carry within themselves something of that stance. Therefore, these generalizations are not as far from the truth as might appear at first glance.

There are clear correlations, which we will indicate below, between secularism and analytic ideas, and it is not plausible that they have no essential basis—that is, that they are arbitrary. We will see that these conceptions appeared in highly correlated fashion on the stage of history. We will also become convinced that one can see a direct connection between the ideas embraced by many secular people and the conclusions of an analytic stance. By way of illustration, I will offer a sharp and clear example here: it is hard to ignore the correlation, which on its face does not seem self-evident, between religiosity and the political or social right, and conversely between the left and secularism, as this is reflected with great force in Israel at the end of the twentieth century and the beginning of the present century.

By their very nature, these questions carry a heavy emotional charge, and therefore I ask the reader to try, as much as possible, to neutralize those emotions while reading. In that spirit, I would like to ask the reader to examine what is said in this division on two planes, corresponding to the two preliminary clarifications above:

1. On the group level. In the present division, general correlations are presented between an analytic stance and left-wing politics, secularism, and postmodernity. On the socio-ideological and historical levels, these correlations do exist, even if there are individuals, perhaps even many individuals, who apparently do not fit this correlation exactly—synthetic secularists, religious postmodernists, and so forth.
2. On the level of the individual person. Almost every individual is constructed in a complex way. The figures I present—the analytic thinker and the synthetic thinker—are theoretical ideal types, which by their nature are one-dimensional, relatively simple, and stereotypical. Every person, of whatever kind, is located somewhere between these poles. The meaning of my previous claim, on the first plane, is that the secular/postmodernist/left-wing person is generally closer to the analytic pole, while the religious/modernist/right-wing person is generally closer to the synthetic pole. This is how the identifications made in this division should be understood.

For these reasons, I ask the reader to judge the positions presented here, on both planes, only after completing this division—especially the last gate, where I try to argue directly for the implausibility of one of the exceptions: the secular modernist. For the sake of completeness, I would recommend postponing judgment even longer, until after reading the next division.

In any case, one can also treat these characterizations as referring to the analytic outlook as such, without identifying it with secularism, the left, and the like. On the contrary, if there are secular people, or people of the left, who are synthetic in essence, they ought to join the synthetic side of the barricade in the meta-ideological confrontation between the analytic and the synthetic. And indeed there are such people who try to do so; on this, see below in Gate Six and in the appendix to the book.

In the next division I will try to show even more than that. Even if there are such exceptions, their position is inconsistent, or at the very least implausible. As I will argue, the plausible basis for a synthetic stance is a religious basis. Therefore, in my opinion, the broad identifications made here have very few exceptions of philosophical significance, if any at all.

Second Remark: The Importance of Generalizations

We will conclude this short introduction with another remark and clarification, also very important, which in some sense repeats the previous remark, but from a different angle.

The claims advanced in this division may arouse another criticism in the reader, coming from a somewhat different direction. It may seem as though the connections proposed here present too simplistic a picture of the socio-ideological reality around us. Too many historical and cultural phenomena are arranged on the same axis and explained in light of a single intellectual development. This criticism arises because many people feel, and quite rightly to a considerable extent, that reality is usually complex, and therefore cannot be reduced to one-dimensional and simplistic explanations.

Let me say at the outset that I completely agree with this claim. Even so, it is important to note that every scientific process that seeks to understand some phenomenon, or a cluster of phenomena, whether in the natural sciences or in the social sciences and the humanities, is built on generalizations. One can say even more than that: every scientific understanding is based on simplified generalizations.

For example, Newton’s first law in mechanics states that a body will continue to move at a constant velocity in a straight line unless a force acts upon it. The second law states that if a force acts upon it, it will move with an acceleration proportional to that force. In actual, complex reality, there is no body on which no force at all acts, and even when some force acts upon it, many other forces act upon it as well, such as different kinds of friction, and so forth. A systematic scientific attempt to understand complex reality proceeds by breaking it down into simplified components, so that each one can be understood separately and defined precisely, despite the fact that in reality they always appear together. After each component is understood separately, one tries to create a fuller synthesis and to understand the complex reality in its entirety, to the extent possible.

Let us add a common example from the human sciences. There is a well-known psychological-sociological law that points to a connection between frustration and aggression. Clearly, in reality this connection is far from deterministic. There are undoubtedly frustrated people who will discharge their frustrations in some other way, not necessarily in an aggressive or violent manner, if at all. Much depends on many additional parameters that can affect the behavior of a given person in reality, especially that person’s will and choice. And despite that reservation, there is a connection between frustration and aggression, and it is very important to point it out. As stated, together with an understanding of many other factors, each one separately, one can then try to understand the complex reality as a whole. Moreover, the connection between frustration and aggression is entirely correct. The fact that reality does not always behave in accordance with it stems from the fact that additional parameters and additional laws also operate within reality and influence the picture.

For exactly the same reasons, the claims made here are not meant to provide an ultimate and complete explanation for the totality of the phenomena that surround us, even those that seem, at first glance, to be explained by these claims. Nevertheless, it seems that the process they describe does indeed exist. There are intellectual forces and influences of the kind described here, and they operate in the historical and real world around us. Clearly, real reality is more complex, and it contains additional parameters and factors. Therefore, it stands to reason that the stereotypes described here appear in reality in various shades, and sometimes even in contradictory forms, as will occasionally also be noted in the course of the discussion.

Therefore, one may perhaps say that what is proposed in this division is a meta-theory in the social sciences, the study of culture, or the human sciences. The processes and forces described in that meta-theory constitute an important driving force in the intellectual history of humanity. It is a kind of cultural “law of nature.” The limitations that apply to scientific theories, laws of nature, or any other generalization, as described here, of course apply to this law as well. My claim is that this law of nature should be taken into account when one tries to understand reality, although one must certainly also take into account the fact that it cannot be regarded as a full explanation of the complex situations that appear within it.

We will now describe the course of the discussion in the present division. It is worth following the outline presented here, because the discussion is detailed and ramified, and it is therefore sometimes possible to lose the context and the overall line of development.

At the beginning of Gate Three, we will describe in broad brushstrokes the course of Western cultural history as that of a culture passing, in a dialectical process, from synthetic thought to analytic thought, and apparently also back again. We will also draw a parallel between this process and the intellectual development of an individual person. The second chapter of Gate Three describes the parallel development in the world of traditional Jewish learning, and the points of contact between these two lines of development. Gate Four deals with the concept of equality, and with the concepts of tolerance and pluralism and their relation to it. This serves as an introduction to Gate Five, which discusses the deeper meanings of ideological and cultural phenomena in the contemporary Western world. Gate Six, the last in this division, addresses the modernist critique of postmodernism, and places it in the perspective of the claim that will be presented below: that the modernism that prevailed in the world during the twentieth century is the cultural-spiritual father of postmodernism. We will see that Western modernism was, and still is, no more than a thin veil over postmodernism’s nakedness.