Introduction to Part Three
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).
Third Unit: Critique of Analyticity
This unit contains an introduction and four gates:
- Introduction to the Third Unit
- Gate Seven: Against Analyticity: First Move
- Gate Eight: Against Analyticity: Second Move
- Gate Nine: Against Analyticity: Third Move
- Gate Ten: Who Is Rational: Does a Pure Analytic Thinker Exist?
In this unit we return to the philosophical level. It deals with three parallel lines of argument against the analytic position. At its end I will briefly discuss the question whether a pure analytic thinker exists, and the relation between analyticity and rationality.
In the two previous units, two philosophical positions were set against one another, positions that have confronted each other throughout the intellectual and cultural history of the Western world: the analytic position and the synthetic position. The terms “analyticity” and “syntheticity” are borrowed from Kant’s philosophy, but in the first two gates they were significantly expanded through the definition of analytic and synthetic “positions” (or approaches). This expression has a broader meaning than “analytic and synthetic forms of thought.” According to the analytic approach, a claim is true1 only if it derives from sensory observations or from an analytic analysis of such observations. I do not mean to say that the analytic thinker does not use other modes of cognition, only that he does not grant them much validity or certainty. From here we arrived at postmodernism as a direct outgrowth of the analytic position. Thus we placed, with a certain degree of generalization, secularism, leftism, and postmodernism on the foundations of analytic philosophy, or analytic meta-ideology. Opposed to this approach is the synthetic position, on whose foundations stand religious, modernist (authentic ones, not the counterfeit versions that belong to the other camp), and right-wing approaches.
In the previous unit we saw the appearance and embodiment of these abstract philosophical concepts in the practical world around us. Having seen this, we return to examine the philosophical assumptions that underlie these positions. I wish to return to the theoretical-philosophical level and examine these positions precisely there. Examining matters at the level of their abstract philosophical roots allows for a less emotional discussion and also for conceptual clarity, which is often absent from ideological-practical debate.
In this unit we will present attacks on the analytic position, and we will do so through three parallel lines of argument, each dealing with a different philosophical layer. The first, which will be presented in Gate Seven, will develop the argument on the philosophical-epistemological level. The second, which will be presented in Gate Eight, will develop the argument on the level of basic reasoning. The third, which will be presented in Gate Nine, will develop the argument on a broader and more abstract logical level.
As noted above, philosophical discussion can clarify the picture and simplify it. Experience suggests that after becoming familiar with the three lines of argument, many readers will feel that the analytic thinker, or the analytic position, as presented in this book, is a straw figure. Apparently, these are figures created as targets on the intellectual shooting range. They are very easy to attack, but they do not represent real positions in the world. For this reason, we devoted the last gate in this unit (Gate Ten) to a discussion of the question whether a genuine analytic thinker exists. We will see there that some people feel themselves to be analytic thinkers, but it is likely that even most of them do not actually think and act in this way (see also above, in Gate Six).2 In that gate we will also challenge the widespread superficial tendency to regard analyticity, in particular, as the rational one of the two approaches.