Intuition in Jewish Law – Lesson 3
This transcript was produced automatically using artificial intelligence. There may be inaccuracies in the transcribed content and in speaker identification.
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Table of Contents
- Intuition as a point of departure in interpretation and halakhic ruling
- Examples of clashes between moral intuition and a halakhic prohibition
- Intuition as a mechanism of decision within halakhic options
- The Shay Dromi law, an “American intuition,” and the discussion of the burglar breaking in
- Motivation, searching for evidence, and the claim that an agenda does not invalidate
- Law, narrative, and the case of Carmela Buchbut
- The principle: “Better to force the wording than to force the reasoning”
- A philosophical definition of intuition: cognition-thinking and a solution to Kant’s problem
- Language, conceptual systems, and “male” versus “female” physics
- The danger of postmodernism and the claim that there is one truth despite conceptual “cellophane”
- An anecdote about an alternative theory of relativity and the limits of translation between scientific languages
- Facts versus values: conscience as moral intuition and not as an arbitrary mental structure
- C. S. Lewis, The Abolition of Man, and criticism of education that flattens values into mere emotion
- Sublimity, beauty, and the possibility of being right or wrong in aesthetic and moral judgments
- Literature, metaphor, and criticism of a “prosaic reading” that destroys literature
- Modern aesthetics, communal consensus, and the price of relativism
- Fitting responses to the universe and the role of education in shaping emotion
Summary
General Overview
The text argues that intuition is a crucial starting point that shapes interpretation, decision-making, and understanding of sources, both in Jewish law and in science, law, and everyday life, and that in truth it is impossible to function without it—one can only hide it. The speaker accepts the criticism that using intuition can bias one’s reading of sources, but presents this as legitimate so long as honesty is preserved and one checks whether the evidence “holds water.” He even brings examples in which his moral intuition clashes with Jewish law and he gives up the intuition. He defines intuition as a faculty that combines thinking and cognition and enables a kind of “seeing” of generalizations and ideas beyond particular observation, and he warns against the mistaken move from the subjectivity of language and tools to the conclusion that everything is subjective. He makes broad use of C. S. Lewis’s The Abolition of Man in order to attack an educational outlook that reduces value judgments to reports of feelings alone, and he argues that there are fitting and unfitting emotional responses to reality, and that abolishing that distinction leads to cultural, moral, and aesthetic relativism.
Intuition as a Point of Departure in Interpretation and Halakhic Ruling
The speaker describes an argument that arose from an article about commandments performed by a secular person or an atheist, and concludes that the disagreement begins and ends with the starting point: the basic intuition determines the direction of understanding, while sources can be “taken this way or that way.” The speaker admits that he first places an intuition on the table and then shows how it can fit halakhic sources, and says that this is indeed tendentious—but he is “proud of it,” because intuition decides between possible interpretations when there is no sharp textual necessity. He presents intuition as a directional cue that is not immune to error, and declares that when the sources do not work out, he is prepared to give it up.
Examples of Clashes Between Moral Intuition and a Halakhic Prohibition
The speaker says that morally he has no problem killing a terrorist who is no longer dangerous, but halakhically it is forbidden so long as there is no immediate or future threat, and therefore there is no permission to kill a person who is not threatening anyone. He presents this as a case in which Jewish law does not align with his moral intuition, and emphasizes the obligation to be honest and admit when there is no way to “pass” a position through Jewish law. He adds that laws such as the law of a pursuer usually fit general moral considerations, but precisely in this example he experiences a gap.
Intuition as a Mechanism of Decision Within Halakhic Options
The speaker argues that when there are “different tracks” in Jewish law, intuition can tilt the choice between two equivalent options and even lead to choosing a minority opinion, so long as the choice remains within halakhic possibilities and does not simply “thumb its nose at Jewish law.” He describes the opposition to this claim as a demand for “dry” analysis according to rules such as Torah-level doubt being ruled stringently and rabbinic-level doubt leniently, but argues that in practice it is impossible to remove intuition from the process—one can only refuse to admit it. He says the fear of bias is real, but he prefers to put the intuition on the table and make sure one is not “forcing the sources,” but choosing among plausible interpretations.
The Shay Dromi Law, an “American Intuition,” and the Discussion of the Burglar Breaking In
The speaker recounts that he wrote in Techumin about killing a thief even before the Shay Dromi law, and defines his basic intuition as an “American intuition” according to which someone who enters your property deserves to be killed on the spot. He presents the wording of Jewish law as narrowing the permission to the concern that the thief might kill the homeowner, and therefore the thief has the law of a pursuer; he cites the Talmudic example of a son tunneling in against his father as a case where it is clear there is no fear of killing, and therefore it is forbidden to kill him. The speaker describes the tension between his initial intuition and the halakhic data, and argues that in many cases one can nevertheless find possibilities within Jewish law that allow broader alignment than people think.
Motivation, Searching for Evidence, and the Claim that an Agenda Does Not Invalidate
The speaker argues that motivation affects one’s ability to find evidence, because someone driven by a need will “turn over every stone” and discover interpretive possibilities that otherwise would have remained hidden. He gives as an example Professor Gilat and his book about the development of Jewish law, and describes public criticism of him on the grounds that he attributed leniencies to economic distress, whereas according to the speaker, Gilat argued that the distress was merely the trigger for searching for evidence that the Sabbatical year in our time is rabbinic and not a substitute for intellectual honesty. The speaker describes this as a typical structure of a halakhic responsum, such as trying to permit an agunah out of the cry of the case, which drives a systematic search, and he distinguishes between the motivation that begins the search and the validity of the evidence itself.
Law, Narrative, and the Case of Carmela Buchbut
The speaker describes how judges can open a ruling with a description of the distress or with a description of the planning and intent, and presents this as a narrative difference that already expresses an interpretive tendency and does not fit the image of a “cold” ruling based first on facts and then on law. He notes that on a feminist website the Shay Dromi law was called the “Carmela Buchbut law,” and emphasizes that the way the narrative frame is constructed affects the ruling. He sees this as analogous to halakhic ruling and source interpretation, where starting points and motivations do not disappear but only become conscious or unconscious.
The Principle: “Better to Force the Wording than to Force the Reasoning”
The speaker quotes the Beit Yosef in Yoreh De’ah: better to force the wording than to force the reasoning, and presents this as recognition that reasoning is an interpretive tool that at times justifies a strained linguistic reading in order to reach a legally reasonable result. He explains that the assumption is that the author of the text “was not stupid,” and therefore strong reasoning can serve as a consideration for thinking that the original intention aligns with it. He uses this rule to ground the status of intuition and reasoning as part of decision-making and not as external contamination of it.
A Philosophical Definition of Intuition: Cognition-Thinking and a Solution to Kant’s Problem
The speaker argues that intuition is a faculty that combines thinking with cognition and enables a move from particular cases to a general law without relying on generalization as an arbitrary inner process, and in that way solves Kant’s problem of the synthetic a priori. He asks how one can justify the claim that the mind’s generalizations reflect the external world and not just the structure of the head, and proposes that intuition is a kind of contemplation rather than pure thinking. He brings three supports: Maimonides with “the eyes of the intellect” at the beginning of The Guide of the Perplexed, Rabbi HaNazir with “auditory logic,” and Edmund Husserl with “eidetic seeing,” in which one “sees” ideas through their concrete appearance.
Language, Conceptual Systems, and “Male” Versus “Female” Physics
The speaker argues that intuitions are formulated through language and a subjective system of principles, and therefore the same reality can be laid out through a different “coordinate system,” yielding a different description while remaining faithful to the phenomena. He uses the image of Cartesian versus polar coordinates and examples from chemistry—the periodic table versus earth-air-water-fire—to show that the choice of basic concepts affects what is easy to solve and what will seem intuitive. He cites Gadi Taub’s criticism of “male physics and female physics,” and argues that differences in cognitive tendency may create social bias in who succeeds in a field, without the physical truth itself changing.
The Danger of Postmodernism and the Claim That There Is One Truth Despite Conceptual “Cellophane”
The speaker presents the postmodern claim that differences in conceptual systems prove that there is no reality “out there,” only what we see, and rejects it as “throwing the baby out with the bathwater.” He uses the image of looking at the world through red versus green cellophane in order to argue that the world itself remains what it is, and that the argument is often about the tools of description rather than about reality. He agrees that there is not always full translation between systems of description, but argues that in most cases one can find connections, and explains that when we are dealing with systems human beings themselves developed, it is easier to find conversions because the human mind can already grasp both.
An Anecdote About an Alternative Theory of Relativity and the Limits of Translation Between Scientific Languages
The speaker describes an encounter with a Vizhnitz Hasid from Haifa named Chaim Shefler, who developed his own theory of relativity, and recounts that Professor Giora Glazki was impressed that it was serious mathematical work but required “translation” into academic language. The speaker says he was unable to communicate and understand even basic terms like “photon” and “integral” as they appeared in Shefler’s usage, and concludes that sometimes the conceptual language differs so much that lengthy study is needed before the content can even be evaluated. He adds that a search in Physics Abstracts showed a huge number of academic alternatives to relativity that receive no attention, and emphasizes the role of politics, luck, and information overload in determining what enters public awareness.
Facts Versus Values: Conscience as Moral Intuition and Not as an Arbitrary Mental Structure
The speaker returns to the problem of verifying moral claims against reality, and presents the subjectivist position according to which “good” and “bad” are reports about a mental structure and therefore are not true or false but merely preferences. He argues that there is moral intuition—“conscience”—which is directed toward truth about the world and not merely toward self-description, and warns that turning values into an arbitrary mental structure prevents real moral criticism and produces, at most, “a nice person.” He admits that different circumstances can give rise to genuine moral disagreements, but insists that this does not cancel the existence of truth.
C. S. Lewis, The Abolition of Man, and Criticism of Education That Flattens Values into Mere Emotion
The speaker quotes extensively from C. S. Lewis’s The Abolition of Man and presents “The Green Book,” in which the fictional authors Gaius and Titius teach that statements like “this is sublime” are not claims about the waterfall but about the speaker’s feelings. He explains that Lewis sees this as a hidden educational insertion of relativism, in which students learn to think that they cannot agree or disagree about value judgments because everything is interpreted as merely an inner statement. The speaker emphasizes that Lewis argues that even by their own assumption it makes no sense to translate “this is sublime” into “I have sublime feelings,” because the fitting emotional response to sublimity is reverence and humility; and he cites the example “you are contemptible,” which cannot be interpreted as “I have contemptible feelings.”
Sublimity, Beauty, and the Possibility of Being Right or Wrong in Aesthetic and Moral Judgments
The speaker interprets Lewis’s claim as the position that value judgments say something about reality by means of human responses, and not only about the speaker, and therefore it is possible to say that one person was right and another wrong regarding “sublime” versus “beautiful.” He adds that differences of language and conceptual world can conceal agreement or create an illusory disagreement, but argues that the human default is to treat the difference itself as a disagreement about the object and not merely as a swapping of words. He uses the image of a photographer bringing something into focus in order to explain how one can “see” an aspect that was not previously visible and thus become convinced that the waterfall is sublime and not merely beautiful.
Literature, Metaphor, and Criticism of a “Prosaic Reading” That Destroys Literature
The speaker says that Lewis also criticizes Gaius and Titius in their interpretation of an advertisement for a pleasure cruise, where they attack metaphors as untrue instead of teaching the distinction between bad writing and elevated writing that expresses feeling appropriately. He argues that a metaphor is not supposed to fit reality literally but to describe atmosphere and meaning, and that literary criticism that measures literature by factuality misses the essence of literature. He connects this to the claim that if people are taught that everything is “just a statement about you,” then they effectively abolish literature’s ability to say something true about reality through fiction.
Modern Aesthetics, Communal Consensus, and the Price of Relativism
The speaker argues that turning values and aesthetics into subjective matters allows cultural consensus to form around “nonsense,” and he gives his criticism of conceptual art such as Duchamp and the urinal in the museum as an example. He praises Kishon’s book on art, which is based on quotations from artists and critics in order to demonstrate empty pathos and language that says nothing, and recounts an anecdote from a lecture about the camera obscura in which a lecturer from Bezalel, in his view, did not produce sentences with meaning. He notes that a “subjective consensus” can arise within a community through discourse, but argues that this does not prove there is objective value in those works—rather, it illustrates how relativism allows nonsense to flood the field.
Fitting Responses to the Universe and the Role of Education in Shaping Emotion
The speaker quotes Lewis, who argues that until the modern age people believed that the universe was such that certain emotional responses could fit it or fail to fit it, and that objects could be “deserving” of admiration or contempt. He emphasizes Lewis’s claim that without the assumption that the object deserves the feeling, there is no room at all for agreement or disagreement, and compares this to his own claim about morality: if “murder is forbidden” is only a report of my personal revulsion, then there is no argument and no morality. He concludes by saying that Lewis already identifies, in a high-school textbook, the seeds of postmodernism, and presents this as a kind of sensitivity that allows one to understand how a small educational outlook rolls into an entire culture in which “an ocean of ink” is spilled on arguments that have no truth-content.
Full Transcript
[Rabbi Michael Abraham] Now, for example, in your article about commandments performed by a secular person or an atheist or something like that—you told me this once a long time ago—so I was suddenly reminded that actually there’s a whole branch in this series about intuition that I’m going to have to touch on at the end. I’ll get to it—not today, maybe in the last lecture in the series—maybe about halakhic ruling based on intuition. Because one of the things that came up there in that discussion—afterward a whole discussion developed—at the end of the day, the dispute there was with someone who responded to my remarks, so following that the article we invited him too to present his position here. In the end it became clear that the whole disagreement begins and ends with the starting point. The question is how, in terms of reasoning, you basically understand the matter, apart from the sources, before the sources and before everything else—that’s what determines everything. Because the sources can always be taken this way or that way, and in the end your basic intuition is what determines it. So I remembered that people also told me, following various articles I wrote in this area—there were maybe three or four articles I wrote in Techumin, from volume 25 to 29 I think—I wrote almost one article in every volume. I think all those articles were attacked on this point: that basically I put it on the table, not that they dug and discovered that I start from some intuition that this is how it ought to be, and afterward I try to show that this really is also what emerges from the halakhic sources. And then they told me that this basically means I’m doing tendentious analysis, because I’m aiming at some predetermined conclusion. And I said: right—and I’m proud of it. Meaning, I’m not denying it, because I think intuition has a very important role. If I have two possible ways to interpret something—and usually when there’s an argument, there are two possible interpretations, after all nobody is an idiot—so one person offers this interpretation and another offers that interpretation, then how do you decide which interpretation to choose? You go to the place your intuition leads you. I mean, what can you do? And I think this is actually a very nice expression, specifically in the halakhic realm, of what we’ve been talking about here: the issue of the starting point, of intuition as the basis for everything that comes afterward. So maybe at the end I’ll bring several examples about halakhic ruling based on intuition—where and how it plays a role at all in halakhic decision-making.
[Speaker C] And if the sources don’t work out?
[Rabbi Michael Abraham] If the sources don’t work out, then no—you give up the intuition. I said: intuition is not immune to error. Intuition is a sense of direction. It guides me where to go. If there are two options, I go with that. But you have to be honest enough that if I see it doesn’t work, then it doesn’t work. For example, someone emailed me now—there was some argument that came up, I don’t even remember where, about killing terrorists after they’ve already been neutralized, what people today call—that’s the popular word, right—after they’re no longer a danger. Is that permitted, forbidden, moral, immoral? I said: look, morally I have no problem—kill him like a mangy dog. But halakhically it’s forbidden. What can I do? It’s just forbidden. You can’t kill a person if he’s not threatening you. There is simply no halakhic permission to do that, unless there’s some future threat or something, and that’s something the police should deal with. Exactly. Meaning, when the threat is right now, you as a citizen certainly can’t just do whatever. If there is an immediate threat, then certainly anyone who can should act. If not, then there is no permission whatsoever. Now in this case, ostensibly this principle of the pursuer and all these considerations are considerations that usually line up with the moral directive. Meaning, Jewish law isn’t all that different from non-Jewish ways of thinking, from various other systems; overall it’s pretty similar. Maybe we’ll even do a whole series sometime on that issue. And specifically here I’m saying: if you had asked me just as a secular person, kill him on the spot. Why leave this dog alive at all? But it’s forbidden. What can you do? This is exactly an example of how not everywhere does Jewish law fit my moral intuitions or my logical intuitions. Sometimes it doesn’t. And fine—where it doesn’t fit, you have to be honest enough to say: no, I can’t get this position through Jewish law.
[Speaker F] But where in life is it not like that? I mean, you always start from intuition in everything, everything, everything.
[Rabbi Michael Abraham] Exactly, that’s why I—
[Speaker F] Actually maybe I was saying the opposite.
[Rabbi Michael Abraham] Exactly. Until now we weren’t even talking about Jewish law at all. We were talking about the question of how we think in every field—in science, in law, in everyday life, everywhere. It just suddenly occurred to me that there’s a branch that’s worth bringing up on this background specifically in the halakhic realm, because there too people have a certain aversion to relying on intuition. Now everybody relies on intuition—don’t fool me—but they don’t do it consciously, they don’t put it on the table. And sometimes the feeling is that if you do put it on the table, then it’s tendentious. Meaning, clear-eyed people understand that there is no human being who doesn’t work with his intuitions. Right? That’s obvious. I don’t think serious people can deny that.
[Speaker D] But which sources to bring.
[Rabbi Michael Abraham] Sometimes it seems a bit blunt to people. I mean, one article I wrote in Techumin, for example—I wrote about the Shay Dromi law, before there even was a Shay Dromi law. I wrote about killing a thief. Then the Shay Dromi law came out. So I wrote about killing… So I said, first of all, my basic intuition is an American intuition. Whoever sets foot on my property gets a bullet in the head. I don’t care whether I can stop him this way or another way, whether I can save the property without shooting him and without… I don’t care. He has no immunity from anything. If he’s here, as far as I’m concerned, his career is over. I can waive my right, but I have no problem at all with someone who finishes him off on the spot. That’s all. I don’t have to start fighting with him now and trying this and maneuvering that, and certainly not letting him escape—which is what the police instructed Shay Dromi and all those people in the Negev who suffer terribly from these thefts. They told them: let them run away and file a complaint with the police. Well, we know what happens when you file a complaint with the police. What kind of thing is that? So first of all my basic intuition was an American intuition. The burglar breaking in—kill anyone who’s here. All right? Of course, if he’s threatening and if he poses some danger—I’m not talking about someone who just happened to trespass by mistake, didn’t notice, I don’t know. I’m talking about someone who came to steal. You don’t have to start fighting with him, even if maybe you’re stronger than he is. Shoot him and that’s it. And not in the air first either—shoot him directly. The question is whether that gets through Jewish law. In Jewish law, ostensibly it doesn’t say that, because Jewish law says it’s only because of the concern that if you start fighting with him, then he’ll kill you. Therefore he has the law of a pursuer, and therefore you’re allowed to kill him. But if there’s no such situation… meaning, if he wouldn’t kill you—for example, a son against his father—then the Talmud says a son against his father, it’s clear that he won’t kill me even if he came to steal from me. My father came to steal from me—that can only happen in the Talmud. My father comes to steal from me, and now the question is whether I’m allowed—after all, I know that if I defend myself, he won’t kill me. Meaning, stealing from me, fine; killing me, he won’t kill me. So there it really is forbidden; you may not kill him. So that’s ostensibly against what I’m saying. Fine, so I began discussing that there. But that too is another example from an article in Techumin of a clash between my initial intuition, at least, and the data of Jewish law. And you have to decide whether it goes through or not. I… It goes through in many more cases than people think. That much is true. Because when you discuss the question of which interpretation to choose—and I already started that lecture—when you discuss which interpretation to choose, and usually there are several interpretive options or opinions, right? In Jewish law there are different tracks, different routes. You have to decide which track you are prepared to follow. Fine? So people say—those who recoil from mixing in intuition—leave your intuition aside. Right now you have several options: Torah-level doubt goes stringently, rabbinic-level doubt leniently, and that’s it. I say no. If I have an intuition and I go with option A because it sounds more reasonable to me, then I choose option A and not option B. Fine? Meaning, this has practical expressions in places where Jewish law allows it. Meaning, not where it compels it—where it allows it. And that makes a difference. Because if you arrive at a conclusion because that really is the law, because that’s what the majority of halakhic decisors hold or because you have proof from the Talmudic text, fine, then you reached the conclusion—and in that case too it happens to fit your intuition. I’m talking about a situation where, were it not for the intuition, I wouldn’t have ruled that way. Maybe I would have remained in doubt, say, or maybe even the second opinion has more support, more halakhic decisors hold that way, there is such a custom, I don’t know, there are all kinds of technical considerations in favor of the second opinion. Therefore I say: in such a place… But if I have intuition, for me that’s something with weight. Meaning, that can cause me to choose a minority opinion, or certainly to choose one of two equally balanced options. Okay? So in that sense it can definitely change things, but that doesn’t mean you’re thumbing your nose at Jewish law. It means that intuition plays a role in how you maneuver within the halakhic possibilities.
[Speaker F] It really does matter where and how you do the calculation. I mean, whether you start with dry analysis, with intuition supposedly set aside, do the whole process, and then reach some point where you bring in the intuition—or whether you start with it…
[Rabbi Michael Abraham] Theoretically it should give the same result. But practically it does make a difference. Because when you really read the material—once you already know, once you’ve defined your intuition for yourself in advance, right, that’s the concern, and that’s why the criticism—there is something to it. I don’t dismiss it; I just don’t agree with it. Once you’ve defined in advance what your intuition is, there is a certain concern that you will already read all the sources in that way. True. But that’s my intuition, and I can try and make sure that I’m not forcing the sources, that I’m not doing things that are blatantly dishonest. I choose options that are at least possible, if not more than that. But yes, it’s dangerous. What can you do? That’s the argument of a professional. True. But on the other hand, giving up intuition also leads nowhere—and in fact you don’t really do it. You just don’t reveal that you’re doing it. That’s exactly the point. Sometimes you don’t even reveal it to yourself. Sometimes even you yourself don’t really… Maimonides says—what does Maimonides say? After all, he can be interpreted differently too. But it seems that this is what Maimonides… and that’s fine, that’s how you should interpret Maimonides, no problem—but put it on the table. If you’re using intuition, then put it on the table. For some reason—and again I’ll say this is historical evidence—I often discover that I can fit it into Jewish law. Meaning, I can show that I even discover evidence within Jewish law. So it’s often just a matter of motivation. Turn over every stone on the way to peace, right? So when I have some motivation to argue for the American approach, yes, about the thief, about killing the thief, then ten times over I’ll sift through the sugya, the passage, and I’ll try to show what the initial assumption was here and what the conclusion was there, and I’ll find evidence for it—or at least there’s a better chance that I’ll find evidence for it. I just have to be intellectually honest so that they really are good proofs. But it is true that motivation helps you find more evidence. If you don’t have motivation to search, you won’t find it. I think I mentioned once Gilat’s book, Chapters in the Development of Jewish Law, I think that’s what it’s called. A professor from Bar-Ilan; he used to be a yeshiva student in Hebron, and therefore his book caused a huge shock, because a yeshiva student from Hebron is supposed to behave properly and not write academic things. So in that book, one of the things he—well, not one of the things, really in a systematic way over many topics—he used a similar move. He argued that after the destruction of the Temple—if I remember correctly, this was about the Sabbatical year in our time being rabbinic, I think—so he says: after the destruction of the Temple, a distress arose. It was impossible to observe the Sabbatical year; the economic situation was very hard. Exile and foreign rule, taxes being taken from you, a very difficult situation. You look for leniencies. So here—we found a leniency: the Sabbatical year in our time is rabbinic. Once it’s rabbinic, you can do a prozbul, you can use legal fictions, it’s no longer as severe as the original Sabbatical year. That’s what he wrote. And people screamed about that. I was living in Bnei Brak, and the local press there practically tore out their hair in alarm. So I looked—of course I immediately bought the book, because I understood that this must be the most interesting book around. They said “forbidden to read,” “heresy,” and so on, so obviously you have to buy it immediately. And in the end I saw that that’s not what he wrote. They hadn’t read it carefully. He said that when there was economic distress, he brought evidence that the Sabbatical year in our time is rabbinic. But he said that the economic distress was the trigger to look for evidence. Now that is certainly true. When a halakhic decisor is in distress, then certainly he will look for evidence for the ruling he wants to issue. When he isn’t in distress, the evidence will still be there—but he won’t find it.
[Speaker D] Or like someone who wants to free an agunah.
[Rabbi Michael Abraham] So he searches under every stone. So when you search, that doesn’t invalidate the method. Examine the evidence on its own merits; forget my agenda. The agenda is only a motivation that helped me find all sorts of proofs that otherwise might have stayed hidden—I wouldn’t have discovered them.
[Speaker F] And in the Talmud Rabbi Yannai permitted them to do this because of economic distress. What? Rabbi Yannai announced—I don’t remember in which Talmudic passage—that he permitted them to trade during the Sabbatical year because of the economic distress.
[Rabbi Michael Abraham] Could be. I don’t remember anymore. It doesn’t matter. But yes—I’m saying, if economic distress by itself leads you to the conclusion, that’s simply a lack of intellectual honesty—that the Sabbatical year in our time is rabbinic.
[Speaker F] Ah, okay—not to that conclusion.
[Rabbi Michael Abraham] Rather, you can’t just decide on your own that something is rabbinic. You can look for interpretive mechanisms, this midrash or that, from which it can be shown that it’s rabbinic. If what you found holds water, then it’s honest. Why should I care that your motivation was distress? Very often we always—almost always—act out of some distress, internal, external, doesn’t matter. You approach a question because something is bothering you and you need to find an answer. That’s why you address the question. So of course you look for evidence. Every responsum is built that way. To ignore that is just to ignore the facts. Every halakhic responsum is built that way. In the end, after all, you know: the cry of this poor, miserable woman came before me and we have to find a leniency and do something and here and there—and then he starts stitching it together, and he shows that all the medieval authorities (Rishonim) and all the later authorities (Acharonim) and all the Talmudic passages make it clear that she is permitted and everything is fine. Before he stitched together this miserable widow, it wasn’t all that clear that she was permitted and everything was fine. But after he said it, then he read everything and searched and turned over every stone to see whether there were proofs. You have to check whether the proofs hold water, but the motivation to find every such proof is distress. And that’s perfectly fine. That’s how it is.
[Speaker G] In a book—I think by Ruth Almog—about law and literature, it begins with the story of Carmela Buchbut. About the Shay Dromi law, on some feminist site I found someone calling it the Carmela Buchbut law. With Carmela Buchbut, she murdered—or her son, Carmela’s son murdered—the father. And that already sounds much better—
[Rabbi Michael Abraham] —than Shay Dromi.
[Speaker G] And the judges who acquitted her began the ruling with a description of her distress. And the judges who convicted her began with the fact that the son had gone and signed out a weapon that same day and all that, and that he had… they began with the murderous intentions and with the fact that it was planned.
[Rabbi Michael Abraham] How obvious this is. Ask any halakhic decisor how he writes a ruling. It’s obvious that he basically has initial motivations; he doesn’t approach it like: okay, we heard the facts, now let’s see what the law says. And that’s fine. That’s how it should be. I don’t think that’s invalid. You have to be honest—meaning, you shouldn’t impose your agenda on the sources—but yes, it can affect your interpretation. Fine, that’s legitimate. The Beit Yosef writes—I always heard this in the name of the Chazon Ish, but it’s written in the Beit Yosef in Yoreh De’ah—better to force the wording than to force the reasoning. What is that if not exactly what I’m saying now? You see some text—I don’t know, some halakhic text, Maimonides, Talmudic text, whatever, something, okay? Now it says something unreasonable. You can offer an interpretation that is strained on the verbal level, but it will yield a result that is very reasonable on the legal level. So what is preferable—strained reasoning or strained language? The Beit Yosef says: better to force the language than to force the reasoning. That is exactly what this means, isn’t it? That once you have a certain reasoning, you can even strain the wording because reasoning too is an interpretive tool. After all, the one who wrote this thing wasn’t speaking nonsense either. So if that reasoning seems to you to be the right thing, that itself is a consideration to think that maybe the one who wrote it also intended that, because he wasn’t stupid either. So what I think is right becomes an interpretive consideration. Okay, fine, so I’ve anticipated the end. Last time we started moving toward a more positive definition of what intuition is. I argued that it’s some sort of faculty that combines thinking with cognition, and it basically solves Kant’s problem of the synthetic a priori, because the basic problem is how we begin to accumulate information about the world. Usually we observe particular cases, but a law—a law of nature—is a general law. So the question is: how do we move from particular cases to the general law? Observation never gives you the general law, so generalization is not merely observational; it’s an act of thinking. And then the question comes back: who says the generalization is correct? The fact that my head is built that way—does the world also operate in a way parallel to how my head is built? Who says? I could have been created differently too; it’s a pretty accidental matter. What guarantees that this reflects what happens in the world? So what I argued is that intuition is actually some kind of contemplation and not pure thinking. It’s also an interaction with the world. And I brought three supports for this from three thinkers or philosophers: Maimonides, who speaks about the eyes of the intellect at the beginning of The Guide of the Perplexed. I said that eyes belong to the plane of observation, of epistemology, of cognition, while intellect belongs to thinking. “The eyes of the intellect” with a hyphen—that’s mixing categories, mixing unlike with unlike. You’re mixing a cognitive tool with a concept of thought. What am I doing—thinking through eyes? “The eyes of the intellect” is like thinking with your eyes or seeing with your intellect. Usually we think of cognition as cognition—there are five senses—and thinking as the internal processing of what cognition brings me. Usually that’s how people think: the basic data are brought to me by observation, and then thinking starts to work. I think we also talked about Bacon and things like that. So I said that intuition is probably some kind of faculty that mixes those two things, a kind of cognitive-thinking, and so on. So in Maimonides the verbal expression for this mix of thought and cognition is something like “the eyes of the intellect,” and in Rabbi HaNazir it’s “auditory logic,” where hearing again is a sense and logic is thinking. And with Husserl, Edmund Husserl, it’s called eidetic seeing. We observe ideas. Ideas are “horseness,” right? In other words, our generalizations, the general laws or the general concepts that we do not observe. Ostensibly, usually we think that we think them. We saw many horses, and from that we make some kind of generalization and build some kind of idea called horseness. What does horseness mean? What is it to be a horse? Okay, that’s not something one sees; it’s a generalization based on the particular facts that we did see, and we try to build some general picture of this concept, horse. So the move into the world of ideas too is usually seen as a process of thought and not a process of cognition. But Husserl sees it as seeing. I observe ideas. I don’t think them or generalize or arrive at ideas by way of abstraction; rather I see the ideas. Meaning, through the concrete horse I observe the idea of horseness. And why? Because they’re all aiming at the same point: otherwise the result of that generalization has no validity. It’s just my internal thought process; in the world there is no indication that it’s really true. Okay? The fact that I’m built in a certain way is no guarantee. Therefore you have to be actually seeing something. Then the whole problem of the synthetic a priori disappears, and everything we talked about last time. Last time I also spoke about the fact that very often this intuition is ultimately formulated through language or a system of principles that are subjective. Because I basically construct these insights that I observe from the world in terms that speak to me from within my own world. So we talked about male physics and female physics, right, that Gadi Taub—about how we build physics on the basis of basic concepts like position, velocity, acceleration, force, energy, momentum. That’s a collection of concepts with which we describe the phenomena of mechanics. Okay? Some creature that thinks differently from us could have come along—or maybe even we ourselves, if by chance Newton hadn’t begun the whole move in this direction, or Galileo—if they hadn’t started the whole move in this direction, physics could have been built on the basis of some completely different conceptual system. For example, I don’t know, in the periodic table—this came up last time too, I think—describing things through Mendeleev’s table of elements is one option, in chemistry. And you could describe it through earth, wind, water, and fire. Water and wind—that is, air—and fire, right? And basically I’m saying that what you call carbon is actually such-and-such a percentage of water, such-and-such a percentage of earth. But it’s not literally water and earth—even the Greeks didn’t think it was literally dust and water. Rather, “earth” meant heaviness, the material thing that goes downward, that pulls downward. Wind and fire are things that pull upward. Wind is the abstract thing, water is the flexible thing. It doesn’t matter. So a certain combination of those traits in a certain dosage—that’s carbon, and another combination in another dosage of… what?
[Speaker G] But the periodic tables themselves are an axis of protons and neutrons, the two characteristics of…
[Rabbi Michael Abraham] No, protons and neutrons are particles that physically make up the…
[Speaker G] Yes, okay, but that replaces chemistry. Any material that has this number of protons and neutrons…
[Rabbi Michael Abraham] No, but I’m saying all of that, all of that I call the periodic table, including the protons and neutrons, the scientific description of… in the end, at root, it’s all physics. Chemistry is the phenomenology of physics, because you can’t really work directly with physics, it’s too complicated, so we work on a more macroscopic level and call it chemistry. Fine, that’s all it is, a branch of physics. So that’s clear. But all of that I call the periodic table. Okay? But besides that, there’s another description that can simply lay out the same space using a different system of concepts.
[Speaker F] But it’s the same…
[Rabbi Michael Abraham] It’s the same thing, and it describes the same things.
[Speaker F] Exactly, in different words.
[Rabbi Michael Abraham] No, but it’s not a word-for-word translation.
[Speaker F] Fine, but it’s different words.
[Rabbi Michael Abraham] It’s like laying out the same space using different vectors.
[Speaker F] It’s the same space.
[Rabbi Michael Abraham] No, it’s much more than different words. That’s exactly the point. The same space means the phenomena are the same phenomena—that’s obvious, because there is only one real physics. No, that’s… that’s the space. But the coordinate system is very important, because if you use a coordinate system… you always do the analysis through the coordinate system.
[Speaker F] Yes, but it’s the same thing.
[Rabbi Michael Abraham] Exactly! But with a different coordinate system… it’s not that there are people who think a little differently. No, he thinks completely differently.
[Speaker F] He thinks from a different coordinate system.
[Rabbi Michael Abraham] Exactly, but that’s completely different. Think Cartesian versus non-Cartesian and polar, not Cartesian versus Cartesian with a rotation. Okay, that’s the same thing. No! Suppose, for example, there’s a creature that simply can’t function with a Cartesian system. It doesn’t understand what terms…
[Speaker F] Those terms are, and all that.
[Speaker D] So he says… it’s the same thing… I don’t even need to go as far as aliens. Why? How? Cartesian and polar—that’s a different way of thinking.
[Speaker F] But that’s… that’s not a different way of thinking.
[Speaker D] I can move between them.
[Rabbi Michael Abraham] There could be a person who knows how to solve problems in a polar system and doesn’t know how in a Cartesian system.
[Speaker F] And there are lots of physical problems that can only be solved in one such system and not another. Why? Because it’s more complicated, not because it’s impossible.
[Rabbi Michael Abraham] Or more complicated, yes. But there can be a person whose inclination is such, whose way of thinking is such, that it’s more natural for him to grasp reality in a polar system—not because of the problem, but because of how his mind works. And another person will see it in a Cartesian way. Now, they’ll describe things in a different language, but in the end, when it comes to the instrument or the phenomenon you’re talking about, of course it’s either right or wrong; it has to be correctly described both in this physics and in that physics.
[Speaker F] That’s exactly the same thing in different words,
[Rabbi Michael Abraham] You’re changing the words completely. No, but you don’t understand that there can be a person… you can call it different words, that doesn’t interest me. I just… what I want to say is this: suppose women—suppose women’s minds work differently from men’s. Okay? And women don’t know what a Cartesian system is; they just can’t grasp what perpendicular things are, they don’t understand what perpendicular means. They don’t have that concept in their heads. Okay? And they have a polar system. In a polar system you don’t need to understand anything about perpendicularity. What you need is angle and distance. Right? So they’ll think in a polar system about all problems, even those that have Cartesian symmetry. Not only the ones all of us find natural to think about. Okay? That’s how they’ll think. Will they reach wrong results? No, of course not. They’ll solve all the problems correctly.
[Speaker F] Right, but if you bring an alien to describe the world, then ostensibly that’s… that’s exactly like Cartesian and polar coordinates. Okay, if you bring someone to describe the world in words…
[Rabbi Michael Abraham] The physics will look completely different. The equations will be different equations, everything will be different.
[Speaker F] Yes, but the equations are just the words.
[Rabbi Michael Abraham] The question is whether it describes the same world of phenomena. Obviously—that’s what I’m talking about. Because physical truth is one. If the airplane works in this physics, it has to work in that physics too. It could be, by the way, as I said, that from this physics they wouldn’t invent an airplane but something else, because that would be the more natural invention there. So you don’t need an alien; we’re
[Speaker F] talking about ourselves, no need to bring in an alien.
[Rabbi Michael Abraham] I was talking there about the difference between women and men, in relation to Gadi Taub’s critique. Okay, I was trying through that to illustrate the idea I was talking about. And what I wanted to say is that very often we have arguments or different viewpoints, but they’re not really different. It’s just a different coordinate system.
[Speaker H] And therefore
[Rabbi Michael Abraham] it could be that there are women who are talented in this mode of seeing and not in that one, and men the other way around, say. And then that would mean that if physics happened to develop in a Cartesian direction, say, then all the successful physicists would be men. And that situation is absolutely possible. And women really wouldn’t succeed because of that. And it would have nothing to do with physics itself; it would have to do with the language we chose in order to describe physics. And if it had happened to be Newtona instead of Newton, then things might have developed in such a way that today all the men would be cooking and the women would be researching physics, because it would have developed in a way more convenient for their kind of mind. And with aliens it’s not just more convenient—it could be completely impossible for them, not just less convenient. And there could be those who don’t even have the concept—they don’t know what location is. And a person who has no spatial perception at all, for example—does he have a physics? He doesn’t understand what space is at all, he doesn’t see the world at all in terms of space and time. He just doesn’t have those categories. He sees it differently, I don’t know, it’s hard for me even to imagine such a being. Maybe there is such a being, with no sense of time and space. Maybe there are even creatures like that, maybe animals like that, that don’t see space and time the way we do—I don’t know. Okay? They also see the world I see in some fashion, they also run away from the tiger when it comes, just as I run away—even faster, okay? Which isn’t saying much. So what does that mean? It means they can describe the same phenomenal whole in a completely different language. It could even be that the image they see in their heads isn’t visual at all—it’s music, or some picture that looks completely different from what I see, like the philosophers’ palace, which we also mentioned. Because is the red color I see the same thing as what you report as red? Okay? So the whole world you’re talking about is entirely different from the other person’s, and still it’s obvious that there is one truth here. This is not a basis for subjectivism. But you have to examine carefully whether the disagreement between us is really a genuine disagreement, or just two different forms of description that stem from the worlds we come from. And that’s what the postmodernists build the whole thing on. They basically say there’s nothing out there at all, there’s only what we see because of these differences. And I say that’s throwing the baby out with the bathwater. True, if I look at the world through red cellophane I’ll see it all as red, and someone else will look through green cellophane and he’ll see it all as green. So who’s right? Is that a disagreement? No, it isn’t. The world itself is what it is, and we agree on that. I simply see it in a red conceptual world, so I describe it that way. But that doesn’t mean there’s some postmodernism in which everyone is equally right. It means that with my tools he too would agree that red is what should be seen; he just happens to be looking with green tools, that’s all.
[Speaker F] The question is whether, when you say one coordinate system and another coordinate system, I’ll be able to find how to convert from one to the other.
[Rabbi Michael Abraham] But there isn’t always a transition. There doesn’t have to be a transition. In most…
[Speaker F] But there isn’t always. Not always, I don’t know, maybe there is, I’m not familiar.
[Rabbi Michael Abraham] But on the principled level, there doesn’t have to be a transition.
[Speaker F] It doesn’t have to be, I agree, but usually there is. Usually when something is described in two ways, I always find the relation between them.
[Rabbi Michael Abraham] Of course. I’ll explain why that is. You don’t understand why? Because we’re doing this among ourselves. You’ve never encountered an alien. The same person with the same kind of thinking as yours defined both polar and Cartesian. How did he define them? Because he knows how to move from one to the other. If there’s a system you don’t know how to move into, how would you define it? In order to encounter a system you can’t make the transition to, you need to meet an alien.
[Speaker F] It could be two people—maybe you invented polar and someone else invented Cartesian, and then a third person came and found the link between you. Never mind.
[Rabbi Michael Abraham] But the two of us have the same kind of mind, because we’re both human beings who think in similar ways, so obviously my mind can grasp both this and that, and so I can move between them. But suppose there’s a certain system my mind simply does not have the capacity to move from polar into; I just wasn’t endowed with those abilities as a human being—not I personally, but the human species as such doesn’t have that form of thought, it just can’t do it. Okay? There are limits. Okay? Then you won’t be able to make the transition. But that doesn’t mean such a system can’t exist. Another alien will come and give you all the predictions—every experiment you run in the lab, he’ll tell you what will come out. Okay? You have no clue. He shows you the system he works with, and you just can’t manage it. I once had an experience like that, by the way. Since we’re talking about it. Once a Haredi friend of mine—this was toward the end of my master’s degree—came to me after seeing in some local paper an article about a Vizhnitz Hasid from Haifa, a man named Haim Shefler, who had developed a theory of relativity, his own relativity theory, and it solved several problems where the existing theory of relativity was stuck. That’s how some journalist reported it. So he says to me, listen, you’re looking for a dissertation topic, you’re finishing your master’s—maybe you should try, because he can’t communicate with academia, maybe you can do something? It sounds interesting. Well, in the meantime it did sound interesting to me. I went to meet him in Haifa. This was after I had spoken to some professor from the Technion who had been at the Technion and later left—Glazki, did you know him? Giora Glazki? Never mind. I think he should be about your age or something. He was a professor at the Technion.
[Speaker D] My teachers were more…
[Rabbi Michael Abraham] Yes. No, maybe he studied with you, maybe. So he worked at Rafael, I think, for quite a long time, and afterward he left, I don’t know exactly what he did later. He had been at the Technion and then at Rafael. He was accompanying this man, and he told me, listen, this is serious work. There are lots of people who babble and find things in the Zohar with equidistant letter skips and all kinds of nonsense like that, you know—they don’t define anything. This man is doing mathematics with integrals; in other words, he’s working, really doing work. But it needs translation. What he calls a photon has nothing whatsoever to do with what we call a photon. You need to understand what he’s saying. It took me a very long time. So it was good that he warned me. He also gave me some material to read so I could begin getting into it, because he too was looking for someone to do… He was guiding him, and he said there’s potential here. But someone has to translate it into academic language. Somebody has to do that, but in order to do it you need some trust in him. Usually you don’t trust these people from the outset, and then they’re lost. You know how many people over the years have come to me with all sorts of ideas like that, and they can’t break into any academic forum to try to present them? Because in most cases it really is nonsense. But it could be that among those people, sometimes there are good ideas. There are very smart people. Even your friend there, though it’s not the same thing—he does have a scientific education. But many… I’ve met lots of such people. And they can’t get in. Now here there already was backing. There was a professor, a man in the field, and he told me, listen, this is serious. So it was worth it, and I met with him. And truly, I couldn’t communicate with him. I simply couldn’t communicate with him. I didn’t understand what he meant when he said “photon.”
[Speaker D] His mind works differently.
[Rabbi Michael Abraham] Yes, everything was different. It even seemed to me that “integral” too wasn’t what we call an integral. Rather he was doing the… differently somehow. I don’t know, it was… It was clear to me that I would have to devote a few months just to the language before I could even begin checking what he was doing and translating and… But he solved, he solved several problems that, according to that Glazki, really are open problems in relativity today. His theory solves them—that was the claim. Now afterward…
[Speaker F] How does he know it solves them?
[Rabbi Michael Abraham] He checked it.
[Speaker I] The result—he looked at the result.
[Speaker F] What, he got a number at the end? I mean…
[Rabbi Michael Abraham] I don’t know, I don’t even remember exactly what they were discussing.
[Speaker F] Because if the whole language is different, then…
[Rabbi Michael Abraham] No, no, but that’s fine. What do you mean the whole language? There is some translation. I mean, he’s not an alien. He’s also a human being. He doesn’t have formal academic training, but… Then afterward, just to finish that parenthesis, I looked in what’s called Physics Abstracts. It’s a collection of all the articles published each year. It used to come in these thick volumes. All the physics articles published all over the world in all journals over the course of a year. Every year there are two or three such volumes. Okay? I started searching, because it’s organized by topic. I started looking for alternatives to relativity theory. Do you know how many there are every year? Published in academic journals by academics, not outsiders. Nobody knows about it. And they all solve problems, and here we’re talking about experts—people in the profession, not Vizhnitz Hasidim. Okay? People who solve all sorts of problems in relativity theory, and nobody cares. Nobody reads it. Because there’s such an enormous quantity of material that in order to break through and get some resonance and suddenly have people notice that you solved the problem, maybe your theory really is more correct, that takes a lot of politics. Not in the negative sense, no.
[Speaker D] It could be that if Einstein were alive today and wrote a new theory of relativity…
[Rabbi Michael Abraham] Nobody would hear about it.
[Speaker D] Right, it would just get swallowed up in the material.
[Rabbi Michael Abraham] Absolutely. Absolutely. It’s a huge matter of luck. There are many results—after the bridge between East and West opened up, it turned out there were lots of results that had developed in parallel in the Russian world, in the Soviet Union, and in the West. What I learned as the Sampling Theorem, my father learned as Kolmogorov’s theorem. Sampling—how much you have to sample each frequency in engineering, I mean. That’s obvious. And we know there are Kolmogorov results on our side too. He was one of the greatest mathematicians, an extraordinary genius. So there are all sorts of results, but they were behind the Iron Curtain, written in Russian. It was outright illegal there to write in English. So there’s no communication; you can’t know. Now a completely different physics could have developed there, I don’t know—maybe all sorts of things developed there, some kind of women’s physics, who knows. You know that in the Soviet Union women were involved in science more than in the West. All those women engineers were all Russian with those boots, electrical engineers—they all immigrated from Russia. Yes, yes, I know that too. What, wrestling? Yes, exactly. Anyway, let’s just close the parenthesis. Those differences in language are very important to take into account, because intuition is always formed using tools that are subjective tools. But those are only tools through which I color reality. They are not reality itself. And one has to distinguish between the two. Now there is a tendency, because of what I said earlier—and here I’m moving to the next stage—there is a tendency because of these subjective differences to think that everything is subjective. And that there isn’t really any correlate in actual reality that these subjective insights, these subjective perceptions, reflect. This skepticism exists also on the factual plane: the more radical skeptics say that even facts and science—it’s all male science, yes, science is… there are such radical skeptics who say it’s all just statemental, it doesn’t really say anything about the world. But certainly in the context of values. In the context of values—and we already spoke about this once—in the context of values, if you say something is good or something is bad, that’s a statement about you, not about the world. We talked about the fact that after all you can’t compare a moral claim to some state of affairs in the world in order to know whether it’s true or not. If you say, “This table is white,” then look and see: if it’s white, you’ve verified the claim; if not, then… the claim is false. But how do you verify the claim “Murder is forbidden”? What exactly am I supposed to compare it to? Since that is so, they say: then forget it—it doesn’t mean anything, it’s subjective. Okay? And I claim that there is moral intuition, what is called conscience. What is called conscience—some say that it is a psychological structure within us that dictates values to us. That’s a subtle difference, but it’s an abyssal one. Because that view—that it’s a psychological structure in us that dictates values—basically says it’s arbitrary, I’m just built that way. It has nothing to do with truth or with right and wrong. So that person is built differently, and he’s built for murder and you’re built not to murder. So what? What makes you better than him? Can you criticize him? That cannot really yield morality. It can yield a nice person. Okay? As against that, I claim that these subjective feelings—and even sometimes when there is a disagreement, it may be a result of circumstances, because under those circumstances there really may be a different moral step that is the correct thing to do in that conceptual world, in that world of perceptions, or something like that. And still that does not mean there is no truth. Now I’ll bring you a few very nice examples I wanted to get to last time and didn’t have time. There’s a friend of my son, a young fellow, I don’t remember, Oren something, I don’t remember, from Jerusalem, who recommended to me this little book called The Abolition of Man. After I told him a bit about what the new book is about that is supposed to come out through Yediot. He told me that basically the underlying idea is here. C. S. Lewis—Narnia. The author of Narnia, the children’s books. Also The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe, that’s all C. S…
[Speaker J] Lewis. The children came out of the wardrobe and arrived in the Holy Land.
[Rabbi Michael Abraham] I don’t know, anyway there were all sorts of—no, The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe is the name of one of his books. The name of one of his books, if I’m not mistaken. There are many books. He was a very prolific children’s writer, a bit wild too, from Tolkien’s generation, very close to him. And both of them were tremendously creative, built languages, built new worlds, very creative literature. In any case, he was also a philosopher and a Christian, even a Christian preacher—an all-around intellectual. So he has this little book which of course came out from Shalem Press. After all, that kind of book doesn’t get published in Israel—it’s illegal, because it’s conservative, right-wing, and not postmodern. Until a few years ago, books like that simply didn’t come out here. In recent years we’ve become a bit more open to criticism of postmodernism, and the Shalem Center is basically leading that somewhat. They publish all the right-wing capitalists in economics, which is illegal to publish in Israel if you want to be politically correct, and so on. So also in philosophy they’re the ones publishing this material. There is also a right-wing philosophy, and I talked about that in “Two Wagons and a Hot-Air Balloon”—that the claim is that the right, in the economic and political sense and in general, is basically a synthetic philosophical outlook. That is the link among all the phenomena somehow called “right wing,” though they seem unrelated. Right wing against the Palestinians, and economic right wing, and right wing in all kinds of areas—what’s the connection among all these? So there is a connection, and it’s a philosophical one, but that’s another discussion. In any case, here he writes as follows. He begins like this—look, I’ll explain to you roughly the principle. I doubt I’ll read selected passages to you, okay? I couldn’t photocopy it because it’s too many pages, and it’s printed in that style where each page has just a few sentences. “I doubt whether we give enough thought to the importance of basic textbooks. Therefore I have chosen as the starting point for these lectures a small textbook in literature intended for boys and girls in grades eleven and twelve. I do not suppose that the authors of the said book, two in number, intended harm. And I must thank them, or their publisher, for sending me a complimentary copy.” The poor fellows apparently sent him a copy so that C. S. Lewis would review it and promote the book, and he certainly promoted it. He promoted it with clubs and axes. “Even so, I do not have a single good word to say in their praise. They are not to blame, they did not intend harm, and I thank them for having sent me a free copy, but I do not have even one good word to say.” And here you have a rather awkward situation. “I have no wish to denounce two active and modest teachers who did the best they could. But I cannot remain silent regarding the true tendency of their work as I understand it.” He knew how to write—he was a writer. “Therefore I shall use fictitious names”—he even guards against slander, that is, the laws of slander; he’s a religious man—“I shall call them Gaius and Titius, and their book I shall call The Green Book.” It’s just a code. “Yet I assure you that such a book does indeed exist and is on my shelf.” Of course, once he wrote this, everyone started looking, and by now people have identified which book it was. It’s like Rabbi Akiva—how does it go there?—that regarding the wood-gatherer, I think, he says it was Tzelofhad. And in the Torah it doesn’t say who the wood-gatherer was. So they say to him: Akiva, what the Creator covered up as a secret, and you go about as a talebearer revealing it. Yes, how does it go there? “A talebearer reveals secrets.” Like Nachmanides about Ibn Ezra: “Rabbeinu Avraham is faithful in spirit and conceals a matter, but a talebearer reveals his word.” Fine. Nachmanides also writes about Ibn Ezra: “Rabbeinu Avraham is faithful in spirit and conceals a matter, and I, as a talebearer, will reveal his secret,” or something like that. So here too. Anyway, in the second chapter of the book Gaius and Titius bring the well-known story about Coleridge by the waterfall. Surely you remember it—or maybe I don’t remember—that there were two tourists there, one of whom called the waterfall sublime, and the other called it pretty, and that Coleridge inwardly accepted the first opinion and rejected the second with disgust. Meaning, the one who called it sublime is right; it’s not pretty, it’s sublime. And this is Gaius and Titius’s interpretation. They interpret Coleridge’s story. “When the man said, ‘That is sublime’”—this is the quotation—“he appeared to be saying something about the waterfall. In reality he was not talking about the waterfall at all, but about his own feelings. It produced in him a sense of sublimity. What does ‘sublime’ mean? ‘The sublime waterfall’ doesn’t refer to the waterfall; it refers to me, to my feelings when I stand before the waterfall. So really the subject of the sentence is not the waterfall at all; the subject is me.” Okay? “What the man was really saying was, ‘I have feelings associated in my mind with the word sublime,’ or more briefly, ‘I have sublime feelings.’” Fine? So, in this way, a large number of deep questions are solved very concisely. However, the authors”—you understand he is criticizing this view, of course—“however, the authors have not yet finished. They add: ‘This confusion is continually present in language as we use it. We seem to be saying something very important about something else, but in reality we are only saying something about our own feelings.’” Fine? If I take a more extreme example: I say, “I see a wall here.” Now this is facts, no longer feelings and evaluations, aesthetic judgments or emotional judgments and the like. Here we are ostensibly talking about facts: “I see a wall here.” Even that is only a claim about me. I am describing what exists in my consciousness. I am not making a claim about the world; I am making a claim about myself. At this moment I see, or experience, the appearance of a wall. It has no connection whatsoever to what is actually there. Okay?
[Speaker B] Now, in the case of “pretty,” isn’t that just our feelings?
[Rabbi Michael Abraham] It is. He said that both “sublime” and “pretty,” both of them were really talking about themselves, and therefore there is no disagreement between them. And therefore Coleridge’s identifying with one rather than the other is nonsense—you can’t identify with one over the other, there’s nothing to identify with, because there’s no argument. He felt this way, she felt that way, that’s all. So if you feel like him, that doesn’t mean you agree with him. It means you’re probably built like him and not like her. So if you’re built like him, then of course the feelings aroused in you by the sight of the waterfall will be similar.
[Speaker E] You feel like him; you can’t say he’s right.
[Rabbi Michael Abraham] Exactly. I’m simply built like him. So you see the connection to our issue, right? The question is whether what I feel in response to a phenomenon is really only a claim about me, or whether there is something in the world itself that I am describing. That’s exactly the issue here. And then he develops it much further, but for me the example demonstrates it most beautifully, because it’s a literary demonstration, not a philosophical one. So they say: yes, this confusion is constantly present in language as we use it; we think we are saying something important about the world, but really we are talking about ourselves. “Before we examine the issues raised by this small but important paragraph”—remember, this is intended for eleventh and twelfth grade students—he’s trying to show how textbooks sometimes, through some banal remark, implant these ideas in young students who still don’t have the ability to critique them. And even if they do, the teacher first has to put his assumption on the table so that the students even know that there is something here to think about and to ask themselves whether they agree or not. Very often you transmit messages and create this subjectivist, relativist, skeptical outlook without even putting it on the table. People grow up into it and never even think there is another option. And I think that is an extremely serious blow. A great many people who advocate subjectivity and postmodernism simply do not understand that there is another possible option at all. I’m not even talking right now about whether it would persuade them or not. First of all, just understand that there is another option. In general, in my books, when I present the other view, usually I don’t even have arguments against the subjectivist view and so on. I just want to claim that it is not necessary, there is another possible view. For many people that alone is enough. I have met quite a few people who told me that this really opened their eyes. It opened their eyes not because I brought crushing arguments against what they thought, but because they had never thought there was another option at all. After all, once you say there is another option, then you suddenly ask: wait a second—why must one say it’s about you? “Sublime” really does sound as though it means only that sublime feelings are stirred within me. What is there in the waterfall that is sublime in itself? Sublime is just the feeling aroused in me. So it sounds so persuasive that if you don’t put the alternative on the table, if you don’t read this book, the student won’t think twice. And from there the next step is immediate: all morality and aesthetics and ethics are just claims about me, about what feelings are aroused in me. Feelings aroused in me at the sight of murder, or theft, or hitting someone, or something like that. It’s only a report about me; it isn’t a claim that something is wrong there, because what does that have to do with it? I am reporting psychological states. Okay? That is basically the consequence of the whole thing. And it starts from literature, which is completely banal. Who cares whether it’s sublime or pretty? That’s not such an important argument. But the implications are beyond reckoning. It goes all the way to saying there is no God, because that too is a statement about me. To say “I believe” is only to say that I have religious feelings; it is not a claim about the world. Do you understand? It follows from there immediately. Now I’m not saying—it may be so. But there are people who present this as the only option, and very often it takes captive all sorts of students who don’t understand that there is another option. And think which of the two you identify with. And that is mainly the role of a teacher: when you speak with younger students, you need to educate them a little to raise the assumptions to the surface. Of course the teachers themselves also didn’t understand that there was another option; it’s not malice, they simply weren’t aware of it. “Before we examine the issues raised by this small but important paragraph, intended for eleventh and twelfth graders, we must clear away a small confusion into which Gaius and Titius have fallen. Even from their own point of view—from any conceivable point of view—the man who says ‘That is sublime’ cannot mean ‘I have sublime feelings.’ Even if we accept the assumption that qualities like sublimity are not qualities of the things themselves but a projection of our feelings onto them, still the feelings which prompt the projection complement the projected qualities, and are therefore almost the opposite of them.” In other words, what he wants to say is this: he is not making a claim about himself that he now has sublime feelings. What he is saying is that this waterfall arouses sublime feelings in him. That’s not the same as saying “I have sublime feelings.” And really, let me translate this now into what I said earlier—it is exactly what I said earlier. What I’m really saying is: look, in you this aroused the feeling “pretty,” and in me it aroused the feeling “sublime”; first of all, we need to check whether what you call “pretty” and what I call “sublime” are in fact the same thing. Maybe they are the same thing, but we just don’t have linguistic richness, or we use somewhat different terminology, and really it’s the same feeling. Second, we have to understand that these feelings are not aroused when I stand in front of this wall, so it’s not just my feeling, right? There is something in the world itself such that, true, its expression in me is of course the result of my psychological makeup and my conceptual world and my way of thinking and my biography—of course all that is true—but that merely colors reality in a certain color. And you, who may color it differently—that is not because you are not making a claim about reality, but because you are making the claim by means of the language or the colors with which you color reality. But you are still making a claim about reality. When you say that this waterfall is sublime, you are not trying to describe your feelings. It seems foolish to me to say such a thing. I don’t think that anyone, once presented with the second option, would insist and remain with the first. He did not mean to say, “I took a pill and sublime feelings arose in me,” even if you were writing a story: “I took a hallucinogenic pill and sublime feelings arose in me.” No. You are trying to describe something about the waterfall. It is nonsense to say that it has nothing to do with the waterfall. True, you are describing it in language drawn from your own world, and feelings of sublimity certainly exist only in us and are not a property of the waterfall. But only waterfalls of this sort arouse feelings of sublimity, and not white walls or less beautiful waterfalls or whatever, other things. So it does say something about the waterfall. Now of course there is some assumption that all of us are supposed to develop feelings of sublimity when we stand before the waterfall, and that again brings us back to the question of the philosophers’ palace and so on. So here one can come with skeptical claims and say that what he calls “pretty” is actually what you call “sublime,” and you have no disagreement at all. Usually we do not assume that. Usually when I say something is red and someone else says something is yellow, my assumption is that we disagree. Okay? Even though it may be that what I call red he calls yellow and we have no disagreement at all, usually we do not assume that. If regarding colors I do not assume that, then the same option exists regarding impressions like sublimity and beauty. Okay? There too I say that if you say “pretty” and I say “sublime,” then that means you don’t really see the astonishing aspect that there is in this waterfall. You see that it is nice, pretty, pleasant—but you don’t understand that there is something genuinely impressive there, something awe-inspiring.
[Speaker G] Or that your feelings couldn’t…
[Rabbi Michael Abraham] Yes, I’m saying it always moves between those two poles. One, it could just be that either your feelings aren’t strong enough, or it’s merely a semantic difference and then we have no disagreement at all, or you did have feelings but you didn’t perceive the waterfall correctly. Look from my angle, or in the combination of things involved here—maybe you didn’t notice the combination that emerges from this landscape. If you notice it, you’ll see how sublime it is. And very often an artist’s gaze, by the way, is just a kind of photographer’s gaze. A photographer is a kind of artist—I mean an artistic photographer. Now what? I also see the situation he sees, but when he photographs it, I suddenly understand what I saw, because he focuses your gaze. Notice—there’s something here that you just passed by and never paid attention to at all. I told you once—I don’t remember all the details of the story, and retelling it vaguely ruins it, but I don’t feel like looking it up. There’s that religious journalist couple, Sivan Rahav-Meir and her husband Yedidya Meir. They had a program together on Friday around noon, on Army Radio, 12 or 1, something like that. In one of their early programs he described something that happened before one of the elections—not the most recent ones, probably the one before. He said he was driving in Jerusalem and at some intersection there was a guy holding a Meretz sign, I think—something like “Vote Meretz” or “Meretz for peace,” I don’t remember exactly. Anyway, he’s standing there at the light and the guy is standing there exhausted. So he asks him through the window, “Tell me, do you have something to drink, brother? I’m dying of thirst.” He says to him, “Fine, go buy yourself something to drink. Can’t you leave this for one minute, just one minute, step away from your shift?” He says, “No, not allowed—they’re paying me for this. I don’t even vote Meretz, I’m a Likudnik, they’re just paying me for it. I can’t leave, I’m working.” Fine, so he was actually a Likudnik working there. He says to him, “You know what? Okay, I’m sorry, I don’t have anything.” Afterwards his conscience bothered him, he says. The man was dehydrated there. So he went to a kiosk to buy him a drink. Fine, he went in there to get him something to drink and something to eat too—he wanted food and drink for him, he was totally wiped out. So he approaches the counter, and there was an Arab shopkeeper there, Ahmad, maybe it wasn’t a kiosk, maybe a supermarket, I don’t know—kiosks don’t usually have signs with names. But there was some sign with a name like that, and he wanted to buy something to drink, and he took a sandwich and chocolate milk. Fine, he comes to the counter, and this Ahmad says to him, “Listen, that sandwich is meat—you can’t have dairy with meat, not according to your rules, right? Dairy and meat—it’s sausage, that sandwich, you can’t have that with chocolate milk.” “Wow, I didn’t notice.” So he quickly ran and switched it. The Arab says to the Haredi or religious Jew, “Look, this is milk and meat.” The Likudnik is holding a Meretz sign, and the Mafdal guy—or I don’t know exactly what Yedidya votes for—is going to buy food for the Likudnik holding the Meretz sign, and the Arab says to him, “Listen, be careful, that’s meat and milk.” Now I tried to picture to myself—and this was a bit of literary ability too, I was proud of myself—I tried to imagine what would happen if I myself had passed through that sequence? Nothing. Nothing. I wouldn’t have noticed at all that I had just passed through something unusual. Fine, so nice, he works there, I wouldn’t have noticed at all. Fine, a Likudnik works there, so he’s holding a Meretz sign and he’s dehydrated and can’t leave, so I went to buy him something to eat—what’s the problem? And Arabs know about meat and milk—he’s just a considerate person, everything is fine. But when you describe the whole chain, suddenly you see that there was something very endearing there, very beautiful. There may even have been another detail I forgot; it was really lovely, you see. And obviously I’ve probably passed through a few such chains in my life already and never
[Speaker D] noticed
[Speaker H] it, never noticed it at all.
[Rabbi Michael Abraham] In order
[Speaker D] to recognize it, he was a photographer.
[Rabbi Michael Abraham] Exactly. Exactly. You need some kind of journalistic soul here, or the eye of a photographer, to understand what’s going on here. Now I understand the argument between the sublime and the beautiful in this way. The one who said “beautiful” wasn’t a photographer; he didn’t understand what was standing before him. But if he had seen the photograph that the fellow of the sublime would have taken—if he had seen the picture that fellow would have taken there—then he too would have said it was sublime, let’s say for the sake of discussion. That’s what Coleridge wants to say. Therefore Coleridge says: the one who said it was sublime was right. There is a right and a wrong here; they are making claims about the world. True, the claims about the world are made in language borrowed from my subjective world: sublime, beautiful—those are all human feelings. But to say that it exists only here, that it’s not a reaction to something in the world, that it doesn’t come to describe something in the world in my own language—that’s throwing out the baby with the bathwater. It’s simply a mistake. Now, many of you—when I said at the beginning that this is a statement about me, if I hadn’t presented it from the outset, it seems to me, in a critical or skeptical tone—I think many of you would have agreed. Because what he says here sounds very logical. Here Gaius and Titius say, yes, when the man said, “This is sublime,” he seems to be saying something about the waterfall. But in truth he was not speaking about the waterfall at all, only about his own feelings. A great many people would accept that. It’s not so immediate to understand that there’s some hidden and nontrivial assumption here. Fine. Now, once you formulate it, everyone understands; it’s no great Torah. But I often say things like this: here too you need to be a photographer. To grasp this philosophical idea too, you need to be a photographer. Once you’ve taken the picture, everyone can see it. But to catch it—to see that Herzl is there above Leibak, that famous photograph there in Herzliya at the HaSira junction, with Herzl on top, “Hebrew labor” and so on, and below two Arabs maintaining the sign, Leibak’s famous photograph—
[Speaker C] Then you need to be a photographer. Exactly.
[Rabbi Michael Abraham] And in a certain sense, if you push people into a corner, they’ll say, no, everything is subjective. It’s nothing, just a form of discourse. We simply developed some language, but it’s subjective. And I argue: not true. You see something here; this creation has value, something to it. Now, it could be that sometimes—what’s the price of this problematic view? The price is that nowadays a consensus can form around some nonsense, a smear of paint. Why? Because if really everything is only a matter of discourse and everything is relative, then there’s no problem. Then you can—there’s Kishon’s book, the one I told you about, I saw it at Menachem Finkelstein’s place, I was rolling on the floor laughing. A new book, it came out only after his death, really a year or two ago. Yes. About art. I recommend reading it, buying it. Reading it—I don’t know—buying it, whatever you want, but it’s an amazing book. I don’t remember its title, I’d have to check—Kishon on art—it came out a year or two ago. Look at it. It’s simply a masterpiece. It’s a masterpiece. Really a masterpiece. He only quotes. He hardly says anything himself. He quotes critics, artists, and so on—that’s all—and leaves you to die laughing. Meaning, he almost doesn’t add a word of his own. It’s unbelievable. You see people saying such nonsense, and with such pathos: this is sublime and wonderful—and it’s some absurd smear of paint. He photographs the works too. Thank God, there are photographs of the works there too. Among other things, there are copyright issues there in wine criticism. What do you say? Wine criticism—I don’t know, there are people who claim… I don’t understand it, so as far as I’m concerned it really is the same thing. But that, by the way, can be tested scientifically. What’s the problem? Take the critic, give him two wines blind, and let’s see whether all the critics give the same answer. If they all give the same answer, that means there’s something here that really differs from something else. Whether it’s better or worse—that you can’t measure. But the fact that there’s something real here—acidity, I don’t know what—fine, I don’t understand it, yes. So in short, that’s what I’m saying: that’s the price. The moment you relate even to serious art in a subjective way, then immediately all the arts pop up like Duchamp with his urinal and all his nonsense, which drags art down into the street. Right? And this gets perceived as a conceptual revolution. The father of conceptual art. Conceptual art: he puts a urinal in a museum. Fine? In short—smears of paint and all kinds of things like that. I don’t know, they’ll say I understand nothing; maybe. I don’t believe there’s anything to understand there. Fine? In serious art I also don’t understand a lot, but I know when I’m standing in front of a good work, it seems to me that I more or less understand. I won’t be terribly mistaken. Maybe I won’t understand the nuances, but I know when I’m standing before a work—
[Speaker B] What do you do, though, if, say, a painting like that arouses sublime feelings in him?
[Rabbi Michael Abraham] No, I think it really does arouse them, because the discourse—the discourse within that community probably manages to produce something. I don’t know exactly what. But there it really seems to me that it’s only on that plane. It’s only inside. That’s what I think. And I think that’s the price of the view that says that even in the serious places it’s like that. Because if so, then there’s no serious and not serious. Then everything is like that. Then they’re right that Duchamp is art. That’s exactly the price. That’s the point.
[Speaker D] And almost uniformly, all those who critique this Duchamp thing, they have an opinion in a certain way—they say almost the same thing, those who say they understand it.
[Rabbi Michael Abraham] What do you mean, they say the same thing?
[Speaker D] Meaning that it’s real. It kind of sounds real.
[Rabbi Michael Abraham] No, I’m saying—I said—it’s possible sometimes for a subjective consensus to form within a community because of discourse. But still they aren’t seeing something in reality; rather, they developed something for themselves—some square with some thing is beautiful, or this is conceptual, or I don’t know exactly what. If you’re “golden,” then you’re conceptual, or something like that. And then they start getting into that language and… you know, I heard things—really. I was at a lecture—I think I may have told this once, I don’t remember. I was at a lecture with my wife and our son. We went to Tel Aviv University. There was a photography lecturer at Bezalel—I taught photography there for several years—so the Bezalel faculty had sent out an email inviting whoever wanted to come: at Tel Aviv University there would be a lecture by a photography lecturer from Bezalel together with a physicist about some kind of photographic box—I even forgot what it’s called—a photographic box, where you expose and close…
[Speaker G] Camera obscura?
[Rabbi Michael Abraham] Camera obscura, exactly. So, camera obscura and various developments, all kinds of things. And to see it from the physicist’s perspective, from the artistic perspective, and somehow see whether they speak to one another. It sounded interesting. We went to hear it. I could not believe my ears. This photographer—my eyes went dark. He was simply spouting nonsense. There wasn’t one sentence there in which even two words connected. Nothing! And it was as if he felt he was saying terribly deep things. And at Bezalel there’s a lot of this kind of nonsense; it’s well known. All the workshops are like that. Now, sometimes there are also things that I think are good. I’m not dismissing everything; I’m dismissing most of it. But it was unbelievable. Now, there was an audience sitting there, lecturers from art-related fields in Tel Aviv, and at some stage they had had enough—not me. You could say, well, maybe I understand nothing. No, no—they slaughtered him afterward. They slaughtered him afterward. Meaning, on the contrary, I said to myself, all right, maybe I really don’t understand something here, but it sounds like total nonsense to me. Here he is just babbling. What did you say? Now explain to me what you said and what you were trying to get at—what’s the claim? And this line does this for me here and I come to it from there—and you can lecture about it for hours. Nothing. They say nothing. You can’t believe it. The words do not connect. I’m not talking about whether I agree or not; he didn’t say anything. I can’t decide whether I agree or not. And that’s a result of the discourse, really… I don’t know, maybe people who are in the same group with him—maybe they… actually I’m sure of it, not maybe. The fact is, he got a position at Bezalel, he’s a respected lecturer, he’s also a well-known photographer, and so on. Maybe he’s a good photographer, I don’t know. But unbelievable, really unbelievable. And among themselves they probably talk like that there.
[Speaker D] I know a few people who advanced on the basis of the fact that no one ever understood what they were saying, so people assumed it was terribly deep. Terribly deep.
[Rabbi Michael Abraham] Right, it’s exactly like Abba Eban. How beautifully he spoke—I didn’t understand a single word.
[Speaker H] There was that attempt here with the…
[Speaker D] There was that attempt here with the substitute for a lot of people. No, no, leave it, there’s more than that.
[Speaker H] There too they talked about things that weren’t there.
[Speaker D] People who would talk.
[Rabbi Michael Abraham] No, no, it’s a known phenomenon. You need to speak with enough confidence—that’s the principle. Then obviously you’re very deep and no one understands you, until someone comes and bursts the balloon.
[Speaker G] Please raise your voice.
[Rabbi Michael Abraham] Yes, exactly, exactly. In a deep bass voice. In short, then, he says: the feelings described—sublimity and beauty—are a projection of something from the world; they’re not just descriptions of me. And that’s exactly what I said earlier about morality, and that’s the intuition. And intuition means the ability to perceive the world—and it’s not with the eyes. My eyes don’t tell me that this waterfall is sublime. My eyes convey an appearance to me. That’s all. The judgment is a judgment made within me. But that judgment refers to the waterfall. It’s not like I said earlier: you could show me a stone and now I think this way. It doesn’t work like that. I also have to see the sublimity, because otherwise sublimity really is only something subjective that arises within me, and then it’s only a statement about me. The image is an image. Fine? Obviously I want to claim something about the world, but I don’t claim that with my eyes. It’s not with the eyes that one sees the sublime. With the eyes one sees the waterfall. The sublime is seen through the waterfall, through the eyes. Like Plato—one sees horseness through the horse, the Ideas, the general concepts; we behold them, we do not think them. It’s something that says something about the world. That’s exactly the same claim; I just want to… he does it better than I do, so I’m bringing him in. “The feelings that lead a person to call something sublime are not sublime feelings, but feelings of awe.” The feelings are not sublime at all. The feelings are feelings of sublimity, but the feelings themselves are not sublime. If there is any point in reducing “sublime” to a statement about the speaker’s feelings, the correct translation is: “I have feelings of humility.” Not “I have sublime feelings.” My feelings are not sublime. In the face of that sublimity, I have feelings of humility. “A consistent application of the view of Gaius and Titius would lead to obvious absurdities. It would force them to claim that the meaning of the statement ‘You are contemptible’ is ‘I have contemptuous feelings.’ You arouse in me feelings of contempt. To say that you are contemptible is a statement about you, not about me. My feelings are feelings of contempt, not contemptible feelings.” The feelings of contempt express the fact that you are contemptible. Fine? Again, this is interaction with the outside, not something that happens only within me.
[Speaker I] So you can also judge a person’s actions as contemptible, right? There are shameful things about which there’s no dispute. Exactly. So it doesn’t have to be the feeling that I feel contempt toward you and therefore you’re contemptible. No, no, not therefore.
[Rabbi Michael Abraham] The opposite. Because you are contemptible, I feel contempt, not because I feel contempt that you are contemptible. The reverse—that’s exactly the point. I’m not claiming it starts with my feelings; it starts with the world. I’m making a claim about the world. Because you are contemptible, I feel contempt toward you. And the postmodernists, the skeptics, the subjectivists—they say the opposite. What is a contemptible person? A person toward whom everyone feels contempt. That is the definition of a contemptible person—not that it’s an indication; it’s the definition. Yes, so here he goes on in the same vein. He says good education must build certain feelings. You don’t need to appeal to feelings as they are. The role of education is to build feeling, not to speak to the feeling that already exists. You have to build more refined feelings. He brings an example there from some descriptive book; he brings another example from some other book, not Coleridge, which is a literary work, but another book in which he says: “Before I examine the philosophical assumptions of the position taken by Gaius and Titius on the question of values, I want to describe its practical effects on the educational process. In the fourth chapter of their book they quote a foolish advertisement for a pleasure cruise, and they set out to inoculate their students against that kind of writing.” It’s inferior writing; they want to teach them what literature is, and this is inferior writing—an advertisement. So what do they say? They say this: the advertisement tells us that those who buy tickets for the cruise in question will—now a quotation—“cross the western ocean sailed by Drake from Devon, on an adventure in pursuit of the treasures of the West Indies.” Yes, Francis Drake, the famous pirate. Fine? That’s a quote from the book there. “And they will bring back with them a treasure of golden hours and glowing colors.” That’s what the advertisement says. Okay, we know advertisements. “Indeed, it is bad writing”—yes, “a cheap and vulgar exploitation of feelings of awe and delight.” It’s not a golden treasure—go enjoy yourself, have fun, that’s all; don’t make it into sublime things. Okay? So that’s bad writing. “The delight that people feel when visiting places that evoke in them strong associations from history or legend.” If Gaius and Titius had remained within their area of expertise and had taught their readers, as they promised to do, the art of English composition, they should have presented this advertisement alongside passages by great authors in which that feeling is expressed well. Meaning: literature at a higher level, and then show the difference between poor writing and writing of a beautiful literary quality. They could have used the well-known passage from Johnson’s book”—he gives examples; yes, he’s a literary man himself. “But in practice”—I’m skipping—“they point out that the luxurious motor ship will not really sail the routes sailed by Drake, and that the tourists will have no adventures”—yes, adventures are, after all, the connotation of Drake; he was a pirate—“that the treasures they bring back will be of a purely metaphorical nature.” They’re not really treasures. That’s what they teach their students; that’s the criticism they have of the advertisement. “And that a trip to Margate would provide all the pleasure and rest they need.” There’s no need to travel all the way to who knows where, the Gulag Archipelago. All this is perfectly true, except that one needs talents less great than those of Gaius and Titius to discover it. That is not literary criticism. Fine? What they failed to notice, or what did not interest them, is that one could say very similar things about a large part of fine literature that deals with this very feeling. You can say the same thing and use metaphors beautifully; it’s still only a metaphor—you’re not describing the thing itself. But that doesn’t make it inferior literature. So the point here isn’t the literature. The criticism they taught here isn’t literary criticism at all. They simply said it’s a metaphor; it doesn’t fit what it literally says. Thank you very much. So what? Literature also uses metaphors. Is that your problem with the text—that it uses metaphors? Literary texts also use metaphors; they have to use metaphors, because that’s part of literature. We’re not talking about encyclopedias; we’re talking about a literary work. So that’s your criticism? Again, this move from the objective to the subjective—that’s the literature lesson they consistently teach. They say: don’t believe it; it doesn’t really describe reality; you won’t really have adventures. Fine, we all understand that we won’t have adventures like Francis Drake. Okay? It’s a metaphor. Now—but what? They understand that a metaphor has no meaning at all. But that’s not true. A metaphor can have meaning, especially if you write it not in bad writing but in elevated writing. A metaphor can arouse sublime feelings, can arouse the sense that you’re standing before impressive art, and the judgment is not whether it literally describes reality correctly. We once spoke about art, right? About poetry. What is poetry? I said there: “There once was a lone streetlamp at the edge of a neighborhood” does not mean that there literally was a lone streetlamp at the edge of a neighborhood. It’s a sentence that comes to describe an atmosphere. It’s not a sentence that comes to describe a concrete situation. Fine? So the lamp and the neighborhood may never have existed—but imagine yourself in an old neighborhood in little Tel Aviv, with a lone streetlamp and children playing soccer, before there was internet and all that. That’s what they’re talking about there. Fine? Now, if you write beautifully, what’s wrong with the fact that it doesn’t correspond to reality in the literal sense? What kind of literary criticism is that? It’s nonsense. What is weak in this thing is not a mismatch with reality. They’re driving toward the claim that every metaphor is a statement about you. Not true. That’s the point. The point is that there are metaphors that do have a relation to reality, just not to reality in its plain sense, not to reality in a prosaic way. It’s not prose; it’s metaphor. Fine? So you have a relation to something, to some sublime dimensions in reality—not to the description itself, but to the meaning of reality, to the feelings it is supposed to arouse in you. Now literature is supposed to educate its children—to refine their feelings—and in distinguishing between good literature and bad literature, they should awaken the right feelings in the face of a sublime waterfall, understand that it is sublime and not merely beautiful. Okay? That’s what you need to educate them toward. And not explain to them that everything is a statement about you. When you say that everything is a statement about you, what you’re really saying is that there is no sublime and no beautiful and nothing—and no literature. There is no literature. There is only factual description and fiction, that’s all there is. Is that teaching literature? It’s simply absurd. The whole point of studying literature is to understand what fiction there is in something true. We’re only talking about fantasies. A true story has to apologize: so we have a true story. Literature is by definition an untrue story, but it comes to tell you something true about reality. It comes to reveal to you some angle of vision that in plain reality probably doesn’t arise. So they depict an imaginary reality through which one can understand it better. Fine. Is your literary criticism of Crime and Punishment that there was no Raskolnikov and he didn’t commit murder? Is that your literary criticism of Crime and Punishment? It just makes your hair stand on end, this stupidity. Fine. He says this: “Until very modern times, let us say. But there is a third and deeper reason”—I’ll finish with this—“a third and deeper reason for the approach of Gaius and Titius from which they watched. It may be that neither of them would have any difficulty admitting that good education ought to build certain feelings and destroy others. It may even be that they tried to do so. But there is no chance that they will succeed. The initiatory aspect of their work—and that aspect alone—will really leave its mark. And one thing they will do. To understand this necessity clearly, we must depart for a moment from the main subject and show what may be called the educational difficulty of Gaius and Titius. Until quite modern times, all teachers and indeed all human beings believed that the universe is such that certain emotional reactions on our part can either fit it or fail to fit it.” In front of such a waterfall it is appropriate to feel humility. Yes, that’s a sublime waterfall. Another waterfall is just a simple waterfall, so it’s beautiful. Fine. But there are waterfalls before which it is fitting to feel sublimity and others before which it is not. That was the view until modern times. What he calls modern, I would today retrospectively call postmodern. Okay? Because we’re talking about the middle of the twentieth century. “Even all human beings believed that the universe…” “They believed, in fact, that things are not merely objects for our positive or negative opinion, for our admiration or our contempt, but can actually deserve them.” That’s what the old-fashioned people once believed. Coleridge agreed with the tourist who called the cataract sublime not because he himself was made that way, but because he understood that such a cataract really deserves feelings of sublimity. And he disagreed with the tourist who called it beautiful because he believed that inanimate nature is such that certain responses can be more right, proper, or fitting to it than others. The sublime is right; the beautiful is wrong. You can say such things even about emotional expressions like sublime and beautiful. And he believed—and rightly—that the tourists thought as he did. Both of them, by the way. One reported sublimity, the other reported beauty. There is an argument here, but both are in fact making a claim about reality, and therefore there is a right and a wrong here. You remember in previous classes I said that if I report a religious feeling and the other person does not report a religious feeling, then we have no dispute. We’re just built differently. If I claim that I believe in God and the other says he does not believe in God, then we have a dispute. So if I understand that a religious feeling reflects the existence of God, then true, I express it by subjective means, through my religious feelings, but I am actually making a claim about the world. Do you understand? What he says here is exactly everything I’ve been talking about for the last three sessions. He also claimed that the object deserves those feelings. Without that claim there would be no basis here for agreement or disagreement. Like in morality—we talked about that, yes? When I say it is immoral to murder, does that mean that it arouses revulsion in me when I see someone murdering? Revulsion with a capital R—when I see someone murder. Then that is basically a claim about me, like these people say. So someone says, fine, and I remain indifferent. I took a pill beforehand, now I’m built differently. Fine. So what does that mean? Does it say something about morality? Nothing. It only says something about how we are built. Fine? By contrast, someone who understands that there is morality and not just emotionality actually wants to claim that there are acts to which it is appropriate to respond with contempt or condemnation or revulsion or something like that, and acts to which it is not. Sometimes we have an argument about whether a particular act is this kind or that kind, and then that’s a dispute. A dispute is legitimate so long as we understand that there is a dispute here. But if the claim is only: for me this arouses revulsion and for you it arouses exaltation, but it’s only a report about me, then we have no dispute. There is no morality, and we have no dispute, and there is nothing. And people don’t understand this. People think it’s enough to speak in subjective language and they can go on arguing. It doesn’t matter, it doesn’t bother them, because in the postmodern world everything is possible. That’s the only thing there is. We’ll argue even though there’s no room for argument. So what? There’s no meaning to a real argument, because there’s no true and false at all. So it’s a kind of world that built whole balloons—books, encyclopedias, series. Oceans of ink have been spilled over nothing. Simply nonsense, nonsense. And it all starts here—this is exactly his criticism. This is even before postmodernism was really born, and he already identifies the buds. Incidentally, that’s a very fine sensitivity. Today it’s easy to see, when it already exists everywhere. He sees it in a literature textbook for eleventh and twelfth grade and understands what’s going to happen here. That was in the first half of the twentieth century. What came out of those textbooks is what we know today. Or let’s say today it’s even retreated a little… let’s say today it’s already retreated a little, but until twenty years ago it was really depressing. Okay, and he saw it when it was only just beginning to take shape. That’s why this criticism is very beautiful. Fine, one can continue, but I won’t continue here, and the rest—go and learn. Afterward he gets into the philosophy of the matter, and this is only the literary description through which he presents the problem, and that is basically what I’ve been talking about until now. So it’s not really a philosophy book, but he certainly deals with the things themselves, not only—
[Speaker D] with their examples.