Faith and Its Meaning – Lesson 4

Table of Contents

• Faith as a factual claim and the toolboxes of justification
• The stages of intellectual maturation: dogmatism, youth, and the crisis of certainty
• Three ways out of the crisis: skepticism, fundamentalism, and synthetic maturity
• The struggle of postmodernism versus fundamentalism and a “dialogue of the deaf”
• Militancy, refusal to accept a non-certain position, and religious authenticity
• The example of the Chief Rabbinate and rabbinic dress as a social mechanism of fundamentalism
• Maimonides in Guide for the Perplexed and the identification of lack of understanding with divinity
• An attempt to justify rational faith and the comfort of “faith as a different sphere”
• Capital punishment, “stoning Sabbath desecrators,” and doubt within the system of Jewish law
• Traditional authenticity, the chain of generations, and the Binding of Isaac as a direct command
• The parable of the blind man and the sighted man and the idea of vision that cannot be proven logically
• The problem of the synthetic a priori: Hume, Kant, and the analytic/synthetic and a priori/a posteriori distinction
• Kant’s solution: phenomena and noumena, and a critique of “throwing out the baby with the bathwater”
• Canceling the dichotomy between thinking and cognition: “the eyes of the intellect” and the capacity for intellectual cognition
• Intuition versus emotion, System 1 and System 2, and thought experiments
• Faith as intuition and as an intellectual faculty, and the implications for the discussion about God

Summary

General Overview

The text presents faith in God as a factual claim and raises the question of how it can be confirmed or refuted, while criticizing the simple distinction between a logical-a-priori “toolbox” and an observational-empirical “toolbox.” It describes a process of intellectual maturation in three tracks—skeptical/postmodern, fundamentalist, and synthetic—and argues that the social struggle between postmodernism and fundamentalism fails because both sides assume that only certainty grants legitimacy. In the end it offers an epistemological solution: there is a capacity for intellectual cognition that is not sensory, “the eyes of the intellect,” identified with intuition and faith as an intellectual faculty, and this is the basis for scientific laws as well as principles like causality and induction.

Faith as a factual claim and the toolboxes of justification

Faith in God is defined as a factual claim, and therefore the question must be asked how one arrives at it and how one confirms or refutes it. The discussion sets up two possible “toolboxes”: a logical-philosophical a priori one versus an observational-empirical-scientific one, but it is argued that the distinction is artificial because science too moves from observations to theory through a mental process of generalization and abduction. The claim is that neither of these tools on its own leads to certainty, and therefore another direction is needed in order to ground faith.

The stages of intellectual maturation: dogmatism, youth, and the crisis of certainty

The stage of childhood is described as dogmatic: a person accepts claims on the basis of authority, such as a parent, teacher, priest, shaman, rabbi, or rebbe. The stage of youth is described as a stage of resistance in which a demand for proof arises, based on the assumption that a rational person accepts only what is proven. The crisis that ends youth comes when it becomes clear that every claim rests on assumptions, and therefore “there is nothing that can really be proven,” and from that a contradiction emerges between “only something certain is acceptable” and “nothing is certain.”

Three ways out of the crisis: skepticism, fundamentalism, and synthetic maturity

The first possibility is “skeptical maturity” or postmodern maturity, which concludes that if there is no certainty then there is no legitimacy, and therefore “everything is narratives” and no truth is preferable to its opposite. The second possibility is “fundamentalist maturity,” which holds on to the demand for certainty and denies the claim that there is no certainty, by means of supra-critical sources that provide certainty, like “whatever the rebbe said.” The third possibility is “synthetic maturity,” which gives up the demand that only certainty grants legitimacy, accepts that there is no absolute certainty, but still accepts positions on the basis of common sense and probability, with a “warning label” and a willingness to withstand criticism and to change one’s position.

The struggle of postmodernism versus fundamentalism and a “dialogue of the deaf”

The public struggle is described as a failure because both sides operate on the same platform, identifying legitimacy with certainty. The postmodernist claims that there is no certainty because there is only ordinary thinking, while the fundamentalist claims that there is certainty from exalted sources, and therefore the pluralist cannot cope with a claim of certainty of a different kind. The conceptual alternative is presented as synthetic maturity, which asks both sides why certainty is needed in the first place, and is offered as a direction that provides an intellectual solution and not just a reaction on the battlefield.

Militancy, refusal to accept a non-certain position, and religious authenticity

The militant positions are described as relativist skeptics and fundamentalists, because both of them “are unwilling to accept something that isn’t certain.” It is argued that religious positions that believe without certainty are rejected by both sides, because anyone who identifies legitimacy with certainty rejects value-based demands that do not come “in the name of certainty.” It is further argued that both in religious society and outside it, rabbinate and religiosity are identified with fundamentalism and with an external framework of dress and style, and that this creates contempt for “toy rabbis” and for religiosity that places itself under criticism.

The example of the Chief Rabbinate and rabbinic dress as a social mechanism of fundamentalism

It is argued that secular people sometimes vote for the “darkest” rabbis because they are seen as “the real rabbis,” while moderate religious figures are viewed as inauthentic. The automatic respect given to black clothing and a hat is described as a social marker representing the expectation of a rabbinic figure who does not speak “in a logical language” and does not stand up to criticism. The author also describes a personal experience in Yeruham, where a deep effort was required in order to take “the Religious Zionists” seriously, and presents this as a cultural barrier parallel to the mechanism of demanding certain authority.

Maimonides in Guide for the Perplexed and the identification of lack of understanding with divinity

Maimonides is presented as describing, in the third part of Guide for the Perplexed, an outlook according to which some people have difficulty giving reasons for the commandments because if the commandments are logical, then “a human being could have come up with them too,” and therefore they want the commandment to be incomprehensible so that it will count as divine. The idea is presented as a direct continuation of the identification of religiosity with lack of criticism and with speech that cannot be understood or debated.

An attempt to justify rational faith and the comfort of “faith as a different sphere”

It is argued that there is a “wonderful agreement” between believers and their attackers that faith “cannot be logical,” and that this position is convenient for both sides because the attacker is exempt from having to engage with it, and the believer is exempt from having to justify it. The author rejects this separation and argues that anyone who adopts factual claims ought to be able to justify them even if there is no certainty. He defines certain types of believers as “atheists with religious experiences” because they give up on justifying factual claims.

Capital punishment, “stoning Sabbath desecrators,” and doubt within the system of Jewish law

It is argued that there is no “one hundred percent” certainty, and therefore anyone who imagines certainty is deceiving himself, and a moral-practical difficulty is raised regarding the extreme implementation of laws such as stoning. It is argued that the Sages refrained from implementing extremity in practice, and the passage in tractate Makkot is cited in which Rabbi Akiva and Rabbi Tarfon say, “Had we been in the Sanhedrin, no person would ever have been executed,” and Rabban Gamliel responds, “They too would increase bloodshedding in Israel.” The claim of the late Aharon Shemesh is mentioned, that capital punishments were never actually implemented and that the laws developed only after there was no longer a Sanhedrin, alongside historical reservations about that claim. The author argues that even if the system commands an extreme action, considerations of expected consequences and doubt about the possibility that the Sages erred in interpretation may prevent carrying it out in practice.

Traditional authenticity, the chain of generations, and the Binding of Isaac as a direct command

The author argues that he is “completely authentic” because a person adopts a position using his own tools, and he has no tools for certainty, and he refuses to identify authentic religiosity with fundamentalism. He places the “chain of generations” within a human framework and argues that the earlier generations too had to cope with the same tools. The Binding of Isaac is presented as a situation of direct divine command in which doubt may disappear, and therefore one cannot judge Abraham our forefather from a situation in which there is no direct revelation.

The parable of the blind man and the sighted man and the idea of vision that cannot be proven logically

A well-known Chabad parable is brought about a blind man and a sighted man who enter a room full of furniture, leave it, and lock it, and later the sighted man enters and claims that the room is empty, while the blind man presents a logical proof that it is impossible that the furniture was removed. The parable illustrates a situation in which “wonderful proofs” do not change the fact perceived by sight, and in which the two sides are unable to convince one another because they operate with different tools of perception.

The problem of the synthetic a priori: Hume, Kant, and the analytic/synthetic and a priori/a posteriori distinction

David Hume is described as an empiricist who limits knowledge to what is directly observed and attacks induction and the principle of causality because they do not arise from observation but from habits of thought. Kant is presented as one who awoke from dogmatic slumber and reformulated the question as the problem of “how synthetic a priori judgments are possible,” while presenting the two axes of a priori/a posteriori and analytic/synthetic, with examples such as “every bachelor is unmarried” as opposed to claims dependent on observation. It is argued that in practice, until Kant only two categories were recognized, and Kant demanded an explanation of how there can be knowledge that adds information but does not rest on direct sensory observation.

Kant’s solution: phenomena and noumena, and a critique of “throwing out the baby with the bathwater”

Kant is presented as distinguishing between the world as it is perceived (phenomena) and the world as it is in itself (noumena), and claiming that science deals with the world as it is perceived through our cognitive structures, and therefore one can make “synthetic a priori” judgments about that structure. Examples are brought from Russell, who says that there is no “yellow color” in the world but rather an electromagnetic wave, and from the Zen riddle about a tree falling with no one there to hear it, in order to show that sound and color are cognitive phenomena. The author rejects Kant’s solution and argues that it is mystical and does not explain why cognitive constraints would prevent us from detecting other possible physical phenomena, and he compares it to an “English-English dictionary” that explains something unclear by means of things that are even less clear.

Canceling the dichotomy between thinking and cognition: “the eyes of the intellect” and the capacity for intellectual cognition

The proposed solution is to deny the assumption that there is a sharp dichotomous separation between thinking and cognition, and to claim that there is a capacity for cognition that is not sensory, in which the intellect “cognizes” and does not merely “think.” Terms such as “the eyes of the intellect” in Maimonides at the beginning of Guide for the Perplexed, “auditory logic” in Rabbi HaNazir, and “eidetic intuition” in Husserl are brought in order to describe direct cognition of relations and principles. It is argued that the principle of causality is grasped in this way, not as merely the product of habit but as something the intellect “sees” in the relation between kicking a ball and its flight, and that someone who denied causation would be seen as someone who needs hospitalization.

Intuition versus emotion, System 1 and System 2, and thought experiments

Intuition is presented as a tool for recognizing reality and not as an emotional feeling, and the example is given of arriving at the mathematical solution “eight” immediately without being able to explain all the stages of inference. It is argued that one does not debate feelings, but one does debate intuition, because there is one correct answer, and therefore intuition is not merely subjective reporting. Daniel Kahneman is brought in with “System 1” and “System 2” to describe fast and slow thinking, including the example of automatic driving, and the claim is that one can reach correct results without explicit calculation. A change in basic assumptions is presented as a move that sometimes happens by means of rhetoric and thought experiments and not only through formal logical inference.

Faith as intuition and as an intellectual faculty, and the implications for the discussion about God

Faith is defined as an intellectual faculty of contemplating reality and drawing factual conclusions at some level of probability, and not as a specific content such as faith in God. It is argued that anyone who dismisses intuition as “emotion” is committing a categorical mix-up, and in doing so slides into absolute skepticism that does not allow even scientific laws to be accepted. It is argued that there is no science without intuition, and therefore one cannot dismiss faith in God merely because it relies on intuition, even though discussion is still required as to whether this intuition is correct or misleading. Trust in intuition is presented as non-fundamentalist because it is not certain and is not immune to criticism, and synthetic maturity is presented as a framework that allows legitimacy without absolute certainty.

Okay, where did we get to last time? First of all, once we reach the conclusion that belief in God is a factual claim, that raises the question of how we arrive at that factual claim, how we confirm it or refute it. There are two possibilities, or two toolboxes, that one might think to use: the a priori toolbox—logical, philosophical, things connected more to thought—and the observational toolbox—the empirical, scientific one—which is connected more, of course, to observations, to interaction with the world. I said there’s apparently a problem here, because neither of those two toolboxes can really lead us to a conclusion, even though the very distinction between those two toolboxes is a bit artificial, because drawing scientific conclusions also doesn’t involve, and doesn’t suffice with, direct observations alone. Anyone who thinks scientific laws are products of observation is living in la-la land. We have a collection of observations that we start from—it’s not detached from observation—but once I have the observations, the path from them to the theory, to the generalization, to the abduction, is really a path of thought. Meaning, it’s by intellectual means, not by observational means. So even what we call the scientific toolbox actually contains elements of thought and not just cognition. Therefore this very division into two toolboxes is a bit problematic.

So how do we nevertheless move toward grounding the claim of faith? To present this issue, at the end of the previous session I described a person’s maturation—his intellectual maturation—as a three-stage process. The first stage is childhood, the dogmatic stage, where a person accepts something because somebody—I don’t know—some authority figure said it: a parent, a teacher, whoever it may be, the shaman, the priest, or the rabbi, or the Rebbe, or whatever. That’s the childish stage.

The second stage, adolescence, is the stage in which some opposing reflex awakens. Meaning, the adolescent basically says to the adult, to that know-it-all: who says so? Prove it. In other words, why—who says that’s true? And the assumption underlying that claim is that a rational person should accept only things that have proof.

Then comes the second crisis, at the end of adolescence. Adolescence is a sandwich between two crisis points. The second crisis point, which closes that stage, is the point at which a person reaches the conclusion that there is nothing that can be proven. Because everything is based on assumptions. So once nothing can be proved, now we’re in a crisis. Why? Because we have two assumptions. One assumption: only something certain is acceptable. Second assumption: nothing is certain. Conclusion: nothing is acceptable. QED.

So what do you do in such a situation? First of all, what do you mean, what do you do? Then nothing is acceptable. Right, that’s what follows from those two claims. And indeed, that is the expected option. I called that skeptical maturation, or if you like, postmodern maturation. A maturation that basically says: right, nothing is acceptable, everything is just narratives, nothing is truer than its opposite. Because in the subtext there’s some expectation that acceptable things should be certain. Usually these worlds of discourse are treated as something very far from logical thinking, from logic, from systematicity. But the opposite is true. A skeptical, postmodern, relativistic world is a world based on too high a logical bar, not on ignoring logic. It’s a bar that says: only something that is certain, completely logical, entirely certain, am I willing to accept. But since there is no such thing, we arrive at these relativistic worlds, these narrative worlds of various kinds. It begins with a very strong demand for certainty—saying that without certainty we are unwilling to accept things.

So that’s the first form of maturation, the one that adopts both assumptions. The second form of maturation is giving up the assumption that nothing is certain. True, only something certain is acceptable—but it is not true that nothing is certain. We can attain certainty. How? After all, observation doesn’t give us certainty, and neither do logic or philosophy. We said there are two toolboxes, and neither really does the job. So how do we nevertheless reach the longed-for certainty? For that we have fundamentalism, right? Basically, for that we have all-knowing, exalted sources—go back again to all the previous examples: the priest, the shaman, the rabbi, the Rebbe, whatever, whoever they may be—sources that are supposedly above critical thought. They can give us certainty and everything is fine, we’ve solved the problem. It is true that only something certain is acceptable, but it is not true that nothing is certain. There are certain things. Whatever the Rebbe said. Okay? That’s certain enough for me, and therefore I accept it. That is fundamentalist maturation.

I said fundamentalism in the philosophical sense: placing some principles beyond critical thought, meaning an unwillingness to subject them to intellectual criticism. Okay? It’s as if they’re above criticism. It’s the place where philosophy ends and faith begins, or all kinds of nonsense of that sort. Those are basically fundamentalist conceptions.

The third maturation is of course giving up the assumption that only something certain is acceptable. Meaning, I stay with the claim that nothing is certain—the second assumption I accept—but I give up the first assumption. The first assumption says that only something certain is acceptable. No, I am willing to accept things that are not certain. It’s enough that common sense tells me so, enough that it seems reasonable to me, for me to accept it. Of course, I’ll accept it with a warning label. I accept it together with a note on the side: but I’m not sure. Meaning, it could be that I’m mistaken, and I’m willing to hear different arguments that show me I’m mistaken. Okay? I’m willing to change my mind, I do subject things to intellectual criticism. Okay? That’s exactly the difference. Meaning, I am willing to adopt things; I don’t claim that if something isn’t certain then it’s arbitrary and I have nothing to say about it. No, I do have something to say about it. I think it’s true, but it’s true in the sense that, for me, it stands open to intellectual criticism because I’m not sure. I have a certain position; someone else may come and enlighten me and show me that I was mistaken, and then I really do have to be honest enough to retract. Meaning, I accept things, but not in a fundamentalist way—that is, not with certainty.

So there is not accepting anything, there is accepting things in an absolutely fundamentalist way, and there is accepting things but not in a fundamentalist way. That is what I called synthetic maturation. Okay?

Now, I said that the struggle taking place today—even in the world, yes, you can see it with your own eyes—between postmodernism, pluralism, it has various names, and obviously not everyone is exactly at the core of what could be called postmodernism, but society as a whole is heavily influenced by the postmodern approach, even societies that wouldn’t define themselves exactly that way—and it is fighting against fundamentalism in various places. It’s not succeeding. It’s not succeeding because these two positions that are fighting one another sit on the same platform. They both agree that only something certain is acceptable. Their dispute is only over whether there are certain things or not. You think there aren’t, because as far as you’re concerned there is only philosophy, logic, yes, our ordinary thinking. The fundamentalists say: no, we have some exalted sources, and we can reach certainty by other paths. A pluralist can’t really cope with such a claim. Fine, if you have such sources, I don’t know them, I wasn’t privileged to bask in their light—but if you have such sources, I have nothing to say to you. Okay? If it’s certain, then what can I do?

And therefore this war is doomed to be a dialogue of the deaf. And the philosophical alternative—again, I’m not talking right now in terms of weapons and physical wars, who will win on the battlefield. Even the pluralist, in the end, if he is in danger, he will fight. When we’re in danger he doesn’t care, but if he’s in danger he’ll fight. Okay? He’ll fight—why? To defend himself, not because he is right and the other side is wrong, but in order to defend himself: I want to stay alive. Fine—interest. That is not a value-based or ideological dispute, however you want to call it.

The way to deal with this on the philosophical-ideological level—not in war on the battlefield—is synthetic maturation. Synthetic maturation says: why do you think only something certain is acceptable? And that, I claim, against the postmodern relativist. And I claim exactly the same against the fundamentalist: why do you think you need to resort to all kinds of dubious sources because you need certainty? No—who said certainty is necessary? I am willing to make do with things that are common sense. I do not require certainty in order to accept things. Meaning, there is something here that pushes back against both conceptions that confront one another and can’t really decide the matter, and there is some alternative here that offers something on the level of thought too, not only on the battlefield. Okay? And in that sense, maybe one could say, in a certain sense, that it is a peace solution.

By the way, I think you can see that the most militant positions in the world today are either the skeptical relativists—who are very combative and militant, which is a bit paradoxical but that’s the fact—or the fundamentalists, of course. Right? Because they both basically refuse to accept anything that isn’t certain. So anyone who acts according to some value that isn’t certain—religious people, but not fundamentalists for example, in our world—the skeptics will go to war against him. Because what right do you have to speak? Those are just your hallucinations. Live and let live, as they say. Meaning, in a kind of ironic reversal, they themselves become very fundamentalist when the value they cling to is the absence of values, or the absence of truths, if you like. And the fundamentalists—there’s no need to spell out that they are in fact extreme and violent.

And in a certain sense, by the way, it’s not only in the sense of ISIS and murders and terrible wars and so on. Let’s look even within our own little field, our own little garden—the religious world. Even in the religious world and around it, you have exactly the same forces, just with less violence. They don’t kill each other yet—I mean the Jewish religious world. But yes, you have the same forces there. You have the violent ones from both directions. And I think the third alternative is not sufficiently on the table. The alternative that says: look, I think—my common sense tells me—there is a God, the Torah is binding, I don’t know exactly what, I have certain values and so on. I can’t tell you that for me this is certain, but I still think it is true and I want to promote those values. That’s not a claim that will be accepted so readily.

Meaning, you can live inside your own vacuum and do whatever pops into your head, as long as you don’t claim that it’s true and demand that others behave that way too, right? No problem—that will be respected. Do whatever you want, dance a hora in your house on one foot with a turban on your head, no problem, you can do whatever you want. But when you go outside and say no, no, I also believe in this, I want to promote these values—that, no. That position is not accepted. And when I say it’s not accepted, I mean first and foremost in the philosophical sense. It is not accepted because they really identify acceptability with certainty. Meaning, if you’re not coming in the name of certainty, then what do you want at all?

As for the fundamentalists, I have no argument with them—we just need to defend ourselves because they’ll kill us. But I understand what they want. Meaning, they’re sure they’re right in their hallucinations—but they are sure they’re right. We have to fight them and defend ourselves against them, but I understand the thesis. Okay? Precisely the positions that do not hold certainty but do believe things are positions that are not really understood by either side. Meaning: what are you playing games for? If you’re not sure, then you’re not really religious. Right? Meaning, you don’t really believe. So why are you making demands? Do whatever you want in your own house. What do you want from me? Okay?

There’s something here—I’ve often found myself talking with people: why are the darkest rabbis always chosen for the Chief Rabbinate? Right? What causes that amusing process? Amusing and irritating. Amusing if you don’t encounter it directly. Usually people say: well, it’s a political constellation, coalition politics. That’s a mistake, my friends. That’s not it. People choose them because those are the real rabbis; the others are toy rabbis. Meaning, if someone is religious, wears a long coat, and is dark enough—he’s a real rabbi. Now I’ll fight with him, I’ll scream that he’s coercing me, everything—but he’s a rabbi. Meaning, the rabbi who was with me in the paratroopers with sandals and a knitted kippah like that—that’s not really a rabbi, that’s a toy. I’m not going to vote for him to be chief rabbi, right? The summit of the world chief rabbinate—we’re not going to put some clown like that in such a magnificent institution. So that’s the reason secular people always vote for the darkest people—or part of the reason. It’s a generalization, but part of the reason.

You can see it, by the way—examine yourselves too. When you encounter someone with a long coat and a hat and so on, immediately it’s “honorable rabbi,” immediately “honorable rabbi.” But if someone comes with a knitted kippah and sandals and so on, he may be ten levels above that other guy, but fine—he was my counselor in Bnei Akiva, meaning it’s not real, right? Some toy rabbi. That is an external social representation of what I described earlier. Meaning, a more open position, a position willing to subject its conceptions to critical thought—that’s not authentic, that’s not truly Jewish, you’re not really a rabbi, okay, you’re playing the game, but you’re not real.

And this is deeply ingrained in all of us, and certainly outside the religious world, and also within the religious world. It’s very, very deep. It’s hard to break free of it. Look, I—what? Yes, exactly, or how he is perceived, the framework in which he appears. Clothing is an expression of it, but it has to be some other kind of world, a fundamentalist kind of world, not one with critical thought. If you speak my language, then I know you’re talking nonsense. Meaning, it has to be someone who speaks in some language I don’t know, who comes from somewhere else.

I can say this about myself: when I got to Yeruham, I came from Bnei Brak to Yeruham to teach in the yeshiva there, okay? It took me a very long time—as someone who came from the Religious Zionist world, I grew up there, I know it very well—okay? As someone who came from that world, when I arrived in Yeruham it was very hard for me. I had to work on myself very, very hard in order to be willing to hear things from Mizrahniks. What—they can sit in my class, it doesn’t matter how smart they are, and it doesn’t matter—they can’t really be Torah scholars in the full sense. So they could sit in the front row of my class or the third row, but that’s all—that’s the upper limit. Meaning, to relate seriously to someone like that requires very deep work. And this—you have to understand—goes very deep. It’s not easy to free yourself from it.

And not for nothing do people always talk about rabbinic dress, and judges are required to wear hats and all that nonsense. Why? Because that’s how people relate to the figure of the rabbi. It’s very hard for you—a person can be absolutely outstanding, a great scholar, righteous, whatever you want—but if he doesn’t appear within that external framework that is usually associated in our minds with rabbis, fine, he’s nice, he’s a good person, everything’s fine—he’s not really a rabbi. Rabbi has to be something dark, black, ultra-conservative, says nonsense to the point that you can’t even understand what he wants, and he himself doesn’t understand what he wants—that’s a real rabbi. Not someone who just says sensible things—that’s not a rabbi.

It’s just like Maimonides writes in the third part of Guide for the Perplexed. It’s exactly like that—understand, I’m not joking, I’m being completely serious. Maimonides writes there that there are those who find it difficult to give reasons for the commandments. Why? Because if the commandments are rational, then a human being could also have done them. And if it’s rational, I too could have told you to do the commandment this way and not another way. In what sense is this a divine creation? A divine creation has to be only something that is absurd, worthless, and impossible to understand—otherwise it’s not a divine creation. Right? It’s exactly the same idea.

Right—can we add “worthless” to that too? Again? That it’s worthless and impossible to understand? No—if you’re not talking nonsense, then you’re not really religious. You’re speaking logically, people can argue with you—no, then you’re not truly religious. A real religious person has to come from, I don’t know, the mountains of Hermon. That’s where my truth comes from—fundamentalism. Meaning, they identify religiosity with fundamentalism. Okay? Deep, deep down. I’m not talking about fundamentalism in the sense of beheading people—that’s not the point. The point is that religiosity is something that isn’t supposed to stand up to critical thought. That’s the point. Because if it does, then that’s philosophy. So he has one philosophy, and the other guy has a different philosophy, so you have a religious philosophy. So what? That’s not religious. Religious is something else. It doesn’t play on the philosophical field. As everyone knows, where philosophy ends, faith begins, right? We all know that. All those who can’t justify their views—that’s the refuge, the refuge of the fool.

At any rate, this conception basically hides, or does not allow, synthetic maturation to appear, because it isn’t on the map. On the map, the fundamentalists and the pluralists are constantly grappling, and if someone tries to insert some statement of a different kind—it doesn’t work. You’re not taken seriously. You’re not really perceived. So now I want to return to my example in order to move further, but maybe just one final sentence on this point: everything we do from here on will be some attempt to justify faith in a rational, intellectual, systematic form that stands up to critical thought. That in itself is already a step that a great many people will regard as illegitimate. Both inside the religious world and outside it, by the way. Meaning, there is a wonderful agreement between the believers and those who attack them that this cannot be rational. It’s very convenient for both sides. Those who attack say: fine, it’s irrational, I’m exempt from dealing with it. And those who defend, and have no arguments with which to defend—it’s irrational, I don’t need to defend it, everything is fine, and I’m exempt from bringing arguments. This escape route is very convenient for both sides, the escape route that says no, faith is its own sphere, it’s something else. I already said what I think about believers of that sort: many of them are atheists with religious experiences.

In the end, when I adopt factual claims, I am supposed to be able to justify them. Now justify them—fine, there are assumptions, everything is good, but I’m not claiming there will be certainty here. But yes, to justify them in some way, and that brings me to the next step. Five—I did mention this last time, let’s say yes. But at least our position here demands irrelevant implications, and at a certain point you say: I have to say I don’t have certainty. That’s a very, very high bar. And I rule on Sabbath desecrators—that’s hard for people.

Okay, so I’ll answer you with a few things about that. First of all, examine yourself first of all whether for you it’s a hundred percent real or seventy percent real. Leave the implications aside for now. Meaning, if it’s seventy percent for you, then you convince yourself it’s a hundred percent so that you’ll be able to stone Sabbath desecrators—fine, I won’t succeed, what can I do, that’s the truth. Now if you say it’s a hundred percent, in my opinion you’re deceiving yourself. Maybe it’s convenient, but you’re deceiving yourself, because there is no hundred percent. That’s one thing.

Second, I want to argue that the Sages did not refrain from carrying out these extreme things in practice for no reason. All the sublimations about killing Amalekites and a destructive Sanhedrin once in seventy years and so on—that didn’t come for no reason. It comes exactly because of this issue. “The congregation shall rescue”—and there are verses and everything is true—but we all know where it comes from. It comes from that same place where you are not really prepared to carry it out in practice.

Aharon Shemesh, of blessed memory, was here—a Talmud scholar. He wrote a book on capital punishment. I haven’t read the book, but at first glance it seems odd to me—he claimed that capital punishments were never actually implemented. These are things that developed in the Talmud long after there was no longer a Sanhedrin and no capital punishments. So suddenly all these laws of capital punishment were born, and in the study hall we can stone everyone. But when you actually have to do it, you don’t really do it. There is some truth to that. Again, I don’t know whether he’s historically right. It seems a bit suspicious to me; I even have a few pieces of evidence against it. I haven’t read the book, so I don’t know. But there is something there.

On the other hand, there is the Talmud at the end of the first chapter of Makkot, I think. The Talmud says there that Rabbi Akiva and Rabbi Tarfon say: if we had been in the Sanhedrin, no person would ever have been put to death. There, regarding the Sanhedrin… Exactly. So Rabban Gamliel says to them: then you would increase bloodshed in Israel. What’s the difference? Rabbi Akiva was the son of converts. He didn’t sit in the Sanhedrin; he sat in the study hall. In the study hall, everything is excellent—“the congregation shall rescue,” the ultimate rescuer saves everyone. But you know that if you save everyone and don’t punish murderers, it’s not worth being around here. Okay, so Rabban Gamliel says: look, I’m the head of the Sanhedrin, I have responsibility. With all due respect to your subtle arguments, I’m not in the study hall; I have to decide. That’s the other side of the coin. The other side says you can’t do without capital punishment—but yes, we will restrict it only to cases that really…

Now of course there are witnesses and warning and acceptance of warning, and that makes it nearly impossible. I say: anyone who already got past the witnesses and warning and acceptance of warning is exempt by reason of insanity. Meaning, obviously you can’t kill him—he’s simply not sane. So this is a system that destroys itself. It’s not really implementable. If it was implemented, I don’t know how. That’s point number two.

And I said there’s also a third point, and this is my own personal point, but it seems to me that anyone who is honest with himself will have to admit it too, I think. Since I am not one hundred percent sure of the system, even if the system tells me to stone some Sabbath desecrator, I’m not sure I would do it. I’m not sure I would do it because in the end I make my own utility calculations—we’ll talk about utility calculations—but I make my own utility calculations, and I say: look, there is a chance that this whole story is not true. Especially something not written explicitly in the Torah but only interpreted by the Sages in some way, or expounded by them in some way. The Sages were human beings—they could make mistakes, and apparently they did use that ability more than once. Okay, so if that’s the case, are you going to kill a person—or die yourself, by the way, same thing—for what? For something you are not one hundred percent sure about? I’m not sure I’d do it.

There is the famous myth of the Chasid Yaavetz. They educate people on this in Bnei Brak—I still remember my cheerful days in Bnei Brak. There was some big myth there in praise of simple-mindedness and ignorance. Why? Because in the Expulsion from Spain, the Chasid Yaavetz recounts there that the common folk stood the test triumphantly, while the Torah scholars found loopholes and somehow got around it and didn’t pay the price. They didn’t go into exile, but somehow—I don’t know what—they did some circus act and managed somehow. I wrote about this on my website too. I don’t know what is so praiseworthy about ignoramuses for being ignoramuses. Meaning, the fact that you don’t know there are loopholes does not make you… more stupid. Meaning, it’s true that someone smarter withstands certain tests that the boor cannot withstand. Okay? And maybe he also fails. But that doesn’t mean I glorify ignorance. Fine, so I have to see how I stand up to tests as a person who is not ignorant.

How do you see this claim in relation to when people say: listen, you’re not authentic? Meaning, when people speak about the Torah received at Sinai, you can no longer judge it. I’m completely authentic. When a person adopts a position, he adopts it with his own tools, and these are my tools. I have no tools with which to reach certainty. I don’t know why that’s not authentic. Once again, you are expressing that same conception that says only a fundamentalist can be authentically religious. I do not accept that. The chain of generations—I claim that even in the second and third and fourth generation, not only in the fiftieth generation or however far down someone is, I would have had to do the same thing. And the whole chain too—I disqualify the whole chain, not only its final link. What do I mean disqualify? I place it within a human framework. You can convince me a hundred thousand times that I should be convinced, but I’m not. I’m a human being. A human being cannot be convinced like that. So what are all these stories? I am the true traditional continuation—that’s what I claim. Those who deceive themselves are continuing nothing.

No—they got a direct command from the Holy One, blessed be He. It may be that in such a situation I too would do it. It’s like the criticism of Abraham our forefather. There are those who want to claim he failed the test of the binding because he should have refused the command. Okay? Now, that is of course total nonsense in the exegetical sense, because the Torah itself praises him—“now I know,” and so on. It’s nonsense in tomato juice. But the question really is: why not? And the answer is that if I were to receive a direct divine command—I’ve never been in such a situation—maybe then I really would have no doubts and I would do it as is, perfectly fine. I don’t criticize anyone who is in a situation that I’m not in.

He tells me: look, I’m telling you—it’s like an example I once heard from a Chabad returnee. There are sensible things you can hear from those directions from time to time. He was with us in Yeruham. I hosted him; Rabbi Blumentzweig wasn’t yet in the yeshiva then. So—yes, otherwise I wouldn’t have been anywhere near there. In any case, he spoke there in the study hall, said various things. I still remember his parable—a parable I use a lot. He says: let’s say two people, a blind man and a sighted man, enter a room, and the sighted one sees that it is packed with furniture. They feel around, see, everything is fine. Okay? There are no entrances or exits in the room, a sealed room. Fine? They go outside, lock the door, sit with two chairs by the door. After an hour the sighted one enters the room, opens the door, goes in, and says: Yankele, you won’t believe it—there isn’t a single piece of furniture in the room. The room is empty. So Berel the blind man says to him: Yankele, you’re talking nonsense. An hour ago the room was full of furniture, right? There’s no entrance or exit to the room. Okay? We sat by the door, right? I was sitting on his grave, as they say. Meaning, nobody entered and nobody left. Okay? Therefore the room is still full of furniture. QED. Right? That’s it. I have a clear and certain logical proof. What can Yankele do with that? Nothing. He says: I see that the room is empty. Why are you talking nonsense to me? You have wonderful proofs, but I see the room is empty. Okay? Now neither of them will convince the other. Why? Because you don’t have the tools to see what I see, because you’re blind. Fine. And you have a logical proof, and I can’t demand that you go against your logic—but I’m telling you that I see.

There are situations in which—I was never a prophet, to my sorrow, and I was never in a situation in which the Holy One, blessed be He, spoke to me. So I have no way of judging Abraham our forefather for what he did, or how he related to a revelation from the Holy One, blessed be He, who told him things directly. I can tell him: listen, you should have refused the command, or you should have doubted—yes, there are such questions from Kierkegaard and others; they also appear in our commentators—who told you this was even true? Maybe some demon got into you or something. After all, there are many logical proofs that this cannot be. “Through Isaac shall your seed be called”—if I kill him now, how will the divine promise be fulfilled? And what about morality—that I’m expected to act morally, and now the Holy One, blessed be He, tells me simply to kill my son for no reason, when he did nothing? That’s blatantly irrational. So he has wonderful logical proofs that this is obviously some deceiving demon, right? It can’t be revelation. But he experienced divine revelation, and apparently it was clear to him that it was not that. I have never experienced that, so he won’t be able to explain it to me, but I understand how he himself could arrive at such conduct. Okay?

And over the last three hundred years, everyone fell, rose—also fell. The Jewish people remained. How do you see that? How is that connected to what I said? What do you mean, how do I see it? I see it as a historical fact that the Jewish people remained. What am I supposed to do with that fact? It’s logical—it’s a fact. What do you mean logical? It’s a fact. Is the principle of certainty logical? It is usually perceived as contradicting ordinary logic. I think that’s not true, but that’s how it’s usually perceived. Fine—but that’s the fact. What can you do? Like the blind man and the sighted man: the room is empty of furniture. You have marvelous proofs, but the room is empty. What can I do? But how does that bear on what I said earlier? Ephraim at the time said that the fact that there is—well, I too was in Bnei Akiva. Okay, and also Kishon’s “knitted kippah,” his article. Okay, so what am I supposed to do with that? So he said, fine.

In any case, I haven’t even gotten into divine involvement and so on. Fine, that’s another issue. It may be that there is, and that the Holy One, blessed be He, saved us from their hands, and everything is excellent, and the miracles of October seventh have already been discussed at length, and all kinds of things like that. Fine, okay, I’m not getting into that. I’m speaking right now on the purely, purely principled level. Fine. The miracles of the Holocaust too—there are lots of miracles we’ve gone through over the course of history.

In any case, the claim is that there is still a real question here that we need to answer. And what is that question? Now I return to the regular line of thought—close all the parentheses. When the adolescent asks his father, right, “Who told you? Prove it.” So what—let’s say his father is synthetically mature, okay? What does the father say to him? “I have no proof, but my common sense tells me this is how it is.” Okay? What will the adolescent say to him? “Your common sense is crooked,” right? “Your common sense is in crooked coordinates; a straight line in crooked coordinates is crooked.” So what exactly is happening here?

What is happening here—I think I said this last time too—is that the adolescent is really asking the adult, or interpreting the adult, in light of the stages in his own biography that he has gone through. And what has he gone through? He has gone through dogmatic childhood and adolescence, right? He sees the adult who tells him, “Listen, it’s like this because this is what is true.” Ah—you’re still stuck at the dogmatic stage. Meaning, you just accept things because someone dictated that they are true. But I’m a rational person; I’m not going to be an idiot like you. So I wait for things to be proven to me, and whatever is proved I accept, and whatever isn’t, I don’t. Meaning, he cannot accept a synthetic statement from the adult; he has not yet gone through that process of ripening himself, okay? So he won’t accept it. He just sees it as dogmatism.

On the other hand, his question is a good question. So what, then? So what if my common sense tells me, right? As Mark Twain was mentioned here—Mark Twain also said, “What does the world owe you? It was here first.” Meaning, the fact that you think the world should behave in a certain way—fine, that’s what you think, so what? That’s how you’re built. Why do you assume that the world thinks that way too, that it behaves that way? Meaning, the fact that your common sense says something means nothing. You’re just calling that man’s hallucinations “common sense.” Okay, it’s a matter of labeling. Why should I accept that?

That question is a good question, and we need to give it a real answer, not just say: well, I’m synthetically mature, so everything is fine—I gave it a name and got out alive. You have no proof. If you have proof, fine, I understand. If you don’t have proof—right? You don’t accept revelations of Elijah, so why would you accept this? Because your common sense says so? Fine, because that’s how you’re built. Right? And I say the same thing about myself too, says the child. We are built in a certain way—but why does the world owe us anything? Who said that the way we think is really what happens? After all, you have no proof. That is basically what lies behind the child’s claim.

Now what is the answer to such a thing? The answer is not so simple, and I’ll first expand the question before I explain what I think, at least, the answer is. And it really touches directly on our topic. This is basically parallel to a philosophical question that exists quite apart from beliefs and the Holy One, blessed be He, and all that, but in a more general form, as I’ve described things until now. This is the problem Kant calls the problem of the synthetic a priori.

What does that mean? There’s a book by Hugo Bergmann called Introduction to Epistemology. In the ninth chapter there he calls it “the rationality of the world”—in that old-fashioned Hebrew. Some kind of logic of the world, or the rational infrastructure on which the world is built, something like that. In that chapter he surveys all the answers given throughout history to this question and in the end leaves it as “needs further study.” We always have this feeling that with philosophy you can’t draw any conclusions: this one says this and that one says that, and each philosopher has his own conceptions. I think that’s a mistake. There are many issues in philosophy in which you can reach conclusions. The fact that several people said nonsense—fine, they said nonsense, so what? If someone wrote something, does that make it a possible philosophical position? The fact that someone wrote it still doesn’t mean it’s true or logical.

In any case, there you can see that he goes through all the possible answers and rejects them all. Fine—that itself is suggestive, because it means there’s a question here such that if I find another answer, one that cannot be rejected in his ways, then I have proof for it. Because all the other alternatives have been ruled out. Okay? So here is an example of an issue, a method—a philosophical method—for reaching conclusions.

At any rate, what is the question? The question is basically as follows: David Hume, who as is known was a fanatical and convinced empiricist, said that the only way to reach conclusions about the world, factual claims about the world, is the observational route. Anything that is not observational… Mark Twain, yes, who lived after him of course, says: “The world owes you nothing; it was here first.” Meaning, the fact that you think this way doesn’t mean the world behaves this way. Okay? That is basically what he is claiming: only what you have seen.

Now, of course, solipsists will say: so what if you saw it? Maybe your eyes deceive you altogether. Fine, let’s leave those skeptical questions aside. So he said, therefore—for example, do you understand? Empiricism is often perceived as some approach that broadens the realm of knowledge. Whatever we observe we can believe. But in fact empiricism is mainly a restricting position, not an expanding one. Anything that is not direct observation we cannot accept. That is really what underlies empiricist thinking. It comes to negate, not to expand.

Now let’s see what it negates. David Hume was honest enough to put his finger on many things that empiricism negates, so that you are left with very few things you can actually hold onto. Because very few things can I say I have seen or observed in an immediate way. If we look at the laws of nature, for example, no law of nature has ever been observed directly. We may have observed particular applications of it. We see that this fell to the ground and that fell to the ground. Who said that all massive objects fall to the earth? Has anyone observed that general law? Has anyone ever seen the force of gravity? We may see the law of gravity, but the force of gravity—that is, this object that exists in the world and causes gravitational attraction? That is our hypothesis, that there is such a force. We haven’t seen it. What we see is the phenomenon of attraction. Never mind—that may have implications for betrothal, but I still ask whether it is true or not. I’m allowed to ask. I think it matters too, but that’s not my point here.

Therefore David Hume said, for example, that you cannot really accept the laws of nature. Or in later language, the laws of nature are statements about us, not about nature. They are the way we choose to organize the facts known to us. The most convenient and efficient way for us to organize the facts—but we aren’t really claiming… scientific theory is not really seen as a claim about the world. Okay? Because truly, it’s not something we arrived at by direct observation. Observation is always observation of a particular case. When you derive a general law from it, you cannot anchor that in observation. We said earlier that the scientific toolbox includes non-observational elements as well. And this is exactly what David Hume does not accept.

So the two principles that were especially targeted by David Hume were, first, the principle of causality, and second, induction. Let’s start with induction. Scientific induction is the view that says that if we have seen a number of examples, we can generalize on their basis. We can say that it will also happen in other cases that we haven’t yet seen. And David Hume asks: and from where do you get that? The fact that you’ve seen something until now—does that mean it will continue in the future, or that it is always true? Where did you get that from? Because you are used to making inductions; that’s how you are built. But the world owes you nothing; it was here first. The fact that you are used to thinking this way still doesn’t mean it is true. Okay? Therefore he basically does not accept the principle of induction. He claims it is our methodological tool, but not really an instrument for arriving at claims about the world. Okay? I do not stand behind my scientific generalizations; I just see them as some tool I’m used to using, and since I have nothing better, I use it. That’s one claim.

By the way, there are attempts to justify induction—maybe this came up here, I don’t remember, it came up in one of the classes at some point—to justify induction by saying: after all, it has always worked until now, or often it has worked until now, so it is probably true. Do you understand that we are using induction in order to validate the principle of induction? Meaning, if it has worked until now, then it is probably always true. Now that—yes—that is not logical. Fine, so you cannot use the principle you want to prove in order to prove itself. Begging the question—we talked about that. So that is one principle Hume attacked.

The second principle is the principle of causality. Hume basically claimed that we assume that everything has a cause. Right? That is the principle of causality. When we see a concrete event—say, someone kicks a ball and the ball flies—we assume that the kick was the cause of the ball’s flying. So that is a specific assumption about a particular case. We have the general philosophical assumption that everything has a cause, and we have the diagnosis of a specific case—that if we kicked the ball and the ball flew, then the kick was the cause of the ball’s flight. Okay? That is a diagnosis of a particular case. Both of these are expressions of the principle of causality.

David Hume says: this does not emerge from observation in any way. When you see that I kicked the ball and then the ball flew, you did not see that my kick caused the ball to fly. What you saw was that first I kicked it and then it flew. Right? That is what we saw, if we stick to what was directly observed. Everything else is interpretation that we give. We assume that the kick was the cause of the ball. Maybe we saw this in other cases too, and then we already make a generalization from it, which takes us back to induction. Therefore, in the end, says David Hume, the causal assumption is an assumption we bring from home. It is not the result of direct observation, and therefore he did not accept it. He argued that there is really no such thing as a causal relation, but we are used to thinking that way, so we use those concepts and those thinking tools.

So those are the two positions Hume attacked, but through them he in a certain sense collapsed almost everything we know about the world—except things we have directly observed. For example: that when I dropped this thing yesterday at ten in the morning, it fell to the ground. Notice—not that if this thing is dropped it falls to the ground, but that yesterday at ten in the morning, when I dropped it, it fell to the ground, because that I saw. Any generalization whatsoever—I’m not even talking about all massive objects—even about this object. What will happen to it today? I don’t know, let’s see. We’ll try and see, and then once again we’ll know only what we saw. We won’t know what is expected to happen. Okay? That is basically the claim.

So there is a very big crisis here in philosophy of science, and in philosophy in general, in epistemology, but also in the philosophy of science. And then Kant comes and says that Hume awakened him from his dogmatic slumber. Right? Meaning, he had basically been used to treating these things as self-evident, and suddenly Hume said: wait a second, there is something here that requires justification. Meaning, how do you rely on these assumptions of causality, induction—or in other words, how do you trust your own mind? You should rely only on observations. Anything beyond direct observation—what? Rely on what? What do you mean? Rely on something you did not see, whereas what you did see was that what happened indeed happened. Right, that too, fine, okay. Know—don’t call it “rely,” call it “know.” He says: you know—if you bet with someone, or what difference it makes for betrothal, right?—if you bet with someone that yesterday morning when I dropped this it fell to the ground, then you won the bet. On that you can rely. Fine?

Now let’s talk about induction regarding the truth value of the statement. Yesterday its truth value was true—who said that today it continues to be true? Fine. In any case, Kant basically put the matter on the table and understood how deep this crisis is in epistemology. Now, I told you, this is the question posed by David Hume. Kant reformulated it, and he formulated it like this. He divided the claims in the world along two axes: the epistemic axis and the logical axis.

On the epistemic axis—that is, epistemic means how I know the thing, epistemology is the theory of knowledge—okay?—there are a priori and a posteriori claims. What does that mean? A priori claims are claims that come before observation. I can know them even without observation. Okay? Claims like: every bachelor is unmarried. “Every bachelor is unmarried”—I don’t need to check this bachelor’s marital status in order to know that he has no wife. Because if he is a bachelor, then he is unmarried. That is an a priori claim. Then there is an a posteriori claim: every bachelor is six feet tall. Okay? Maybe false in this case, but never mind—that is an a posteriori claim. To know it, to know whether it is true or not, you need to make observations. Okay? So that is an a posteriori claim. That is one division, a division on the epistemic level, in how I know that the claim is true: whether observation is needed, or whether it can be known even without observation.

There is another division on the logical level. The logical division divides claims according to their content. There are analytic claims and synthetic claims. Analytic claims—“decomposing” claims, in Hebrew—are claims that follow from analysis of the concepts involved in them. For example: every bachelor is unmarried. “Every bachelor is unmarried” is an analytic claim. Why? Because how do I know that he isn’t married? I analyze the concept bachelor. Once I analyze the concept bachelor, I understand that the claim that this bachelor is unmarried is a true claim. Fine? So it is not only a priori, it is also analytic.

By contrast, “every bachelor is six feet tall” is a synthetic claim. Why? Because it does not follow from analysis of the concepts involved. Analyzing the concept bachelor does not reveal that he must be six feet tall. Or: this ball is round—that’s an analytic claim. And: this ball is heavy—that’s a synthetic claim. Right? Because it doesn’t follow from its being a ball. I need to observe and see, or know in some other way, but there is additional information here.

Now let’s formulate it this way: an analytic claim is a claim that does not add information. Everything in it is already contained within the definition of the concepts that compose it. A synthetic claim is a claim that adds information. Okay? It contains information beyond what is embedded in the definition of the concepts.

Now—what? Yes? No, there is no information there. No—you know it; you just didn’t know that you know it. Because if you don’t know it, then even after they present you with the solution you won’t understand it. The solution to a math problem merely reveals, takes you to the point where you understand that you really already knew it beforehand. You didn’t find it—we talked about this one of the previous times.

Now, on the face of it, these two divisions—I’m doing this really briefly and telegraphically, but I think the main points can be understood—on the face of it these are two independent divisions. One division concerns the structure of the sentence: whether the sentence is the result of analyzing the concepts, or whether it contains additional information beyond what is embedded in the definition of the concepts. The second division concerns how I know the sentence—it is not connected to the structure of the sentence. It is the question of how I know it. Do you follow? Like the distinction between truth and certainty. Truth concerns the statement itself; certainty concerns me. The question is: at what level of reliability do I know the statement? If with certainty, then I know it one hundred percent. The question whether the statement is true and the question whether it is certain to me are two questions that have nothing to do with each other. A statement can be true and I either don’t know it or I know it without certainty, but it is still completely true. Fine? By the way, a statement can also be false and I know it—even know it with certainty—only I am mistaken. Fine? One is a claim about me, and one is a claim about the statement itself.

So these two divisions that Kant makes—this is his own analysis—these two divisions are divisions on axes that are independent. If they are divisions on independent axes, then how many groups should there be? Four. Right? There should be a statement that is analytic a priori, analytic a posteriori, synthetic a priori, and synthetic a posteriori. Right? Two independent divisions.

One moment, I haven’t gotten there yet. I need preliminaries—this is Kant, he’s German. You have to grind through a lot of water before you get to the question that interests you. Sometimes too much water. So the claim is that there should be four groups. Now it turns out in practice, if you check, that there are only two. Every analytic claim is a priori, and vice versa; and therefore every synthetic claim is a posteriori, and vice versa. Try to think of a claim that is analytic but not a priori. There is no such thing, right? An analytic claim is one that follows from its concepts. You don’t need observation to know it—you just have to analyze the concepts. Right? So by definition it is a priori. And conversely, can an a priori claim be synthetic? No. Because if it were synthetic, that would mean it contains additional information, so how do I know it a priori without observation? That means it cannot be.

Therefore, Kant says, until his time these two divisions were treated as one division—or two aspects of one division. This is the epistemic aspect and this is the logical aspect, but it is one division. Basically, statements in the world were divided into two categories: analytic a priori statements and synthetic a posteriori statements. Statements that contain information and need observation in order to be known—do you see the empiricism? Statements that contain information about the world, but require observation to know them: synthetic a posteriori. Or statements that do not contain information about the world because they merely analyze concepts, and therefore do not require observation either; they can be known without observation. Okay? That is the division accepted until his time.

Now Kant reformulates Hume’s problem in the language he has just developed, the one I described to you here. And he says that all of Hume’s problems can be formulated as one general problem: are synthetic a priori judgments possible, and if so, how? A third category. Analytic a posteriori judgments do not exist according to Kant, although there are those who claim they do, but in my opinion that’s just a different definition. But according to Kant, the claim is that there can be synthetic a priori judgments.

Notice, this breaks the parallelism I described until now. Synthetic judgments are supposed to be a posteriori. Or in other words, judgments that contain information and I know them without observation. In plain Hebrew, right? That is basically what he is asking: how can there be a statement that contains information, but I know it without observation? That is called synthetic—it contains information—and a priori—I know it without observation.

Now Kant says: why is this the translation of all of Hume’s problems? You understand that this is really the question of empiricism, right? Can I know anything about the world without observation? Rationalism versus empiricism, okay? Rationalism as a philosophical position, not a life attitude of being rational. So philosophical rationalism basically says that I have a way to know things about the world not only by empirical tools, but by other means. So the whole set of Hume’s questions about causality, induction, whatever you want, boils down to the question: how are synthetic a priori judgments possible? That is basically what Kant claims. And on the face of it, it seems impossible. Impossible. If the statement is synthetic, it contains information not already contained in the concepts that make up the statement—then how do you know it? If you know it, apparently it comes from observation. You cannot know it a priori.

In effect, he defined a conceptual framework within which all of Hume’s questions can be formulated as one general question. Okay? And that is a very important step toward a solution—which in my opinion Kant did not find, but it is an important step toward a solution.

Now this is interesting, because when Kant formulated this question, he did not formulate it as “Are synthetic a priori judgments possible?” but rather “How are synthetic a priori judgments possible?” It was obvious to him that they are possible. The only question was: fine, but how can such a thing be justified? Why was it obvious to him? Because he trusted, for example, in the laws of nature. And every law of nature is a synthetic a priori judgment. And he was not willing to accept Hume’s skeptical thesis that says: no, it’s only a statement about us, not about the world. I’m not claiming that there is in the world a law of gravity. If I say “law of gravity,” it organizes the facts nicely for me, that’s all. I do not want to claim that in the world there is a law of gravity. Okay? That is basically what Hume says. Kant says: what are you talking about? Of course there is a law of gravity in the world, don’t talk nonsense. Now the question itself is a good one, okay?

And in a certain sense I want to translate the adolescent’s question to the adult into this question. The adolescent is basically saying: you expect me to accept things that you haven’t proved to me, and that are not the result of direct observation. Why should I accept that? So I translate the adolescent’s question to the adult into Hume’s question as posed by Kant, Kant asking us on Hume’s behalf. Okay? How can it be that we can accept things about the world without having proof on the one hand—and proof alone, after all, is not enough, because that’s intellectual, and to know something about the world you need observation, proof is not enough—and without direct observation? Direct observation gives you specific, particular facts, but not general laws. How do you know general laws? The laws of nature are always general laws.

What Kant proposed now is the following claim. This is his solution—one of the solutions that Bergmann rejected, rightly. But this is more or less the accepted solution in the world. Kant’s solution basically says this: he distinguishes between what are called phenomena and noumena. Phenomena are the world as I perceive it—phenomenal, experiential—and noumena are the world as it is in itself. And then he says: all our claims about the world do not deal with the world itself. They deal with the world as I perceive it.

Right? When I look at a scientific fact, I’m not talking about the scientific fact itself. I’m talking about my perception of the scientific fact. Bertrand Russell, much later than Kant, asked the question: is there in the world a yellow color? The answer is of course no. There is no yellow color in the world. Yellow exists only in our consciousness. In the world there is an electromagnetic wave. At best, if electromagnetism is correct, there is an electromagnetic wave in the world. When—wait—an electromagnetic wave of a certain wavelength hits my retina, it creates in me the image of the color yellow. But if my retina were connected to the hearing center, then that wave at that wavelength would produce Beethoven’s Ninth Symphony. And I would not be any less correct than I am now, when it is connected to the visual center. The sound or the color are phenomena that exist only in my cognition, not in the world. In the world itself there are certain abstract phenomena. Everything I say about them is really about the picture of the world as I experience or perceive it. It is not about the world itself. In its completely abstract sense, without entering into specific characteristics, I assume it exists in the world. Good question why, by the way, but I assume it. Zeitlin asked this about Kant—he has a nice article on the issue. But I assume it exists. Yet nothing I say about it belongs to the world itself, but only to the way I perceive things.

Okay? Those who know the famous Zen riddle: if a tree falls in the forest and no one is there, does it make a sound? And usually the obvious answer is yes—what is this skepticism? Of course not! It makes no sound. Obviously. It moves the air; there is a pressure wave. But sound is produced only when the pressure wave hits an eardrum, undergoes translation, and in the auditory center it is translated into something auditory, and then there is sound. In the world itself there is no sound. That is obvious. There is no indication whatsoever for saying there is sound in the world. Maybe there is, I don’t know what “sound in the world” would even mean. Sound is entirely a cognitive phenomenon. I don’t even know whether the question whether there is sound in the world has any meaning at all.

No, what Kant is basically saying is: granted, Hume is one hundred percent right, and therefore from now on I… wait, I haven’t yet gotten to how this solves Hume’s problem. Right. One more moment, I’ll get to what he says about Hume and whether it holds water. In my view it doesn’t really hold water. But I want to do this step by step.

So basically what he claims is that scientific claims are claims about the world as we perceive it, not about the world itself. Okay? By the way, many people interpret this statement of Kant as something subjective, skeptical, or the like. That’s not correct. Very often there’s also confusion from various postmodernists. The fact that I describe the phenomena in the world in the language of my cognition contains nothing skeptical. When I say, for example, that if your eardrum were connected to your visual center, then you would see sounds, like the people of Israel at Mount Sinai—that has nothing skeptical in it. That’s a biological fact. Okay? And you would not be any less correct than I am; there is no “right” and “wrong” here. But on the other hand, it’s not that there are many truths. There is only one truth. What exists in the world is this thing that I call an electromagnetic wave. How do I perceive it? Always in my own language. But there is nothing subjective about that. Fine? Obviously, my perception is always formulated in my own languages. That is not what people mean when they talk about a multiplicity of truths. When they speak of multiple truths, they mean there is a disagreement. Yes—if I say I see yellow light here and he says I hear Beethoven’s Ninth Symphony, do we have a disagreement? We do not. We both agree that there is this object here called an electromagnetic wave. You experience it this way; I experience it that way. So what? Fine. If I were wearing glasses with orange cellophane, then for me the whole world would appear orange, and no one would dispute that I really see orange. Right? We have no disagreement. We always perceive the world through the glasses with which we observe it. There is nothing skeptical about that. It simply means that our way of describing the world is in our own terms. Yes, that’s obvious. There is nothing skeptical about it.

So that is basically what Kant claims. And then he says—based on that—he tries to offer a solution to Hume’s problem, to the problem of the synthetic a priori. What he wants to say is that it is no wonder we can draw from our fevered minds general principles about scientific phenomena. Why? Because the scientific phenomena we are talking about are scientific phenomena that come to us mediated by our senses, by our cognition, by our forms of thought. That is the phenomenal realm, not the noumenal one. And since that is so, we can say all sorts of things about what we will see, even without observing the world, because we are aware of how the tools by which we observe the world are built. Therefore we can say synthetic things in an a priori way.

For example, I can already tell you that everything I will see from now on will be within the visible wavelength range. Fine? I will never see things outside the visible range, because we do not see such things. For that I do not need to observe a thing of invisible wavelength and see whether I can see it or not. I can determine it. Why? Because I know my tools of observation, and I know they are sensitive only to these wavelengths and not to others. Okay? So the fact that I can say things about the world without observing it, says Kant, stems from the fact that I know my cognitive tools. Or there are categories imposed upon me, forms of thought imposed upon me, they are transcendental for me—not transcendent, that’s something else. Transcendental, meaning they precede cognition, but they are imposed on all cognitions we will ever have, because this is our structure. This is how we look at things. Okay? Therefore we know that we will hear sounds and not see sounds because we know that in us the ear is connected to the hearing center and not to the visual center—unless someone…

Fine, let’s not talk about tools. Leave it, it doesn’t matter. Even if there were tools and I know what… wait one second—there’s a difficulty there too. Oh, I didn’t understand. So you can expand. No problem, expand. And then too I will tell you a priori what you will see and what you will not see, once I know the tool to which you extended. It doesn’t matter. On the principled level it remains the same.

So Kant’s claim is that the way to solve Hume’s problems is to understand that our claims are not really about the world, but about the world as we perceive it. And if that is the case, then it is no wonder that subjective matters, or our forms of thought, take part in what we can say about the world. Not only observations can provide the basis for what we say about the world, but also acquaintance with our cognitive structures or templates. I’m presenting all this very roughly.

Now, like Yonatan said earlier, I completely agree. Kant threw out the baby with the bathwater. He remained with Hume’s skepticism; he just gave it some nice words, but that’s all. I’ll ask more than that. Why, for example—take Newton’s second law, right? Force equals mass times acceleration. Let’s say this is basically what Kant is telling us—I’m translating now. Kant is basically telling us that the real law might be that force equals a constant times acceleration squared. F equals kA squared. It won’t be mass, it will be something with different units. But kA squared, acceleration squared. Okay? Except that all bodies that move according to that pattern, I simply won’t detect them. Because I have some cognitive constraint that forces me to see only things whose acceleration stands in direct relation to force.

Now I don’t understand why a body—the same body, with the same mass, moving with the same acceleration—I won’t manage to detect it. Where does this mysticism come from? It has the same mass, it moves with exactly the same acceleration as another body I saw, but because in its case the relation is force equals a constant times acceleration squared, I won’t be able to detect it. Or I won’t be able to measure the force acting on it, I don’t know—something I won’t be able to do—it won’t cross the threshold of my cognition. That sounds to me like mystical hallucination.

You know, it’s like an English-English dictionary. What’s the difference between an English-English dictionary and an English-Hebrew dictionary? An English-Hebrew dictionary takes one word and explains it using other words you understand. An English-English dictionary takes one word you don’t understand and explains it with ten others you understand even less. Okay? That is more or less the explanation being offered here. You are trying to offer me an explanation for some phenomenon I don’t understand. How can it be that I succeed in knowing things in the world without observation? Right? That is the question you came to answer. And how do you answer it? With something I understand even less, some fantasy that is certainly not only incomprehensible but simply devoid of all logic. That I cannot see an object of mass one kilogram moving with acceleration two meters per second squared, right? If the force acting on it were two, which would satisfy F=ma, then I would see it. If the force is four, and it is the same mass with the same acceleration, I would not see it. Why? What would happen to my sensory instruments if the force acting on that object were different? You understand that this is mystical nonsense that cannot be justified.

Or in other words, Kant’s solution joins the group of solutions that Hugo Bergmann threw into the dustbin of history. Meaning, it’s not a solution. We remain with a question unanswered.

Now I want to suggest where I think the solution lies. And it is a solution under somewhat limited warranty, but I don’t think there is another option. I want to argue that the difficulty exists because we make a distinction that seems artificial to me, between thought and cognition. Right? We are very used to making a sharp dichotomous distinction. There is cognition, sensory observation of the world—that’s how we know things. And thought is something that happens inside us; it is not interaction with the world. Right? We think about things, analyze, derive relations between claims—that happens inside us. Cognition is our interaction with the world through the senses. Fine? That’s the difference between cognition and thought.

Now the assumption—or what leads to Hume’s and Kant’s problems and the synthetic a priori and all those complications—is that there is a sharp dichotomous distinction between thought and cognition. Therefore people say to me: look, the tools of thought cannot justify facts. They cannot bring facts to your knowledge. Facts are available to us only by means of cognition, not by means of thought. Right? In free translation that is basically the point. And I want to deny that dichotomous assumption. And I think that is the only possible solution to this question in epistemology.

I want to claim that we have a cognitive capacity that does not operate through the senses. Our intellect can also know, not only think. The terminology for this can be drawn from several places. Maimonides, at the beginning of Guide for the Perplexed, speaks about “the eyes of the intellect.” What are the eyes of the intellect? Think about that expression—it joins with a hyphen the expression “eyes,” which belongs to the world of cognition, right? Not of thought—and “intellect,” which belongs to the world of thought. So what are the eyes of the intellect? The eyes of the intellect mean that we have a branch of the intellect that deals with cognition, not with thought. Right? That is basically what he says. These are not eyes in the physical sense, of course—that’s a metaphor. It’s a metaphor to say that the intellect knows how to contemplate, not only to analyze and think and do things inwardly.

We have some ability—not through the senses—we have some ability for the intellect to contemplate the world and know reality. Rabbi HaNazir uses the expression “auditory logic.” It’s the same kind of combination. “Auditory” belongs to the world of cognition; “logic” belongs to the world of thought. How do you connect, with a hyphen, a cognitive instrument to thought? And again the answer is that we have some ability—what he calls listening to the world by means of the intellect, not with the ears, by means of the intellect. Or in other words, we have some possibility of using the intellect as a knowing instrument, not as a thinking instrument.

Husserl also spoke about this. He spoke about eidetic intuition, seeing ideas. Yes—how do we observe ideas? Ideas are not seen with the eyes. How do we observe ideas? He claims we have some ability to observe ideas. Now “ideas” for us is perceived as a concept belonging to the world of thought, not cognition. Plato invented the notion that ideas also exist in the world of ideas and so forth. But usually most of us, I think, tend toward Platonism—I don’t, by the way—but most of the world tends toward Platonism, and for them it is obvious that ideas are our invention. We do not observe ideas; they are constructions we produce. Okay? But if you observe ideas, that means your intellect also has some ability to know, to observe, not just to think, not just to create things, but also to interact with something in the world and know of its existence. That is called observing ideas.

What does that actually mean? It means that the difference between cognition and thought is not as dichotomous as people usually think. There is a branch in the intellect that deals with cognition and not only with thought. It has a branch of knowing intellect, or cognizing thought. Okay? That is basically the claim.

If that is so, then I want to offer the following speculation. What I basically want to say is that the way I get from the facts I have observed to the general law, to the generalization—or the way I become aware of a causal relation—I’m returning to Hume’s problems—is simply that I see them. Hume as an empiricist says: wait, you don’t see the causal relation; you saw that someone kicked and then the ball flew. How did you see that the kick caused the ball to fly? You didn’t see the causation. What you saw was the first event and afterward the second event. Okay? I claim no—I saw the causation too. Not with my eyes, but when I looked at the situation my intellect grasped that there is a relation of causation here between the kick and the ball’s flight.

Now understand: on the one hand this sounds very mystical. On the other hand, if someone told you that all that happened was that first you kicked and then the ball flew, but there is no causal relation between them, you’d have him hospitalized. Right? Which basically means that maybe you’re not aware of it, but all of you believe in the mysticism I just described. And it’s not mysticism—it’s simply a fact. We all know that we have some such capacity of cognition by means of the intellect.

And I think that the generalizations we make, when I take a collection of facts and generalize them—yes?—what does it mean that I generalize them? I create from them a more general doctrine, a theory or a broader generalization. Now there may be many possible ways to generalize that set of facts. Why do I choose that specific generalization? Because I understand that it is the correct generalization. How do I understand? After all, I saw the facts, not the generalization. You don’t see the theory, right, as David Hume told us. I do—I do see it. I see it with the eyes of the intellect, not with the two eyes of flesh, but I see it with the eyes of… I understood from the situation that this is how it is.

Take for example an axiom in geometry. Fine? Say, two parallel lines do not meet. How do you know? There is no proof of that, right? It’s an axiom. How do you know? Did you see it? Never in your life. Did you follow them out to infinity to verify that they never meet? What do you mean, how do you know it a priori? What do you mean? Do an analysis for me of parallelism. For any claim you ask me, I can always say it’s analytic—what’s the problem? For example, people ask me: why do you think God exists? It’s analytic, because existence means the existence of God; without that there is no existence at all. So that’s analytic. That’s just an escape. In the end you can always present everything as a definition, but in the end you want to make a claim, not merely define a term. When you make a claim, you need to explain to me how you arrived at it.

So my claim is: we really do see—but to see this you don’t need to follow those two lines out to infinity and verify that they never meet. When I look at those two lines, I know they will never meet. I simply see it. This is not seeing with the eyes. Rather, the intellect is involved here. Of course the eyes also serve me, but it’s not only the eyes. Through the visual appearance, my intellect performs some analytical act and reaches the conclusion that this is the case. That is what I call eidetic intuition, or the eyes of the intellect, or whatever you want to call it. And I think no one really denies this. It just sounds terribly mystical when you hear it. But by the same token, it sounds mystical if I say that if I see a cabinet there, then apparently there is a cabinet there. Who told you? So what if you see it? And that is not mystical? Why is it not mystical? Because we all know that it’s true—there’s a cabinet there. We all know this too; we just need to acknowledge it, that’s all.

Now I told you, that’s why I said: it’s not exactly a full solution, but I think it is the best solution we can get. What do I mean? I want to claim that there really are no synthetic a priori judgments. These judgments are synthetic a posteriori. They are the result of observation—but not observation by the senses, what we usually call observation. Rather, this is observation: our intellect observes reality and understands that the principle of causality is true. That everything must have a cause. That a thing without a cause is not logical. People will say: nonsense, you’re just used to thinking that way. These are just patterns implanted in you. No—I’m telling you it’s true.

Fine, as I said, the solipsistic question always comes up in relation to empiricists and for some reason they ignore it—don’t ask me why. I’ll say that that’s just their definition. That’s the world for them, right? What I see means the world exists; there is no further content there. Ask yourself: is that a very high percentage of certainty or is it simply obviously true in your opinion? Two plus three equals five. Is that certainly true, or is it just that so far in this case you’ve seen that it comes out five? And if you added cucumbers there it would come out minus pi? How do you know it’s true? Because it is obvious to you that it’s true. Not a percentage—obvious that it’s true. What percentage? It could be I had some crazy thing in my brain. It is certainly true for all practical purposes, okay? It’s true. No, no, leave coordinate systems aside. Two plus three equals five. So? Parallel lines too—I’m talking about Euclidean space. Fine? Not about… so, in Euclidean space. What? No, parallel lines meet at infinity—why? In art. Because they draw perspective, it’s just perspective—they’re not really parallel, you get some perspective and create it through some imaginary meeting point off the canvas or something like that.

Anyway, the claim is that the solution, it seems to me the only solution I can think of—and I don’t think there is another one, and I don’t think any other one has really been proposed throughout history—is that we have the ability to know by means of tools of thought. Our thinking also knows and doesn’t only think. Okay? And that’s all. You just have to embrace that unfortunate or joyful fact, and all these questions disappear on their own. It just sounds terribly mystical to people, so they look for all kinds of solutions and none of them hold water. But mystical or not mystical—that’s the fact. The fact is that we all know this is how it is, and that’s all.

Now why is this important? Because what is this capacity of cognizing thought? Let me maybe give you an example. I call it intuition. This is what we call intuition. People usually attribute intuition to accumulated experience that unconsciously wires our neurons in the brain in a certain way. And that is basically what we call intuition, or direct, immediate thinking without all the arguments being explicit—and it is the result of experience. I’m not sure it is a result of experience. I think part of it is a priori. Meaning, it is already there. It’s not only the result of experience.

In any event, this ability called intuition is often confused with emotion. Let’s say—I may have used this example when we talked about faith as emotion, I don’t remember anymore. Suppose I sit over a difficult math problem for half a year, sweating blood over it, and in the end I arrive at the answer, which is eight. It’s eight. Someone else comes, glances at the page with all my scribbles, says: what are you doing here? No, I’m looking for the solution to this equation. Oh, that? Eight. Eight—I see it immediately. You ask him: how did you know? I’ve been bleeding over this for half a year. And he says: I had a feeling.

Does that answer express emotion in the sense of feeling? Not at all, right? So what does it express? Right—it was intuitively obvious to me that it’s eight. I don’t know how to explain it; even after the fact I’m not sure I’ll know how to explain to you how I arrived at it. But notice: his answer—regarding emotions, after all, we said you can’t argue about them, right? I love someone and you don’t love him, we have no argument. I’m built in such a way that I love him; you’re built in such a way that you don’t. That’s not a disagreement. Okay? You can’t argue about emotions. I feel this way, you feel another way—there is no disagreement. We are built differently and feel differently.

What happens here? If someone says the answer is seven—does he disagree with the one who says the answer is eight? “He feels this way, he feels that way—it’s just emotion,” right? Obviously not. Check the equation and see whether it’s seven or eight. There is one correct answer here, assuming existence and uniqueness, of course. So there is one answer, right? So if one person says the answer is eight and someone else says the answer is seven, one of them is right and the other is wrong. They disagree. So when you call this a feeling, that’s not really right. It’s not emotion.

So what is it? It’s some ability to get to the fact or to the correct answer directly. Not by means of a detailed calculation with all the stages, but in some direct way you simply see that it’s eight. Some genius like that just knows—he has some way of seeing it immediately, while someone else has to grind through calculations for half a year. Okay? So that means intuition is a tool for knowing reality. Notice that it comes to me directly. It doesn’t go through the senses, it doesn’t go through anything—but the result is a factual claim. If you don’t accept it, then either you made a mistake or I made a mistake, but there is a disagreement here. I am making a factual claim, not reporting an emotion that exists inside me.

Therefore, intuition is often called feeling, but that’s a mistake. Intuition and emotion are two different things. Intuition is that same branch of the mind I talked about earlier, the branch that can get to information directly. What Daniel Kahneman calls System 1. There is System 1 and System 2—thinking fast and thinking slow. He says there are cases like when we drive on autopilot. When we drive on autopilot, we don’t really think about what we are doing; we react automatically, and that’s perfectly fine. I at least, in the past—I don’t know, maybe I’ve grown old by now—but at least in the past I could find myself a hundred and fifty kilometers from home with no idea where I had passed on the way. I arrived exactly at the right place at the right time, parked, everything was fine, I didn’t run over anyone as far as I know—at least not that I’m aware of to this day—and everything was fine. I wasn’t conscious of what I was doing on the way at all. I was thinking lofty thoughts on the way, I don’t know where I was. That is System 1. System 2 is the system in which you do everything consciously. It is much slower, of course, but it knows how to handle hard problems that System 1 can’t handle.

What? No, it’s not a problem if you trust my System 1 ability. If you want System 2, then you need… no, today I’m already with System 2, it’s fine. So I’m saying that in a great many things we do, we react instinctively, and that’s no less good. We know how to do things, and correctly. Not that we merely have some feeling. It’s correct—that is the right answer. We know how to do the calculation without doing the calculation. We arrive at the correct result without doing the calculation. Fine? That is basically an expression of what I earlier called intuition.

I assume that the fundamental ability is innate. If someone doesn’t have that fundamental ability, no training will help. But I assume training can perhaps sharpen it or improve it, I don’t know, I imagine so. On that question I don’t know how to answer whether this has to be with System 1 or System 2. Because there are things System 1 doesn’t know how to cope with. If intuition doesn’t solve the problem, then what do you do? You have no choice but to go through the systematic route, and maybe you’ll succeed and maybe not, but at least you have a chance of solving a problem that System 1 cannot handle. System 1 is generally for easy problems that require speed. If you do it with System 2, you won’t respond in time in a car accident, you won’t respond in time. System 1 will do it faster. No, I said—it’s not always like that. The example I gave earlier with the eight isn’t like that, really. There it’s a hard problem and you managed to skip all the technical stages in the middle and know the answer directly.

You can look at this from many angles. I’m just bringing many angles, all of which lead us to one place: we have some ability to reach a correct result, a claim about the world—not a subjective feeling in the subjective sense—but in some direct way. Not through observation and not through calculation and not… just directly. I think this is an expression of what can be called the eyes of the intellect.

Now I already need to finish, so I’ll just close the circle back to our issue. I think that this notion often called intuition is simply another name for faith. It is the capacity called faith. When you ask me how I know there is a God, many people—there are arguments about this and so on—but even arguments have assumptions, and then you can ask how you know the assumptions. We’ll still talk about that. But in the end, many people will say: because it seems to me there is. I simply believe there is.

Now often you can say: okay, you believe there is because you grew up there, or because you have this feeling or that feeling. Again, that is the same conception that says if you have something that isn’t based on, and you don’t give some explicit argument that leads to it, then it’s just emotion, a subjective matter. And I claim that this is a confusion between emotion and intuition. Someone can come and say: I look at the world with my own eyes, and it is obvious to me that at its foundation sits some entity—God—in whose existence I believe. But “I believe in His existence” is really a factual claim that is the result of observation in the broader sense I defined earlier—namely, through the eyes of the intellect. It is the result of intuition. Okay?

And the lack of trust in statements of that kind—“I have intuition, therefore I think this is true”—that absolute lack of trust… You can say: look, in my view you are mistaken, and therefore in my view your intuition is an illusion. Fine, that’s a legitimate disagreement. It may be that intuitions mislead us. That can happen. But if someone is not willing in principle to accept intuitive claims because he basically sees them as emotional claims—this is just feeling, a subjective matter—then he is categorically unwilling to accept this instrument called faith. Not faith in God. Faith in God is derivative. The question is whether you are prepared at all to acknowledge the existence of, or give validity to, this instrument called intuition, or this instrument called faith.

Do you believe in the principle of causality? I believe in that too. It is not the result of observation, as Hume said. Kant’s solution is worthless. And in the end—why do I think the principle of causality is true? Because I see that it is true. Now Hume says: where do you see it? Just because that’s how you are built. No, no—I see. Like the blind man who asks the sighted man: how do you know there’s no furniture? Do you have proof there isn’t any? You may have proof, but I see there isn’t. Fine? Now if I trust what I see, that means that for me this seeing, or this intuition, is some kind of instrument for obtaining facts. I claim that I can contemplate reality with my intellect and arrive at results that are factual claims about the world.

You ask me how I know. Give me the systematic route, sensory observations like scientific observations? I don’t have one. I don’t. It may be that I start from scientific observations and then make some generalization—from that we’ll still speak. But it may also be that I don’t. Someone may come and say: I have an intuition and I think there is a God. Completely legitimate in my eyes. Exactly as I have an intuition about the law of causality. Fine? If you have it, you have it; if not, you don’t. What? Couldn’t it be that it’s not the same level of intuition? Right, definitely. Of course there are intuitions at different levels, and everyone ranks them differently. Ask yourself how solid it seems to you—but you are the only one who can answer that. Okay? Obviously. Intuition doesn’t mean certainty. And intuition, by the way, also doesn’t mean it is not open to intellectual criticism. I’m talking about synthetic maturity. Intuition simply means I’m willing to accept it because it makes sense. But if you persuade me otherwise, intuition can be mistaken. Don’t turn this into a different kind of fundamentalism. Meaning, absolute trust in intuition and an unwillingness to accept critical arguments—that’s just another form of fundamentalism. It’s fundamentalism in disguise.

Okay? No. I do trust intuition, but I understand it is not a certain instrument. If you bring me good arguments, I may be persuaded that here I really was mistaken, or that I was educated this way and it misled me, or whatever the reason may be. I may be persuaded. The way to persuade in this area, by the way, is usually by means of rhetoric, not by means of logic. People disparage rhetoric, and usually it is taken as a synonym for demagoguery. Yes, but demagoguery is the use of rhetoric by ignoble means. It is an attempt to sway your opinion in dishonest ways. Okay? But when I speak of rhetoric, I mean an attempt to persuade, not to manipulate you. And often we are not persuaded by logical arguments. Rather, I can draw a certain situation for you, place you within a certain way of looking, and suddenly you understand that I am right. And there is nothing dishonest in that. It’s perfectly fine. That’s also how I myself form my own position. How do I myself form my assumptions? I simply look at the situation and say: yes, it seems to me there is a principle of causality. Now you don’t see it. So let’s place you in the situation, come on—it’s more a literary ability than a logical one. Okay? Try to examine yourself within that situation and see. What in scientific contexts is called a thought experiment. There are discoveries in science that were reached by thought experiments, not by experiments done in a laboratory. Thought experiments are exactly the experiments that tell me: imagine yourself in a certain situation—what do you think would happen there? Okay? And then see that what you think would happen there says something. Fine? Here too, it’s the same.

Therefore the tool for persuading someone about intuitions he has or doesn’t have—or for being persuaded—is called rhetoric, not logic. Logic is taking assumptions and deriving conclusions from them. Here I have no way to persuade you that your axioms are not correct. But it is not true that therefore the axioms are arbitrary, first of all. And it is also not true that there is no point in discussing them. There is a point in discussing them, and it is possible to discuss them. People change their assumptions by tools called rhetoric, not by tools called demagoguery.

And that is basically—here I close the circle—that is basically the capacity we call faith. Faith is not a specific content, faith in God. Faith, for me, is an intellectual capacity. This capacity we have to contemplate reality and make claims about it, to be right with a certain level of probability or reliability. Okay? That is the capacity I call faith. Now this capacity—some people use it in order to arrive at the recognition that there is a God, because you can’t get there by observational tools and you can’t get there by scientific tools at all. But fine—my intuition tells me there is. And one can argue about that. Say, my intuition tells me there isn’t, and let’s discuss it. But someone who says: no, no, if you got there by intuition then there’s nothing to discuss because it’s just subjective feeling—that’s not that I disagree with you; I don’t accept intuition as a relevant tool—that basically means you are a total skeptic. Because you won’t be able to accept scientific laws, you won’t be able to accept anything, because intuition stands at the basis of everything we know. That’s the important point. Because many times this discussion is presented as though scientific people are unwilling to accept intuitions, only observations. There is no science without intuition. If you do not accept intuition as a tool, then you can throw out your science too.

Now that doesn’t mean that if you accept science you’ll also believe in God. It only means that the a priori claim that you are unwilling to believe in God because it’s intuition—that is not correct. Fine. Now we still have to discuss whether intuition indeed says that, whether it misled us or didn’t mislead us—that is a discussion that has to be conducted. But when you dismiss it out of hand and say no, this is emotion, it doesn’t interest me—that is a categorical confusion between emotion and intuition. Okay.