Platonism – Lesson 3

Table of Contents

• Platonism and Aristotelianism: ideas, the naturalness of concepts, and the Borges example
• Pragmatism, democracy, and discovery versus invention
• Halakha given to Moses at Sinai, scriptural decree, and naturalness versus tools of perception
• Leibniz: identity, similarity, and the principle of the identity of indiscernibles
• Critique of Leibniz: an object as having properties and not as just a collection of properties
• Physics: fermions, bosons, and Bose-Einstein condensation
• Applying the argument to concepts: Platonism as the claim about a “concept as having properties”
• Halakhic application: ownership, prohibition of benefit, the rest of one’s animal, and a married woman
• Kant: phenomena and noumena, and the role of internal language in perception
• “A tree falling in the forest,” other senses, and rejecting subjectivist postmodernism
• Existence is not a property: Anselm’s ontological proof and the challenge to it
• Love, “love that does not depend on anything,” and a relation to something that cannot be put into words
• Perception is not a limitation: defining perception as bringing something into an internal language
• Concluding questions: gender, the dictionary, and the process of discovery versus brainwashing

Summary

General overview

The lecture presents the dispute between Platonism and Aristotelianism regarding the status of concepts and objects, and argues that our initial intuition actually leans toward Platonism, in which ideas and concepts are discoveries of something that exists rather than inventions of consciousness or culture. The text uses Borges to illustrate the absurdity of a view that identifies an object with nothing more than a collection of properties, and then moves to Leibniz and the principle of the identity of indiscernibles in order to sharpen the question of whether there is a “bearer of properties” beyond the set of properties. Later, it argues for a distinction between properties as modes of perception and the thing in itself, using Kant, perceptual examples like “a tree falling in the forest,” and applications to the world of Jewish law through the concept of ownership, a married woman, and scriptural decree, all the way to the claim that one can stand in relation to the thing itself even without being able to verbalize it in terms of properties.

Platonism and Aristotelianism: ideas, the naturalness of concepts, and the Borges example

Platonism says that ideas and abstract concepts exist, and that recognizing a concept is an observation and discovery of something real. Aristotle says that concepts are human constructions, and that recognizing a concept means creating a grouping of properties that we ourselves build. Borges’s story about Tlön, Uqbar, Orbis Tertius illustrates the absurdity of an idealism in which there are no objects, only collections of properties, and therefore any arbitrary combination of properties can count as an “object.” The example of a “state in Mambology” and the arbitrary joining of the properties of a state with a cumulonimbus cloud sharpens the claim that some combinations of properties feel natural, whereas others feel arbitrary.

Pragmatism, democracy, and discovery versus invention

The pragmatic claim tries to explain the “naturalness” of concepts through fertility and usefulness, but the text argues that the debate over the concept of democracy is not proof that the concept is constructed; it may just as well be proof that it is the discovery of a natural structure that exists even if it was not formulated in the past. The text rejects the idea that concepts like democracy were “unnatural” in earlier periods, and argues that if people had defined them then, they would have understood them and even adopted them—just as the theory of relativity was true before Einstein and had simply not yet been discovered. Aristotle is presented as someone who would say that theories like quantum theory are explanations created to organize observations, and that the explanation is not a claim about the world itself but a construction that could be replaced by another explanation. The text presents the view that at first glance Platonism seems mystical, but on second glance it actually fits our natural intuition better.

Halakha given to Moses at Sinai, scriptural decree, and naturalness versus tools of perception

The text compares a halakha given to Moses at Sinai with a Jewish law written explicitly in a verse, such as “You shall not plow with an ox and a donkey together,” and defines both as innovations given by the Holy One, blessed be He, which we would never have thought of on our own. The central claim is that the fact that we would not have thought of something does not prove that it does not exist; it may simply show that we lack the tools to perceive it. The text argues that halakhic commandments do not seem “natural” to someone who did not grow up in a halakhic world, but perceptual non-naturalness does not negate the reality behind them. The text criticizes a view of scriptural decree as a law without reason, and argues that a scriptural decree may have a real rationale—just one that we do not sufficiently understand, or one that would not be convincing enough in practice without the command itself.

Leibniz: identity, similarity, and the principle of the identity of indiscernibles

Leibniz draws a distinction between complete similarity and identity: similarity means the same set of properties with no way to distinguish between them, while identity means that it is one and the same entity, not two. The example “the evening star is the morning star” illustrates that identity is not a claim about an identical set of properties, but about one object appearing in two ways. Leibniz’s principle of the identity of indiscernibles says that if two objects have exactly the same set of properties, then they are identical and not two. The argument is based on negation: if they are not identical, then each has the property of “not being the other,” and that creates a difference in properties that contradicts the assumption of identical properties. The text argues that one’s philosophical nose immediately senses a problem in this simple argument and proposes that the competing positions need to be defined carefully.

Critique of Leibniz: an object as having properties and not as just a collection of properties

The text presents an opposing view according to which there can be two different entities with the same set of properties, and from this it follows that there is something in an object beyond its set of properties. The claim is that object A’s not being object B is not a property but a statement about the object itself, and therefore Leibniz is begging the question when he treats non-identity as a property. The text also argues that “existence” is not a property, and that one can speak of an object with a set of properties even if it is imaginary and does not exist, so adding “exists” is not adding another property. The text frames the dispute as a return to Borges’s problem: if an object is only a collection of properties, there is no explanation for why one particular collection of properties appears to us as a natural object while another appears to be an arbitrary combination.

Physics: fermions, bosons, and Bose-Einstein condensation

The text brings in the physical distinction between fermions, which cannot share the same physical state with the same set of properties, and bosons, which can exist in the same quantum state with identical properties. It is argued that the ability to count many bosons in the same state seems to be a refutation of Leibniz, but one possible answer is that Leibniz would say that this is really just one “big particle” divided up arbitrarily. Bose-Einstein condensation is described as a phenomenon in which many bosons form one condensate that makes it hard to distinguish among its components, and the text concludes that the issue cannot be settled through scientific evidence but only through a logical-intuitive claim about the naturalness of objects.

Applying the argument to concepts: Platonism as the claim about a “concept as having properties”

The text says that Leibniz deals with objects, but the same pattern can be applied to concepts such as a democratic state, tolerance, fascism, communism, love, and horseness. The claim is that concepts too contain something beyond a list of properties, and therefore the collection of properties is not the concept itself but rather a characterization of an existing concept. Platonism is defined here as the position that says the concept exists in the world of ideas, and its appearance in our world is a discovery rather than a creation. The text returns to the analogy with relativity and states that democracy “already existed” even before it was discovered in the modern age.

Halakhic application: ownership, prohibition of benefit, the rest of one’s animal, and a married woman

The text proposes seeing halakhic concepts such as ownership not as a collection of laws but as an ontic-metaphysical relation that exists in reality, from which legal consequences then follow. Laws such as rights of use, prohibiting others from using the object, liability for damages, and the laws of acquisition and torts are presented as properties or derivatives of the concept of ownership, not as the essence of ownership itself. An example is brought of an object used for idol worship that must be destroyed, and the discussion refers to a dispute among medieval authorities (Rishonim) over whether the prohibition of benefit removes ownership or only removes monetary consequences. The text argues that even if the monetary consequences no longer exist, the metaphysical ownership can remain. It then brings a practical difference regarding the requirement that one’s animal rest on the Sabbath, when an animal from which benefit is prohibited violates the Sabbath, as well as a question about liability for damage it causes, attributing the examples to the Rogatchover in Bava Kamma 17 and to the phrase “It is a lion crouching upon it.” The concept of a married woman is described as a metaphysical bond between the man and the woman, from which consequences follow, such as prohibition to others, permissibility to the husband, the status of the children, and mutual obligations.

Kant: phenomena and noumena, and the role of internal language in perception

The text presents Kant as arguing that our statements are about the world as it appears to consciousness and not about the thing in itself, and it brings in the distinction between phenomena and noumena. It is argued that there is a natural inference that if there are properties that appear to us, then there is something behind them that has those properties. But the text brings a criticism of Kant in the name of Tseitlin, who formulated this challenge in the name of Lev Shestov and asks how one can know that there is a thing in itself if all knowledge is only of appearances. The text describes an earlier attempt to arrive at Spinoza’s pantheism through the idea that the properties exist only in consciousness, and therefore all entities are identical in themselves, and then retracts that by arguing that differences in the world are not merely subjective but exist in reality too, even if the language of color is an internal descriptive language. The physical explanation of color as related to crystal structure and frequencies of light is used to show that the physical properties exist in the world even if the sensory experience is an internal translation.

“A tree falling in the forest,” other senses, and rejecting subjectivist postmodernism

The text argues that a tree falling in the forest when no one is listening does not make a sound, because sound is a phenomenon of consciousness, whereas in reality there is an acoustic wave of air pressure. The text expands on this by saying that the world itself lacks colors and sounds as experiences, and that the five senses are a translation of waves and physical phenomena into an internal language, so that creatures with different senses might “see sounds” or “hear sights” and still be referring to the same phenomena. The text says there is no narrative dispute here about facts, only different languages for describing the same phenomenon, like describing something in Hebrew or in English. It argues that the role of the receiver is not creative in the sense of choice, because perception is forced on a person according to the way he was created, and the creativity belongs to the composer or the Creator, not to the act of hearing itself.

Existence is not a property: Anselm’s ontological proof and the challenge to it

The text presents Anselm’s ontological proof for the existence of God through the definition of “the being possessing all perfections” and the claim that if it does not exist, then one can think of a more perfect being that also exists, and therefore there is a contradiction and one must conclude that it exists. The text presents the criticism that existence is not a property and therefore does not belong on the scale of perfection, and that the gap between “exists” and “does not exist” is not a difference in properties. The text uses this criticism to strengthen the claim that one can say something about the thing itself that is not a description in terms of properties, thereby justifying the distinction between the bearer of properties and the collection of properties.

Love, “love that does not depend on anything,” and a relation to something that cannot be put into words

The text suggests that the statement “I love” can be a relation to the bearer of the properties and not to the properties themselves, so that even if the properties change, the love can remain. Pirkei Avot—“Any love that depends on something…” —serves as the framework for distinguishing between love for properties and love for the person himself or herself. The text argues that perception of the thing in itself is impossible by definition, but one can still have a relation to it without being able to describe it in words, because speech and description are always in terms of properties and characteristics. The text connects this to the Kantian distinction and argues that a relation to the noumenon is possible even if it cannot be spoken.

Perception is not a limitation: defining perception as bringing something into an internal language

The text rejects the claim that Kant’s distinction points to some special limitation, and defines perception as an act in which the perceived thing is brought into the patterns and internal language of the perceiver. It argues that “perceiving the thing in itself” is a contradictory concept, like a “round triangle,” because perception by its very nature is an appearance within the subject’s perceptual system. The text acknowledges that there are limitations of the senses and frequencies that are not absorbed, but argues that the fact that every perception comes through patterns is not a limitation but the essence of perception. From that, it explains how love can be directed toward the bearer of properties even though access to that bearer is always mediated through properties.

Concluding questions: gender, the dictionary, and the process of discovery versus brainwashing

The text addresses the question of contemporary concepts that are perceived either as fiction or as real, and proposes two interpretations of the process by which a concept becomes “tangible”: psychological habituation and brainwashing, versus a new distinction that makes it possible to discover something that existed all along but had not been seen. The text states that even as a Platonist, one need not claim that every process is discovery; there are also illusions and hallucinations of ideas that do not exist. The text concludes with a question about the dictionary and says that a dictionary can be interpreted in a Platonic way—as a description of the properties of an existing concept—or in an Aristotelian way—as a constitutive definition of a concept as a convention. It marks this as the next step for the next lecture before ending with “Shabbat shalom.”

We’re in the series on Platonism and abstraction, generalizations, and I want to… okay, I’ll mute here. At the end of last time I spoke, I tried to illustrate a bit the meaning of the dispute between Platonism and Aristotelianism. Right, Platonism is the view that ideas exist, that abstract entities exist, that categories exist. And Aristotle claims that these are constructions we create, our own conceptual structures. So for Plato this is a kind of observation—to recognize such a concept or such an idea—and for Aristotle it’s a kind of creation: I simply create that thing. And I illustrated this through Borges’s story about, yes, Tlön, Uqbar, Orbis Tertius, what he calls some planet like that where idealists rule, or the people on it are idealists. And we saw that what he’s really demonstrating is the absurdity in the idealist view—the view that objects don’t exist—by showing that really any collection of properties can be combined to create an object. Right, the bird’s cry in the distance together with the color of the cloud now passing over me—that too is an object, because the idealists don’t believe in the existence of objects; they see an object as a collection of properties. So why specifically this collection of properties? Any collection of properties can be an object. And that’s really an expression of the absurdity of idealism. But at the same time I noted that this is talking about objects and not about abstract concepts, not about ideas. Do objects exist? A bird—is that something that exists, or is it a collection of properties? But in exactly the same way, the dispute between Plato and Aristotle addresses that same question with respect to concepts, not with respect to objects. Does the concept democracy exist, or is the concept democracy just a collection of characteristics: separation of powers, elections, civil rights, all kinds of things like that? So that collection of characteristics is what I call democracy; it’s not that there is a concept democracy whose characteristics these are. According to Borges’s description, you could say then that you could also manufacture a concept like a bambological state. A bambological state is a state located on a seacoast, with a population over five million, and where they grow peaches. That’s it. All such states will be called bambological states. There’s no obstacle to producing such a concept. Or alternatively, to produce a concept made up of either being a bambological state or being some cloud—I don’t know—cumulonimbus, what are clouds called? I’ve already forgotten. Meaning, you can play with these things however you like. But we have some sense that there are nevertheless definitions that are more natural. A collection of characteristics from which it really makes sense to form a concept, and there are characteristics that are unrelated—you combine them and it doesn’t produce a concept. What’s the difference? Why does this collection of characteristics feel natural while that one seems arbitrary? The answer Plato offers is that this collection of characteristics simply characterizes an existing idea. It’s an idea that we see, and it has a set of characteristics. Whereas according to Aristotle, if we combine the characteristics and create the idea—where the idea is the collection of characteristics—then we could have made any collection of characteristics we wanted. It just depends perhaps on our cognitive structure, or our culture, or whatever, but there’s no real meaning to saying that one concept is natural and another is not natural. That was the point. But why can’t you answer that it’s a pragmatic matter, a utilitarian matter? We could create endless concepts, but there are concepts that are fruitful and give us possibilities. For example, precisely the example the Rabbi gave about democracy—after all, both sides today speak loftily in the name of democracy when these are actually different concepts; we all understand that two people are talking about different realities. What you’ve just raised is excellent, because it will appear later in today’s lecture. You’re bringing the dispute over the concept as evidence that the concept is only a construction. I see the dispute over a concept as evidence that a concept is not a human construction. But I’ll get to that in just a moment. But why are there concepts like democracy that if people had talked about them 2,000 years ago no one would have understood them? So it wasn’t natural then, and then it became more natural? I don’t, I don’t agree at all. I think that if someone had defined the concept then, everyone would have understood, and it would also have been adopted. It simply hadn’t yet been discovered then, just like relativity hadn’t yet been discovered. But if they had discovered it then, people would have understood that there’s some structure here that is indeed natural. Maybe they wouldn’t have immediately adopted it, maybe yes, I don’t know. But it’s not the same thing as the bird’s cry and the color of the cloud. People would indeed have seen in it some coherent concept, yes, that there is some set of characteristics where it makes sense to combine them into a natural concept. And therefore, in my view, that’s actually an indication that this concept is a discovery and not an invention. They discovered it in the nineteenth or twentieth century, or really not before that—in the modern period and not in antiquity. That’s all. But if they had discovered it then, it would have been the same. But what would Aristotle do with quantum theory? We don’t understand it or something—no, that’s not, I didn’t understand. Again, if it only comes from our consciousness, we don’t understand what’s in quantum theory. It’s not something we see and understand and it’s obvious. It’s something—it emerges. What’s beneath it nobody knows. No, Aristotle would say that this is the theory we created in order to explain the set of facts we observed. But we created this theory; it’s not really a claim about the world. The explanation is not a claim about the world. The phenomena we observed are. The explanation is our construction, and someone else with a different kind of mind will come and create some other explanation for that same set of phenomena. Right, I think we talked about this—about feminine science and masculine science, of Gadi Taub I think. So, so that’s why I say this dispute will be hard to decide, but it seems to me that at first glance Platonism somehow looks like some sort of mysticism that it’s unclear why one should go there. And what I tried to show in previous sessions is that on second glance you actually see the opposite. The simple tendency and our primary intuition are actually Platonic. Aristotle’s claim sounds like something detached from our feelings, from our natural intuitions. But still, yes, everyone can decide. What about a law given to Moses at Sinai, where we say it’s a novelty and there wasn’t such a concept before, it didn’t appear at all, and only after the Holy One, blessed be He, said it, it became something that existed? But, that is, it’s a concept that by definition is not something natural that I would have understood. Look, first of all I don’t think that’s unique specifically to a law given to Moses at Sinai. Even a Jewish law written explicitly in a verse—you could say the same thing. The Jewish law “You shall not plow with an ox and a donkey together.” And that’s no different from a law given to Moses at Sinai in this respect, except that this one is written and that one was transmitted orally. But it’s still a novelty that the Holy One, blessed be He, gave us, and without His giving it to us we wouldn’t have thought of it. But here we need to distinguish between two things. The question is whether we wouldn’t have thought of it because it doesn’t exist, or because we don’t have the tools to grasp it. Meaning, here perhaps we really don’t have the sense of the thing’s naturalness. The halakhic commands, to an objective eye, let’s say—someone who didn’t grow up in a halakhic world—won’t see them as any more logical than, I don’t know, some collection of pagan rules. It’s not that when a person encounters them he understands that there’s something more natural here than just some set of rules one way or another. But that doesn’t mean that behind these things there is no existence or no reality. It only means that we don’t have the senses to recognize it or grasp it, and therefore I need the Holy One, blessed be He, to tell me about it. I’m talking about those things in which we do have a feeling of naturalness, like the world of concepts. The fact that we have a feeling of naturalness means that apparently there is something there behind them. It doesn’t mean that with regard to everything we have the ability to grasp it in itself. There are things we don’t. And that’s what’s called a scriptural decree, yes, things that we need the Holy One, blessed be He, to tell us about because we would not grasp them on our own. It somewhat resembles the difference in how you relate to a scriptural decree. There is some tendency among people to think that a scriptural decree is a law without a reason. What—this is a law without a reason. If you find a reason, that’s a sign it’s not a scriptural decree. And I think that’s incorrect. A scriptural decree is a law that definitely has—or at least we should understand that it has—a sufficiently convincing reason for it to be implemented. But that doesn’t mean there isn’t some real reason there behind the matter. So it somewhat resembles this dispute, I think. In any case, yes? Is there any practical difference whether we invented it or whether it existed? Maybe we’ll talk about that more; for now the practical difference is for the betrothal of a woman. So I want to look at this issue from a slightly different angle, a more modern one, and this is an argument of Leibniz, a German philosopher from the eighteenth century, I think, and he speaks about the principle of the identity of indiscernibles. What does that mean? He says: we can speak about the relation between two objects on two levels. We can say that they are similar to each other, and we can say that they are identical to each other. Very often we think that identity is perfect similarity. Similarity means similar but not entirely; identity means completely similar. I want to speak about this on a different plane. When I talk about similarity, I mean complete similarity. They are not distinguishable from one another. All the characteristics of this one are found also in that one. It’s impossible to distinguish between them. That I call similarity, not identity. Identity means that they are the very same object itself. Not that they are completely similar in all their characteristics. It’s simply the same object; it’s one object, not two. In analytic philosophy they sometimes bring the common example: the evening star is the morning star. Once they thought the evening star and the morning star were two different stars. At some point they discovered that this was actually the very same star. In the evening it appears this way, in the morning it appears that way. Okay? When you say that the evening star is the morning star, you didn’t say that the evening star and the morning star have the same characteristics. You said it’s the same object. It’s simply one object and not two. That’s what I call identity. In fact, with the evening star and the morning star it may even be that the characteristics are not identical, but it’s the same object itself with two sets of characteristics. Fine. So the distinction I want to make here for our purposes between identity and similarity is not a distinction of degree. It’s a different category. Similarity means all the characteristics are the same. When I say that two objects are similar, that means there is no difference between them at all. When I say that two objects are identical, that means it’s simply one object; it’s not two. You thought it was two, but you were mistaken. It is one object. Now Leibniz argues—this is what’s called the principle of the identity of indiscernibles—he says that if there are two objects that have exactly the same set of characteristics, they are not distinguishable from one another, they are completely similar to one another, then they are also identical. Meaning, it is one object, not two. If object A and object B have exactly the same set of characteristics, then it’s not object A and object B—it’s the same object. That’s his claim. Now he has evidence for this, a proof, an argument. What does he say? Let’s assume not. We’ll prove it by contradiction. Suppose there are two objects that are different, they are not identical, and yet they have the same set of characteristics. Object A and object B have exactly the same set of characteristics and they are still two. Leibniz says: object A has the property that it is not object B. Not that it’s not similar, but that it is not object B, it is not identical. And object B does not have that property. So if they are not identical, that means they are also not similar. Because there is one property in which they differ from each other. And that contradicts the assumption that they have the same set of properties. So we have proved by contradiction that two objects with the same set of properties are one object. Meaning, this is the identity of indiscernibles: if they are indiscernible, then they are also identical. That’s Leibniz’s claim. Now, at first glance it may be a little hard to put your finger on where the problem is, but your sense of smell immediately says there’s a problem. It can’t be that such a simple argument proves some proposition that at first glance looks very strange to us. So in order—and this is true for many arguments of this kind—you often need to define very carefully the two positions that are confronting one another. Meaning, what is Leibniz arguing against? So let’s present my position, say—I don’t agree with Leibniz—say he is arguing against my position. So the position of Akiva and the position of Leibniz. What is Leibniz’s position? He basically says that two objects with the same set of characteristics are the same object itself. There cannot be two objects that are not identical but are similar and indiscernible. I claim no, there can be two objects that are two objects—they are not identical—and yet they have exactly the same set of characteristics. That is the counterclaim. Against that Leibniz argues. I’m not saying who is right, but first of all we need to define very carefully what the two positions are, one against the other. Now when I try to dig a little into the position I’m expressing, what I’m really saying is: what does it mean that there are two objects that are not the same object itself even though they have the same set of characteristics? What I am really saying here is that there is in fact something more besides its set of characteristics, right? That’s what I’m saying. Otherwise, if there were nothing in it except the set of characteristics, then if they have the same set of characteristics, obviously it’s the same object itself—that would be a tautology. And if I say these are two different objects, I am basically claiming that there is something beyond the set of characteristics. Okay, and then I claim: this something—there are two of this something here—and each of those two has the same set of characteristics. Meaning, what I am really saying is that object A’s being not object B is not a characteristic; it is not a property. Because it is something beyond the properties. Or in other words, I’ll formulate it this way: when I look at the collection of characteristics—and therefore I say this is just another way to present what I talked about last time—when I look at this collection of characteristics, why do I really see it as a coherent set? Some natural collection, some defined set where the characteristics connect to one another in a common group and not like the bird’s cry with the cloud? Because they characterize the same object, right? What I’m really saying is: there is a certain object whose characteristics these are. And therefore I see them as one whole and not as just some collection of characteristics that I happened to put together. So what does that really mean? It means that the object I’m talking about is not the collection of characteristics but the possessor of the characteristics. The object is the thing of which these characteristics are the characteristics. As opposed to Leibniz’s conception, where Leibniz says that the object is nothing but the collection of characteristics. There is nothing in the object beyond… it is simply a collection of characteristics. You can already see that he is immediately exposed to Borges’s attacks, right? So really, why is this collection of characteristics an object and not the bird’s cry and the cloud? Because the collection of characteristics is the object. There isn’t something of which these are the characteristics, that bears them, that owns these characteristics. Right, the sentence has no subject. When I say that a democratic state is a state with separation of powers, elections, and civil rights, there is no subject… that sentence doesn’t really have a subject. The subject “democratic state” does not really exist; it is simply the collection of characteristics. That’s a definition, not a proposition. Okay, this collection of characteristics is what I call a democratic state. Okay, so Leibniz’s claim basically says that an object is nothing but a collection of characteristics. That’s all. The opposing claim says no, there are objects and objects have characteristics. Not that the collection of characteristics is the object, but that the collection of characteristics is characteristics of the object. There is something of which these are the characteristics. That’s what is called an object. Now see why Leibniz’s proof begs the question and therefore collapses. What is he really trying to claim? He says: let’s assume for the sake of contradiction that Mick is right—that there are two different objects, each of which has exactly the same set of characteristics. He says: then if so, object A has a property or characteristic that it is not object B. That characterizes it, and object B does not have that property. So here they differ in one of the properties, and that contradicts the assumption that their properties are identical—which is what we wanted to prove. Where does he go wrong? He goes wrong in that if I say there is something in the object beyond the properties, then that means there is something I can say about the object that would not be one of its properties. For example, that it exists. The fact that an object exists is not a property. That is a statement about the object itself; it is not a description of the object. There may be an object all of whose characteristics are those same characteristics but it does not exist. That is an imaginary object. It doesn’t really exist in the world, but those are its characteristics. To say that it exists is not to add a characteristic. To say that it exists is to say something about the object itself, not about its characteristics. In the same way, I claim that to say that object A is not object B—not that it is not similar, but that it is not identical, that it is another object—is a claim about the object itself; it is not one of its characteristics. And therefore when I say that all the… all the characteristics of the two objects are identical, you cannot say to me: but object A has the characteristic that it is not object B, and in that respect it is not identical to object B. That is not a characteristic. To say that it is not object B is not a characteristic, because when you assume that it is a characteristic, you are basically saying there is nothing in the object except the characteristics. You cannot say anything about it that would not be one of its characteristics. And I claim, the opposing position, that’s not true; there is an object whose characteristics these are, and in principle I could also say something about the object that would not be a characterization of it. Assuming that this is my position, Leibniz will not be able to prove to me that he is right. Because if this is my position, then when he says to me: wait, A’s not being B is a different property between A and B, I will tell him: not true, that is not a property, it is not a characteristic. Leibniz of course assumes that everything is characteristics; there is nothing at all in the object beyond its characteristics. But if I assume otherwise, then his claim is really a claim that begs the question; it cannot change my position. Rabbi, Rabbi? Yes? Can we take this opportunity to ask—I didn’t understand in Leibniz. Suppose two objects are completely identical in all their characteristics and everything, in matter and spirit, and both are suffering. Both are suffering from something. Now he says it’s the same thing, so it’s one object. But doesn’t he see, doesn’t he understand, that there is a difference between two objects suffering and one object suffering, even if the suffering is completely identical? No, he claims it’s the same thing. They also—don’t forget—are also in the same place, called by the same name, have the same father and mother, so it’s the same object. It’s just one. For some reason you think there are two here; you are mistaken. It’s one. If it’s really one. But if we were able to show… No, he says it really is one. If the collection of characteristics is identical, then it is one. If we take—the Rabbi already said elsewhere that an object is not a matter of place or… there can be an object without a place. So if we take two objects, two I don’t know, photons… Don’t ask according to my position, so don’t ask Leibniz from my assumptions. I don’t agree with what I said. No, let’s take two photons that the Rabbi mentioned, and suppose they felt something, and both are suffering, and they are two photons. Physics says these are two photons, but they have absolutely identical characteristics. Doesn’t he understand that these are two photons? Leibniz would say it’s one photon. Again, I don’t agree, I can’t defend a position I don’t agree with, but that’s what he claims. The example you gave about photons is actually an example from physics that I have brought up when discussing these matters several times in the past. In physics they distinguish between two types of elementary particles. There are fermions and bosons. Fermions are particles that cannot have the same set of properties. If they are different particles, then there is at least one property in which they differ. In the language of physics, they cannot occupy the same physical state; they cannot have the same set of properties. And bosons—named after Bose, the Indian physicist, Bose-Einstein condensation, yet another thing Einstein inflicted on us—bosons are particles that can all be found in the same quantum state, the same physical state, with exactly the same properties. Now, this difference between fermions and bosons itself constitutes a refutation of Leibniz’s conception. Here we see that there is a type of particles that we can observe in physics, and say that this is in fact a set of particles all in the same state, and still I can count them. There are n particles: ten, twenty, a hundred, two thousand, as many as you want. You can count these particles, and that counting has physical consequences. I know that I have such-and-such a number of particles here. So this is seemingly a scientific proof against Leibniz’s philosophical conception. I’m not sure that it’s true, because Leibniz might really say: you’re simply looking at it incorrectly; these two thousand bosons that are in exactly the same state are simply one big particle, that’s all. They are not two thousand particles; you call it two thousand particles only because you divide this large particle into two thousand parts, and that is not interesting. Meaning, in the end it is one particle, or one organ, or whatever it may be. And by the way, with bosons, what characterizes them when they are in the same quantum state is that what is called a condensate is formed, Bose-Einstein condensation. That really means they all basically create some kind of fluid in which you cannot distinguish between the different particles, because they are not different, they are all in the same state and somehow really form one condensate. That’s somewhat similar, I think, to what Leibniz would answer to that kind of question. Therefore I don’t think you can bring scientific proof against Leibniz’s conception. I argue against him with a logical claim, not a scientific one. I want to argue from that same feeling of naturalness I spoke about earlier. The feeling of naturalness says that this collection of characteristics—that this table is made of wood, it is brown, it has four metal legs, it is such-and-such a size, and so on—this collection of characteristics I define as a table, or this table. Okay? Whereas the color of the chair together with the speed at which that car is moving and the make of this phone—I do not define that as an object or as a concept. Why? It doesn’t feel natural to me. Why? So some will say because it is not useful, it doesn’t serve me—that is probably how Aristotle would answer. And it seems to me that the answer more fitting to our simple intuition is that here I see one object for which all these characteristics are its characteristics: this table. And the color of the chair with the phone and the speed of the car—there is no object to which I can attribute all these characteristics. Meaning, I understand that there is some object whose characteristics these are, and not that the collection of characteristics is itself an object. We return again and again to Borges. But through Leibniz, I think the philosophical presentation of this dispute is sharper. Here one can see more sharply this distinction that I am trying to argue in favor of: that an object is the possessor of the characteristics and not that the collection of characteristics is the object. Now, why can’t one simply say more simply that to say an object is not—one can’t say—it’s not a property to say I am not something. You can only say something positive, yes, this is the—I have some program or something. But to say that I am not, that’s not… I don’t think that will help you, because I’ll say object B has the property that it is object B, and object A does not have that property. So there, there is a difference in the properties. No, but you can’t say I am A. A has no meaning except when you look at the larger system. Meaning, from inside the cell itself he cannot say anything about the system except the cell. And why not? I didn’t understand. I can say about myself that I am A. What is the meaning of A? The meaning of A is only if you look at other things and say I am not B. But to say that I am A without saying that I am not B—that has no meaning. That’s exactly the same thing. We understand many things through their contrast, but that doesn’t mean they have no meaning. You just wanted not to speak about negative properties. So I presented to you the positive side. Now you tell me yes, but the positive side cannot be understood except through the negative property. And you said I’m not willing to accept my not being A as a property. So I said okay, then let’s talk about the property that I am indeed A as a property. You said no, because the property of indeed being A is not understood unless I say that I am not B. Fine, then that’s just riding on two saddles. You can’t say I’m not willing to accept negative properties, but a positive property that is defined only by means of a negative property doesn’t count. Then there are no properties at all. I think that does not, does not sound reasonable to me. Rabbi, a question. Yes. In an Aristotelian conception, or like Leibniz’s, any object in which something changed in its properties has no continuity with its previous property? Meaning, an object that changed location, an object that changed time. We’ll get to that in just a moment. A very good comment; I’ll come to it in just a moment. So what I just want to preface first is that this dispute with Leibniz is really a dispute about objects, about things. But I want to claim, as I said before, the same thing regarding concepts. Right, he talks about a table, a cloud, a bird, I don’t know, all sorts of things like that, a car. I want to talk about concepts. A democratic state, tolerance, I don’t know, a fascist regime, a communist economic system, whatever—all sorts of things of that kind. Various concepts. Love, horseness, what Plato calls ideas. There too I want to claim exactly the same claim. So I want to claim that also with respect to concepts—where already fewer people will agree that abstract entities exist—there many people will say no, the concept is simply the collection of its characteristics. And I will argue the same claim I argue against Leibniz. No. And here this already is Platonism. Because Leibniz deals with objects, so that’s not connected to Platonism. Platonism talks about concepts. But I want to claim the same thing I claimed against Leibniz also with regard to concepts. I want to say that a collection of characteristics like a democratic state—namely separation of powers, civil rights, elections, and so on—looks natural to us. Meaning, it is a whole where it really makes sense to join all these characteristics together into one whole. And I want to claim on that basis that if so, then the same logic I have when I look at objects exists also when I look at concepts. And the concepts too, I claim, have something in them beyond the collection of their characteristics. And that is exactly Platonism. Platonism basically says that the collection of characteristics characterizes the concept; the collection of characteristics is not the concept, but rather they characterize the concept. By the way, we touched on this a bit in the halakhic context as well. And by Jewish law I mean to get there eventually, but it’ll still take us a little time; but I just remembered something now so I’ll say it now. In the halakhic context we are often used to relating to halakhic concepts as collections of characteristics. For example, the concept of ownership. What does it mean to be an owner of an object? To be an owner of an object means: I have rights of use; someone else may not use it without my permission; one who damages it must pay me—yes, a collection of laws that pertain to the object of which I am the owner, yes, the laws of property. Is the concept of ownership some kind of entity, or is it just the collection of characteristics? So I wanted to argue in an article—and perhaps we’ll get to it later—that what we have here is some kind of existing thing, some sort of reality, of which the collection of characteristics are its characteristics. Meaning, to say that I am the owner of an object is to say that there is an ontic, metaphysical bond between me and the object. That has legal ramifications, but the statement that I am the owner of the object is a metaphysical statement. As a result there are all sorts of legal ramifications: it is forbidden to use it, I am permitted to use it, one who damages it pays me, a thief, and so on. One transfers it or one does not transfer it, all the laws that concern ownership, property law and tort law and everything. But all those laws are not the concept of ownership itself; they are properties or characteristics or derivatives of the concept of ownership. To say that I own something is a metaphysical statement. The claim is that the relation between me and the object is something in reality itself that has various characteristics. I brought various proofs for this; perhaps we’ll talk about it more later. What if I produce an idol and I’m obligated to destroy it, but I’m not considered its owner? It is forbidden for benefit and I’m no longer its owner even though I have an obligation to destroy it? Did you worship your own object or someone else’s object? Let’s say my own object, I worshiped something and now I have an obligation to destroy it. Okay, yes. But still it’s not considered mine. Who says it’s not considered yours? There is a dispute among the medieval authorities (Rishonim) over whether something from which benefit is forbidden belongs to you or not; it’s a dispute among the medieval authorities (Rishonim). Right, but even according to those who say it’s not yours, that’s because the Torah removed it from you. And that doesn’t mean—the simple understanding is that the object is yours, except that you are forbidden to use it. And therefore even among some of the medieval authorities (Rishonim) who say it’s not yours, in my opinion they don’t mean to say it’s not yours; they mean to say that one who steals it from you doesn’t have to pay, one who damages it doesn’t have to pay, and all the ramifications don’t exist. But I want to claim that metaphysically it is still yours. A practical difference, for example, if it is an animal that you worshiped as an idol and it becomes forbidden, you have to destroy it. Now it desecrated the Sabbath, the animal. There is such a concept as the rest of one’s animal. If your animal does labor on the Sabbath, you have violated a prohibition. Okay, not that you yourself are doing labor with the animal—that’s a different prohibition. I’m talking about the animal’s rest, not about leading it with a load. The rest of one’s animal means that you have to ensure that the animal does not carry outside the permitted boundary, or that the animal does not reap on the Sabbath or something like that. This is incumbent upon you. If you don’t do it, you have transgressed a Torah prohibition. This is called the rest of one’s animal. Okay, now an animal from which benefit is forbidden to me and that I need to destroy because I worshiped it as an idol—yes, apparently after idol worship even a little Sabbath desecration doesn’t bother me, but the animal desecrates the Sabbath—have I committed a prohibition? I want to claim that yes. I have committed a prohibition because the animal is mine. I have no rights of use in the animal, one who damages it doesn’t have to pay me, I myself really have to destroy it—but that doesn’t matter. Metaphysically the animal is defined as mine, and therefore I am liable for the Sabbath desecration it does. A second practical difference is from the Rogatchover on Bava Kamma 17. He brings these two practical differences. He wants to claim there that the concept of ownership exists prior to its practical differences, and these are the two examples he brings. One example is the rest of one’s animal, and the second is when it causes damage. Suppose this animal—I worshiped it as an idol, I have to destroy it—now the animal went and caused damage. Is… when with something forbidden for benefit there is no ownership, I think “there is no ownership” means there are no ramifications of ownership, but the metaphysical concept of ownership, of which the ramifications are ramifications, would still exist even in this case. And that is what is called in the language of the Talmudic text: “a lion crouches upon it,” meaning it is really mine, but there is a lion that does not let me approach it, yes? The prohibition prevents me from approaching the thing, but really it is mine on the metaphysical level. So here is an example of the claim that really says there is something in reality itself, where the characteristics—in this case the laws or halakhot that pertain to it—are its ramifications, and not that the status of a married woman—when I say that a woman is a married woman, what am I saying? That it is forbidden for another to have relations with her and permitted for me to have relations with her? No, I am saying that she is my wife, and that has ramifications: that it is forbidden for someone else to have relations with her and permitted for me, and the children are this or that, and the mutual obligations between the spouses and all those things. But all of those are ramifications. They are not the concept of marriage itself. The concept of marriage itself is first of all that there is a bond between me and the woman, some metaphysical bond, and as a result of that bond there are various ramifications. All these conceptions are basically Platonic conceptions. Conceptions that say there is something in reality itself, while the characteristics that are revealed to your eyes—for after all you see only the characteristics, you don’t see the thing that possesses the characteristics. For example, I don’t see the table, I see the wood, the iron, its structure, its size, all its characteristics. What is the table itself when you strip away all the characteristics? You don’t—there’s nothing there to see. You see the characteristics. But the Platonic claim says there is such a thing there, there is something that possesses the characteristics, of which the characteristics are characteristics. So just as with the table, so too with concepts. Democracy is a concept that exists in the world, and when I look at it I discover that it has a collection of characteristics. And the claim is that democracy was not invented in the modern age but discovered in the modern age. It existed also two thousand years earlier or five thousand years earlier; it simply had not yet been discovered. Like relativity. Relativity was true before Einstein too, but it had not been discovered. Einstein discovered it. Plato’s claim is that democracy is like science, like relativity, except that it is not properties of the material world; it is something that exists in the world of ideas. But it is still something that exists, and its appearance in the world is discovery and not creation. Rabbi, but let’s take, for example, a musical composition—Mozart, something, a symphony—if there were no human being or living creature that heard this collection of sounds, it wouldn’t occur to anyone that it was a composition; he would hear noises at different frequencies. But let’s go to the extreme: if there were no air in the world and no living creatures at all with the ability, with an auditory center in the brain, then what idea of a Mozart piece would we have at all? Exactly—everything you say, that there was an idea and nobody had any way to it, there was no initial thought for it to come to expression in any way—so what? Who said every idea has to come to expression? It may very well be that there are many, many ideas for which in our world there is no possibility of bringing them to expression; we’ll never discover them. So what? I never claimed that all ideas are discoverable. On the contrary, I said that even those that are discoverable, the discovery is not the idea itself; there is something behind the discovery. And it may very well be that there are other ideas that have no manifestation at all. Fine, that proves nothing. By the way, even regarding the symphony, it’s very hard to define—or not hard, I think it’s possible at all to define—which ideas… You can speak about a specific Beethoven symphony as an existing idea; you can speak about the concept of harmony in general, or fundamental concepts in music. Not every specific musical piece is an idea in the world of ideas. Rather, musical harmony is an idea, and it has many very different practical expressions. There are such harmonies and other harmonies. But the claim is that the basic musical concepts are ideas, not necessarily that every song or every symphony or every composition is itself also an idea. I don’t know, it’s a little hard for me to answer a question like that; I don’t know how one even attacks it. But the claim is that in principle these things have existence, and not only their appearance to our eyes exists. This really connects to Kant’s question of phenomena and noumena. Kant basically claimed that when we look at the world… he really wanted to claim that when we look at the world, what we say about the world are not claims about the world itself, but about the world as it appears to us. I say that this table is brown. So I’m not saying something about the table. I’m saying something about the image of the table that exists in my consciousness. That this image has the color brown. And this is not a statement about the table in itself. He distinguishes between the world of things as they are in themselves and the world of things as they are perceived by us. The noumenon versus the phenomenon. And really the things as I perceive them—that is perhaps what is called characteristics. The characteristics are really the way in which I describe the thing. If someone asks me what this table is, I’ll tell them: it’s a brown thing with four legs and so on. That’s not the table; those are the characteristics of the table. Yes, but everything I can say about the table is what I encounter of it. And what I encounter of it are its characteristics. I have no way to encounter the table as it is in itself except through its characteristics. But Kant assumed this as self-evident, and I think most of us assume this too: that if I encounter characteristics of something, then apparently behind those characteristics there is something. There is something that possesses the characteristics. And therefore he spoke about the thing in itself versus the thing as it appears to us. And indeed he was attacked for this. If you claim that everything we can say about the world is only about the world as it is revealed to us, then who told you there is any world beyond that at all, a world that is not revealed to you? After all, you are not making that statement because it was revealed to you. All you know is the collection of things that are revealed. How do you know that there is something in the world itself that is what is revealed to you? Zeitlin wrote this challenge in the name of Lev Shestov. I wrote about this in columns on the site. How do you know that very thing itself? How do you know there is such a thing as the thing in itself? It is some sort of logical inference. You are basically saying: if I see a collection of characteristics, it is clear to me that there is something in the world that possesses the characteristics. Now once I wanted to claim—I later retracted it—that in the world itself, in fact, if so, since the characteristics exist only in our consciousness, then in the world itself all the objects are the same thing. There is no difference in characteristics, only for us; the characteristics exist only in our consciousness and not in the world itself. So if so, when you strip the object of its characteristics, then really what is the difference between object A and object B? And that is a mistake. Why is it a mistake? It’s Leibniz’s principle of the identity of indiscernibles. Why is it a mistake? Because it is not true that the characteristics exist only in our consciousness. Not at all. The language I use to describe the characteristics exists only in my consciousness. I look at two tables. One is white and one is brown. So what—there is no difference between the tables, I just happen to see this one as white and that one as brown? It is obvious that there is something different in the tables themselves because of which I see this one as white and that one as brown. Something in the tables themselves is apparently different; otherwise why do I see this one as white and that one as brown? What differs between them is not color, because color exists only in my consciousness. But there is something different in the tables that in my internal language is described in terms of color. This is white and this is brown. In today’s physics we know that this is actually a crystal structure. A certain crystal structure reflects light this way; another crystal structure reflects light in another color, at another wavelength. So color really expresses in our internal language the crystal structure of the table, but the crystal structure of the table is indeed one of its characteristics in the world itself. And it differs from the crystal structure of another table. In my consciousness I don’t see crystal structure, I don’t see crystals. That’s not relevant. What I perceive when it reaches me is color, such that a different crystal structure produces a different color. But that doesn’t mean that all the differences between the tables exist only in my consciousness. No, they exist in the tables themselves. It’s just that in my consciousness I describe these differences in my internal language, like the language of color. More than once I’ve brought the amusing example of a tree falling in a forest. If a tree falls in a forest and nobody is there, the question is whether it makes a sound. And of course the answer is no. A tree falling in the forest when no one is there does not make a sound, because sound is a phenomenon of consciousness. What the tree falling in the forest does is create an acoustic wave. There is a pressure wave moving through the air. When I place an eardrum there and that pressure wave hits my eardrum, then inside my consciousness a sound, a noise, is produced. And only inside consciousness is there noise. There are no noises in the world. The world itself is mute, without colors, without anything. The world itself is some sort of neutral thing, terribly boring. All the diversity we know—audio, video, all those things—is a function of our perceptions. It exists only inside our consciousness; it does not exist in the world itself. But it’s not that in the world itself there are no differences and everything looks the same. Rather, the differences that exist in the world as it is in itself—we have no language to describe them. We can describe them only in terms of our own language. We say that when a tree falls in a forest, it makes a sound. The truth is that this is incorrect. When a tree falls in a forest, a sound is created in my consciousness. What the tree does is create an acoustic wave. When fire burns, it creates light. It’s not correct that it creates light. In my consciousness, when I look at the fire, light is created. What the fire creates is an electromagnetic wave, and in me that finds expression as light. Heat creates an electromagnetic wave, emits photons, and so on, and then some sort of light or color is produced in me; all these concepts are concepts inside us. Other creatures built differently from us would see the world in completely different terms. They might hear images, see sounds; they might have senses we don’t know at all through which they relate to electromagnetic waves or acoustic waves, or touch or taste. All these things are just senses. We happen to be built in this way, so we measure everything through touch, appearance, sounds, and so on, our five senses. There may be other creatures with other senses, and then they would hear yellow light as Beethoven’s Ninth Symphony. Every time they see yellow, Beethoven’s Ninth Symphony would play for them. That’s how they are built. They are no more mistaken than I am and no less mistaken than I am; they are simply different from me. But note well: we have no dispute. We have no dispute. We are talking about the same phenomenon and we agree. The language in which we describe this phenomenon is a different language, okay? Because the language is an internal language. We are really describing what exists inside us. But we are not talking about what exists inside us; we are using our internal language to describe things that exist in the world. Instead of saying that the table has a certain crystal structure, I say it is brown. Brown is not a crystal structure at all. There is an article by Nadav, my friend, Nadav Shnayer, saying that brown is not even a wavelength, it’s not a color, it’s some kind of something—and that’s really something I don’t fully grasp, this strange phenomenon. But never mind, yellow. So the claim is that it is not correct to infer subjective conclusions from the picture I am describing here. I’m not talking about claims that everything is subjective, postmodern, narrative, whatever. There are different narratives, there are different languages, but those languages point to the same phenomena. We may describe them in different languages, but that is not a dispute. It is just like describing a phenomenon in Hebrew and in English, that’s all. But what does that mean in terms of the role of the receiver? The Rabbi just described so beautifully the creative role of the receiver. The noise doesn’t exist until someone hears it and hears a tree falling in the forest or creates a consciousness of a Beethoven composition, and then the Rabbi says that theoretically he could also have seen visions of divine visions in the presence of those sounds, when all that was there were frequencies, just pressures moving through the forest. So there is some creative role here, not merely an epistemological one, on the part of the listener—he really creates it. Why is that creativity? We are simply built in such a way that this translates into sounds. It’s not that I did something creative when the sounds were produced. The sounds are produced in me against my will; I don’t create anything there. The one who created the sounds maybe has creativity, like Beethoven, but the one who hears hears what Beethoven makes him hear. It may be that if he’s an interpreter or something like that, fine, there may be creative interpretation, but hearing itself is not creation. That’s just how we are. The Holy One, blessed be He, created perhaps—not we—He created us, so now we hear or see. In any case, what I want to say is that the distinction I’m making here is certainly related to Kant’s distinction between the thing in itself and its appearances. When I spoke about Platonism, what I am really saying is that in the world of concepts too there is the concept in itself—the concept democracy—and the concept democracy has characteristics. The characteristics are really the ways by which we perceive the concept democracy; that is its color, its sound—of course in a metaphorical sense—but these are the characteristics of the thing. Yet there is some thing there of which these are the characteristics. Therefore in the world of concepts too I make a distinction between the thing in itself and the thing as it appears to us, and I claim: there is a concept that exists in some real sense. That is the Platonic claim. It has properties. Certain properties about which I can also speak. Usually when I speak about concepts or objects, almost everything I say will be their properties, or their characteristics, almost everything I say. It is very hard to say something about a thing that does not deal with its characteristics. But earlier I already gave examples that nevertheless there are examples where one can speak about the thing itself. For example, that it exists. The claim that this thing exists is a claim about it itself, not about its characteristics. How do I know this? For that I have a philosophical proof, a proof by contradiction. Anselm’s ontological proof, yes? For the existence of God, is built—that example I already brought in the “Two Carts” series. That proof is built on the following sort of subtle argument. He says: let us define the being of all perfections. Right? That is God. Definition. Define Him however you like. The being of all perfections. Now the atheist with whom I am arguing understands the definition. He claims that He does not exist, but he understands the definition; otherwise he couldn’t even say that God does not exist. If he doesn’t understand what God is, you can’t say that He exists and you can’t say that He does not exist. We understand what we are talking about; we just have a dispute over whether He exists or not. That is the assumption. If so, then he says: this is the most perfect being one can conceive of; I define that as God. Now let us suppose that He does not exist. We’ll prove by contradiction. Suppose He does not exist. If He does not exist, then I can conceive of a more perfect object. It is the same object, only it also exists. Ah, but if so, then I have conceived of a more perfect object, so that means the first object is not the most perfect object I can conceive of. Here I have conceived of a more perfect one, which contradicts the basic assumption, because the definition of God is the most perfect being I can conceive of. So I have proved by contradiction that He exists, because the assumption that He does not exist leads me to a contradiction. Now usually there are all sorts of arguments against this. Those who even bother to argue against it; most just mock it. But those who do argue against this argument, in one way or another, I think most of the arguments boil down to this point. The claim that a given object exists or does not exist does not belong to its level of perfection. When you say that I imagine the same object only now it also exists, I have not imagined a more perfect object. Why? Because perfection is something that derives from the thing’s properties. When I say that a being is perfect, I mean that all its properties are perfect completely. It has each property in the most perfect way possible. A thing’s perfection is a statement about the collection of its properties. Now to say that it exists, as I said before, is not a property. Therefore one cannot say that the same object insofar as it exists is more perfect than this object insofar as it does not exist—as a hypothetical object that does not exist. The relation between them is not one of more perfect and less perfect, because the difference between them is not a difference in properties, but a difference in that one exists and the other does not, and existence is not a property. Okay? Now if you accept this challenge to Anselm’s argument—and for example I think this challenge is correct—then what that really means is that existence is not a property. Or in other words, to say that a certain object exists is not a statement about one of its properties. There you have a statement that does not deal with the thing’s properties, but with the thing itself, the thing in itself. There is an owner, as it were, of this collection of properties. That is the statement that the object exists. The collection of properties also characterizes the hypothetical object. When I say that it exists, I am really saying the object is not hypothetical, but rather that there is something that possesses these properties. Therefore by definition to say that something exists is not a statement about its properties. Once—that’s an example I’ve brought ever since I once spoke about this many years ago in Yerucham at the women’s seminary Midreshet Be’er, where I was. A woman there remarked to me that perhaps even when I say I love someone, I am not relating to his or her properties. Meaning, when I encounter someone, I of course encounter some whole collection of properties. Everything I encounter, I encounter through its properties. But somehow some link, some bond, some connection is formed there between the spouses, let’s say if we’re talking about love between spouses. Some connection is formed between the spouses that began through the properties, but in the end the properties were only the mediation through which I feel a connection to the possessor of the properties. And the indication is what happens when someone loses those properties. The properties by which I initially fell in love change—so do I continue to love him? If I continue to love him, then apparently this love was not love for the properties, but through the properties I fell in love with the possessor of the properties. And therefore even if the properties disappear, it doesn’t matter; so long as it is the possessor of the properties, I continue to love. So he says that a relation—yes, this is what is written in Pirkei Avot—“Any love that depends on a thing, when the thing ceases, the love ceases; and any love that does not depend on a thing, when the thing ceases, the love does not cease.” Meaning, if the love is love of properties, then I do not love the person; I love his properties. Now if his properties change, then of course when the thing ceases, the love ceases. And if through the properties a love for the person was created in me, then after I’ve climbed the ladder I throw it away. And indeed now, even if the properties change, the love can remain. That is an indication that even a relation of love perhaps is directed to the thing itself and not specifically to the collection of properties—or can at least be directed to the thing itself and not only to the collection of properties. That does not mean I encounter the thing itself directly; I encounter the thing through the collection of properties. Fine. But afterward, the connection that is created is actually created with the thing. Maybe really here a clarifying remark about what I said earlier. There is a widespread tendency among interpreters of Kant, and even more so among non-experts, to say that Kant is really talking about some kind of limitation. I cannot grasp the thing; all I can do is grasp it as it appears to my eyes or to my senses, okay? My senses and my thighs. So that, then, means I have some limitation in that I cannot grasp the thing itself. I argued—and those are the same columns I mentioned about Lev Shestov—I argued that this is a mistake. It is not correct. It is not a limitation. Perception is defined as taking the thing and bringing it into my internal language. That is what it means to perceive. When I perceive the crystal structure of the table in the form of color, that is not a limitation. There—I perceived the crystal structure of the table. How did I perceive it? By bringing it, in my internal language, into the concepts of color. That is what perception is. To perceive something means to bring the thing perceived into the world of the perceiver. That is the definition of the concept of perception. Therefore there is no such thing as perceiving the thing in itself. To perceive the thing in itself is like squaring the circle, because once you have perceived it, then by definition perception deals with how it appears in your internal language, how it enters that language. That is what it means to perceive. That doesn’t mean that the thing itself is the totality that appears inside you. Absolutely not—on the contrary. The thing itself is the thing that appears to me in this internal way. There is something there that appears. I only claim that to perceive it is only through the ways it appears. And that is not a limitation; that is how perception works. There is no one who can perceive the thing in itself. Why? Even the Holy One, blessed be He, cannot perceive the thing in itself. Why? Because there is no such thing as perceiving the thing in itself. To perceive the thing in itself is like a round triangle. Because once you have perceived, perceiving means bringing the thing itself into my patterns. That is what it means to perceive. Okay? Therefore now each one with his own patterns. It may be that there are things in the thing that I will not be able to perceive because they do not fit into my patterns. For example, sounds at frequencies to which my ear is not sensitive, then I will not hear them. That does not mean there is no acoustic wave there. There is an acoustic wave and I cannot perceive it. Of course there are limits to our perceptions. But the very fact that we perceive things through perceptions is not in itself a limitation; that is what it means to perceive. Rather, our perceptions are not all-powerful—there are things we fail to perceive. But with regard to those things we did succeed in perceiving, that does not mean we have some limitation regarding them; that is simply how we perceive. Therefore when I return to love, which was the trigger for the discussion, when I encounter a woman through a collection of properties and fell in love with her through the properties, that does not mean I did not encounter her. I did encounter her. Through the properties I encounter her. And therefore it may be that I fall in love with the thing I encountered, even though I cannot say anything about it except how it appears to me, because everything is properties. And all of that can change. She had a car accident, her face was crushed, her beauty, her mind was damaged, her properties changed completely—and I can still continue to love her. So there are people who will say, okay, that is just a residue of what once was; you love some imaginary thing in your mind. I want to make a philosophical claim, not a psychological one. That love is directed toward the possessor of the properties, and therefore it may be that all the properties change and I still love the possessor of the properties. If that is so, then this is also an interesting demonstration—if I am right, and I think I am right—then this is an interesting demonstration of this Platonic distinction. By the way, we’ll get to this when we talk about Platonic love. Because the question is why Platonic love is called Platonic at all; what is Platonic about it? How is it connected to the Platonism we are talking about here? I want to claim that Platonic love is love for the Platonic idea and not for its appearances. That is the concept of Platonic love even in everyday language when analyzed philosophically. But we’ll get to that. Great. That’s it for now. Are there questions, comments? But again I didn’t understand: when all the characteristics by which you fell in love are gone, then what exactly do you love now when… You didn’t fall in love with them; I fell in love with the possessor of the characteristics through the characteristics. I encountered him through the characteristics and fell in love with him. But they are now gone, and now you say I love the thing itself. But what do you love? I have no idea. Not that I have no idea—I can’t say anything about it. That’s not the same thing. You also grasp nothing. No, that’s true, because by definition you cannot grasp the thing itself. It’s not a limitation—that’s what I said. So what do you love? So what do you love now? You love some hidden thing that at the moment you have no hold on? Yes. But there are no statements about that thing; that’s exactly the point. What you’re asking me, you’re trying to extract statements from me. There are no statements about that thing. Everything I say will relate to properties. So how can one nevertheless understand philosophically what you love? It’s like asking me what it means to say that a thing exists. Can you explain it to me? No. In my opinion you’ll never succeed in explaining it to me. I can’t explain it to anyone. It’s harder for me to understand what “does not exist” means. No, I’m saying: does that mean that when I say the thing exists I’m saying nothing? That I understand nothing? No, I understand very well. I just have no way to say it, no way to describe it. Why? Because to say that a thing exists does not belong to its properties, and I speak only the properties of the thing. The same thing I want to claim here. You’re trying to extract from me descriptions of what the thing is, but descriptions will always be in terms of properties. If I speak about the thing itself, if I intend the thing itself, then I cannot speak about the thing itself because those intentions are not expressible in speech. They cannot be spoken, because speech always deals with properties and characteristics, with phenomena and not with noumena. But that does not mean there are no noumena or that I have no relation to the noumena; it is just a relation that cannot be verbalized, it cannot be transcribed. Okay? May I ask a question? Yes. I wanted to ask about concepts according to Plato. About concepts that are basically—I don’t know what to call it—some would claim they’re fiction, some would claim they’re real. Suppose, for example, derivatives of gender—today there are people who claim them and adopt them and define themselves that way. And often, you know, people with simple intuition say, what is this? It’s nonsense, there’s no such thing really. But on the other hand, the more the concept is perceived and the more accepted it becomes, it turns into something tangible and legitimate, supposedly. We’ll get to that, because one can argue about the interpretation of the process you just described. There will be those who say we simply got used to it, internalized it, not that we really discovered something new. A psychological process. If you repeat it enough times, in the end you become convinced that there is something here and you speak about it naturally. And there will be those who say that perhaps they helped you notice something you didn’t notice before, but now you really do notice it. Like a teacher or a guide helps you discover things you might not have noticed before, but after he reveals them to you, you really do see that it’s so. So these are two possible ways of relating to it. I think that on the principled level there are processes that are like this and processes that are like that. Even as a Platonist I am not saying that all processes are processes of discovery. I do not claim that there are no illusions or no brainwashing. There certainly are. I only claim that not everything is brainwashing. That there is also a way to discover things in this way. Not everything is brainwashing. That doesn’t mean that every fabrication someone comes up with, I have to say that it’s an existing idea and if I don’t notice it, then presumably the problem is with me. Not necessarily. Maybe yes, but not necessarily. It may be that the problem is with him, that he is hallucinating non-existent ideas. Okay, intriguing. I wanted to ask a somewhat, I don’t know, amusing and interesting question about a dictionary. A dictionary is a book that, you know, gives properties to concepts. If you had to place it, would you place it as a Platonic book or an Aristotelian book? No, those would be two interpretations of the dictionary. It’s neither Aristotelian nor Platonic. The Platonist would say the concept exists and I’m giving you a description of its properties, its characteristics, I don’t know exactly, something like that, its uses and so on. And Aristotle would say that here I’m defining the concept, I’m constituting the concept here. So these are just two different interpretations of the dictionary. Both would write a dictionary. Right. Because Aristotle would say that the dictionary reflects a convention, an agreement. And Plato would say that the dictionary reflects an observation. But I’ll get to that later. That is literally the next step in the next lecture. Thank you very much. That’s it, anyone else? Okay. Sabbath peace. Thank you very much.