Platonism – Lecture 24

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[Rabbi Michael Abraham] In a certain sense, what Plato is really doing—after all, the distinction between form and matter is Aristotle’s distinction. Aristotle makes a distinction between form and matter, and what Plato does is take the form and turn it too into a kind of object. That’s the idea. But right, you’re correct that the content of that idea is what Aristotle calls form. And it’s not a perfect horse, but the form of a horse insofar as it is a horse. Not necessarily perfect, but the properties that make it distinctively a horse. Okay? It’s just that for Aristotle this is an abstraction made by us, whereas for Plato it’s an object that exists in the world of ideas. And we talked about why one would think that way and what the implications of those things are—we discussed that at the beginning of the series, and I’ll come back to it a bit later on as well. I’ll try to illustrate these things through a paradox that people still write quite a bit about to this day, called the Third Man Paradox. And the claim is basically—the Third Man Argument—which is really Parmenides, in Plato’s dialogue called Parmenides. Plato describes there some confrontation of Socrates—after all, all these dialogues are Socrates against… various people—so Socrates versus Parmenides. And Parmenides attacks the idea of a world of ideas. Yes, the Platonic idea of a world of ideas. He asks—he raises an argument against the Platonic view called the Third Man Paradox. To this day people write articles about it and all kinds of things of that sort. You may be a little surprised when you hear it, because on the face of it it really seems silly, and in my opinion it really is silly, but I don’t know—philosophers keep busy with all sorts of things. In any event, the argument goes like this. Suppose we have a collection of objects of the same kind, yes, the same collection of horses. Okay? So they all have the same set of essential properties. Okay? There are x, y, and z, all horses, and each of them has the same collection of essential properties: alpha, beta, gamma, delta. Okay? Each of the horses has that same collection of properties, and they differ in non-essential properties. One is tall, one is short, one is brown, one is black—differences in non-essential properties—but the essential properties are shared by all of them. Okay? Now what actually defines the horse? What defines the horse is all the objects that have that same set of essential properties—alpha, beta, gamma, delta. Okay? And in addition, of course, they can also have other properties—lambda, phi, whatever—they have other properties, but they have those four essential properties of horseness, or of the horse. Whoever has those four properties is what we call—what we call a horse. Now Parmenides says: if that’s so, let’s take the Platonic idea of the horse. What are the properties of that idea? So he says: the properties are basically alpha, beta, gamma, delta—the essential properties of horses. But if that’s so, he says, then that idea too is a horse. So in fact the number of horses now is not just x, y, z, but also h—yes, horse—the idea of horseness. So now the number of horses has gone up to n plus one. Okay? Now look at the group of those n plus one entities—and this is only according to Plato, because according to Aristotle the idea doesn’t exist, so there’s nothing to discuss. But according to Plato this is an entity, and that entity has the properties of horses, so it is itself a horse. And since it is a horse, it has to be added to the group of horses, so now the group of horses is x, y, z, and h. Okay? So there’s one more horse. Now he says: for that group—and he assumes that every group, every set of objects, has an idea—so this group has another idea, h-prime, h-tag. That is the idea of this group. What are the properties of that idea? Again: alpha, beta, gamma, delta. So it too is a horse, and so on, of course. And now it turns out that there are infinitely many horses. And therefore this is considered a paradox that is supposed to refute Plato’s claim that ideas exist, and support Aristotle’s position that ideas are only our abstractions. Aristotle himself, by the way, saw this paradox as one of the essential stumbling blocks in the Platonic conception. That is, he saw it as one of the major difficulties in Plato’s view. Now it’s a bit unnecessary to explain why this is simply silly—I don’t know what there is to explain about why it’s wrong, it’s so obvious that it’s just nonsense—but what interests me is one particular aspect that connects to what I was talking about earlier. This thing is nonsense for several reasons. First, you assume some premise that the list of objects x, y, z, and h has yet another idea, h-prime. No—the idea of that set is h itself. Why do you think—after all, one of those objects is an idea; the idea of that group is the very same idea that is already inside the group, not a new idea. It’s the same idea. I don’t see why one has to assume an h-prime; it’s h itself, it is the idea, and that’s the end of the story. So the number of horses is n plus one, and that’s it. That’s the first point. The second point—and this is more important for our purposes—is that it’s simply not true that the idea of horseness has the properties alpha, beta, gamma, delta. That’s just a misunderstanding. Those properties belong maybe to the perfect horse, but Plato does not claim that the perfect horse exists. If Plato claimed that the perfect horse exists, then one could generate the Third Man Paradox with respect to the perfect horse. But Plato does not claim that the perfect horse exists—that’s an abstraction. What does exist is the idea of horseness. But the idea of horseness has no properties. The property-set alpha, beta, gamma, delta—that collection of properties is the idea of horseness. Those are not properties of the idea; they are properties included in the idea. They are not properties of the object, of the idea as an object; rather that set of properties is the object. An abstract object that turns properties into an entity. You can’t say that the idea of horseness has legs or has a tail. That’s a mistake—a philosophical mistake in understanding Platonism.

[Speaker H] I didn’t understand—who determines which properties are horseness? Who determines that in the end? In the end it’s people who determine it.

[Rabbi Michael Abraham] You’re assuming a Platonic—sorry, an Aristotelian premise here. Aristotle really does say that these are our abstractions. We are built in such a way that this collection of properties appears to us as some meaningful whole, so we gather that collection of properties and call it horseness. But that’s just an abstraction made by us. I showed, through several arguments at the beginning of the series, why such a thing cannot be correct. If you remember Borges’s story about the planet Tlön—there, through that, I think there’s a beautiful illustration of why that can’t be right. Plato claims that this is observation. The idea of horseness exists, and we look at that idea, and that’s how we know what the essential properties of the horse are. It is not an arbitrary human decision. It’s given. Just like I know there’s a fan here in front of me because I see it, I see horseness. I see it through the horses. But I do see it—it’s not a decision. It’s not something that could have been decided differently. Someone who decides differently is simply mistaken. Because horseness is not a concept that we define. Horseness is a concept that exists in reality. The Holy One, blessed be He, created horseness, not only horses.

[Speaker H] If you give artificial intelligence lots and lots of examples of horses, and then you give it another example and ask whether it’s a horse or not—what?

[Rabbi Michael Abraham] A few people are talking here—there’s… let’s mute, I can’t hear. Yes.

[Speaker H] I’m saying that if you give artificial intelligence—Daniel—

[Rabbi Michael Abraham] I muted, Daniel.

[Speaker H] If you give artificial intelligence—did you hear me?

[Speaker E] We hear.

[Rabbi Michael Abraham] There are voices in the background here; it’s bothering me.

[Speaker H] Sorry, okay, then I’ll drop it.

[Rabbi Michael Abraham] Ah, okay, fine, sorry, I just didn’t hear. So this distinction I made above between the ideal horse or the perfect horse and the idea of horseness is actually one of the essential bugs in the Third Man Paradox. Because the Third Man Paradox treats the idea as some kind of horse, in a certain sense, like the perfect horse. But no—the idea of horseness is not the perfect horse; it’s something else, it’s a collection of properties. Now, this may seem to you like some uninteresting philosophical distinction, but it seems to me that it is actually very interesting in terms of its applications. And here I return to Platonic love. Love—I’ll call it—the concept of Platonic love, it seems to me, was actually defined in the fifteenth century by someone, a scholar from Florence named Ficino, Marsilio Ficino. And he speaks of love for a person’s personality and wisdom, and not for the person himself, not for his physical properties. That is, not for his physical properties but for his personality and wisdom—for the person’s mental, spiritual, inner properties. Until his time, such love was actually called Socratic love, by the way. For some reason he chose for this expression the term Platonic love. But I think—leaving aside Ficino’s intention, again, I have no idea, I haven’t read him in the original—I want to distinguish between these two kinds of love, and for the sake of discussion I’ll call them Socratic love and Platonic love. Platonic love is the kind of love that Shmuel defined earlier: love for a person’s properties and not for the person himself. Socratic love is love for the person himself who possesses the properties. Okay? That’s the point. Now notice: when I speak about the person himself, I don’t mean specifically his bodily dimensions, but rather the object that possesses the properties, including the physical properties and the mental properties. Some object such that these properties are his properties, and my love is directed toward him and not toward his properties. It seems to me that this fits the concepts that became standard, at least later on. Now, a very important point: when we say, for example, “let sins cease, and not sinners.” Yes, we want the sins to disappear, not the sinners to disappear. Or in hatred, yes, there is a commandment of hatred toward a wicked person, so various commentators and halakhic decisors say that you need to hate the wickedness in him and not him. Okay? That is essentially the claim. You understand that in fact what is being said here is that you must hate or love platonically, not socratically. That is really what they are saying. You should not hate the person—again, not his body—the person who possesses the properties; rather you should hate the properties in that person that are worthy of hatred. That is basically a distinction between a Socratic emotion and a Platonic emotion. We have a book in the Talmudic Logic series on Platonic thinking in the Talmud; there I spell this out more, because one really needs to make a logical formalization of these distinctions, and then it comes out much sharper and many confusions can be cleared away that way. But here I’m doing it very briefly. The claim I ultimately want to make is that this distinction is superficial. There is no love directed at ideas. I’m not even sure such a thing exists at all, but even if it does, it has no importance, no meaning, and no value. When we speak about love and hate directed toward a person, they must be directed toward the person himself, not toward his properties. When you are commanded, “Love your neighbor as yourself,” you must love your neighbor, not the good in your neighbor—your neighbor. When you hate an evil person, you must hate him, not his wickedness but him. Hate and love must be directed toward human beings. Say, in the commandments of love and hate in Jewish law, which I’ll get to in a moment, the commandments speak of the fact that you must hate or love—or are forbidden to hate or love—a person, not properties. To hate or love properties is a borrowed expression; I don’t know what that even means. That’s not the concept of hate and love in the ordinary sense in which we speak of them regarding people or objects. Therefore, Platonic love as I defined it earlier, namely love for properties, is not really the love we are talking about. But there still is a difference between two kinds of love within Socratic love, you could say. You can—and perhaps this is what one might call Platonic love if one is more precise—you can love the person as such, and you can love him because of certain properties he has. But in the end, loving him because of those properties means the properties are the reason, but in the end the love or hatred must be directed toward the person. So there is a difference between the question of whether you must love him, period, and the question whether the love is for him because of certain properties in him; but the love is always for the person and not for the properties. That is the important point. Love for properties—I simply don’t know what that is at all. I don’t know if it exists, and if it does, that’s not what we’re talking about. I’m talking about love for the person, and still there are two such kinds. I’ll give an example that sharpens this, taken from Rabbi Yitzchak Hutner, Pachad Yitzchak. He says there that a wise man once asked him about Maimonides. There is a difficulty in Maimonides—why? Maimonides counts the commandment “Love your neighbor as yourself,” love of one’s fellow, and he also counts the commandment of love for the convert, yes, one must love the convert. So he says there is a difficulty with Maimonides: surely the commandment to love the convert is included in the commandment to love one’s fellow. Why? Because the convert is also Jewish; just as one must love every Jew, one must also love him. So what new thing does the commandment to love the convert add beyond the commandment to love one’s fellow? In any case you have to love him, since he is Jewish. So what novelty is there in the commandment to love the convert? And according to Maimonides’ own method in his principles—it doesn’t matter now—that commandments without separate content are not counted separately; if one is included in the other, you don’t count them as two commandments. So he asks: why does Maimonides count these two as two separate commandments? And in his answer Rabbi Yitzchak Hutner says this. Let’s think for a moment. Suppose I have a neighbor who is a convert. And I don’t know that he is a convert, but he is one, and he is a very nice person, and I love him very much—or I love him because he is a member of the Jewish people, because of the commandment “Love your neighbor as yourself,” or I love him because he is a nice person, it doesn’t matter, I love him. Have I thereby fulfilled the commandment to love the convert? Rabbi Yitzchak Hutner argues that I have not. No, I have not fulfilled the commandment to love the convert. Why? Because the commandment to love the convert is a commandment to love him because of his conversion. It is not to love him and he happens to be a convert. No, rather to love him because he is a convert. So if I don’t know that he is a convert, then technically I love a person who is a convert, that’s true, but I have not fulfilled the commandment to love the convert, because the conversion is not the addressee of the love. It’s not that if he is a convert, then loving him is now a commandment. No, I need to love the convert because of his conversion. His conversion has to play a part in the inner movement of my love toward him. Now notice: this is not merely the reason for the verse. If it were just the reason for the verse, then I would say: one must love him, and the reason is that he is a convert, and therefore, I don’t know, that is the reason why one should love him. But the halakhic definition of the commandment is to love this person who is a convert. If it were only the reason for the verse, then I would fulfill the commandment if I loved that same neighbor, because I love a person who is a convert. There is a reason why it is right, why it is good, to love converts, but the definition of the commandment is to love a person who is a convert, and I loved a person who is a convert. But here I claim: this is not just the reason for the verse; rather, the fact that he is a convert is part of the very act of the commandment itself. When I perform the commandment and love him, I must do so because he is a convert. It is not merely the reason why I should do it; it has to take part in my own motivation in loving him. So if I don’t know that he is a convert, then my love toward him is not because he is a convert. I love a person who is a convert, but not because he is a convert, and therefore I have not fulfilled the commandment. Now he says: if that’s so, then in fact all commandments of love—and one can show this in other commandments as well—all commandments of love are really commandments that speak about Platonic love. Platonic love in the sense I defined earlier: love for the convert because he is a convert. As opposed to Socratic love, which speaks about love for the person as such—he has properties, he is a convert and this and that, and I need to love him. That basic kind of love is what Rabbi Yitzchak Hutner rejects, yes—the idea that I need to love him and he just happens to be a convert, and then I’ve fulfilled the commandment. That is the Socratic assumption. But the commandment is to love with Platonic love, not Socratic love. But notice: the Platonic love is not to love the conversion; it is to love him, only to love him because he is a convert. That is the precision. Because to love the conversion is just to love ideas. You need to love people, not ideas. But people by virtue of characteristics or steps they took or decisions they made or traits—whatever it may be—their being Jewish, whatever, you need to love them because of the characteristics or because of the traits. In that sense this is Platonic love. So notice: I have actually defined three concepts, not two. There is Socratic love for the object itself, for the person himself who possesses the properties. There is Platonic love in its extreme technical definition, which is love for the property. And there is Platonic love in the sense I just defined, which is love for the person by virtue of his having these or those properties. That is what I call Platonic love. Now my claim is that all commandments of emotion in Jewish law—commandments of love, hate, and the like—all of them speak about love of the third type. Platonic love of this kind, half-Socratic and half-Platonic. Yes, in the end you need to arrive at loving or hating a person. You do not love or hate an idea. My grandfather used to say about one of the rebbes—I won’t say who, because that would be slander—that he greatly loved the Jewish people in general, but with the particulars he had a bit of a problem. Meaning, the claim is that when you love ideas, you can be a very bad person, because in the end what measures you is how you relate to people, not how you relate to ideas. I once knew someone—again, I won’t say who it was—I once knew someone who said: I have no friends; I have fellow travelers.

[Speaker F] Rabbi, where we come from they say that we love immigration, but we don’t love the immigrants.

[Rabbi Michael Abraham] Yes, exactly. That’s precisely the point. That is, ostensibly it sounds like something noble and Platonic, but it is really not noble at all. I don’t even know what it means to love ideas. In the end, your inner attitude has to be toward human beings. Love, hate, permitted love, forbidden love, permitted hate, forbidden hate—all of that exists in Jewish law and in general. But the addressees of love and hate must always be human beings. What is unique in Jewish law is that Jewish law does not demand that you love a person; it demands that you love a person because he is such-and-such. Or to love God—that’s something else. Okay?

[Speaker G] Rabbi, does this only fit with the choosing person? Seemingly a person who does not choose—according to those who hold that he does not choose—

[Rabbi Michael Abraham] So—

[Speaker G] —he is basically just the sum total of his properties.

[Rabbi Michael Abraham] Then what do I have to judge in him? No commandment is relevant regarding him if he doesn’t choose. No, but—

[Speaker A] I never understood what it means to love God. He isn’t a person. How can you love something?

[Rabbi Michael Abraham] Right—to love the Holy One, blessed be He, not a person.

[Speaker A] Is that a property? Is that something of the person?

[Rabbi Michael Abraham] But not His properties; rather the object itself, the possessor of the properties. But to love Him, the possessor of the properties, because of these or those properties, or because of who He is. That is the difference between that and Socratic love, or a Socratic attitude toward things. Now you understand that this is exactly the distinction I made earlier. That is, to love the idea is basically Platonic love in its problematic sense. It is to love the commandments, not those who perform them; or to hate the sins and not the sinners who commit them. Both things are wrong. It’s well known—Rav Kook and the Rebbe of Vizhnitz, I once heard, I don’t know, there are various discussions about who said it—that it is better to fail through baseless love than through baseless hatred. And I always think when I hear that: it would be better not to fail in either one. That is, better not to fail in either baseless love or baseless hatred. Whoever should be hated should be hated, and whoever should be loved should be loved. Why fail? Don’t fail in either one. In the end, you need to choose your loves and hates in a way that depends on people’s traits or actions or affiliations, but in the end it is directed to the people themselves and not to the traits and affiliations. So therefore…

[Speaker D] What is baseless love? What? You are obligated in “Love your neighbor as yourself,” so what is baseless love?

[Rabbi Michael Abraham] Baseless love—say, if you love someone who is not your fellow, not Jewish, only you don’t know it—then you’ve failed through baseless love. Failed in the sense that you did not fulfill a commandment. It isn’t a transgression to love a non-Jew, but it’s… or if he is wicked, then it may even be a transgression to love him.

[Speaker D] So baseless love is only toward a non-Jew? No—or a Jew whom one should not love, one who does not act as one of your people, or—

[Rabbi Michael Abraham] Yes, all sorts of cases like that. Then you’re obligated to hate him? Right. So what is baseless love in that sense regarding a Jew? It is baseless love when you love someone whom you are not supposed to love, or whom you are supposed to hate, or whom you’re not—

[Speaker D] —supposed to love, never mind. That’s baseless love. Every Jew needs to be loved—

[Rabbi Michael Abraham] —loved.

[Speaker D] Every Jew needs to be loved, so there is no baseless love in that. It’s not baseless love, because he is Jewish. Right.

[Rabbi Michael Abraham] And with a non-Jew, that would be baseless love. But you’re saying with a Jew—

[Speaker D] —whom one should hate, then your love toward him is baseless love, but it is forbidden love because one should—sorry? Baseless love is failure. You failed. Ah, I understand. It is forbidden to love him baselessly. Right. Or—so when people ask—

[Rabbi Michael Abraham] A non-Jew you need not hate; you simply are not obligated to love him because of “Love your neighbor.” In the case of a wicked person, you need to hate him.

[Speaker D] So the concept of baseless love is either directed toward a non-Jew, or it is mistaken. Right?

[Rabbi Michael Abraham] It’s mistaken in any case. I didn’t understand.

[Speaker D] Why is it mistaken in any case?

[Rabbi Michael Abraham] It is forbidden. Toward a non-Jew it is not forbidden, but it is not obligatory. If you love him, fine, love him, but you are not obligated.

[Speaker D] But all the time rabbis say, if only we would all love one another with baseless love—so what, that has no meaning?

[Rabbi Michael Abraham] Right, it has no meaning. Those are exactly the statements about failing through baseless love rather than baseless hatred. No—I don’t want to fail in either one. No, that’s exactly the point. Love must have a reason. If there is no reason, then no—then one need not love, or it may even be forbidden to love, depending on the case. There is no problem: if one need not, you can still love, and maybe it is even appropriate; it simply isn’t included in the halakhic commandment of “Love your neighbor as yourself.” It may be morally reasonable, even morally proper, to love every person as long as he is worthy of love. The commandment is only regarding a Jew. Okay? So for me the concept of baseless love is synonymous with failure. You failed; that is, you did not fulfill the commandment. Yes, not always failure, but you did not fulfill the commandment. Baseless love is something superfluous, or not included in the commandment, or even forbidden. The same goes for baseless hatred, by the way. Baseless hatred is forbidden, usually forbidden; and regarding a non-Jew it is not clear there is any prohibition—it’s only… there is no prohibition. But baseless hatred means hatred without a reason, and that too is not something one should fail into. You must not hate someone without a reason, and neither should you love someone without a reason. Everything has to work with reasons. Every commandment of hatred or love is supposed to have a reason in the background, because of which you love or hate him, but in the end you are addressing the person. You say, “Let sins cease, and not sinners”; you say, I need to hate the wicked. What does it mean to hate the wicked? Tosafot in tractate Pesachim, yes, the well-known discussion: there is a contradiction between Elu Metziot and Pesachim there on “you shall surely help him.” So it says: “If you see the donkey of your enemy… you shall surely help along with him.” So Tosafot asks: how can there be “your enemy”? Isn’t it forbidden to hate a Jew? So what—it must be that one is supposed to hate them, so we’re talking about a wicked person. A wicked person one must hate. But if this is a wicked person, then why—why “you shall surely help along with him”? Because… the Gemara says “you shall surely help along with him” in order to subdue your inclination so that you not hate him. But if it is permitted to hate him—indeed one ought to hate him—then why subdue my inclination? So Tosafot says: so that it not become complete hatred. What does that mean, not complete hatred? According to the way I am explaining here, the answer is: it is supposed to be hatred of the person insofar as he is wicked, not hatred of the person in a categorical sense. I’ll say more than that: in this complex Platonic sense, I can love and hate the same person at the same time. I hate him insofar as he is wicked, and I love him insofar as he is Jewish. And the commandment “Love your neighbor” may perhaps apply to him as well—at least in principle it could perhaps apply to him too; maybe he does not act as one of your people, so maybe not, but that can be discussed. But in principle there is no logical barrier to there being both love—both the commandment to love him and the commandment to hate him. In the Socratic sense that is impossible; either you love the person or you hate the person—you can’t be both. But in the Platonic sense, I love him because he is Jewish or a convert, and I hate him because he is wicked. So true, in the end the hatred and the love are directed toward the person, but they are directed toward the person because of some aspect or characteristic he has, and in that sense there can be emotional doubleness, or a double attitude, toward that person. And therefore this Platonic perspective causes many of the difficulties that arise in Jewish law simply to dissolve on their own; there is really no problem. If you understand it this way, then it seems to me that the…

[Speaker D] So love must be dependent on something—there has to be some specific thing in the person.

[Rabbi Michael Abraham] Right. In that sense love always has to be love that depends on something. And if the thing ceases, the love ceases.

[Speaker D] Then what is love that does not depend on anything?

[Rabbi Michael Abraham] That’s not my fault—that’s what it needs to be.

[Speaker D] Then what is love that does not depend on anything?

[Rabbi Michael Abraham] What the Mishnah in Avot says: “Any love that depends on something—when the thing ceases, the love ceases. Love that does not depend on something…” yes, there it is speaking about love for a Jew. Love for a Jew because he is Jewish, and not because of some particular thing that I find in him. But there is still the reason that he is Jewish, in order to love him, and that has to depend on something. Love that depends on something means it depends on something else, something that is not the thing that ought to determine the love—that is what is called love that depends on something. But at the principled level, all the halakhic commandments involving emotions—hate and love—are by definition hate and love that depend on something.

[Speaker D] So I didn’t understand—so the “something” is that he is Jewish? Yes. That’s all? And then there’s nothing else?

[Rabbi Michael Abraham] Right. And don’t love him because he is righteous. No—you don’t need to love him because he is righteous; even if he isn’t righteous, because he is Jewish. That is what is called love that depends on something, not love that does not depend on something.

[Speaker H] What about love of the Holy One, blessed be He? What about that? Same thing. And that—

[Rabbi Michael Abraham] —also because He is—

[Speaker H] —dependent on something, or do I love Him because He is the Holy One, blessed be He? It is dependent on the fact that He is the Holy One, blessed be He—that is something very fundamental, but yes—

[Rabbi Michael Abraham] —very similar to love of a Jew, because he is Jewish no matter what he does. No, Jewishness is a Jewish property—it is a property. The Holy One, blessed be He, has no properties; for Him that is His essence. A Jew did not decide that he is Jewish; he was born that way. He did not acquire it, he did not receive it, he does not “deserve” the love—

[Speaker H] —for that.

[Rabbi Michael Abraham] It is a commandment of the Torah. And the Holy One, blessed be He, is the same. Because of what He is, you are supposed to love Him. Not because He decided to do something and therefore deserves love, but because of what He is.

[Speaker F] You’re making it so that when we go out into the street now and see people, we’ll start: do we love him, do we not love him, is there some formula, is there no formula—you’re putting us into a problem.

[Rabbi Michael Abraham] Obsessions are never a good thing. We don’t need to do things obsessively. But yes, one does need to let intellect, thought, and will govern the actions we do, and one should know: there are things one should love and things one must not love; things one should hate and things one must not hate; certain things one should both love and hate from different aspects. And that’s it. Now usually it doesn’t work in such a robotic and technical way. We have certain simple intuitions, but yes, one should calibrate them from time to time according to the Torah’s conceptions. We are not robots, but neither are we animals. We have an intellectual dimension, or an intelligent one, and it needs to be involved in our conduct. Okay.

[Speaker C] Rabbi, Rabbi, maybe part of the destructiveness—or what I see as destructive—in the Platonic approach is that the moment you love not the person in front of you but rather you have before your eyes, or you think there is, some perfect entity on account of which, or because of whose traits or presentation, you love it, then you don’t make the extra effort to accept, to judge favorably, to interpret, to see the beauty in the person before you. And that’s destructive?

[Rabbi Michael Abraham] What do you mean, you don’t? It’s not deterministic.

[Speaker C] You feel it, you talk about it. I didn’t say deterministic, that’s not the point. I’m saying: the destructive thing here is that when you see the person in front of you, you basically impose on him what you think ought to be, and you don’t make the effort to let what he is impose itself on you.

[Rabbi Michael Abraham] What the Torah thinks ought to be. What the Torah thinks ought to be.

[Speaker C] What? I’m not talking about Torah prohibitions—no. I’m speaking in principle: what is destructive in general about the Platonic approach is that it worships an idol, namely the idea that you supposedly say exists, and it imposes it on the world, and once the world doesn’t line up—

[Rabbi Michael Abraham] That’s the subject of the next lecture. I’ll get to destructive Platonism, but that’s exactly why I made this introduction here, because destructive Platonism is the kind of Platonism that I rejected here too. I’ll get to it. That’s Popper, in the book—what’s it called—The Open Society and Its Enemies. The whole first half deals with criticism of Platonism at this point. So that is the topic of the next lecture.

[Speaker H] Come on, maybe let’s also do an experiment between Platonism and Aristotelianism. Teach a computer, yes, in artificial intelligence, horses and all sorts of things like that—it has no Platonic concept from the start—and let’s see how right it is, between what Aristotle said and what he said. And that won’t tell us anything.

[Rabbi Michael Abraham] It won’t tell us anything. Why not? Why not? Even if it identifies horses perfectly—and basically computers do that today—if it identifies horses perfectly, that does not mean it understands what a horse is, because it has no understanding. It’s phenomenological.

[Speaker H] But that’s exactly the point. If you say it’s a Platonic thing, the concept exists and you don’t learn it, then how can the computer be—what?

[Rabbi Michael Abraham] One can learn it, I don’t know. After I learn, I suddenly identify some concept that exists. But the way to get there can certainly be as Aristotle says: see the particulars, generalize, understand what is common to these and those—but in the end I understand that I have arrived at some kind of idea. The way to do it could be supervised learning, it doesn’t matter. The question is what happens in the end. Artificial intelligence can imitate many of our functions; that doesn’t mean we don’t have those functions, or that we don’t have something it doesn’t have. Like John Searle’s Chinese room, yes, with understanding Chinese. Artificial intelligence can speak Chinese, but it doesn’t understand Chinese. It understands nothing. And yet it speaks Chinese, gives relevant answers, everything is fine. It’s obvious that the fact that it imitates this phenomenologically—that it works, or performs the same tasks a human being performs—does not mean that it has inside it what the human being has inside him. Two different things. By the way, even when artificial intelligence learns this, it learns it because someone wrote the program that teaches it that matter. So therefore even in unsupervised learning, there is still a program helping it learn; it doesn’t just learn on its own. The one who wrote the program may in the end have worked with ideas he recognized, even if the program itself does not work with those ideas—but that’s just another note.

[Speaker D] Rabbi, so I still come back—I don’t understand—love of David and Jonathan, and Amnon and Tamar, is that all just a matter of the love of two Jews? That in the end the Gemara is speaking about—David and Jonathan loved each other as two Jews who need to love one another?

[Rabbi Michael Abraham] The love between David and Jonathan was not love between two Jews, because if that were the case then it wouldn’t be the love of David and Jonathan—it would be the love of six hundred thousand young men.

[Speaker D] No, but you say that love that does not depend on anything is only loving a person as a Jew. That is the only thing by which one can define it as love that does not depend on anything.

[Rabbi Michael Abraham] Again, again. The love of David and Jonathan has nothing to do with a commandment. The love of David and Jonathan—they loved each other. There are people who love each other. It has nothing to do with the commandment “Love your neighbor as yourself.” In Jewish law, love that does not depend on anything means loving someone because he is Jewish, because in Jewish law—

[Speaker D] Then what is the Gemara trying to tell us—I didn’t understand—

[Rabbi Michael Abraham] It is coming to emphasize for you the concept of love that does not depend on anything. What’s the problem? Between two Jews who are supposed to love one another.

[Speaker D] They were supposed to love one another in a different sense. Their love was not the same love that existed between David and everyone else, even though the commandment applies to all Jews. So that is exactly what I’m trying to understand. So the Gemara is indeed trying to tell us what love that does not depend on anything is?

[Speaker D] I asked you—explain to me, according to your own view, forget mine, what is the difference?

[Rabbi Michael Abraham] After all, one must love every member of the Jewish people, so what is this love-that-does-not-depend-on-anything between David and Jonathan? What was there between David and Jonathan that did not exist between David and Moshe Zochmir?

[Speaker D] That’s what I’m trying to understand.

[Rabbi Michael Abraham] So what does that have to do with me? Just ask about the Mishnah itself; it has nothing to do with what I said. Whatever you answer there, I’ll answer too. And the answer is that it is love that does not depend on anything in the personal sense between them, and from that they illustrate the concept of love that does not depend on anything in a broader sense, and that does not overlap with the commandment “Love your neighbor as yourself.”

[Speaker D] So their love was love that did depend on something?

[Rabbi Michael Abraham] No, not dependent on anything.

[Speaker D] So what was that love that was so unique? That’s what I’m trying to understand—how does the rabbi understand that love?

[Rabbi Michael Abraham] Even if Jonathan had done bad things to him, he would have continued to love him. Because? Because he loves him.

[Speaker D] So how does the rabbi understand that Gemara?

[Rabbi Michael Abraham] King David did a noble thing here. They are describing the concept of love that depends on something, or does not depend on something—that’s all. It has nothing to do with the commandment “Love your neighbor as yourself,” nothing to do with anything—just defining the concept, what it is for love to depend on something or not to depend on something.

[Speaker D] Then how can love not depend on anything at all? There has to be something that creates that bond.

[Rabbi Michael Abraham] Yes, but not some thing… the person.

[Speaker D] Okay, so the person’s properties, the person’s entities, and that is still a thing.

[Rabbi Michael Abraham] No, not the properties. About that I’ll maybe speak next time; I’ll sharpen it more, and there I’ll speak not about Jewish law but about the emotion of love as such. I’ll sharpen it more, okay?

[Speaker F] Fine. Rabbi, is there a connection between love and responsibility for a topic, between love and responsibility in various areas?

[Rabbi Michael Abraham] I don’t think so. Why? Why should there be a connection? I think—

[Speaker F] For example, I don’t know, the Taasa family tried to save Jews near the Gaza envelope. Is that out of love, out of responsibility, out of what?

[Rabbi Michael Abraham] It could be either one, but there need not be a connection between them. Say I have responsibility for someone—I’m watching over a cow that was entrusted to me—so I have responsibility for it. Does that mean I love it? True, if I love someone I will also act toward him responsibly, but I will do so not because of my responsibility toward him, but because of my love for him. So the actions may look similar, but to my mind they are two different things.

[Speaker F] I heard that if someone is having a hard time—I don’t know, his daughter is getting married and it’s difficult for him—and you help with providing for the bride, is that out of responsibility, out of love, out of what?

[Rabbi Michael Abraham] Ask yourself why you do it—each person from wherever he comes from, I don’t know. I’m only claiming that it’s not the same thing. There may be someone who does it out of love, someone else who does it out of responsibility, and a third person who does it out of both. Okay? I’m just saying there’s no connection between them, no necessary connection between them. These are two different emotional movements. Responsibility can exist even toward plain objects that were deposited with me; that has nothing to do with love. The actions sometimes look similar. When I act toward something or someone for whom I have responsibility, and when I act toward someone I love, many times it looks similar because I care for him and protect him and so on, but I think these are two different emotional movements.

[Speaker C] Rabbi, the thought—the thing that the person who asked earlier was getting at—the thought that supposedly love has to come from some kind of reason, which sounds trivial, isn’t necessarily true, because

[Rabbi Michael Abraham] there is love

[Speaker C] that comes out of the thought that there is something in the other person, and because of that… I didn’t say there is something—the opposite, no!

[Rabbi Michael Abraham] No, I didn’t say that the rabbi said that. The questioner asked whether it’s supposedly something that exists in the other person, or even the very fact that he exists.

[Speaker C] I’m saying not necessarily. It could be that love exists because a person wants to love. A person wants to love God even though he hasn’t seen Him and hasn’t met Him. It could be that he’s gotten plenty of bitterness from Him, and the whole world has gotten plenty of bitterness from Him…

[Rabbi Michael Abraham] He knows things about Him—that’s not… I said I’ll talk about that in the next lecture. I’ll try to sharpen it more, this time not in the halakhic context but in the emotional, psychological dimension—I don’t know what to call it—the general one. Okay, friends, have a peaceful Sabbath. Peaceful Sabbath.

[Speaker F] Peaceful Sabbath, thank you very much.

[Speaker C] When is the next lecture?

[Rabbi Michael Abraham] After Passover already. You’ll get a message.

[Speaker C] Hope the state holds up.

[Rabbi Michael Abraham] Peaceful Sabbath to everyone. How’s it going, friends? Very good. Welcome to those here—have a good week, a good month, happy festival days, all the blessings. We’re continuing our series on Ethics of the Fathers. We’re in chapter 3, Mishnah 3. A very famous Mishnah, a very important one, where Rabbi Shimon says: Three who ate at one table and did not say words of Torah over it—it is as if they ate from sacrifices to the dead, as it is said: “For all the tables are full of vomit and filth, without place.” But three who ate at one table and did say words of Torah over it—it is as if they ate from the table of the Omnipresent, blessed be He, as it is said: “And he said to me: This is the table that is before the Lord.”