Platonism – Lesson 27

Table of Contents

• The ugly face of Platonism according to Popper, and the price of utopias
• The need for a vision versus the danger of throwing utopia in the trash
• Attentiveness to reality, religious ideology, and interpretation as the key
• A critique of religious violence, ISIS, and the limits of what price can be paid
• The Sages and Jewish law as a non-literal implementation of an idea
• Two mistakes and the proposal of “soft Platonism”
• Kant, objective morality, and David Enoch’s spinach test
• “Revealing” arguments, the dispute over changing moral facts, and human progress
• “Rabbinic” versus “sovereign” Judaism, and criticism of legislating private values
• Moral motivation and religiosity: Kant, the sheep parable, and Maimonides
• Participants’ questions: relativism, materialism, and examining motives

Summary

General Overview

The text presents a critique of dogmatic Platonism that tries to impose an abstract utopian model on reality and thereby creates a terrible price, alongside a counter-critique of the total abandonment of utopias and ideologies, as attributed to Popper and to postmodern positions, because such abandonment empties the concepts of repair and meaning of all content. The speaker argues that there is a necessary tension between an abstract ideal and its implementation in a complex world, and proposes a “soft Platonism” that holds on to binding ideas but examines their implementation through attentiveness to reality, proportionality, and cost. He then connects this to moral realism through David Enoch’s “spinach test” and through arguments for commitment to objective values, including the demand that a moral or religious act be done out of motivation of commitment to the command, and not merely as a natural inclination, using examples from Jewish law, from Maimonides, and from a discussion of religious interpretation versus dangerous purism.

The ugly face of Platonism according to Popper, and the price of utopias

Karl Popper, in his book The Open Society and Its Enemies, devotes broad attention to Platonism and sees it as an evil root because it places a utopian model in the world of ideas and then tries to implement it in a complex reality. The text states that when people cling to a utopia and try to impose it on the world, “chips fly,” and disasters are created; the central example is communism, where an apparently positive idea cost the blood of millions. The text mentions typologies such as “Halakhic Man” by Rabbi Soloveitchik as a kind of Platonism that describes an idea rather than a concrete person, and stresses that the world of ideas does have a connection to the world, but it becomes dangerous when it turns into rigidity that forces reality to fit the idea “at any price.”

The need for a vision versus the danger of throwing utopia in the trash

The text argues that without a utopian vision there is no direction for repairing the world, and therefore Popper “throws the baby out with the bathwater” when he rejects grand ideologies and proposes only small-scale corrections. The speaker describes a communist professor who gives up on the practical realizability of utopia but still defines communism as a desire always to improve things, and the text says that this becomes empty of content, because improvement requires a model by which one measures closeness. The text presents a situation in which the communist and Popper, despite their apparently opposite positions, arrive at the same place: giving up on utopias and focusing on local fixes, and it connects this line to a postmodern extreme of “everything is narratives” and “there is no big truth.”

Attentiveness to reality, religious ideology, and interpretation as the key

The text distinguishes between ideology as principles that society chooses because they are “better and more pleasant,” and ideology as an external, binding factor such as “the Holy One, blessed be He,” which leads to “be killed rather than transgress.” The speaker argues that what the Holy One, blessed be He, “wants” is always the result of human interpretation and a chain of translations across generations, and therefore it is impossible to detach religious implementation from the real world. The text uses the principle of “a decree that was not accepted by the majority of the public” to argue that this is not a compromise with the weakness of the public, but an indication that the decree itself was “too Platonic” and therefore not correct, because “the Torah was not given to ministering angels,” and the Torah was given to be implemented in this world. The text criticizes ideals such as Christian asceticism even at the level of the individual when they are not the right model for the world, and places a not-entirely-sharp tension between pious stringency and a view that sees lack of implementability as a principled mistake.

A critique of religious violence, ISIS, and the limits of what price can be paid

The text distinguishes between fighting ISIS as self-defense and a criticism “even by your own logic” of someone who implements a religious ideal in a way that destroys the world. The speaker says a person has to ask whether the implementation “makes sense,” to activate moral senses and reason, and to examine costs and chances of success, because Platonic coercion “will crush the world until there is no world left.” The text says there are prices required for any repair of the world, but there are prices “that are simply unthinkable,” and compares this to chemotherapy as a poison given in the present for the sake of future healing, while distinguishing between a reasonable price and an unjustifiable horror.

The Sages and Jewish law as a non-literal implementation of an idea

The text brings examples in which the Sages shaped an implementation that is not literal, such as “an eye for an eye means monetary compensation,” and such as “the stubborn and rebellious son never was and never will be; it was stated only so that you may expound it and receive reward,” and presents this as an understanding that there are laws that were stated as a kind of utopian direction-marker and were not intended to be realized in their simple literal form. The speaker defines this as “the greatness of Judaism,” which implements principles through the generation and through reality, in contrast to religions that continue cutting off hands, and expands this by saying the principle should be a general human one, not only a Jewish one. The text concludes that the ideal can stand “even if it comes directly from the Holy One, blessed be He,” but the implementation must include attentiveness to the surroundings, the costs, and who gets trampled along the way.

Two mistakes and the proposal of “soft Platonism”

The text presents two polar mistakes: adopting rigid Platonism all the way, as Popper criticizes, and on the other hand throwing utopias and ideologies in the trash, as attributed to Popper, to the “age of the end of ideologies,” and to a position that leads to a “crazy” world. The speaker proposes “soft Platonism,” in which one works with a utopian model and a vision from the world of ideas, but in implementation one uses conscience, moral and rational intuition, judgment about pace, form, costs, and maneuvering. The text ties this softness to sayings of the Sages such as “the Torah was not given to ministering angels” and “its ways are ways of pleasantness” as anchors that prevent absolute implementation even when things are written and attributed to a divine command.

Kant, objective morality, and David Enoch’s spinach test

The text describes Kant as a revolutionary who emphasizes a subjective dimension in metaphysics and epistemology, yet still holds to a universally binding morality, and the speaker wants to sharpen moral realism as part of that same “soft Platonism.” The text presents David Enoch’s “spinach test”: a statement like, “How good that I don’t like spinach; if I liked it I’d eat it, but spinach is disgusting,” sounds funny because it confuses subjective taste with an objective claim, whereas regretting not knowing quantum theory and relativity is not similar, because those are true claims regardless of preference. The text applies this to morality through the example of enslaving Black people, and says that most people experience this as much more like relativity than like spinach, and therefore in practice they are not moral relativists. The text explains that the lack of observational access to moral truth does not make it subjective, just as the claim “there are 100 billion ants in the world” is still a claim even if there is no way to measure it.

“Revealing” arguments, the dispute over changing moral facts, and human progress

The text defines the spinach test as a diagnostic tool that helps a person discover what he himself thinks, not as a persuasion tool, and distinguishes between someone who “laughs” about morality the way one laughs about taste and someone who understands that there is moral “right and wrong.” The text deals with the example of Abraham our forefather, who had slaves, and argues that moral facts do not change; rather, humanity learns morality in the same way that it learns science, and therefore human beings become “better scientists” in the moral realm as well. The speaker says there is no blame toward someone who lived in a period in which “nobody got it right,” but it still was never right to enslave human beings, and he rejects the claim that the world changes such that “the moral facts changed.”

“Rabbinic” versus “sovereign” Judaism, and criticism of legislating private values

The text cites Ari Elon and his play on words between rabbinic Judaism and sovereign Judaism, and presents the claim that a secular person “picks his own values” as a conceptual mistake. The speaker argues that if every person legislates values for himself, then a pirate or a contract killer is also a model of value-driven devotion, and from this it follows that criticism of them assumes an objective standard that distinguishes between good values and bad ones. The text states that values, by definition, are not determined by the individual or by society alone, and formulates this as moral realism and as the existence of binding value-ideas “in the world of ideas.”

Moral motivation and religiosity: Kant, the sheep parable, and Maimonides

The text argues, following Kant, that a moral act is not only doing the right thing but doing it out of moral motivation, and illustrates this with Amnon Yitzhak’s sheep parable in order to show that naturally refraining from evil is not value-based righteousness. The speaker defines a moral person as someone who acts out of a conscious decision and commitment to values that he did not determine, and parallels this to religion through Maimonides at the end of chapter eight in Laws of Kings regarding a resident alien who keeps commandments “out of rational conclusion,” about whom Maimonides says that he is “not among the pious of the nations of the world, but among their wise.” The text adds an example about tefillin and about a correspondence between Rabbi Yitzhak Hutner and the Lubavitcher Rebbe, in order to argue that a religious act receives validity only when it is done out of commitment to the command and not as a folkloristic or self-interested action. The text concludes that without an objective external idea there is no value to actions and no “meaning,” and criticizes Viktor Frankl’s Man’s Search for Meaning as a possibly therapeutic path that is not real “meaning,” because meaning must be given by an external objective source.

Participants’ questions: relativism, materialism, and examining motives

The text includes objections that define morality as a general agreement that will prevent people from “swallowing one another alive,” and raises the possibility that the future may prefer rule by the wise over equality, and the speaker replies that there is a certain logic to that, but “a logic that is not correct in the moral sense,” and sends the questioner back to self-examination by means of the diagnostic tool. The text asks whether materialism contradicts Platonism, and the speaker says that depends on the definition and on what the materialist is willing to include in his conceptual world. The text discusses the difficulty of deciding whether a person acts from morality or from interest even when he pays a price, and the speaker says there are no sharp indicators, but that the question is mainly defined in relation to the person himself, while returning to the point that the feeling of commitment to an objective value is an indication of Platonic realism.

The striking idea—and something like it—was told to me by the head of the Antiquities Authority. Let’s begin. In previous sessions I spoke about the bad side of Platonism. That is, Karl Popper, in his book The Open Society and Its Enemies—I said that he devotes half the book to a survey of Platonism. And the reason is that he sees Platonism as the root of all evil. Platonism is basically an outlook that places before our eyes some kind of utopian model. Yes, in the world of ideas there is some utopian idea of democracy, communism, whatever it may be, it doesn’t matter—freedom, capitalism, everyone with his own utopia. And the moment you try to take that theoretical model and apply it to our reality, splinters start flying. In other words, problems arise. And why? Because our world is complicated, and you can’t apply abstract principles in it that may be good in the world of ideas, but here it never really works the way the utopia presents it to us. And someone who clings too tightly to the utopia ends up imposing it on reality, and the price is a heavy price. We know all kinds of examples of this. The most prominent example that Popper himself refers to is communism. Because someone can come and say that the idea in itself is a positive and good one, and if only the world really were that equal and wonderful and the wolf would dwell with the lamb. But the attempts to realize this in the world, this beautiful idea, cost the blood of millions, and that’s a huge price. Plus they tried to implement it exactly.

Like Rabbi Soloveitchik—he has Halakhic Man, all kinds of typologies—that’s an example. He doesn’t say there really is such a person. Exactly. So a typology is also a kind of Platonism. In other words, I’m describing to you not a concrete person but some idea of a person that can exist in the world of ideas. Now obviously when you describe that idea, it’s not completely disconnected. Right? It’s not some kind of pure science: I want to investigate the world of ideas. That world of ideas has something to say about our world. Just as the idea of horseness—it’s not about values, but it’s an idea, and clearly it is the basis or root of the concrete horses we encounter in our world. And therefore there is always a double aspect in Platonism. On the one hand we speak about abstract things that exist in a distant world, the world of ideas, disconnected from our world; but the gaze is always, always directed at our world. In other words, there is always something there that is very, very ideal, and so it naturally invites an attempt to bring our world closer to that ideal thing. And the whole question is how to do that.

Now among Platonists, as Popper describes it, the attempt is basically to align what happens in our world entirely with the idea—to make sure our world is as close as possible to the abstract idea, and for some of them, at any price. When you do that at any price, then as I said before, millions of people are killed for good goals. And sometimes apparently there’s no choice; you can’t implement the idea without that. But on the other hand, maybe it’s worth thinking that perhaps the idea should not be implemented as is, if that is really the price. And therefore Platonism in its dogmatic, rigid form is very dangerous.

I already spoke about the saintly ideal, right—I don’t remember which article I brought there, Susan something, Sarah Stroud maybe—about the saint, or about friendship, about all kinds of values that are good values, but the question is how far you go with them and what you want to do with them. So this is a very, very delicate tension. It’s a very delicate tension because on the one hand we are indeed nourished by some kind of utopian vision, because without that—what would we even want to strive for in this world? After all, we want to repair this world. When you repair something, you always need some model before your eyes showing where to advance. So in that sense I think Popper is trying, to some extent, to throw out the baby with the bathwater. If you give up Platonism, then in effect you give up repairing this world. You say: okay, let’s flow with what exists, and this is what exists. Fine, we’ll try to be good people within what exists, but that’s it. We’re not going to fix anything here, because social engineering is a very, very dangerous thing—and it is indeed very, very dangerous. Movements that want to fix the world, society, the state on a grand scale, usually bring damage—very great damage. So it really is dangerous.

On the other hand, to give up the Platonic vision altogether, this utopia, basically means we make peace with what exists and will never fix it. I brought that story about the communist, right—the communist economics professor—who understands that the communist utopia is not feasible, so he gave it up; he no longer thinks one should strive toward it. But he is still in favor of… so I asked him: then how do you see communism? And he said: the desire to keep fixing and improving all the time—that’s communism. Do you understand that this becomes completely empty of content? If you don’t have some model that you are striving toward, so that improvement is defined by the degree of closeness to that model, then everyone wants to improve. The question is: improve in what direction? What counts as improved? Communism is not the desire to improve; communism is the desire to improve when your improved model, your utopia, is an egalitarian utopia. Others may very much want to improve the world when their utopia is that everyone believes in God. Others that everyone believes in Jesus or Buddhism or whatever. So each of them wants to improve the world; the question is what counts as improvement, or where to improve it toward.

So you can’t ignore the utopia in the background. And giving up utopia altogether is exactly what’s so wonderful here, because it appears on both sides of the barricade. He’s a communist and Popper is the sharpest critic of communism, and both arrive at the same place. They both arrive at the same place: they give up the utopia and say, okay, let’s focus on local repairs of the world, let’s try to do as much good as possible within the existing framework. And still one defines himself as a communist and Popper defines himself as an anti-communist, and both are saying the same thing. Why? I think that certainly in the communist’s case, but also with Popper, the insight is really a similar one. Both understand that striving toward a utopia at any price, without compromise, and trying to implement it as is in reality, is very dangerous. It’s not practical, it’s not right, it’s very dangerous. And Popper, as a result—or at least in his writing—it seems that he throws out the baby with the bathwater. So if that’s the case, let’s just give up utopias, throw utopias in the trash. And in an extreme form this is basically postmodernism, which says: okay, everything is narratives, there is no grand truth, no right and wrong, and thus we’ll bring world peace. I already wrote…

Rabbi, Rabbi, maybe instead of attacking postmodernism, couldn’t one say that Popper and that whole school are really aiming at existentialism? Meaning: if you lived reality and weren’t enslaved to the ideology you chose, then you’d see that you would repair, you would improve, you would focus. And when you lose that and live in another world, you get where we’ve gotten. We even see it today in this war. We lost contact with reality, we’re enslaved to some mantra of victory at any price, and it leads to ruin.

Today I’m going to try to sharpen exactly this point, and then we can check whether we’re saying the same thing or not. But yes, I agree with the general formulation; we just need to sharpen a few things. So what Popper says is exactly that—exactly what you said. He says: leave it, let’s proceed on a small scale, let’s be attentive to reality, repair what can be repaired, be as good as possible, without big ideas, without dogmas, without utopias and without grand ideologies.

Now I already wrote in several books that positivism, which Popper was in a certain sense part of, is a forerunner of postmodernism. Because positivism, which clings to reality itself, indeed gives up utopias and Platonism—even in its interpretation of science, by the way, but also in the ideological-value context. And it’s the same thing. In his interpretation of science too he says: let’s stick to what we observe, forget the grand theories, I don’t trust grand theories—scientific theories, not values right now. But it’s the same idea; it comes from the same place, a Hobbesian place. And really this outlook is very tempting after seeing where the Platonism that Popper rebelled against led—communism and the big ideas; and Nazism too, in a certain sense, is like that.

And the question is: how do we understand the very concept of ideology? Is it something external that obligates us to behave in a certain way, or is it a social agreement saying it would be better for us to live by these principles? Now if it’s just a matter of principles we think it would be better and nicer to behave by, then indeed we need to weigh what matters more—killing millions or upholding them. But if we believe this is something external, an external factor—God, whatever it may be—that obligates us to live this way, then it’s “be killed rather than transgress.” Let billions die, what difference does it make? That’s what’s required; there’s no choice.

You are theoretically right, but that too is theoretical. That theory also has to be abandoned. I’ll tell you why. Because I think that when you speak about what the Holy One, blessed be He, expects from us—and I just read some interviews with Yehoshua Shapira, who also always speaks in that language that drives me crazy: you expect—that is, you must do what the Holy One, blessed be He, wants, and let the world be destroyed. But what the Holy One wants is always the result of human interpretation and translation. You didn’t hear the Holy One; you don’t know what the Holy One wants. Even the Torah you received from Him—assuming it really was received from Him—passes through countless interpretations over the generations. In the end there is no determination that is not saturated with human interpretations and understandings.

But from the perspective of that believer, those human understandings—that’s it, that’s the truth; what difference does it make? I disagree with him, but for him that’s the truth.

And those human understandings take the world into account too—or at least they should. How do you shape interpretation of the Torah? Do I shape interpretation of the Torah through the question of what is right purely within the Torah? Now I’m asking the same question: do I ask what is right in some utopian sense? Or do I say: wait a second, there is a world here—let’s see what this means in terms of the world. I think I spoke about this—I don’t know if in this series, maybe yes, I no longer remember because it’s long—but about how it works there regarding a decree that was not accepted by the majority of the public. A decree that was not accepted by the majority of the public is void—the Talmud says so. Why? People usually think that a decree not accepted by the majority means that in principle this really was the right thing to do, but our world is made of human beings, of ordinary people out in the fields, so you have to know how to compromise with what happens in our world. I think that’s a mistake. The claim, rather, is that when a decree is not accepted by the majority, that basically means it is a Platonic decree. It is right in the Platonic world of ideas. If it doesn’t work here in this world, then it is not right. It’s not a compromise. If it doesn’t—because the Torah was not given to ministering angels; the Torah was given to this world to be implemented in this world. And once something is unsuitable—that is, it doesn’t work in this world—then apparently there is something genuinely wrong with it. In that sense, the fact that the decree is not accepted by the majority is feedback to the study hall or the religious court or the Sanhedrin that they made a mistake. They were too Platonic; they lived in some abstract world, a world of the study hall, but when you go out into the street you see it isn’t right. You can’t live this way; it’s not right to live this way. And then the study hall has to learn the lesson and cancel that decree. Because it understands that this is not right—not as a compromise.

The practical implication, for example, is that in such a situation even you yourself, sitting in the study hall thinking this was right, should not do it. Because it is not right. That is not how one lives. Therefore, for example, I think monasticism—monasticism in the Christian sense, not abstaining from wine and haircuts—but monasticism in the Christian sense: there is something problematic in it even if individuals decide to do it. If you are not presenting it as an ideal model for the whole world, then as far as I’m concerned, even if you as an individual do it, there is something problematic there. Because if that thing is not really the right model for the world, then it is simply not right. Not that the world can’t live up to it and we need to compromise, but rather this is an indication that it is not right.

Now there is room for discussion. Of course there is acting beyond the letter of the law and pious conduct, and people do things beyond the accepted standard in the world. The criterion here is not a sharp one. But we have to understand that even within religious interpretation—of Jewish law, of Torah, of sacred writings, or however you want to call them—that same tension exists. The tension is between what is written and… what? There is a world around us. The question is whether what is written, as you understand it, is really the right way to implement things.

I spoke about this in the context of ISIS, for example—with those horrific atrocities; yes, we now have some ISIS-types close to home too, we don’t need to go far. All kinds of insane and terrible acts these people commit, and they do it out of religious belief. The question is: as a result, can I not criticize them? After all, that’s what they believe in. I believe you should wave the lulav, and they believe you should behead anyone who isn’t Muslim. Right? Or rape, or I don’t know what, burn the children of non-Muslims. So can I criticize them? My answer is yes. I can criticize them, even though there are mitigating arguments. Meaning, yes, if you believe this with religious conviction, I can understand you more than someone who just does it out of pure evil. But on the other hand, that doesn’t mean I have no criticism of you. Because even with religious belief, you have to understand that religious belief is at most, in the best case, some kind of ideal. Its implementation in the world must always be attentive to what is happening here.

But you don’t always see it moment by moment. If, God forbid, I have cancer, what do they do? They give me poison. They give him poison. And apparently, what is that—aren’t they harming him? But in the long run, later in the process, that will heal him. The same here.

First of all, with ISIS it’s not a matter of anger. At ISIS I’m not angry or not angry. ISIS I fight to destroy in self-defense. That’s all. Not because I have one opinion or another about them.

You’re not talking on the level I’m talking about. Obviously one has to fight them in self-defense; that’s not the discussion. I’m asking a different question—leave aside the need to kill them in order to defend ourselves. I’m asking what my attitude toward them is, apart from the war. Do I have criticism of them or not? That’s a completely different question.

I have criticism just as I have criticism of anyone I disagree with.

No, no, I don’t have criticism of other people I disagree with. I don’t have criticism of that kind; I just disagree with them. But criticism is always criticism according to your own view, not according to mine. The fact that I disagree with you—obviously I disagree with you. But when I say I have criticism of you, that means I have criticism of you even according to your own standards. And the question is whether such a thing can exist regarding ISIS. And I claim yes. Yes. Beyond the war of self-defense. Yes, because a person needs to understand that he lives in a world. And when you live in a world, you need to understand that there are things which—even if in your utopia you concluded this is what ought to be done—you should check it. Does it make sense? Does it sound reasonable? Is this the right way to live? Use your moral senses and see whether it seems reasonable to you. It may be that you used them and it does seem reasonable to you—then something is distorted in you. But I tend to think that with many of these people, the problem is Platonism. Since their ideal model is one they understand to be in dissonance with the world. They understand it doesn’t fit here. Only they think, as you said before: yes, yes, we will crush the world until it takes the right form. No. You will crush the world until there is no world. And therefore I say you have to open your eyes.

I’m not saying that one shouldn’t—hold on—I’m not saying one shouldn’t pay prices. What tablet is that? Okay, go ahead. Fine. There are noises here, I don’t know what. I’m not saying you shouldn’t pay prices in the present in order to achieve future goals. On the contrary, every repair of the world has some sort of price. But there are certain proportions. There are things that are simply inconceivable. It cannot be that you pay such insane prices, even assuming you will succeed in the end. Especially since you probably won’t succeed in the end anyway. How do you know you will succeed in the end? That’s why I say: the Sages said “an eye for an eye” means monetary compensation. The Sages say that the stubborn and rebellious son never existed and never will exist, but is there only “so that you may expound and receive reward.” It’s written explicitly in the Torah that his father and mother bring him out to the gate of the city and he must be killed. That is what is written regarding the stubborn and rebellious son.

Right, and that’s what it was, and cutting off the hands of thieves and all that—that existed, that existed. Today we need to explain that “an eye for an eye” means money. What? Where does it say that it means money?

I’m now talking about this question: how do you take a verse that is written explicitly, remove it from its plain meaning, and empty it of its content? It says it. The Torah—the Holy One, blessed be He, said it. How can that be? Because you understand that things need to be implemented. There are things said to you as a kind of utopian Jewish law, as a direction marker, and they were not meant to be implemented literally as written. That’s all. That is the greatness of Judaism—that it goes with the generation, with modernity, so to speak, unlike dark religions like the Saudis, who keep cutting off hands, I don’t know.

I understand. So that’s it—what’s the argument? We agree completely. So I claim that the greatness of Judaism—what you call greatness—ought to be the greatness of all human beings.

But that’s our opinion. That’s our opinion.

What do you mean, “that’s our opinion”? I always speak only my opinion. I’m not speaking anyone else’s opinion.

Right, fine, but it’s not absolute.

Fine. My claim is that every person, in every context, in every place—religious or non-religious—must always keep his eyes on the surroundings, even if he has a perfect utopia, even if it comes directly from the Holy One, blessed be He, Himself. You have to have some attentiveness to how this story behaves, what it means, what the prices are, what your chance is of attaining that utopia, whom you’ll crush on the way—all these things are very important parameters in formulating your ideology. And when people don’t take that into account—the Saudis and various other people too, though recently they’ve begun taking it into account, there are revolutions there in this direction as well—when they don’t take it into account, that really is problematic. That’s what I’m criticizing. So we don’t disagree. That’s exactly what I’m talking about.

So in that sense, going back to the communist versus Popper, I want to claim there are two possible mistakes here. One mistake is to take Platonism all the way, and that is what Popper criticizes. The second mistake is the one that communist makes, which is to throw out the baby with the bathwater—and in fact this is also Popper’s conclusion—to throw out the baby with the bathwater and say: leave me alone with the grand utopias. I don’t believe in ideologies, right, the era of the end of ideology, which was supposed to bring us eternal peace and instead brought us a mad world. And these two mistakes are basically two poles, and what I want to claim—I said this briefly last time, and now I want to sharpen it a bit more—should lead us to what I might call soft Platonism.

Soft Platonism means that I do indeed work with a utopian model. I have an ideology, I have a utopia, I do have some vision of what a repaired world should look like, and this vision is taken from the detached world of ideas. But when I implement it in our world, I have to use my senses and my conscience, my moral intuition, my rational intuition too—not just moral intuition—and see how to implement it, whether to implement it, at what pace, in what form, at what cost, and know how to maneuver. The Torah was not given to ministering angels. “All her ways are ways of pleasantness,” and all the things the Sages sometimes use and you don’t know where they suddenly came from—they are really just trying to tell you this very thing: there are wonderful ideas and all is well, I’m not arguing with them—maybe I am—but even if I’m not arguing with them, that still doesn’t mean they should be implemented absolutely. There are things we do not implement even though they are written, and even though the Holy One, blessed be He, said them, and despite everything, everything, everything. And not as Yehoshua Shapira keeps saying all the time.

Rabbi, Rabbi, Rabbi—for example, one would apparently expect that a position like yours—which I don’t necessarily agree with regarding moral realism—but if there are moral facts, then the world is constantly speaking to you and there are always new facts, and you’re supposed to be attentive to them because they speak to you and make normative demands of you. And if you say, no, no, I stop looking at that revelation, I’m attentive to what I generated in my own spirit—that ought to be anti-moral.

I’m getting to the moral facts in a moment, and there I’ll try to sharpen this. I’m not one hundred percent sure I agree with what you’re saying, that moral facts change. But application—application has to change. But that’s exactly where I’m going in a moment.

And they have enormous diversity. Enormous diversity. No one case is necessarily similar to another.

I’m getting to that. One more moment, I’m getting to that.

So I really wanted to sharpen this point of soft Platonism more forcefully through an examination of ethics. In ethics there is a very interesting picture that emerges, precisely from Kant’s angle. Kant, in his philosophical, metaphysical, epistemological approach—his whole philosophy is basically some kind of subjective philosophy. That is, it basically says: let’s move all the dilemmas we see out in the world into the world of thought, inward into ourselves. So space and time are forms of our perception, the categories are structures implanted within us—they are not things that exist in the world. Basically he carries out a kind of revolution that makes things more and more subjective. That’s not quite accurate—I’ve spoken about that more than once—but that is the general trend on the one hand.

On the other hand, when he writes about morality—and that’s in a different work, not in the Critique of Pure Reason—when he writes about morality, the tune sounds a little different. There he speaks about objective morality, binding, universal, something much more objectivist than his metaphysics and epistemology. And the question is what exactly that means.

So I want to get a bit into this objective morality, because I think that with respect to morality too there is significance to that same soft Platonism I described earlier: on the one hand, you cling to some abstract ideas located in the world of ideas; on the other hand, the question is how we implement them in our practical lives, in our world.

So maybe I’ll begin with the spinach test. The spinach test is from David Enoch—I had a debate with him, he’s a professor at the Hebrew University, a very smart fellow—and in one of his articles he proposed a test for checking the nature of various claims. He says: let’s begin with a child who says, “How good it is that I don’t like spinach. If I liked spinach, I would eat it, but spinach is yuck.” So what’s the problem with that kind of statement? Why is it amusing? Why do people laugh when they hear such a statement? Because if you liked spinach, what would be the problem with eating it? In other words, you’re looking at the hypothetical situation of what would happen if you liked spinach from your current perspective, in which spinach is yuck. But spinach is not objectively yuck. Spinach is yuck because you don’t like it; if you liked it, then it would be perfectly fine. Therefore such a statement is problematic; it fails to understand the meaning of the claim “spinach is yuck.” Spinach is not yuck; spinach is yuck in your eyes. Okay, that’s one side of the coin.

The other side of the coin: suppose I made the following claim—“How good it is that I live after the twentieth century, because now I already know quantum theory and relativity theory, and if I had lived in the eighteenth or fifteenth or tenth century I wouldn’t know that, and that would be bad, because I really love knowing scientific knowledge; I love understanding the world as deeply as possible.” Is that statement similar or parallel to the spinach claim? Obviously not. Why? Because relativity and quantum theory are scientific propositions, not subjective ones. If they are true, they were true in the tenth century too; people in the tenth century just didn’t know them. So indeed people in the tenth century were less knowledgeable in the scientific sense—that’s true. Unlike spinach, which is yuck only because I don’t like it, relativity is true not because I like it but because it’s true, because that’s how the world works. Therefore, regarding claims of that kind, if I said something similar to that spinach child, no one would laugh—on the contrary, excellent.

I would laugh too, because in the end—no, because in the end here too it’s not exactly the same as spinach, but still, at every given moment I should feel great sorrow that I do not know the discoveries that will come a hundred years from now; that pain should always be present.

Up to this point I agree with every word. Where’s the laugh? The laugh is that I say a sentence as though only because if I had lived then I’d have missed today’s discoveries, as if that solves the problem. No—every single day there are discoveries I’m missing.

But the word “only” you added; I didn’t say “only.” Right, I’m also sorry today that I don’t know what will happen in the 122nd century. So what’s the problem? Right, so it’s not wild laughter, but the reaction to that sentence is certainly—what’s the problem with it? Again, I’m not saying you too have to be sorry, but if you hear someone who is sorry, there’s nothing funny about it. He really wants to know all knowledge. What’s the problem? By the way, every good scientist, basically that’s his consciousness: he strives to discover more and more because in a sense he is pained by the things he doesn’t know; he has a drive to discover more and more. What’s the problem? Again, I’m not saying everyone has to have that drive or should have it, but if someone describes such a drive to me, there’s nothing paradoxical or absurd about it. It’s all fine. There’s no problem with it.

So one more sentence just to sharpen it maybe: the word “laughter” doesn’t fit here, but still his sentence says “if.” Because by living today, I’m not sorry the way I would be sorry if I had lived a hundred years ago. And I tell him: you should be sorry to the same degree; your loss if you had lived then and your loss living today are the same loss.

Oh, here we have a mathematical disagreement. Because someone who lived a hundred years ago missed both this century and the whole future. And I miss only the future, so he should be more sorry. What can I do? If someone is sorry he doesn’t have a billion dollars and I’m a millionaire and I’m sorry I don’t have a billion dollars, while he has nothing, then he is more sorry. It’s true that both of us are sorry about the future, but he lacks even more. But never mind, these are unnecessary arguments. In the end I’m trying to explain the difference between that and spinach. And that difference is agreed upon and completely clear; there’s no arguing about it.

So the question is—Rabbi, maybe we can argue a bit about that? The fact that I don’t know certain facts about reality—the truth is, yes, I’m not coming closer to understanding creation, its structure—that doesn’t necessarily mean it’s good. It could be “he who increases knowledge increases pain”; it could be that the innocent world of the past was happier than we are, and I actually believe that.

Completely irrelevant to the discussion. Irrelevant. I’m not talking about that question. A person can come and say, “he who increases knowledge increases pain; how good it is that I know nothing—that’s the best, it’s wonderful.” I have no problem with such a statement. The question is whether, when I say the opposite statement—I want to increase knowledge, and if I lack knowledge I feel pain—whether that resembles spinach. The answer is no. The answer is no.

But there is some subjectivity here, because he assumes that it’s worthwhile to know everything, that it matters to me…

Subjectivity in what you like and don’t like—of course. You like knowing; you don’t like not knowing. Fine, everyone to his taste. But that has nothing to do with the subjectivity of spinach. In the spinach case, the child is simply wrong, not merely thinking differently from me. He’s wrong. That’s exactly the point. Here we disagree about whether it’s good not to know and I like to know. Fine, to each his own. But my taste is not funny; there is nothing absurd about it, it’s just not your taste. But regarding spinach, the child is mistaken. It’s not because I think differently from him. He’s missing the point.

The child’s mistake is that he thinks everyone has to like spinach or not like spinach.

No. He thinks everyone doesn’t like spinach—sorry, that everyone doesn’t like spinach—and that is a factual mistake. If he liked spinach, then he himself would like spinach. It’s not about what ought to be. The child isn’t expressing a value judgment. He’s talking about facts—what he enjoys and what he doesn’t enjoy. “Spinach is yuck” is not a moral “yuck.” It’s yuck to eat, yuck to the palate. So I don’t see how one can argue about that distinction. That distinction is very clear.

What this means is that we have a test that can help us discover the nature of a claim before us. Is it an objective claim or a subjective claim? If it’s a subjective claim, then when I formulate the spinach test regarding it, it provokes amusement. If it’s an objective claim, then when I generate the spinach test regarding it, there is nothing funny about it.

Now Enoch uses this to examine moral claims. Suppose someone were to say, “How good it is that I didn’t live two hundred years ago, because then I would have enslaved blacks.” Fine—black people. African Americans; today you’re not allowed to say certain things, so whatever, you understand what I mean. In short: I would have enslaved them. And today, how good that I live now, when they are more or less people with equal rights, meaning that it no longer even enters anyone’s mind to take them as slaves. Is that statement like spinach or like relativity? A great many people who say that morality is a matter of taste, exactly like spinach—when you put them before a test of this sort, they realize they don’t really think that. I don’t know if everyone. Maybe someone will say to me: yes, it’s just as funny, I have no problem living then and enslaving blacks. But it seems to me most people don’t feel that way. Most people understand that this is more like relativity theory than like liking spinach. And that means that moral principles have in them something objective, like physics.

So what confuses people, or what causes people to imagine morality as like gastronomic taste, like liking spinach? The fact that we have no observational way of arriving at the result. I can’t, by observation, arrive at the conclusion that all human beings are equal, or that one must not enslave dark-skinned people. But the fact that I don’t have observations, and maybe therefore I also can’t convince someone else who doesn’t see it that way, does not mean that this is subjective like liking spinach. It means that this is a truth not accessible to me in the observational sense.

It’s like—an example would be that the positivists assume that a claim which cannot be measured or subjected to a scientific falsification test is a pseudo-claim. The logical positivists—Carnap and his gang. A pseudo-claim means it doesn’t assert anything at all. Therefore they say metaphysics—claims about God, demons, whatever, all kinds of such things—are not claims at all. They say nothing. It’s not that they are true or false; they simply say nothing. Because something that cannot be measured in the world is not really speaking about the world—that’s their assumption.

Then I ask: is the claim that there are 100 billion ants in the world at this moment not a claim? Obviously you can’t measure it. We have no way of verifying how many ants there are in the world at this moment. But clearly it’s a claim. In other words, either it is true or it is false. I have no way of knowing whether it is true or false. But it is a claim in every sense. In the same way, I want to claim, the moral statement that one must not enslave people is also a claim, and it too has a right and wrong to it, unlike liking spinach. Although, like liking spinach, I have no observational way of getting there. I cannot empirically take you with a microscope and show you that one must not enslave blacks. But the fact that I have no way to measure it or subject it to a falsification test does not mean that it is not asserting something, that it is not true or false. One can debate it, but it is open to the question whether it is true or false. Unlike liking spinach, where there is no true or false. One likes it and the other doesn’t; there is no truth there. There is no disagreement between someone who likes spinach and someone who doesn’t like spinach.

So the claim that the spinach test is trying to show—or at least to show a person about himself—I cannot convince anyone with the spinach test. If I ask someone and say, tell me, do you laugh when you hear me say this—that how good it is that I didn’t live 200 years ago because then I would have enslaved blacks, whereas today I don’t do that? Excellent, then, I’m glad I live now and not then. If someone would burst out laughing as with the spinach, then he is probably a moral relativist. For him morality is no more than psychological constructions, nothing with validity, nothing objective. But I think most human beings would not laugh, and most human beings understand that this is not the same thing as spinach.

So for those who do not laugh—and that’s why I’ve called this several times in the past a theological proof, or a revelatory argument—I cannot prove anything to you; I can help you discover what you yourself think. And if you do not laugh when you hear me say this, unlike the spinach case, that means you yourself are not a moral relativist. And that you think moral claims are objective, like scientific claims. That doesn’t mean they are scientific claims—in the sense that one cannot reach them through observation. One cannot subject them to empirical tests, to empirical falsification tests. But they are claims of right and wrong. That means that someone who says otherwise is mistaken; I have an argument with him. If I like spinach and someone else doesn’t like spinach, I have no argument with him. Let him like spinach, I don’t like spinach, all is fine. We’re simply built differently. But if we are built differently in the moral sense—I’m built to enslave blacks and he is built not to enslave blacks—what problem does he have with me? I’m just built differently, like spinach. No! Most human beings do have a problem with me. Why? Because what I am doing is wrong. I’m built that way—I don’t know, maybe it needs treatment—but in any case, what you’re doing is problematic. And therefore it’s not the same thing as liking or not liking spinach.

In this sense, the spinach test helps us—or many of us, at least—to realize that despite what we think, that morality is relative, subjective, some convention or another—no! A society that agrees on different moral principles, in that society there will be a different convention, and still I will criticize them. And I won’t agree with what they agreed to. Why? That was their convention. And if morality in its entirety is nothing but agreement, then that was the agreement, so what’s the problem? What criterion are you using to measure their morality? Is there something objective not dependent on agreement? Yes. Meaning, if I criticize other people’s agreements or other people’s moral assumptions, that means I have some standard from which I criticize their moral norms. Which means that moral norms are not merely the result of agreement. And that from the very… Rabbi, Rabbi, Rabbi, couldn’t we soften this a bit and say: after all, we have a big problem here—Abraham our forefather, 3,000 years ago, 4,000 years ago, kept slaves and didn’t feel bad about it, didn’t feel bad about it. Now you can’t say, okay, Abraham our forefather was immoral. As far as we understand it, he is supposedly a symbol of morality. But he really didn’t think that way. So perhaps one could soften the gap between us and say that the world changed—that is, the moral facts changed. Humanity changed; it’s like a kind of revelation. The world changed as if the laws of nature changed, and now humanity changed reality because it rose a little morally.

I look at it differently. Abraham our forefather also didn’t know relativity theory. What I claim is that humanity learns. Humanity learns in the scientific sphere, and humanity learns in the moral sphere. Therefore my claim is—again, it’s hard to decide here—but as I see things, the moral facts are always the same moral facts. It’s just that we become better scientists. We are more moral than Abraham our forefather—definitely yes. Now this doesn’t mean that if I had lived in Abraham’s time I would have done something better. No. Obviously humanity helps itself and advances gradually. If I had lived then, I assume I too would have behaved as he did; I hope I would have behaved as he did, because I assume that for his time he truly was a kind of moral ideal. But that doesn’t mean the moral facts changed; it means people are increasingly exposed to moral facts that were always correct, exactly as in science. That’s at least how I understand the matter. I think it was never right to enslave people. But I don’t blame someone who was there—not because he acted rightly; he did not act rightly, but in that period no one acted rightly, and I too would not have acted rightly. So therefore I don’t assign blame. I think this is a more…

Wait a second maybe—I don’t understand how one knows what the right morality is.

I’m getting to that question in a moment. But what I want to say first is to show us that we assume there is a right morality. After that comes the second-order practical question: okay, so how do we know what it is? For me, the spinach test is a test that, if each of you applies it to himself, will help you discover that you yourselves believe in objective and correct morality. Now one can ask himself: yes, but how do I know what this right morality says? That’s a second-order question, in a moment.

So the claim—yes, right, I agree with vegetarianism. The claim—maybe I’ll present the same claim from another angle. I also spoke about this once when I did a series on morality.

Rabbi, by the way, isn’t that actually Kant’s categorical imperative, in the non-superficial, seemingly childish way people understand it? He didn’t mean to give some technique for deciding what it’s right to do. Rather, he meant that morality means that when you feel claimed by something, you don’t feel “I want,” like “I like spinach,” but that you feel every person ought to do the same thing. That was his whole point, not all the accusations thrown at him.

No, obviously I began by saying Kant is a moral objectivist. I’m simply now spelling out what lies behind the Kantian view. He didn’t speak explicitly about moral realism, but it’s there, clearly.

Let me perhaps present it from another angle. Look, there is—again, I’ve brought this in the past—the son of Judge Menachem Elon, one of the sons, Aryeh Elon. He became secular and turned into some kind of secular Hasidic rebbe, a kind of storyteller engaged in secular Judaism—not fake, I say; I’m not saying this cynically. Meaning, he is that type—very charismatic, intelligent, knows how to present things, a wonderful speaker. He speaks beautifully, writes beautifully, in the direction of secular Judaism, against religiosity and all that—but Judaism, yes, Judaism is very important to him. The God he doesn’t believe in is specifically the Jewish God.

One of his many wordplays, in the Hasidic style, is to distinguish between rabbinic Judaism and sovereign Judaism. Rabbinic Judaism is a Judaism whose values are dictated to it by rabbis or from above, whereas sovereign Judaism is a Judaism that selects its own values. A nice wordplay, of course: secular people are the sovereigns and religious people are the rabbinic ones, and therefore the secular are wonderful and the religious are less so, which is what he wanted to prove.

But I want to examine this distinction he makes. Maybe, if I may ask: if a person really legislates his own values, then what would Aryeh Elon say to someone who legislated for himself the value of being a pirate? Meaning, boldly and devotedly he sacrifices himself for the realization of the lofty value of robbing every ship that passes at sea for his private treasure. Okay? Or a hired murderer, if you like. Right? That’s what he legislated for himself. Now, does Aryeh Elon see him as a moral exemplar? I assume not; I never asked him, but I assume not.

So let’s speak about anyone among us who doesn’t see that as a moral exemplar. What does that really mean? Why not? After all, he legislated his own values and adheres to them, and follows them, even willing to pay prices for them. What’s the problem? The problem is which values he adheres to. Adherence to values is worthy of appreciation. But the values to which you adhere are bad values. But if the fact that I legislated these values is what determines whether they are good or bad, then what I just said is entirely meaningless. Every person who established for himself a set of values has, by definition, values that are good from his point of view, because that’s what he established.

If I say that a person can establish bad values for himself, and therefore I criticize the hired murderer even though he chose that value, then I have criticism—why? Because it’s a bad value. But what does that mean, a bad value? He chose it! And if the choice is what determines whether it is good or bad, then one cannot say it is a bad value. When I say it is a bad value, I am once again assuming that there is some objective standard that determines what is good and bad, and not the determinations of human beings, whether of an individual person or of a group of people. Rather there is some objective standard by which I check whether values are good or bad. And only after that can I come and see whether the person adheres to good values or bad values—or adheres to nothing, just goes along with the crowd, like the comedy troupe.

This illusion of Aryeh Elon and many like him, that they legislate their own values, is simply complete nonsense. It’s just a mistake; it’s not even a disagreement. It’s simply a mistake—he doesn’t understand himself correctly. Values by definition are something that you do not determine. That’s what values mean. If you determine your own values, then we are all equal and everyone has his own values, and the hired murderer and Mother Teresa are in exactly the same moral condition. They both legislated their own values and they stick to them and pay prices for them and suffer because of them—wonderful. They are both righteous pillars of the world, as opposed to those who merely drift with the moral current and are just pathetic and didn’t legislate their own values, or those with religious values. That is nonsense.

In the end, the fact that there are binding values means—and once again this is just the spinach test from another angle—that our relation to values as binding means there is something objective, there is some set of values that we did not determine, it is objective, it is given. And this is what is called moral realism. That is, there is some set of values—I would even say some value-ideas in the world of ideas—that exist somewhere; it is not my agreement, nor society’s agreement, nor anything of the kind. They are simply there, and they bind. I claim they also bind by divine force, but that is another step further. Leave that aside. For now I completely agree with Enoch. Our argument began only over whether God is needed in order to say this. But on this picture we both agreed, and that is what was convenient in that debate: we had a shared starting point.

So the claim is that you cannot speak of binding morality or valid morality if you see morality as the offspring of your own psychological makeup, or even of social agreement. There is no such thing. In other words, if morality passes the spinach test for you, that means you are a moral realist. It means there is some binding moral standard.

Now, Rabbi, Rabbi, Rabbi—but still, there is a very big problem here: every person does what he believes is right in his own eyes. ISIS and the Nazis and Hitler all did what they believed was the right thing to do. So if that’s the case, what is our claim against them? In the end our claim against them remains not that they failed to hear the call of—didn’t study Kant’s moral book or didn’t understand Enoch’s moral facts—but that they lacked the humility to look at reality as it is and instead became enslaved to that same Platonism. That’s the whole point. So it turns out the whole difference between good and evil is this.

We keep returning to the same point, and again here I interpret it differently, exactly as I did before. The same disagreement. But I’m getting there and I’ll explain in a moment why I see it a bit differently. My claim is that when a person responds to the moral command or to moral values, he is in fact responding to something outside himself. He does not determine what is moral and what is not moral—and neither does society. An entire society can accept other agreements, like Nazi society, and everyone still criticizes it. And criticism of it is not because I accepted a different agreement. That’s not criticism; that’s maybe only self-defense, like what was said earlier regarding ISIS. If I have criticism of them, that means the content of their agreements is immoral. But if moral content just means what we agreed on—then what now?

Let me say more. Kant’s view—and I agree with him—is that a moral act is an act done out of moral motivation. That is, it is not enough that you do a good thing, something defined as good by moral theory; your motivation also matters. Meaning, if your motivation is doing good, then you are a moral person. Otherwise you are a sheep. Yes, like the sheep parable I love from Amnon Yitzhak: the rabbi slaughters a sheep, gets up at four in the morning, covers it with a prayer shawl and shouts, “Oh righteous one, righteous one has died, a righteous one has died.” Everyone opens their windows, wakes up at four in the morning, sees this great righteous man and the rabbi sobbing in the street. They all come out to escort the righteous man on his final journey, they reach the cemetery, and then they remove the prayer shawl, lower the righteous man into the pit, and discover that it’s a sheep. So they want to throw the rabbi into the pit in place of the righteous one. He says to them: I don’t understand what you want from me—he really is righteous, the sheep really is righteous. And why righteous? You say the same thing. I scold you for not doing what you should. You say: look, we don’t steal, we don’t murder, we don’t beat anyone. The sheep also didn’t steal, didn’t murder, didn’t beat anyone—she is thoroughly righteous, just like you. So what’s the problem? She meets all your criteria.

And the point is that in order to be righteous it is not enough to have a good character. A good character means you are a good person. A righteous person, or a moral person, is someone who acts according to values. Someone who does things because values obligate him. Notice that here I’m taking one step further: not only do I claim there is moral realism, that there are moral values in the Platonic world, ideas that determine what is moral and what is not moral—I am also claiming that this must take part in the motivation of the moral action. When I do a moral act, I must have those ideas before my eyes and be committed to them, act according to them in order to realize them. Do you see the Platonism I’m reaching here? I really do see some idea before my eyes, and my role is to implement it in this world—the very horrifying Platonism Popper described. And therefore in this sense I really think there is something very deep in Platonism, and someone who throws out the baby with the bathwater, as both communism and Popper did, misses something enormous. Because in the final analysis, without utopia not only do you have no way to repair the world, because you have nothing to aspire to, but the utopia also takes part in your motivation. When you do things, you have to do them out of moral motivation. Otherwise even if all your life you do good things, if it is just your nature, then it is not a moral action; rather, you are just a good person. But a moral act is an act of conscious decision out of commitment to values that I did not determine. That, in my view, is what it means to be a moral person. Quite apart from Judaism or religion, by the way—that is my definition of a moral person.

Now, for example, Maimonides says the same thing at the end of chapter 8 of the laws of kings. He writes that a resident alien who keeps the commandments out of rational decision is not among the pious of the nations of the world but among their wise. What does that mean? When you keep the commandments—and notice, we are talking about the seven Noahide commandments of the resident alien, meaning basically morality for the resident alien, in broad terms mostly moral principles—when you keep those moral principles because your reason has determined that this is correct, then you are not among the pious of the nations of the world but among their wise. In my own words, I say: it has value, but it has no religious value. Religious value exists only for a commandment performed out of commitment to the command of the Holy One, blessed be He—the command of God. Otherwise you can perform all the commandments, put on tefillin in the street when Chabad people stop you, and you have not fulfilled the commandment of tefillin. If you repent in the afternoon, you have to put on tefillin again, because you did not fulfill your obligation that day. You never performed the commandment of tefillin, even if every morning Chabad people stopped you and put tefillin on you. Unless, of course, you put them on because you understand that this is a commandment and you do it because the Holy One, blessed be He, commanded it—only for some reason, without the Chabad people, you wouldn’t do it, I don’t know. If there is someone like that, then for him it is a commandment. But if you stop someone and he puts them on, I don’t know, out of solidarity with Jewish folklore, or just to get the Chabad people off his back, then he has not fulfilled the commandment of tefillin.

There is a very interesting correspondence between Rabbi Yitzhak Hutner and the Lubavitcher Rebbe on this issue. Rabbi Yitzhak Hutner represented the view I’m describing here. He says that what the Chabad people are doing is valueless. Well, I don’t know if it is valueless, because there are people who do it genuinely as a commandment. But in general, if you grabbed someone who is not committed to Jewish law—he may believe in God, but he is not committed to Jewish law—if he is not committed to the idea that there is a commandment of tefillin, then he has not fulfilled the commandment of tefillin.

So in that sense the concept of commandment in the religious context is the same concept as moral act in the moral context. It is not enough that you do the right thing; you have to do it for the right reason, or from the right motivation. The moral thing you need to do because of commitment to the moral command, and the religious thing you need to do out of commitment to the command of God given at Sinai, as Maimonides writes there.

Therefore—and notice this is already one step beyond moral realism as such—moral realism or religious realism as such basically say that there are some Platonic ideas of what it is right to do, morally or halakhically / in terms of Jewish law, Torah-wise, and so on. But I am claiming it is not enough that you obey those things; you need to do it out of commitment to obey those things. That has to be the motivation when you do those things.

So I think that one pole of soft Platonism—up to this point I’ve only gone halfway. What I wanted to show is that one must not throw out the baby with the bathwater. There really does need to be a utopia or Platonic idea whose implementation in the world is what you are trying to realize. That is how one repairs the world; that is how actions have value. Actions have no value if there is no external objective thing that gives them value. The value of actions cannot be a subjective value coming from within you. That is like my critique of Man’s Search for Meaning, by Viktor Frankl. Psychologists there too treat it as some sort of therapeutically valuable move: if you find meaning for yourself in your life and in what you do, then you will be psychologically healthier. That may be true; that has to be tested factually with psychological tools. But that is not called meaning. That is called a person putting himself into an illusion. Meaning must be given by an external objective factor that says: what you are doing has value. There has to be some Platonic idea against which you are measured; if you advance it, then your act has value, and if you oppose it, then your act has negative value. There must be some objective standard that gives an act value—and on that one must not give up.

In other words, one must not give up that Platonism which says: there are objective ideals in the world of ideas that are supposed to guide me in what to do and what not to do. In that sense, despite all the dangers Popper describes, I think to give this up is to give up the meaning we have in our lives and in our actions altogether.

Now we need to get to the second side and ask ourselves: okay, then where is the softness? Up to now I’ve arrived at Platonism—but why should it be soft, and how does that fit with its being soft?

Rabbi, this moral realism—if, let’s say, when we say “who renews in His goodness every day continually the work of creation,” suppose we really meant it seriously, that every moment is truly a new reality. And you can’t compare it one-to-one with what was before. All the names and descriptions we gave things are nominal; they are not truly accurate for every instance. And every reality is alive, every situation is different. Then in effect, the whole force of what Popper says about facts—even if they were correct in the sense that they are connected to and emerge from reality—but reality is different every moment. So the whole significance of clinging to some moral facts somewhat loses its force.

Again and again we return to the same point. Again and again to the same point. You return to the claim that moral facts change over time, even if there are moral facts. And I return to the view that in principle, no—they do not change. But there is still room—there is still room—to take into account what is happening in the world, even if the facts are rigid facts. But that is exactly the definition of soft Platonism I’m speaking about. So I don’t want to get ahead of myself; we’ll do it step by step.

All right, any more comments or questions?

I still think morality is basically agreement, a general agreement. Right, not everyone can invent a morality for himself, but if there is broad agreement among all human beings that this is the proper way to behave—otherwise people would swallow each other alive, and all those reasons—then that is morality. Thus, for example, slavery and all that: are these things progressive, or do they change like fashion—today this way, tomorrow that way? It seems obvious to us that… for example, tomorrow people could decide: why should everyone’s vote in elections count equally? After all, we all agree there are wiser people and more foolish people. Why should we let the foolish decide our fate? Wouldn’t it make more sense for only the wise to determine things? In other words, if today there is equality, who says that is the correct ideal? Maybe it isn’t. Tomorrow people could decide: no, we’ll let the wise govern us.

Regarding Plato’s rule of the wise, I’ve given classes on that—I assume you’ve heard them already, or maybe not. In any case, I’ve spoken and written about it a lot. There is a great deal of logic in letting the wise govern us, but it is the wrong logic. Wrong in the moral sense. But that is another issue, and I won’t go into it here. I’ll answer your actual question. The advantage of the spinach test, or these kinds of arguments that I call revelatory arguments, is that I’m not trying to persuade you of anything. I’m trying to give you tools so that you can examine yourself and see where you stand. Now, if you yourself scoff at my statement about the enslavement of blacks exactly the way you scoff at spinach, then you really are a moral relativist. I haven’t persuaded you of anything. If you don’t scoff, then I’ve helped you discover that although you think you are a relativist, you are not. Okay? That’s all. Now you have to ask yourself where you stand. I’m not now presenting an argument in favor of moral realism. I’m not. I’m presenting a diagnostic tool that each person should use regarding himself and discover whether he is a moral realist or not. I think, from my experience, that many people are moral realists, including people who don’t think they are. Meaning, even people who think morality is a matter of taste, a convention—once it was customary to enslave blacks, today it isn’t; it’s all conventions. I say to the person: listen, apply the spinach test to this and check yourself. If you really laugh as with spinach, then fine—that’s your conclusion. But if not, then know that you are living in error. Meaning: you do not really think this is like liking spinach. That’s all. Now you need to examine yourself. If you examined yourself and reached that conclusion, then fine, apparently we disagree. But this is not an argument meant to change you; it is meant to help you discover where you already are. That is the claim. Okay?

So if you think that… if you relate to it the same way as spinach, then you really are not where I am, and we see things differently. So for you morality is convention, and for me morality is objective.

No, I’m not arguing about spinach; I’m only asking whether it is possible that in the future they’ll decide that it’s more moral that the wise…

I answered. I’m answering. It’s possible. Therefore I suggest: go check whether you think that this possible thing would indeed be right or wrong. Check yourself. If you pass the spinach test, then you can examine what you think about that. Is it possible? Of course everything is possible. But I’m asking what I think, not what is possible. Many things are possible. The question is what I think. This tool helps me formulate the position or understand what I think. That’s all. I, for example, am a moral realist. You should examine yourself and reach your own conclusions about where you stand; I don’t know.

All right.

Rabbi, may I ask a question?

Yes.

No, I’m on Zoom. I wanted to ask: does materialism necessarily contradict Platonism? Meaning, if a person holds a materialist position, does that necessarily commit him to being…?

Again, I think this is partly a matter of definition. A person can say: I’m a materialist, but in the world of ideas there can also exist things that are not material. Fine. That’s not a contradiction. Such a position is possible, so it’s semantics. Ask the materialist what he believes. If he thinks yes, then yes; if not, then not. There’s nothing here I can force him to accept just because he’s a materialist. Of course one could ask him: if you believe in the existence of ideas, why don’t you believe in the existence of God or the existence of a soul? Maybe he has explanations for why he doesn’t believe; I don’t know.

Okay. And regarding the position… what we spoke about earlier, that a person acts out of moral principles, out of moral values, and not simply because he is a good person. Suppose someone… I just wanted to put it to some kind of test to understand the reality. Say someone tells the truth even though it’s uncomfortable for him, puts him in an embarrassing position, he has to admit something. Doesn’t that necessarily indicate it was done out of morality?

No. Meaning, there may be another aspect such that for him it’s actually more convenient. He won’t feel good after lying, say, and he prefers to escape the bad feeling later, and is willing to pay for that with a bad feeling now. So in principle it doesn’t prove anything. A person can examine himself or get an impression in one way or another, but there are no clear indicators here. Even someone who pays prices may be doing it out of self-interest.

So what exactly is the focused question a person should ask himself—whether he is doing it because of self-interest or because he thinks it’s right?

There are no indicators by which you can decide the question, but it is a well-defined question. Okay? If you think it’s right—mainly regarding yourself. About others it is harder to assess, though even regarding others, whether it comes from this or that, it is just an estimate like any other estimate.

Yes, I meant that I don’t need to formulate it in Platonic terms—do I need to ask myself whether some value exists…?

No, I think that question is hard to answer. If you find within yourself commitment to some objective value, and not because of one interest or another, then you are probably a Platonic realist. But you don’t ask it directly—“Do I see ideas?” Rather, the feeling within you or the understanding within you is the indication of whether you are Platonic or not.

All right, we have to leave, so I ask your forgiveness. Fine. Thank you very much. Sabbath peace.

Sabbath peace. Sabbath peace.