Platonism – Lesson 40

Table of Contents

• [0:00] Opening and introduction to Platonism
• [3:17] Defining intuition and its characteristics
• [4:44] Empiricism and rationalism in philosophy
• [5:46] Democracy: the Aristotelian versus Platonic definition
• [9:22] Definition versus claim in philosophy
• [10:41] Concepts in quantum physics and existence
• [12:14] Diagnosing Aristotle or Plato through arguments
• [15:02] Defining Judaism and pluralism
• [21:24] Concept versus term in language
• [24:31] Ethics and morality: Platonism versus Aristotle
• [27:50] Argument and pluralism: one truth versus many
• [28:53] Objective morality versus human morality
• [30:02] The history of morality: cannibalism and racism
• [32:02] Examples of moral nonsense: about spinach

Summary

General overview

The text summarizes a long series on Platonism through the dispute between Plato and Aristotle over the status of categories and concepts, and argues that this question has practical implications for contemporary debates in morality, politics, identity, and gender. The speaker links Platonism with the view that concepts are the discovery of something objective and binding, and Aristotelianism with a conventionalism according to which concepts are mainly the product of conceptualization and agreement. He proposes a “soft Platonism” that holds on to objective truth and binding values but is wary of rigidity and certainty that lead to extremism, and he also criticizes postmodernism/pluralism, which in his view empties discourse of content.

Plato, Aristotle, and categories

The speaker opens with the dispute over how to understand categories and general concepts that classify the world. Aristotle is presented as holding that categories are abstractions and arbitrary decisions of consciousness, so there is no “horseness” in the world, only individual horses, and a creature with a different kind of thought would divide the world differently. Plato is presented as holding that concepts are not inventions but distinctions of what exists in an objective sense, and therefore “horseness” is something discovered, not something invented.

Mental constructions, intuition, and the distinction between thought and cognition

The text presents a basic distinction between thought, which organizes and processes sensory data, and cognition, which receives information about the world, and argues that intuition includes cognitive components and is not merely a process of thinking. Aristotle is presented as viewing the world in a narrow way, limited to what is actually present, and everything beyond that is our construction. The speaker frames this in modern language as the difference between empiricism, which limits knowledge to observation, and rationalism, which recognizes a priori claims as information about the world, and he identifies rationalism with the Platonic view.

Concepts, democracy, Borges, and Kripke

The speaker uses the example of “democracy” to distinguish between an Aristotelian view, in which the concept is a convenient name for a collection of conditions, and a Platonic view, in which the characteristics are characteristics of the concept that exists, not what arbitrarily composes it. He brings in Borges to illustrate that if concepts are inventions, then any arbitrary collection of features can be given a new name like “Plutarchus,” and there is no principled limit to the production of concepts. He describes conventionalism as social agreement and mentions, in Kripke, “baptism” as the act of giving a name to a collection of features.

Definitions as claims and the distinction between phenomena and theory in physics

The text challenges the habit of sharply separating between a “definition” as an arbitrary act and a “claim” that is examined as true or false, and argues that many definitions are not arbitrary but rather an attempt to describe a concept grasped intuitively, and are therefore claims. The speaker distinguishes between the observational results of quantum theory, which are discoveries, and the concepts and theories built on top of them, over whose existence there is philosophical dispute, and he emphasizes that one must distinguish between the phenomena and the theoretical determinations.

Arguments, pluralism, and the indication of Platonism

The speaker proposes a criterion for identifying a Platonic or Aristotelian tendency through one’s attitude to arguments about concepts such as “democracy” or “who is a Jew.” He argues that in a conventionalist view such an argument is meaningless, because it is only about synchronizing linguistic usage, whereas in practice people argue as though there is one truth and accuse the other side of being mistaken. He argues that the pluralist rhetoric of “there is no one correct definition” in practice assumes that there is one concept over which people are struggling, and therefore the very existence of the argument proves Platonism rather than pluralism.

Changes in concepts, term versus concept, and Groucho Marx

The text argues that in a conventionalist world there is no meaning to “a change in the concept,” only to replacing a word or using a term differently, and therefore it makes no sense to say that “Judaism has changed” instead of simply choosing a new term. The speaker distinguishes between a term as a word in language and a concept as the content that the word describes, and presents the Aristotelian world as a world of terms without stable concepts. He mentions Groucho Marx’s joke about principles that can be replaced in order to show that the idea of “other principles” is funny only if principles are seen as objectively binding.

Morality, David Enoch’s “spinach test,” and moral progress

The speaker presents morality as an example of the question whether there is objective truth that is not measured by the senses, and argues that an Aristotelian approach would have difficulty justifying condemnation and judgment of others. He brings David Enoch’s “spinach test” to show the difference between subjective claims like a preference for spinach and objective claims like medical knowledge, and argues that most people relate to moral progress the way they relate to scientific progress, not like personal taste. He compares historical changes such as slavery, racism, and discrimination against women to mistakes that were morally uncovered over time, and argues that the fact that there is progress and error does not make morality subjective but points to a gradual approach to the truth.

Torah, Jewish law, morality, and the will of God

In the question-and-answer section, the speaker affirms a distinction between morality and Jewish law and presents them as two categories of the will of God, without necessarily tying this to the discussion of whether both were given at Sinai, and he mentions that he wrote about this in “The Last Column.” He refuses to shift the discussion away from morality itself to “the World to Come,” and maintains that there is moral obligation even if our understanding of it progresses through the generations. In response to a question about suffering and the long time it takes for moral progress, he says he has no knowledge of the intentions of the Holy One, blessed be He, but the very existence of progress does not cancel objective obligation.

Queerness, “What Is a Woman?”, and the criticism of emptying out concepts

The speaker brings the queer claim of a multiplicity of identities and genders and presents it as a claim that speaks in pluralist language but in practice says, “there is no such thing as gender.” He describes the law in New York about “34 genders” to illustrate that the very counting contradicts the assumption that there is nothing there to count. He mentions the film “What Is a Woman?” and describes how the interviewees struggle to give a definition of “woman” because every definition is immediately attacked, and then the claim “I am a woman” rests on the fact that, according to their own view, the concept “woman” has no content, which turns the struggle over the use of the word into a struggle over an empty term.

Soft Platonism, Popper, extremism, and rigidity

The text adopts a criticism by Karl Popper, according to which utopias and absolute ideals may give rise to extremism, violence, and totalitarianism, and agrees that there is in Platonism a tendency toward rigidity. The speaker argues that the response of giving up Platonism leads to a postmodern, “queer” vacuum that empties values and meaning, and therefore the solution is to distinguish between Platonism and rigidity. He proposes that ideals can appear in different forms depending on circumstances and that there can be progress in our grasp of them, so that one can justify change without denying the existence of the concept.

Halakhic examples: surrogacy and motherhood

The speaker brings up the halakhic dispute in surrogacy over the question “who is the mother,” between the owner of the egg and the owner of the womb, and emphasizes that opinions are divided even in Jewish law. He argues that if this is only an arbitrary definition, then there is no meaning to a value-laden decision that will affect custody of the child, responsibility, or questions of marriage and siblinghood, and therefore there must be a real concept of motherhood even if it is more complex than people once thought. He presents this as an example of the possibility of an objective concept with varied manifestations without falling into the claim that there is no concept at all.

Jewish law, Platonism, and mysticism

The speaker mentions Torah examples such as “legal effect and acquisition regarding something that has not yet come into the world” and “something that has no tangible substance” as evidence that Jewish law rests on Platonic foundations when it is understood in depth and not only superficially. He argues that Platonism is not mystical but simply “that’s life,” and that all of us are in practice Platonists, and that’s a good thing, as long as we do not become rigid.

Politics: certainty, Haredim, road blockades, and voting according to values

At the end a political discussion comes up about blocking roads, and the speaker rejects the general call to “break the arms and legs” of every road-blocker, but says that someone who blocks a road in the name of injustice in order to advance wicked ideas may justify sanctions, whereas in a case of distress one should clear them by force but not punish in that way. He argues that there will be no government “without Haredim” unless the public votes according to values such as democracy, religion and state in a reasonable balance, and the absence of coercion, and that the inability to break free of the molds of “right-left” and “Bibi–not Bibi” creates a map in which the Haredim hold the balance of power. He blames the public for “cooking up” these results, including regarding the Chief Rabbinate, and argues that political hatred is a rigidity built around personalities rather than content, and that the moment it stops, the Haredim’s balancing power will disappear.

Discovering new concepts, gender dysphoria, and listening without a “package deal”

In response to a question about how one “discovers” a new Platonic concept, the speaker says that if you feel a truth is being forced on you, there is no obligation to accept it, but if you identify a truth you had not noticed before, it may be that something new has been revealed. He argues that one can accept a certain point in new claims without adopting a “package deal,” and says that the queer movement also initially aroused instinctive resistance in him until he tried to listen and concluded that it contains a valid critique of an overly rigid dichotomy, without accepting the total emptying-out of the concept of gender. He presents the possibility of a split between physiological sex and psychological gender and accepts that gender dysphoria can exist even if the two usually go together, and he ends with a reservation about data “in the press” and the statement that the subject is so charged that even the data are affected.

Today the plan is to finish the series on Platonism. Every good thing has to end sometime, and what I really want to do is try to give some overall view of the path we’ve taken, because this has been going on for over a year and a half, to give some kind of general picture and a few more comments about implications for our world today. The discussion of Platonism is completely not un-Platonic—that is, it has meanings in practical life too. So I started with the dispute between Plato and Aristotle about how to relate to categories. Right? That was the starting point. When we divide up the world or classify things in the world through various properties, descriptions, characteristics, general concepts—you can call these categories—there’s a dispute about how to relate to those categories. According to Aristotle, those categories are our abstractions. There is no horseness in the world, and there isn’t really something that distinguishes horses from donkeys in any way other than distinguishing one horse from the other horses. Meaning, the divisions, the grouping of things into sets, are basically arbitrary decisions of ours, which are really the result of conceptualization, of how we think, or whatever. In other words, a creature with a different kind of thought would have no horses in its world at all, only four-legged creatures that live in Israel and four-legged creatures that live in Australia, where among the four-legged creatures living in Israel you could include horses, donkeys, dogs, all kinds of things, and that would be the same group. Meaning, the division of the world into groups and features and descriptions is purely a function of our way of thinking. And Plato argued that we don’t invent that—we notice it. Meaning, it exists in some objective sense, and all we do is perceive those divisions. But the concept of horseness is not something we invented, rather something we discovered. And in that sense this is really the basis of the whole Platonic-Aristotelian move, because the question is how far we are willing to accept the existence of things that we don’t see directly, or don’t encounter, or don’t see immediately, but only as kinds of mental constructions. The broader question is really how to relate at all to our mental constructions. Do we treat our mental constructions as fictions, or as products of our subjective structure, or do we see them as a kind of mental capacity we have to perceive things in reality not through the senses? That brought me to the discussion of what intuition is, and the claim was that contrary to what people usually think—that intuition is a process of thought—I think intuition has cognitive components. The distinction between thought and cognition is almost a cornerstone in philosophy, and I think it lies at the basis of quite a few philosophical failures, because we assume there are things we grasp through interaction with the world. We look at the world, smell the world, it doesn’t matter—with the senses we create interaction with the world, and through that we draw information about it. We learn something about the world through the senses, and thought is supposed to process the data of the senses and create certain mental constructions, organize things in our heads, and of course here it depends on what’s comfortable for us. The construction we create is the one that’s more convenient for us. That construction is something we create, not discover. It’s not a claim about the world. In that sense, Aristotle really grasps the world in a very narrow way. Meaning, what is actually present before our eyes—that’s the world. Everything we do beyond that is our own construction. In much more modern dress, because thousands of years came after him, we already speak in terms of empiricism and rationalism, and the claim is that information about the world can be obtained only by means of observation—where of course the intention is observation through the senses, or measuring devices that mediate the senses and the like. And rationalism, really beginning from the sixteenth century onward, is almost a dirty word today. Not rationality, but rationalism. Rationalism as a philosophical position is the view that I can learn about the world even without observation. Or that the a priori claims, the a priori insights I have, are also statements about the world and not just some subjective frameworks of mine within which I organize what happens in the world. That’s the Platonic view. And as a result, these things have implications for how we understand concepts. I gave the example of democracy. In an Aristotelian view of the concept democracy, we basically treat democracy as an arbitrary definition under which several features are gathered. Meaning, a democratic state is a state that meets a number of conditions. In short, instead of repeating all those conditions each time, we say: this is a democratic state. So the concept “democratic state” is a concept we created, not one we discovered—that’s the Aristotelian understanding. In contrast, in the Platonic view, the claim is that the features are features of the concept; the concept is not the collection of the features. The concept possesses the features. Meaning, there is some concept, and we define it or describe it through various features, and that view is a Platonic view, because we see—well, not see, but assume—that there is something there, even though we do not see it. We see only its features, but we assume that this thing, this collection of features, is not a random cluster. It’s not by chance that we gathered separation of powers, the three branches of government and the separation between them, elections, civil rights, all kinds of things like that, and gave all of this one inclusive name: a democratic state. We didn’t gather—as I brought from Borges, Borges’ story—we didn’t gather the color of tables, the color of the left side of the tables, together with the height of a bird’s shriek in the distance and the time of sunrise, and call those three features “Plutarch.” Meaning, I define a concept that collects those three features. We don’t do things like that. Why don’t we do things like that? That’s Borges’ point. Because if concepts were our invention, then any set of features could define a concept. There would be no limitation on this. Some concepts might be more fruitful and some less fruitful, but that’s not an essential difference. Meaning, we could gather any set of features and define it as a new concept. That’s what they did on Borges’ planet. In contrast, in the Platonic view—or let’s call it this: if Aristotelianism is conventionalism, meaning agreement, we agree that this set of features will be called by such-and-such a name, what Kripke—the religious American philosopher Kripke—calls baptism. We baptize this set of features and give it a name. Okay? That’s basically the Aristotelian claim, which in terms of the relation to concepts leads to conventionalism. I see concepts as products of social conventions. We agree among ourselves and call this set of features by a certain name. Plato says that the concept of a democratic state existed from eternity. It wasn’t invented in the past few centuries; it existed from eternity. We discovered it in the past few centuries—leave ancient Greece aside for the moment—we discovered it in the past few centuries, and therefore the concept of a Platonic state is not our invention but our discovery. And now we understand that if I want to describe that concept, there is a set of features that need to be present, and then I propose a definition for that concept. But the definition of a concept is, in some senses, a claim. We usually assume that a definition and a claim are two different things. A definition is arbitrary—define whatever you want, however you want—whereas claims are examined in terms of whether they are true or false. I can’t define what is happening outside right now as though it were night. It isn’t night now; it’s day now. You can use a different word, but I’m talking about the concept: it is day now and not night now. Meaning, I cannot make arbitrary claims. An arbitrary claim is false. A true claim is one that has to correspond to some state of affairs in the world. In contrast, a definition is arbitrary; it doesn’t have to fit anything. Meaning, I can define whatever I want: some set of features I define as a concept. That’s the accepted view. And I want to claim that although there are definitions that are indeed arbitrary, there are very many definitions—I think most of them—that are not arbitrary at all. They are really a kind of claim. They attempt to describe some concept that I grasp by means of my intuition and to conceptualize it or put it into a verbal framework. Meaning, to try to explain or describe that concept which I grasp, and in that sense I see the definition as a claim, not as an arbitrary act. It is a claim. I am claiming that a democratic state is A, B, C, D. I am claiming that, not defining it. We saw—what? In modern physics, quantum, first and foremost, is a discovery. It’s not a definition, that there is quantum—if we translate all sorts of things we wouldn’t have thought such a thing existed, we find it, and that’s a discovery. No, but first of all in physics—this is free of charge—we talked in the previous-to-last classes, we talked about physical Platonism, and regarding physics, if you’re talking about observable facts, you’re entirely right. Nobody argues about that. I’m talking about physical concepts, and it’s not certain that physical concepts exist—that’s a philosophical dispute. The occurrences of quantum theory, what I measure in the laboratory, those we discovered. I assume that if we had carried out that laboratory experiment 2,000 years ago, we would have discovered the same results. Physics hasn’t changed. Our knowledge of physics develops, but the conceptions we create on the basis of the measurements in the lab—those are concepts that can be disputed. The question is whether they exist or not. So you have to distinguish between the two things: between the phenomena of quantum theory and the theoretical determinations, the concepts formed in quantum theory. Those are two different things. As a result of this distinction between definitions and claims, or between conventionalism and essentialism—essentialism, yes, that means that things have essences—I said, I’m really just sketching a schema so you can see the full picture, because there were lots of details in the middle. I said there are two forms, or two tests, through which a person can examine himself or others to see whether they are Aristotelians or Platonists. One test is the question of how we relate to arguments. If we have an argument over how a democratic state ought to behave—because what is democracy? How should a democratic state…? Arguments that are going on here every day. Right? You need to understand that from the Aristotelian-conventionalist perspective, that argument is completely meaningless. We’re just arguing about a definition. Meaning, you define this set of features as democracy, I define that set of features as democracy, but a definition is not a claim. Therefore all the arguments we hear today—“It is inconceivable that in a democratic state there should be such-and-such.” Fine. Then I’ll make it a plutocratic state, not a democratic state. What difference does it make? Define it however you want. It’s words. I define democracy this way, you define democracy differently, so let’s synchronize our definitions and talk in a way that we can understand each other. But a definition is not a claim, and therefore when you say something doesn’t fit a certain definition, that isn’t criticism. It’s only a description: it doesn’t fit that definition. Okay, then let’s call it something else. But of course we all understand that when there is a dispute over whether this is a democracy or not a democracy, or how we ought to conduct ourselves in a democratic state, the dispute is not a dispute over definitions. There is a dispute here over what is correct, and I condemn someone else who says otherwise. I’m not saying, okay, you use a different language from mine. So what if you use a different language from mine? Everyone has his own language. Maybe it’s inconvenient, but I have nothing to disagree with you about. You speak Hebrew, I speak English—what difference does it make? Once you see that this dispute is one where each side thinks the other is mistaken—not merely trying to clarify his language but actually thinks the other is wrong—you basically understand that both sides in the dispute are Platonists. They are really claiming that what I define as a democratic state is a recognition, not an invention. I claim that a democratic state is like this, and if you propose another definition, you are mistaken. It doesn’t fit the idea of a democratic state. We have a dispute, and therefore this is a Platonic view. In other words, one’s relation to argument is actually an indication of whether one is a Platonist or an Aristotelian. And when you look at things by this measure—how people relate to disputes—it seems to me you’ll discover that although almost everyone presents himself as Aristotelian, in fact almost everyone is Platonic. Almost everyone is Platonic. People argue over the question of who is a Jew. Right? Then you hear, “What do you mean? The religious are taking over and deciding who is a Jew, and excluding whoever doesn’t fit their definitions; they don’t have a monopoly on Judaism.” Right, all kinds of notions like that. Very often people use a pluralistic language. Meaning, a language that says: I define Judaism differently. Meaning, who says your definition is the right one? But you have to understand that what lies behind this is really that there is no such thing as a correct definition. If you can define it however you like and I can define it however I like, then we don’t have a dispute over what the definition is. We simply use different language. The concept “Jew” has one meaning for you, and the concept “Jew” has another meaning for me. So what? It’s just language. It’s like speaking Hebrew or English. You can say Judaism or Judaism—it’s exactly the same thing. We’re merely arguing over the definition of a concept. But everybody understands that that’s not true. Those supposedly pluralistic claims—claims that often use arguments like “there is no one definition of Judaism” or “no correct definition of Judaism”—actually assume the exact opposite. They assume that there is Judaism and it has a definition, and they are arguing with me. They are saying the definition is not what you propose, but what I propose—or at least also what I propose. And then you have to understand what “also” means. Because if it’s “also,” then let’s just use different words. Why use the same word in two different meanings? It simply prevents communication. Therefore pluralism is really just born of confusion. Meaning, these ideas of pluralism always drive me crazy. They’re just confused people. Confused people. You can say you disagree with my definition and propose another one, no problem. But you can’t tell me that all definitions are correct and still maintain that a definition says something. If all definitions are correct, then let’s invent a different word for each such definition. Why use the same word for two different definitions? And then fight over it, argue over it, raise budgets for it, do campaigns for it, establish study halls for it. Right? Liberal Judaism, pluralistic Judaism, or whatever the devil they call it. It’s simply a collection of confused people. That’s the whole story. Because a concept has meaning and everyone wants ownership of the concept. It’s like if I set up a candy company and called it Elite. They wouldn’t let me, because Elite has a certain content. They wouldn’t let you because they don’t want to; they have an interest. But I’m talking about—every group claims it represents the concept Judaism. But according to the pluralistic view, there is no concept Judaism, so what are you representing? You’re representing nothing. It’s just an argument over the use of a word. Right, and because that word sits very powerfully with most people, everybody wants ownership of it. Okay, so I say: you can give psychological explanations for that. I’m looking for philosophical explanations for it, and I claim there aren’t any. There are no philosophical explanations. It’s only psychology. And there is no point arguing over psychology. Take a pill, calm yourself down, and stop arguing. Meaning, if we have a real philosophical dispute, I think you’re mistaken, harmful, whatever it is, then it makes sense to have an argument. I want to persuade you, I want to overcome you, I want—I don’t know—whatever. But if we merely have an argument over a word, then it’s really childish. Forget it. I’ll give up the word Jew, you take the word Jew, I’ll use the word Israeli. Fine. What difference does it make right now? We’re just arguing over the right to use a word. Meaning, the right to use a word in the economic sense—you can say it has propagandistic or economic impact, I can say that using a certain brand will bring me buyers. Fine. But that’s interests, that’s psychology, that’s not essence. You’re not claiming that the word Elite belongs to you in some essential sense—that if someone else uses the word Elite, he is mistaken. No. He is not mistaken; he is merely harming me. I want to use that word and it hurts my interests. So that should also be our attitude toward arguments on intellectual planes, not only economic ones, because there too these are simply arguments over the right to use a word. That’s all. Right. Therefore the claim is that very often arguments that are brought as some sort of evidence or indication for pluralism—look, you see, there are many definitions—are actually evidence of the exact opposite. Because once there is an argument over a definition, everyone agrees that there is one thing we are trying to define. And I claim my definition is right and yours is wrong, and you claim the opposite. So the very existence of an argument proves Platonism rather than refuting it. In other words, the existence of an argument actually says that there is something we are arguing about. Meaning, if the thing we are arguing about were merely our invention, our product, something we created rather than discovered, then forget it—let’s choose two words and part as friends. No point fighting over it. So one indication is disputes, arguments. A second indication is changes. If I want to propose a change in the definition of a concept, then in the conventionalist, Aristotelian world, that doesn’t exist. There is no such thing as a change in the definition of a concept. Meaning, when you say, for example, Judaism—then you say: once Judaism was, I don’t know, commitment to Torah and commandments, and today it is loyalty to the State of Israel. Let’s just suppose, okay? Two definitions of that sort. So what are you really saying? You are really saying that you want to use the same word that was used in the past with a totally different meaning. So why use the same word? Pick yourself another word. Are we short of letters in the alphabet? Make up another word and use it. Why do you need to fight with me over this word? And here I’m not talking about fighting in the sense of disagreement, but in the sense of why regard this as a change in the concept Judaism. Define another concept and stick to it, that’s all. When you say no—I’m saying even if there were no dispute. It’s not the question of the dispute. Meaning, even if there were no dispute, even if we all agreed that the concept Judaism had changed—from commitment to commandments to loyalty to the State of Israel. Okay, that’s the new definition of the concept Judaism, and everyone agrees, there’s no argument. I’m not speaking about the aspect of arguments. Even then it makes no sense. Why use a word that had a very clear meaning and give it another meaning while keeping the same word? For what? You have something else you want to express? Attach another word to it. What’s the problem? There is a difference between a concept and a term. A term is something in language. A collection of letters is a term. The word Jew—J, E, W—is a word in language, okay? That’s a term. But the concept Jew is the thing the word describes. The concept Jew is something that is a package of content which the word Jew describes. Just as people have names. My name is Miki, so Miki is my name, but there is a description: I live here, I was born there, my parents are like this, my height is such-and-such, I have such-and-such traits—that whole set is really Miki. The term is Miki; the concept is really the collection of properties that Miki merely describes. Okay? Therefore in the Aristotelian world there are no concepts, only terms. Meaning, there are only words under which we place a collection of features. But you can replace the features. If you replace the features, as Groucho Marx said—I mentioned this yesterday too, I think—“I have my principles, and if you don’t like them, well, I have others.” That attitude, that joke of Groucho Marx, comes from the fact that he sees principles not as something we invented—because if it’s ours, then what’s the problem? He sees principles as something objectively binding, and therefore it’s funny when you say I have other principles too. If you have other principles too, then they are not principles. You can’t switch principles. You can switch your use of a word. Okay? So here too, when you relate to the concept of a democratic state and say: the democracy of the past was one way, but today it should have another definition—you are really saying that there is such a thing as democracy. There is such a thing as democracy, and you are saying that once it appeared in one form and today it appears in another. Or that once people perceived it in one way and were mistaken, and today we perceive it better and it should be described this way. It doesn’t matter how you explain the difference between what was once and what is now. But you are really assuming that there is some… the word escaped me. There is something in reality that I am referring to. It is not an invention. It is not a definition of a word that I invent, but an attempt to describe some Platonic idea that exists in reality—the idea of democracy or democracies. And then I say, okay, it may be that once it appears in one way and under other circumstances it appears in another way. Or that once people did not perceive it properly. Like in science, where there is some kind of progress and today we grasp it better. Therefore, one way or another, we are always speaking about something that exists in some sense in the external world objectively, and not something that is the product of our conceptualization or invention. It is discovery and not invention. I brought David Enoch’s spinach test, which deals with morality, and I said that very often people treat morality—I’m just using the concept now to illustrate everything I’ve said so far—they use morality as something that is really just my way of relating to things or evaluating things. I happen to have a sensitivity to people murdering or stealing or whatever exactly, and so I call that immoral. But really there is no objectively binding content there. Those are feelings that exist within me. And why? Because the Aristotelian is not willing to accept the existence of things that are not measurable, not actually present before the eyes. Morality is not an object, not something I can observe, and therefore for him it is merely a collection of things ingrained in me, and that’s how I’m used to acting or judging others, but it doesn’t really have objective significance. From that perspective it is very hard to understand how you condemn someone else who acts differently. He acts differently because what is ingrained in him is a different set of principles. What do you want from him? Meaning, if morality is nothing but a set of principles ingrained in me, with no objective validity, then you cannot judge others, you cannot argue with others. Just use another word. He’ll call it “forality” and you’ll call it morality, and everything will be fine. Spare us the semantic confusion, the conceptual confusion. Therefore a moral argument, which very often is conducted in pluralistic language, is exactly an example of what I said before. It actually reflects a monistic view, a Platonic view—a view that says there is an objective morality that is binding and true for everyone. And if you do not act by it, then you are mistaken, or wicked, harmful—however you want to put it. And the pluralistic discourse always comes and says, wait, but everyone has his own truth, and my morality is one thing and your morality is another. That is always defensive discourse. When I am attacked for being immoral, I say, wait a second, my morality is this; I have a different morality. Yes, but of course that defense doesn’t mean I have a different morality. It means there is no morality—that your morality is meaningless. There is no such thing as morality, neither mine nor yours, and therefore leave me alone, don’t attack me. You have nothing with which to attack me, because there is nothing according to which to attack me. That is really the claim. In contrast, I want to say that in moral arguments, we all understand that moral arguments are not really conducted that way. When someone condemns someone else or argues with him morally, he means to say that the other person is not okay. He judges him. What does that mean? It means that although very often you use pluralistic language, behind it there sits an essentialist view, a view that there is an essence and an objective, binding reality which obligates everyone and does not depend on what you think, or how you conceptualized things, or what concept you invented. That is not the point. If you invented another concept, good for you—you still are not okay because you are not moral. And therefore very often this discourse of arguments that are supposedly conducted on a pluralistic platform actually reflects the opposite of pluralism. It reflects the existence of one objective truth and no other. We just have an argument about what that truth is. Therefore the existence of an argument, contrary to what people often say, does not prove pluralism but refutes pluralism. In other words, once there is an argument, that doesn’t mean there are many truths. On the contrary: if there were many truths, there would be no argument. You with your truth and I with mine. The existence of an argument proves that both sides agree there is only one truth, and not a multiplicity of truths. We simply disagree about what that truth is. Not that both of us are right, but that only one of us is right, and we just don’t know who. We argue over who is right. So that’s an example of… what? I’m saying the idea exists. How can one know whether it was created by humanity or whether it existed beforehand? What we are trying to clarify is whether it was there a moment earlier or humanity invented that idea. Look, I don’t think one can know in some scientific sense, but I say that if it was created by humanity, then it doesn’t interest my grandmother. But how can one… Fine, so one person will say this and another will say that. Let him say whatever he wants. I’m asking what I say, not what he says. I’m asking whether for me morality is objective and binding. My answer is yes, and therefore I do not see morality as something created by humanity, because what is created by humanity doesn’t interest me. Because this is a line of thought, because in lectures we had in recent years we said—or at least that’s how I understood it—that Judaism does not necessarily reflect morality. Judaism is Torah that one must obey, and that has nothing to do with morality. I agree, but what does that have to do with the previous discussion? It means that in fact we have two doctrines. There is Torah from Sinai and there is the doctrine of morality. Who owns it? What is this? What? The Holy One, blessed be He. He gave us two teachings. Ah, a doctrine of morality and Torah from Sinai? Yes, yes. No, morality and Jewish law, not Moses from Sinai. So when did this come? There is morality and there is Jewish law. The question whether both of them are part of the Torah from Sinai that was given to Moses at Sinai—that is another question. I wrote about that in the last column. But there are two categories here, both of which are God’s will, and that has nothing to do with our previous discussion. No, because in the end this moral issue… it is problematic. There are periods—for instance, once people practiced cannibalism, okay, such a thing existed, there was racism as a concept. Why do we condemn it today? What do you learn from that? I learn from that that morality itself is something that changes over the years. Exactly—that’s the point. I don’t know whether that was once the moral thing and we come and change it, or who determined that morality? So how, okay, then how can one… That is exactly the claim. My claim is that very often people say that the very existence of arguments or different views shows there is no truth, and I argue that the existence of arguments shows there is truth. Because if there were no truth, there would be nothing to argue about. If today I look at the cannibals of the past or at racists—there are racists today too, but there were racists then as well—and I look at this in a condemnatory, judgmental way, then that means that for me, leave aside absolute truth for a moment, but for me these things are objectively binding truths. They are not just arbitrary, conventional definitions. In that sense I… this is self-diagnostics, right? I’m diagnosing myself. I’m not using this to persuade you. But I’m telling you: if you check yourself inside, you’ll see it’s true for you too. Meaning, you too condemn someone who behaves, in your view, immorally. And therefore, although you think there are many moral truths, you are simply mistaken. You yourself do not think that. You yourself think there is an objective moral truth. That is exactly the claim. Therefore I said that David Enoch’s test, from the Hebrew University, the spinach test, basically offers an indication for how to do self-diagnosis of your position on such matters. Let’s say I tell you: a child comes and says, “How good that I don’t like spinach, because if I liked spinach I’d eat it, and spinach is yuck.” Okay? So what would you say about that? I too would smile. Why? Because he’s talking nonsense. Why is he talking nonsense? Because if he liked spinach, then what would be the problem with his eating it? The whole point that he doesn’t want to eat spinach is that right now he doesn’t like it. But if he liked it, then what would be the problem if he also ate it? Therefore it’s a silly sentence, one that makes us smile. But what if I said: “How good that I live today and not two hundred years ago, because now I know, I don’t know, how to cure cancer, and two hundred years ago if I had lived then I would have died of cancer; people died of cancer and didn’t know how to cure it.” Is that also funny? No, it’s not funny. Why not? Because the ability to cure cancer is an objective claim, it is a scientific claim, and it was true then too—only they didn’t know it then. When someone says a sentence like that about objective claims, nobody laughs. You laugh at the spinach sentence because liking spinach is subjective. So if so, we have here a tool that can help us examine ourselves—the self-diagnostics I talked about before—it can help us examine our relationship to various claims. I use this tool to examine our relation to moral claims. And I say: “How good that I live today and not two hundred years ago, because then I would have enslaved Blacks, discriminated against women, all kinds of things of that sort, and today I understand that this is not okay.” Does that evoke laughter like the spinach case? Or is it more like curing cancer? I think that for an overwhelming majority of people it is like curing cancer, not like spinach. And that really means those people think that a moral claim has objective validity. We discover moral principles, we do not invent them. Therefore if once people thought differently, they were simply mistaken. It’s not that they thought differently, okay, that’s what they thought and this is what I think and there is no dialogue between us. No—if they thought differently, then they were mistaken. They were in a state of immoral conduct. And that very judgmental attitude tells us that disagreements are a dispute over what is correct—but there is a correct answer. And if I think this is what is correct, then whoever thinks otherwise is mistaken. Therefore, for example, the implication of Platonism versus Aristotelianism regarding morality is a very substantial one. A great many people do not notice this when they use conventionalist, pluralistic—let’s now call it Aristotelian—language regarding morality, and they come with moral motivations: look, you need also to recognize this kind of behavior as moral and that kind as moral, because there is really no morality and everything is wonderful. Of course, their whole motivation is moral—that we should relate properly to various people or phenomena—and therefore the denial of morality comes for moral purposes in these contexts. But it is clear that what lies behind this claim is not pluralism. The discourse is pluralistic; that pluralism is convenient for them. But it is not really, not truly, pluralistic discourse. It is entirely monistic, entirely Platonic. Yes, but here too there is a problem. In the end, if morality really is binding and everything, and it’s just that we are not discovering it, then it’ll take us another few thousand or hundreds of thousands of years to reach pure, refined morality—and then what? What comes of that? So today we no longer eat human beings, but today we eat animals, and in X years we’ll conclude that this too is against that same interest that it has? So morality has advanced. And in science you don’t say that? Today we know quantum theory and relativity; in another generation or two they’ll know even more and think we were mistaken about certain things. So does that mean science is subjective? Science is not religion. It says what I manage to discover improves my standard of living. But morality is like that too. What I manage to advance morally improves the world. No, that’s not so, that’s not… No, no, leave the next world out of this. Leave the next world to the Holy One, blessed be He. I’m interested in whether I conduct myself morally. And you say: I try to conduct myself as morally as I can, but I’m not sure I’ve reached the purest morality. It may be that future generations will go further. But we connected it a moment ago to Torah, to the Holy One, blessed be He. No, no, leave Torah aside now. I’m speaking about morality in itself. I’m a non-Jew, okay? I want to talk about morality in itself. I claim that moral progress is like scientific progress. And the fact that there is moral progress, and that today I may not hold the ultimate morality—perhaps future generations will go further—that is no different from my condition in science. In science too I progress, but I have not reached the end. Future generations will know more. Therefore this says nothing about the relativity or subjectivity of morality. And there is no obligation to maintain and develop science. A person wants to develop his standard of living. I’m not talking about obligation, not talking about obligation. No, okay. If we go back, well I don’t want to nag, but a few minutes ago we established that there is Torah from Sinai divided into two: commandments and morality. Meaning we are required to live according to a certain moral idea that we don’t even know what it is. We do know what it is; we just may be mistaken, and these things develop. What’s the problem? Everything is fine. God created science too. I very much wanted to fly on an airplane five hundred years ago, but there was no airplane, so I couldn’t. Science was the same science five hundred years ago too; it’s just that I didn’t know how to build a plane. And after three or four hundred years people learned how to build airplanes. There is no commandment that God wants us to fly in airplanes. What does that have to do with anything? But I want to fly in an airplane. People want to improve their standard of living. Here we’re talking more about how a person should behave, how it is proper for him to behave. That distinction is irrelevant. The Holy One, blessed be He, instructed us to behave this way or that. I understand, I understand. But that distinction is irrelevant. Irrelevant. For what you want to say, it means that we are not fulfilling the Torah fully? Correct. So what? In the next generation we’ll fulfill it more fully. And in the generation after that, even more fully. Exactly like the use of science, which progresses with time. And the fact that there is an obligation to conduct ourselves according to Torah and no obligation to conduct ourselves according to science—true, so what? What difference does it make? Conceptually, these two processes are progressive processes. And a progressive process does not mean there is no truth. It does not mean it is subjective. It means we are progressing, getting closer and closer to the truth all the time. And that is exactly the point. So why should God care that for thousands of years we behave improperly? That you have to ask Him, but you have to ask Him regardless of my theses. Regardless of my theses. He allows all kinds of terrible things to happen in the world today too, not only in the past. And you can ask why He does that. The standard answer is that He thinks we are meant to do this by our own free choice, apparently—I don’t know. But perhaps He has another explanation. Ask Him. I have no idea. I’m looking at what happens here. I have no idea what the intentions of the Holy One, blessed be He, are or what He wants to achieve. But what happens here, from my perspective, is that we have a moral obligation, and the fact that we are constantly progressing in our understanding of it does not mean that no such objective obligation exists. It only means that the full truth is not yet in our hands. That is really the claim. Now the point is that these arguments—I’m really just trying to pull out the skeleton in order to summarize, so that you can see more or less the path we’ve taken. These arguments have a great deal of significance in our world today, a great deal. I spoke, for example, about queerness. About those arguments in favor of multiplicity—I don’t even know what to call it—gender multiplicity or whatever term is used. Right? Who says the world is divided only into men and women? There are all kinds of intermediate stages, there are entirely different things, there are all kinds of other sexual tendencies. In short, the world is much more complex and varied than people once thought. That is the queer claim. Okay? Notice that this claim too has exactly the same problem. Why? Because this claim speaks in pluralistic language. It speaks in pluralistic language, but what it really says is: there is no such thing as gender. Not that there are many genders—there is no such thing as gender. No one can determine gender. Everyone is something else. That is really what they’re saying. Now, of course, we do this all the time by creating more and more genders. In New York, I think, there’s some law—34 genders, I think, or something like that—and you also have to make restrooms for every such gender. I don’t know, I once saw some law that passed in New York, something like that. Meaning, they count genders—but there is nothing to count. There really is nothing to count. There are no genders in the queer outlook. And this is where I mentioned the film What Is a Woman? A wonderful film in my view. Later I saw that this fellow—whose name I forgot—has a few other films as well. And that film basically tries to interview all kinds of people who deal with gender—gender studies lecturers, gender activists, and so on. And he tries—he says, for example, a man testifies about himself that he is a woman. Because that is how he feels, and he is a woman. He asks him: “Okay, but explain to me the concept woman. Not whether you are a woman or not. I want to understand what a woman is. Then we can see whether you fit the definition or not. Give me the definition itself. What do you call a woman?” He couldn’t get a definition out of anyone. Why? Because any such definition would immediately be attacked. “Who told you? I want to define it differently.” And what comes out is that a person can claim of himself that he is a woman only because, by his own view, there is no such thing as a woman. So what does it mean when you claim that you are a woman? You are a woman means—you are what? What is the concept woman? You don’t know how to tell me what the concept woman is. And if you are not willing to accept that the concept woman has any meaning, then why are you fighting for your right to define yourself by that concept? What does that mean? What are you actually saying? Now you understand that these arguments are arguments being conducted in our streets and in the media all the time. We’re discussing questions of Plato and Aristotle, this philosophy and that philosophy, but in fact this has very practical expression in the streets, in the media, online. Okay? These things are very, very present in our lives, and therefore it is important to pay attention to them. These philosophical analyses basically show that a large part of these claims are simply nonsense. On the other hand, it’s not a question of whether you are right or wrong—you simply are not saying anything. You’re just saying nothing. You want the right to use the word “woman,” like we said before about morality. You want the right to use the word—what for? Just to confuse us? After all, that word has no content. So use another word. Why do you care? Why do you have to use that word? So this is a reductio ad absurdum of that Aristotelian claim I described earlier. So in fact this is another example of how discourse that comes in the name of pluralism actually presupposes monism behind it. It really does think there is such a thing as a woman. But on the other hand, it is unwilling to give any principled definition of it. Meaning, anyone who gives such a definition—it will wage jihad against him. So I say: if you are unwilling to give any definition and there is no such concept, then why are you fighting for the right to call yourself by that concept? There is no such concept. It’s just a word. That is idiotic. Now, what I said there was that one can go a step further and formulate a soft Platonism. What does that mean, a soft Platonism? There is one very problematic feature of Platonism, and Karl Popper spoke about this. He said that when human beings have some utopia, some idea, before their eyes, then for them that is absolute truth, and they fight for it and are willing to kill for it, and this creates insane extremism. In other words, Platonism is the grandfather of all impurity when it comes to extremism and Nazism and Communism and all the isms of the twentieth century that brought about the murder of millions. And that is true. There is something in Platonism that is terribly rigid. Because if you do not create the concept but rather discern what the concept is, then that is the concept. It is objective truth. Whoever thinks differently or behaves differently is simply wicked, harmful, mistaken. That’s all—objectively. And therefore it leads to a lack of tolerance or to very great extremism. Now the way to deal with this—and this is the problem that in my view Popper didn’t pay attention to—the way to deal with it is exactly the queer route. In the end, Popper in a sense went there, because in the end he says, so what is the way to deal with this? To say there is no Platonism, no objective truths or ideas that we perceive or characterize and live by. There is no such thing; they are inventions. And then you arrive at the queer, postmodern vacuum I described before. The correct way to deal with this, I think, is to distinguish between Platonism and rigidity. Platonism has a tendency to be rigid. If this is the idea, it is not in my hands—I am subordinate to what this objective idea says, and therefore this leads to rigidity. And I say no. Very often, even though there is an idea, the idea can appear in different circumstances in different forms, or there can be progress in our ability to grasp the idea. Therefore there can be changes, and there should be changes and adaptations to different circumstances, even though I am a Platonist. Because if I give up Platonism, then I empty my claim of content. That is the queerness of What Is a Woman? that I mentioned before. Do I say no—there is the concept woman, that objective concept, that objective idea exists in some sense. Now it is true that in the past people grasped it in too rigid a way, too dichotomously, too primitively, and I think it appears, or can appear, in more varied forms. If you make that claim, it is a completely legitimate claim and in my opinion even a correct one. But then you are not saying there is no such thing as a woman, and you are not invalidating every definition of the concept woman. You are only saying: I want to make it more varied. I think that not necessarily what certain people at a certain time thought is really the definition of the idea. No—it can also appear in different forms. And then, motherhood. In arguments—even halakhic arguments—about surrogacy: who is the mother? Is the mother the egg donor or the womb bearer in surrogacy? And it turns out that even in Jewish law, by the way, the opinions are divided. I was sure that on the halakhic plane everyone would say it is the egg donor, but no—there are halakhic decisors who want to say it is the womb bearer. So what will you say? You’ll say this isn’t really an argument at all. The question is how you define motherhood. Do you define motherhood through genetics or through the womb? Okay, but if it is only a question of definition, then there is nothing to argue about. And when I want to derive conclusions from it—for example, to whom the child should be given, or who is responsible for the child, or whom that child is forbidden to marry—the genetic siblings or the womb siblings, or all kinds of questions like that—those are questions that need a decision in a value-laden sense. And if you say this is merely an arbitrary definition, then there is no meaning to making such a decision. Therefore there really does need to be some such concept as motherhood, of mother and child. It may be more complex or less unambiguous than people once thought, but responding to what people once thought by throwing out the baby with the bathwater and saying there is no such thing as motherhood, motherhood is just an arbitrary social definition—that empties the whole matter of content, and you won’t even be able to carry on your own struggle, because you have thrown out the baby with the bathwater. Therefore my conclusion was that in our social and moral conduct we must be Platonists, because otherwise there is no such thing as values and no such thing as correct or incorrect conduct. But the critics are right that Platonism can lead to rigidity, to excessive extremism. However, the alternative is not to throw out Platonism but to soften it—to say that Platonism need not be rigid in the way it so often appears. At some meeting I had some time ago, I heard a certain man say—we were discussing the question of what exactly bothers us in the conduct of the Religious Zionist leadership, the political and rabbinic leadership of Religious Zionism in recent years. So we tried to identify characteristics. Someone there said that the main thing that seemed to him to bother people was the decisiveness, the absolute certainty. Smotrich and Rothman and Ben-Gvir, for example, have certain uncompromising truths; they are unwilling to hear any other claims. They may compromise sometimes because they fail to realize what they want, but they have no initial thought whatsoever that absolute truth might not be entirely in their hands, that there may also be rounder, more nuanced perceptions. I’m not entering right now into the question of whether they are right or wrong—that is another discussion. I’m speaking about the certainty of the position, not the position itself. And in that sense—and I think he really hit on a very important point. Meaning, there is something in their conduct that is very Platonist. It is Platonist in the sense that they have some model that is very clear of what is right. And anyone who deviates to the right or left is a heretic. Now sometimes I’ll compromise with him, and I’ll have to refrain from advancing the full extent of my desire, because I can’t, I don’t succeed. But that is just a technical compromise. It’s not that I am really willing to consider for a moment that maybe the judicial reform should be a bit different from what I think, or maybe settlements like this, or settlement in Gaza, or whatever all these things are—I’m not speaking at all about the actual positions. I’m speaking about the question—yes, in a certain sense it’s parallel. I’m speaking about the question of how absolutely you hold your position, not about the position itself. I’m not talking about the question, I’m not talking about someone who thinks we need to settle Gaza. I’m talking about how open he is to hearing that there are other sides to it. Okay? It’s not about the position itself. And this is where Platonism comes to expression. Platonism means: I see objective truth before my eyes. How can someone tell me that it isn’t so? Correct me? He simply doesn’t understand. After all, I see it before my eyes. It’s as if someone were to tell me that there is no wall in front of me. I see a wall here—should I not relate to it? Now they, from their perspective, see their Platonic ideas the way I see a wall. Therefore anyone who says otherwise is talking to the wall. Meaning, they are not truly willing to listen to him. And in that sense I think he hit on the right point, that person, because I often tried to find what bothered me in their ideas, in what they say, how they conduct themselves. What are they aiming for? What is their utopia? And he says no: the very fact that there is a utopia—that is what bothers me. Not what the utopia is, but the very fact that there is some one unequivocal utopia and it is obvious to me that this is what is right. And now, okay, one has to be practical in order to move toward the utopia, but there is only one utopia. And the whole truth is in my hands, and I know what is right, and that’s it. And I pursue it with maximal force. And in that sense we see before our very eyes rigid Platonism, right? And the discourse against that rigid Platonism is always pluralistic discourse. People always say: wait, but you don’t have a monopoly on the truth, and maybe yes and maybe no. That’s a mistake. That’s throwing out the baby with the bathwater. You can’t deal with Platonism that way—and rightly not—because you are not putting forward any counterclaim, any alternative. Therefore I say that what you need is what I call soft Platonism. In other words, be Platonists, that’s fine, but don’t be arrogant. A little humility. Meaning, even if there is a Platonic idea, and even if we all perceive it, it’s not certain that we all see it in the fullest and most accurate way. There are other people who also perceive that idea, and they see it a bit differently. So let’s try to listen. Maybe we’ll receive certain corrections. And I think that is a much more constructive discourse if it’s conducted that way. And then I say to them: I am not asking you to give up your Platonism, your utopias, your values. I am only asking you to give up rigidity—that is, to give up the fact that you are unwilling to hear any comment or correction or any other angle regarding those same values. Now all those who speak in the name of pluralism are only playing into their hands, because you are really saying there are no ideas, and on that point he will never admit in his life that there is no idea, because he sees it before his eyes. You are asking him to give up the idea itself. I say no—don’t give up the idea itself. I too aspire to this or that utopia. But let’s see what the right way is to express it, how best to do it. Maybe there are such ways, other ways. We need to try to weigh it. The world is rounder than we think. Platonism tends to take us to very extreme and unequivocal places. But no—these things are much more flexible and rounded, and the Platonic facts, yes, these ideal facts, are softer facts. Meaning, their appearance in the world and our relation to the idea is softer and more flexible. Meaning, horseness exists in the world of ideas. But you understand that among horses in the world there are many kinds of horses, and they are all expressions of that one Platonic idea of horseness. So you can deny the existence of the idea of horseness because in fact there are many kinds of horses—that is the Aristotelian, queer, conventionalist view. And you can say no, no—obviously they have something in common. There is such a thing as horseness. But there are different shades of horses. When the idea descends from the world of ideas into the practical world, it appears in many forms. It can appear in this way, in that way, in another way, and all of them are realizations of the same idea. That already sounds really pluralistic, but it’s not pluralistic, because I will not call a donkey a horse, nor a rooster. Meaning, it’s not that I say there is no definition of horse. I say there is a definition of horse. Horseness is a real concept. But on the way from the world of ideas to our world, it can take on many shades, many forms, different appearances in our world. And the same is true of all our Platonic utopias. Therefore I think the conclusion I would at least like to draw from this series is the importance of soft Platonism. Soft Platonism goes against two views, both of which are destructive. The first is rigid Platonism, which leads to extremism, black-and-white thinking, and this incorrect perspective. And it is incorrect not only because it is harmful and hard to communicate with, but because it is incorrect. Platonism is not like that. It is not true that the truth is really so one-dimensional. That is one mistake. The second mistake is those who try to deal with the first mistake by giving up Platonism altogether and saying: okay, then everyone has his own discourse and his own narrative and his own truth—which is really the purest expression of Aristotelianism, what today is called postmodernism. And that is the second kind of mistake. These two mistakes clash with each other and there is no way to bridge them. Try today to think about politics—how do you bridge between pluralist postmodernists and Smotrich, okay? Or I don’t know, Rothman. Meaning, the only way, by the way, that the pluralists and postmodernists become extreme Platonic people too, just like Smotrich. And that is what is happening before our eyes in recent years: they too become zealots. Zealots with their own utopias, their own intolerance, their own extremism, everything. Because this helplessness that says I can’t cope with them through pluralism—but you can’t cope with them because you really aren’t claiming anything. Meaning, it is your fault that you can’t cope with them. That frustration is your fault, not only theirs. And the correct way to deal with this is to enter together with them into that utopian world of theirs and try to see: okay, but there are additional considerations, and this can appear in one way or another. But not to give up utopias, not to give up these Platonic truths as such. Well, that is in broad outline the conclusion I wanted to reach. Just one more sentence in this summary: of course I did not get into all the Torah examples I discussed regarding Platonism in the Torah context—such as what legal effect is, and acquisition over something not yet in existence, and something intangible, and all kinds of things like that, which are also different expressions of Platonic views of Jewish law. And I tried to show that Jewish law too, when one looks at it not superficially but tries to understand the foundations on which it is built, I think those foundations are distinctly Platonic. And now the conclusion of the movement of this series should be that although Platonism sounds like something very mystical—what does it mean that ideas exist, in what sense, what is this, who sees them—it sounds terribly mystical, I wanted to show that in practice we are all Platonists, and that’s a good thing. We just need to be non-rigid Platonists. That is really the claim. And it’s not mystical. It’s just life. No more mystical than physics. Okay, that’s it from me. The series ends here. Announcements about what comes next will follow. Any comments or questions? Rabbi, a few weeks ago—first of all thank you very much for the series, it was truly fascinating, and the conclusions that came up are definitely thought-provoking. A few weeks ago I asked whether it might be possible also to address the kabbalistic aspects. Yes, that was important to me as another item here, but for that we’d need another meeting. If it’s just for me personally, then I can settle for… No, no, it was definitely an item I wrote down following your request. I even added another line at the end today to speak about that too, but I ran out of time. Maybe I’ll do another meeting about it. We’ll see, I’ll think about it. Okay. And in the end, with that faction blocking the road—what do you do? What? I can’t hear. If that faction blocks the road, then what do you do? In the end. Break their arms and legs. What’s the problem? I didn’t understand. Okay. It’s true—not only do they not enlist, they abuse… That’s from Rabin already, a long time ago, right? Break their arms and legs. Okay. And with anyone who blocks a road, basically, the Rabbi said. The Rabbi once said to break the arms and legs of anyone who blocks a road. Yes? I don’t remember saying that, and I’m not sure I even agree with it. I’m not sure that anyone who blocks a road should have his arms and legs broken. But someone who blocks a road in the name of injustice and in order to promote wicked ideas—his arms and legs can be broken. There are people… There are people who do this out of distress; they need to be removed by force. We need to make sure society can function. But breaking arms and legs is already a kind of sanction. They held me up for an hour and a half yesterday. Okay. So they’ve been holding all of us up for many years, and for many more years to come, not just an hour and a half on the road. Should we expect it? Until we draw the conclusions—and we aren’t drawing the conclusions—it probably won’t change. But it’s a dilemma. If there is no government without them, what can be done? Of course there is a government without them—if we vote for parties that will form a government without them. Of course there is. If we place the emphasis on what is called right wing today—right and left have very little to do with right and left—but on yes-Bibi or no-Bibi, and that’s what we vote on, then with our own hands we create a political map in which there is no government without the Haredim. But if we vote for values of democracy, proper conduct, a reasonable religion-state relationship, lack of coercion, and so on—if that is what matters to us, and those are the parties we promote—there will be a coalition without them. There is a clear majority in favor of these things and against the Haredim. It’s just that these are not the things on which we go to the ballot box. We go to the ballot box over right and left. And in right and left there is some sort of division—it’s not half and half anymore, but some such division—in which the Haredim are the swing bloc. And we refuse to vote based on other values, and therefore we are jamming all the other values. If we understand that right and left are not what really matters, and we go with the things that truly matter and really make a difference, then the Haredim won’t be on the map at all. But this is all our fault. Once there was a panel here in Lod of students who asked for a panel on the Chief Rabbinate, and they invited me as the rabbi. They expected I would probably defend the thing—they didn’t know me. So apart from attacking the Chief Rabbinate, of course, I told them that those responsible for the fact that the Chief Rabbinate exists and behaves as it does are them. I mean the secular people. The secular people are the majority here, and the majority can determine something else, yet time and again it appoints the darkest, most corrupt, most reactionary, in short, most useless people to be chief rabbis. Time and again it appoints them. So no complaints. You cook it, you eat it. We are guilty, not the Haredim and not anyone else. If we went to vote based on the right things—again, I’m not telling anyone how to vote, everyone should vote for whoever he wants—but the parameters by which you decide whom to vote for should not be the parameters by which the public in Israel goes to vote. Because if the parameters are these—right, left, governability, power, all kinds of nonsense—everyone behaves more or less the same way when they get to power. There is no difference between Bibi and Ahmad Tibi. They behave the same way. Ahmad Tibi doesn’t come to power, but all of them would behave the same way. Yair Golan will be super-militant when he is prime minister, I promise you. Right and left interest people a lot, but they don’t really affect anything. There is no difference. The things that really make a difference—nobody votes for them for the Knesset, and therefore the Haredim take over again and again. The Haredim and the Hardalim. Unfortunately, that is the situation. Rabbi, in that context, can the Rabbi explain to me—after all, it’s clear to us that there is—what exactly is the difference between Netanyahu and Lapid? Why do they supposedly hate each other politically in such an extreme way, when there is barely a hair’s breadth between them in any field? But the fact is there is hatred, and people follow them like that, hating each other without any difference. It’s not a matter of our not voting based on right and left—there isn’t all that much difference. It’s all rigidity attaching itself to personalities. That’s all. There is nothing of substance here, nothing, content plays no role. But someone fuels it over years, this mutual hatred when it has no basis. Everybody on all sides fuels it. On that point I don’t agree that only… Bibi uses pseudo-national rhetoric, and Lapid or whoever you want uses pseudo-socialist rhetoric. Lapid is not socialist. Lapid is nationalist, and very much not socialist, even though I can’t stand him. So precisely Lapid is not a good example for this matter that there are no real differences. There are differences in personalities, there are differences in the target audience you appeal to, whose boots you lick, okay. But there is no real substantive difference. Suppose, for example, that some new virus came along that instead of corona prevented us from hating each other and despising each other. Then Channel 14 and Channel 12 would sound the same, because what would they have? This one says this and that one says that. It’s absurd, because it is entirely in our hands to stop this mutual hatred, which feeds the Haredim. And you understand that once it ends there will be no Haredim anymore. Right, there won’t be Haredim anymore. Because the Haredim build on that division. Maybe they fuel it, Rabbi. Maybe they are the ones fueling it. I don’t know. I think that’s exaggerated. If the Rabbi checks all the election campaigns in recent years, they were all about the draft law. Deep down, it was all about the draft law. It started there and ended there and can continue. If the elections were about the draft law, then all the Haredim would have enlisted long ago. Because there is a large majority in the public in favor of drafting the Haredim. No, they exploit it. They exploit the… The right benefited. If the argument were about the draft law, that would be excellent, because then the government would look entirely different. No, not so easily. The large majority in the public… No, the elections were not about the draft law, certainly not. But they exploit the fact that… Of course they want that, that’s true. Well, we drifted a little into politics at the end, but okay. I think these are implications that one has to pay attention to. Everyone should draw his own conclusions. These are implications that begin in philosophical analysis. That’s where it starts. One more small question? Yes. It’s still not entirely clear to me how exactly we discover a new Platonic concept. For example, if we’re talking about sexual identities, which as the Rabbi mentioned are supposedly more than thirty, or even in a liberal sphere where people define themselves as vegetarians or vegans or sub-this or something with that, with the fish clause, the honey clause, the… Sometimes I feel that when such concepts are introduced into the conversation, I feel that some truth is being forced on me and I am expected to enter into the… If you feel it’s being forced on you, then don’t accept it. What do you mean? But if you feel that you find something true there that you hadn’t noticed until now, then maybe someone has revealed something new to you. I mean, I feel some definition that is very, very niche, something not really so important and not… It may be that people take it—sometimes there is a correct point and they take it too far, turn it into some kind of formalism, and then create an entire doctrine out of it that really is some kind of subjective invention. But still, at the base there may be a real point—maybe yes, maybe no, but there may be a real point. And therefore one needs to distinguish between what I accept out of the new ideas. I don’t have to accept it as a package deal. There are things I’ll agree with, things I won’t agree with. But I am open to hearing what people say. For example, the whole queer movement, as an example, for a long time aroused an instinctive resistance in me. I opposed it immediately. And at a certain point I said to myself, wait a second, they are saying something. Listen—they are saying something. And then I reached the conclusion that there is something to what they are saying, but they take it too far. They completely empty the concept of gender of content, and that I do not accept. I think there are genders. But I do accept that the concept of gender was too dichotomous until recently, and that criticism I do accept. Meaning, listening to these critics does not mean adopting what they say whole and entire. But yes, to listen—maybe there is something there you haven’t noticed. Wait, but the way you would accept that this definition exists on its own in a Platonic sense is… what exactly? Meaning, what—if it convinces you that there really is value in breaking it down more finely and introducing the… Yes. If I can understand that there are people who have male sex and female gender, that can happen. Why not? If gender is a psychological matter and sex is a physiological matter, then true, usually they go together, but sometimes they don’t. Sometimes a person is born without a leg or without an arm, even though human beings have two hands and two legs. You can call it a disease or not a disease—that’s already loaded language, unjustifiably in my opinion, but never mind. But yes, there can be a split—what is called gender dysphoria—a split between sex and gender. Okay, why not? I completely accept that. Research shows that fifteen percent of the world—not only humans, in general living creatures—research I read says that fifteen percent of life in the world, not only humans, even among animals, are same-sex or what do you call it… No, same-sex is sexual orientation. I’m talking about gender. Sexual orientation is something else. Regarding sexual orientation in animals, by the way, I read that there is almost no homosexuality among animals. Almost none, from what I saw. But never mind… among humans… That also sounds exaggerated to me, but okay. It depends whom you read, you know. Because it’s a loaded subject, the data too is a bit… Not in the press. Okay. Well, friends, I have another class very soon, so okay—Shabbat shalom, good news.