Self-Reference – Lesson 2
This transcript was produced automatically using artificial intelligence. There may be inaccuracies in the transcribed content and in speaker identification.
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Table of Contents
- The problem of relation and the definition of self-reference
- Estrangement as an apparent solution
- Examples of confusion between the self and parts of the self
- Ariel Rubinstein, a theory that affects itself, and a fixed point
- Self-reference is not necessarily a paradox, and type theory
- Consciousness, self-consciousness, and human uniqueness
- The linguistic distinction between “I” and “myself,” and the verse about Lavan
- Games of estrangement: Agnon and Ibn Gabirol
- Schopenhauer, Kant, and the thing in itself
- Colors, subjectivity, and Leibowitz on the psycho-physical problem
- Descartes and the cogito as pure self-reference
- Mirror, reflection, and Narcissus
- Maimonides, Rashi, the Taz, and the Maharit: self-reference in Jewish law
- Questions from the audience and clarifications about speech and self-reference
Summary
Overview
The text argues that self-reference is problematic because a relation is defined as a two-place predicate between two different objects, whereas in self-reference there seemingly are not two but only one. It presents the distinction between the logical-philosophical problem of the possibility and meaning of sentences like “I love myself” and the linguistic ability to say them, and proposes the concept of “estrangement” as a way to understand how a person can serve both as the one referring and the one referred to. It singles out self-reference in human beings not because of a division into body and soul, but because of consciousness and self-consciousness, and develops the linguistic distinction between “I” as subject and “myself” as the object of reflection. It brings philosophical examples from Schopenhauer, Kant, and Descartes, examples from sensory perception and psychophysics, and halakhic examples from Maimonides and the Maharit, in order to show that self-reference is not always paradoxical and that there are loops that do not create contradiction.
The problem of relation and the definition of self-reference
Self-reference seems like a basic problem because relations are always between two different things, whereas properties and characteristics are attributed to a single object. The text raises the question whether there can be a relation of a thing to itself at all, or whether this is really a property rather than a relation. The text distinguishes between the semantic-linguistic question and the philosophical question of meaning, and argues that the ability to say “I love myself” does not prove that such a sentence has real meaning.
Estrangement as an apparent solution
The text suggests that the possibility of speaking about a self-relation depends on the ability to perform estrangement, that is, to distinguish within a person between “the one who relates” and “the one being related to” as two facets of the same object. It reads “A person lives within himself” as an estrangement in which the person is both the house and the tenant, and reads “a song without a name” as marking the problem of self-reference, which requires an outside perspective in order to give a name. It argues that giving oneself a name, speaking in the third person, and the ability to look at oneself as someone else are all expressions of the same estrangement meant to make self-relation possible.
Examples of confusion between the self and parts of the self
The text notes that statements like hatred of one’s body or love of one’s hair are not self-reference in the sense under discussion, because the soul relates to the body as two different components of a whole. It emphasizes that two-way influences between body and soul are not “self-influence” but influence between two different domains, and that only when a process returns and affects the same mental dimension can something arise that comes close to self-reference. It wonders whether loving “the way I relate to people” is full self-reference, since this involves two different mental aspects, and sets up “I love myself” as a purer case in which the lover and the beloved are the same thing.
Ariel Rubinstein, a theory that affects itself, and a fixed point
The text attributes to Ariel Rubinstein the claim that there cannot be an economic theory that fully describes the world, because the theory itself affects economic behavior through expectations. It suggests, as a thought, that a theory “of an alien” that is not exposed to people could describe without influencing, but argues in principle that one can build a theory that also takes account of its own effect. It brings in fixed-point theorems in mathematics, Gödel’s theorem, and argues that Rubinstein’s mistake stems from his socialist approach, whereas a capitalist conception might remain true even when known to the players. It qualifies that a value-based conception is not an “economic theory” in the sense of describing concrete outcomes, and then returns to the claim that there is no principled obstacle to referring also to the “aspect of referring” itself, such as loving the fact that I love myself.
Self-reference is not necessarily a paradox, and type theory
The text states that self-reference is not synonymous with paradox and brings the sentence “This sentence is made up of words” as a self-reference that creates no problem. It presents criticism of type theory because it forbids all self-reference even though the problems arise only from certain specific kinds of self-reference. It emphasizes that there is no justification for preventing self-reference in general, because not every loop is a paradox.
Consciousness, self-consciousness, and human uniqueness
The text argues that self-reference appears in human beings not because they have body and soul, since the relation of soul to body is not self-reference in the precise sense. It argues that even a materialist who recognizes only body and matter still recognizes the phenomenon of self-reference in a human being. It singles out the human in that his soul has consciousness, and even self-consciousness, and raises doubt whether a process not accompanied by awareness that I am thinking can be called “thinking.” It argues that speaking about consciousness is certainly self-consciousness, even if there is a question whether consciousness itself always involves self-consciousness.
The linguistic distinction between “I” and “myself,” and the verse about Lavan
The text argues that “I” is an ordinary linguistic object like “you” or “Reuven,” whereas “myself” essentially reflects reflexivity and estrangement in which the subject becomes an object of contemplation. It explains that “I love I” is not proper because “myself” marks the I as an object to which one is relating. It interprets the verse “Surely you are my bone and my flesh, and have served me for nothing” as a situation in which Lavan says to Jacob, “You are my self,” because he relates to him from outside in a way similar to looking at oneself from outside, and therefore he cannot say “you are I” but “you are myself.”
Games of estrangement: Agnon and Ibn Gabirol
The text points to the title “From Myself to Myself” in Agnon as a wordplay that requires “double estrangement,” in which there is supposedly one self speaking to another self, with a third observer looking on. It brings Ibn Gabirol in Keter Malkhut: “I flee from You to You, and hide from Your wrath in Your shadow,” and the book title “From You to You I Flee,” as a situation in which fleeing from someone reveals that at every destination one meets that same “You” again. It compares this to a person trying to flee from himself, and to philosophy as an act in which a person examines “how I think” by means of estrangement, in which he looks at his own tools of thought as if they were foreign.
Schopenhauer, Kant, and the thing in itself
The text explains the Kantian distinction between noumenon and phenomenon, and argues that according to Schopenhauer there is one striking exception: a person’s perception of himself. It presents the position that there is no way to grasp the thing in itself with respect to a table, but only the properties as they appear to us; whereas with respect to oneself there is a perception “from within” that allows contact with “the possessor of the properties” and not only with the properties. It sees in this a unique intimacy that exists only in a person’s relation to himself and not in relation to anything else.
Colors, subjectivity, and Leibowitz on the psycho-physical problem
The text argues that the color red is not an electromagnetic wave but a cognitive representation created in response to waves, and that in reality itself there are no colors, only physical triggers. It argues that there is no way to verify that two people experience the same color, even though they are synchronized in speech and behavior, and develops the possibility that one person calls “red” what for another is “green,” or even a completely different kind of experience. It attributes to Leibowitz, in a booklet on the psycho-physical problem, the claim that the psychic dimension is not accessible to science but only to human reports, and brings an example from psychophysics through a booklet by Daniel Algom in the Open University, “Perception and Psychophysics,” which tries to quantify reports about the intensity of light as against physical intensities. It argues that a person’s immediate encounter with his conscious experiences is a relation accessible only to him, and that in order to speak about it estrangement is needed even when the looking is from within.
Descartes and the cogito as pure self-reference
The text presents Descartes’ “I think, therefore I am” as an argument that relies on self-reference, because “I think” is a necessary sentence: the attempt to doubt it is itself a thought. It argues that the sting in Descartes is not the move from “I think” to “I exist,” but the necessity of the premise “I think,” unlike “I walk,” which can be challenged. It sharpens the point that the argument does not work the same way in “you think, therefore you exist,” because there is no immediate access to another person’s thought, and distinguishes between measurable brain activity and “the intellect thinks,” which is not accessible to measurement. It defines pure self-reference as a situation in which the same aspect of the soul is grasped both as activity and as awareness of the activity, such as “I think” or “I think that I think.”
Mirror, reflection, and Narcissus
The text uses the image of mirrors facing one another with a teddy bear in the middle to illustrate an infinite series of reflections, and presents this as a representation of estrangement. It argues that a mirror reflection is another optical object and not “me,” and therefore looking at a reflection is not really self-reference but a model or representation. It argues that a solution that bases all self-reference on models of the self leads to the conclusion that there is no self-reference at all, and therefore cannot explain Descartes’ cogito, which seeks to prove the existence of the self and not the existence of the reflection. It compares this to Narcissus, who fell in love with the figure in the pool and not with himself.
Maimonides, Rashi, the Taz, and the Maharit: self-reference in Jewish law
The text presents Maimonides’ ruling that there is no overreaching in pricing with regard to slaves, even a Hebrew slave and even a hired laborer, and brings the question of the commentators that a Canaanite slave is likened to land, but a Hebrew slave and a laborer are not. It attributes to Rashi on Kiddushin 46b a position from which it emerges that a person in general is likened to land, and brings in the name of the Taz that one who cuts a fingernail on the Sabbath violates the prohibition of reaping because a person is likened to land. It brings the responsum of the Maharit in Choshen Mishpat, section 19, which explains that the law of overreaching applies where there is a seller, a buyer, and an object, whereas in someone selling himself there are not three factors, because the seller and the object are the same thing, and therefore the laws of overreaching were not innovated there. It connects this to the problems of “his bill of emancipation and his hand come at once” in the freeing of a slave, and shows how identity between factors sometimes creates paradox and sometimes does not, again emphasizing that not every self-reference is a paradox.
Questions from the audience and clarifications about speech and self-reference
The text rejects the comparison between “speech comes and cancels speech” and self-reference, and defines this as one speech-act canceling another speech-act. It explains that the word “myself” is a linguistic expression of estrangement and not a solution to the philosophical problem of a relation between one thing and itself. It argues that turning self-reference into a relation to a “reflection” or a “model” is too radical a solution, because it erases actual self-reference, and therefore it is not acceptable to him. It concludes by saying he has no idea what David Hume thought about self-reference, and ends with “Shabbat shalom” and “see you next week.”
Full Transcript
[Rabbi Michael Abraham] Last time I spoke about—we returned to talking about self-reference, and I ended with two songs by Shalom Hanoch that actually sharpened two aspects that exist when we talk about self-reference. One aspect is that self-reference actually cannot exist, because relations are always relations between two different things. There is a relation between A and B. A relation is a two-place predicate; the function that marks a relation has to take two variables, a relation between x and y. Say, being the father of is a relation, being greater than, loving—these are relations, but such relations always have two objects between which the relation holds. As opposed to properties or characteristics: properties and characteristics are attributed to a single object. A single object has a certain property or a certain characteristic; it doesn’t need another object in order for me to define one of its properties or characteristics. But a relation is always two-place, and therefore self-reference—actually a person’s relation to himself—contains some fundamental problem, because there really aren’t two objects here. So how can you define a relation between a thing and something that is not something else but is itself? That is really a characteristic and not a relation; it is really a property of the thing and not a relation between it and—because if the “between it and” is also itself, then it is very hard to see such a thing as a relation. And therefore the first problem with self-reference is whether such a thing can exist at all, whether such a thing is even defined. The second aspect, which of course is connected to it, is: what could such a thing even be?
[Speaker B] Is this only a semantic issue? I didn’t hear. Can such a thing exist—is that only a semantic issue?
[Rabbi Michael Abraham] No, no. Semantics reflects reality. The fact that I can’t talk about it is not because language doesn’t allow it; language does allow it. I can say “I love myself”—what’s the problem? There’s no problem in the language with saying such a sentence. I’m asking philosophically whether such a sentence really has meaning; it’s not only the linguistic expression. The solution to this—or at least an apparent solution—is what I called estrangement. Meaning that a person relates to himself as a stranger. So when you want to talk about a relation between a thing and itself, you basically have to—perhaps artificially—define the thing as something with two faces: the one who relates and the one being related to. Say, when I relate to myself, I function here in two roles: I am the one who relates, and I am the thing to which one relates. If I can manage to create—just a second—if I can manage to create some kind of estrangement like that, meaning to distinguish between two aspects of myself, then perhaps, even though we are talking about one object, it may still be possible to define or talk about a relation between me and myself. In other words, it requires some sort of estrangement. We saw this too in “A person lives within himself”—that is really exactly the estrangement, where you are the house and the one living in it is you yourself. And that is some kind of estrangement, because a house and a person are two different objects; here they are two characteristics or two faces of the same object. I myself function both as a house—whose house? My own. And on the other hand there’s the thing about “a song without a name,” right, which marks the first problem: how can a song refer to itself? It has no name. In order to give something a name, you have to be able to look at it from outside. A person cannot give himself a name. In other words, if a person gives himself a name, that will again require estrangement; it will require that you relate to yourself as some other person. If you can enter into such a situation, look at yourself as someone else, then perhaps you’ll be able to give yourself a name.
[Speaker C] A person who speaks about himself in the third person.
[Rabbi Michael Abraham] Right, that’s some kind of estrangement, yes, correct. That estrangement stems from the problematic nature of self-reference. We’re trying to solve it by means of estrangement. If I can define myself or see a certain aspect of myself as something I’m looking at from outside, as something other than me even though it is me, then maybe it will be possible to define some such kind of self-reference. Yes, I spoke about the fact that by the standard definition, I am my own brother. Because x is the brother of y if they have the same parents. Right? Now I and myself have the same parents. My parents are these, and the parents of myself are also these. So I and myself are brothers. Okay? Now that sounds strange, right? It sounds off. Meaning, you see that I can say that sentence; there’s no linguistic problem with saying that I am my own brother. I’m just asking myself what that means. Is there really such a relation? It’s not completely clear. I tried to create some sort of estrangement here with regard to myself, but it’s hard to do such a thing, and whether it has meaning at all. One of the solutions—or one of the things that can cause confusion in this context—is that what generally characterizes self-reference is that it happens in a human being, among human beings. In other words, these phenomena of self-reference are usually phenomena that arise in the context of human beings, not in the context of other things. Now, in the context of human beings, it’s easy to get confused and say, for example, “I love” or “I hate my body, my hair, my—I don’t know—my belly,” okay? Or all kinds of things like that. That is not self-reference in the definition I’m talking about. You can call it self-reference; that’s a semantic question. But it’s not the self-reference I’m talking about. Because here my soul is relating to my body. That is not a thing relating to itself. My soul and my body together do indeed form some whole, which is me. But when the soul relates to the body, I’m actually splitting that whole into two components, which really are two different components. They really are different; they are not the same thing. The fact that together they form one shared whole is another matter. But clearly they are two different parts of that shared whole. So when one part relates to the other part, that is not self-reference. It’s just the same label. It’s like saying “I love my house.”
[Speaker B] What? It’s like saying “I love my house.” Exactly like that.
[Rabbi Michael Abraham] Love my—
[Speaker B] My house, or something like that.
[Rabbi Michael Abraham] No, in this case, my body—say “A person lives within himself”: if I mean to say that my soul lives inside my body, that is not self-reference. I understand “A person lives within himself” not as soul inside body, but rather the soul inside itself. Because soul inside body is not self-reference. Okay? Clearly there is influence between the soul and the body and between the body and the soul, and influences of that kind raise no fundamental problem at all. If I have a wound in my body, then I feel pain. The feeling of pain is a mental matter. The wound in the body is a physical matter. So the physical affects the mental. Of course the reverse also happens. A person is depressed, and he may, say, lose weight because of it. So that means the soul affects the body. In other words, there is two-way influence. But that is not self-influence, even though people often call it that. It can become self-influence at the point where the body’s weight loss returns and affects the soul. Say I’m depressed, I lose weight because of it, and the fact that I lose weight comes back and affects my psyche. In that sense there is some kind of relation—here it begins to become self-reference.
[Speaker C] Rabbi, if say someone really loves the way he relates to people, the way he treats other people, and he has decency and all that—is that also a kind of self-reference?
[Rabbi Michael Abraham] Here there is some room for hesitation. Because this is indeed the soul relating to itself, since we are talking only about mental matters here. My relation to other people is a mental act. And my relation to other people is one particular aspect of me, while the fact that I love that thing is another aspect of me. So again there is room to wonder whether this is self-reference in the full sense, or whether something has entered here into my soul or psyche, but still, since we are talking about two different aspects of it, then it is still not quite self-reference. When I say, for example, “I love myself,” that is already more self-reference. Or “I hate myself,” whatever. Why? Because here the lover and the beloved are the same thing; these are not two parts. I’m talking about my whole self.
[Speaker C] Why is that called loving myself? What does it mean, loving myself? I love the other things that are not—
[Rabbi Michael Abraham] The love—I mean, that is love—who says? Why can’t I say that I love the fact that I love myself? Can’t I say that? I also love that part of myself. You know, it reminds me: once I read an article by Ariel Rubinstein, an economics professor—emeritus professor, I assume—at Tel Aviv University, Israel Prize laureate, and he once wrote some article, I think in Machshavot, I no longer remember where I saw it. He wrote there an article about how there cannot be an economic theory that fully describes the economic conduct of the world, or of some society, or something like that. Why? Because the moment there is such a theory, the theory itself affects what will happen in the economic world. The expectations created as a result of the theory themselves come back and affect what people do. And so it turns out that there cannot be a theory that fully describes the economic conduct of the world—unless perhaps it is the theory of some alien who reveals it to no one and remains outside the world, where people don’t know that theory. That could be. That was one reservation I had about what he said. But the second reservation I have about what he said is that even if he’s right—I think it’s not correct. Even theoretically there could be a theory that describes the economic conduct of the world while also taking into account its own influence on the world. Theoretically that can be. In mathematics there is a family of theorems called fixed-point theorems, like Brouwer’s and others. What is a fixed point? Say I have a mapping, a function, mapping numbers from the real line to the real line, right? f of x equals x squared. Give me a real number, and the function gives you back a real number. A fixed point is a place where the value of the function and the variable of the function have the same value. For example x equals 1 in this case. x equals 1, x squared is also 1, so that is a fixed point of the function. Okay? And there are points at which a function can correctly describe its own variables even when it takes itself into account. Fixed-point theorems, in more complex form, really say exactly that. Gödel’s theorem basically does something similar. Right—he constructs the Gödel number, and the statement reflected by the Gödel number—he inserts it as a variable into the Gödel statement. Never mind, for those who know.
[Speaker D] I think Ariel Rubinstein’s mistake—Ariel Rubinstein’s mistake, similar things appear in his book Economic Fables—stems from the fact that his basic approach is socialist, whereas a capitalist approach, which says that if everyone does what is personally best for him, then because there are many people and many markets, the result will be good—a theory like that could exist. I’m not sure today in a world of monopolies, but it could perhaps still be true even though everyone knows that the other person, and I too, are acting to maximize our profits.
[Rabbi Michael Abraham] Yes, but I think it’s hard to call that an economic theory. It’s a meta-economic theory, or a meta-economic value outlook. An economic theory, for our purposes, is a theory that describes what happens in the world. Give me outcomes. Meaning, what will be the amount of money of this company at such-and-such a time, or what will be the total goods, or what will be a state’s GDP. In other words, I’m talking about concrete outcomes, not values, like capitalism or socialism or things of that sort. Those are meta-economic matters. Okay, so—I just remembered that—but in principle, getting back to our issue: a person’s love can also include the fact that he loves himself, even that aspect in which he loves. There is no principled obstacle, right? And that’s why I remembered Ariel Rubinstein. There is no principled obstacle to my also referring to that very aspect of the relation I’m talking about. I love the fact that right now I have a self-referential relation of love. I also love that. Simultaneously, it also relates to itself. We already talked about the fact that self-reference is not always paradoxical. People have some tendency to think that self-reference is synonymous with paradox, but no—there is self-reference that does not create a paradox. I talked about the sentence “This sentence is made up of words.” The sentence I just said is also made up of words. So what? Does that make the sentence “This sentence is made up of words” paradoxical? No. It refers to itself and that creates no problem. Not every self-reference is problematic and not every loop is a paradox. Okay? People have some tendency that the moment you find a loop here or find self-reference here, that’s it—we’re stuck in a paradox. Not true. There are self-references that are not paradoxes, and that’s what I talked about. When I spoke about type theory, I said that one of the problems I see in type theory is that it forbids all self-reference, when the problems arise only from very particular kinds of self-reference. Not every self-reference creates a problem. Therefore I do not see any justification or reason to prevent self-reference as a rule, in general. In any case, returning to our matter: the claim is that self-reference usually happens in human beings, but that does not stem—and this is the important point from which I want to move onward—from the fact that a person has body and soul, unlike a table, chair, ball, or cloud. Because the soul’s relation to the body is not what I call self-reference. More than that: take, say, a materialist, a materialist who thinks that a person is made only of matter and has no spirit. Does he not recognize the existence of the phenomenon of self-reference? Does self-reference not exist for him? Of course it does. He agrees that a person has self-reference, even though from his metaphysical point of view there is nothing in a person besides matter, besides body. That is to say, self-reference is found specifically in human beings, but not because they have body and soul—that’s not the important point here. So what is? It’s pretty clear that what distinguishes the human being is not that he has body and soul—animals have that too, in some sense—and still, I think it’s hard to talk about self-reference in animals. Again, I don’t know, maybe there is, but it’s hard for me to imagine a situation in which a cat relates to itself consciously. Genuine self-reference—not taking care of itself in the practical sense, running away when someone attacks it. That of course happens, but that is not self-reference in the sense of mental, conscious reflection. But that is exactly the point here. I think what distinguishes the human being is not that he has body and soul, but that his soul—unlike perhaps the souls of animals—is a soul that has consciousness. And not only consciousness, but also self-consciousness. Some would say that consciousness and self-consciousness are synonymous terms, so let’s just call it consciousness. You can say, for example, that I don’t know what happens in a cat’s mind or in the mind of any animal. Is the animal aware that it is thinking, or does it simply think, or perform actions that look as if it is thinking? Say a cat is at a crossroads and has to decide whether to flee right or left because something is chasing it. There are considerations this way and that way; it has to make a judgment call. A person in such a situation would make a judgment call, think, and reach a decision. The cat reaches a decision too, and let’s say it reaches a good one. You can discuss this on several levels. First, maybe it didn’t make a decision at all; maybe it just ran—it’s programmed that way. Second, maybe it thought and made a decision, but it was not aware that it was thinking and making a decision. In other words, it thought and made a decision, but if you asked it, “Are you thinking and making a decision?” it wouldn’t know how to answer; it does not grasp the fact that it is thinking. And it seems to me that what is usually called consciousness is the second thing, not the first. The fact that you think and make a decision is not called consciousness; that’s called thinking. Consciousness means that you are aware that you are thinking, that the thought is present before your eyes and you understand that right now you are engaged in thinking. That is something additional. Now this is pretty tricky. Because if someone thinks and is not aware that he is thinking, I’m not entirely sure we’re allowed to call that thinking. Maybe that takes us back to the first stage I mentioned, in which case it’s just programmed in him; he simply acts in a certain way. That isn’t what we usually call something that thinks. Something that thinks somehow always comes together with my being aware that I am thinking. The thought is carried out consciously. Because if it is carried out unconsciously, then it is a mechanical matter; that isn’t called thought. Fine—but still, it is clear that in the end, when I talk about consciousness, I certainly reach the third stage. It isn’t just an act of making a decision; there is both decision-making and awareness that I am making a decision. And perhaps the middle stage does not even exist. But the third thing is basically what I call consciousness. And therefore when I talk about consciousness, I think that in a deep sense, all consciousness is self-consciousness. There is no consciousness that is not self-consciousness. To be aware that you exist—I think it’s hard to detach that from being aware that you are aware that you exist. Otherwise it is hard to call that “I am aware that you exist.” I think—meaning, when I said “I am aware that you exist,” what I really expressed by that was that I am aware that I am aware that you exist. This is a very confusing question on the philosophical level. It may be that I can be aware that you exist, but when I say the sentence “I am aware that you exist,” the very saying of the sentence expresses that I am aware that I am aware that you exist. And that is already self-consciousness. But perhaps being aware that you exist without saying it, simply being aware that you exist—that could be consciousness that is not self-consciousness. I don’t know. It’s a very confusing business. But when I say the sentence “I am aware that you exist,” then clearly there is the dimension of self-consciousness. Because after all, I’m saying something that I understand, that I’m aware of. And what am I aware of? I’m aware that I am aware. Right? Therefore here—I don’t know whether consciousness itself is always self-consciousness, but talking about consciousness is certainly self-consciousness. Okay, that is really what I want to say. Usually when we talk about consciousness, we talk about it, and therefore talking about consciousness is certainly self-consciousness, even if consciousness itself may not be. That’s a question I don’t know how to decide—maybe yes, maybe no—it’s very confusing. So it seems to me that what distinguishes the human being—why this phenomenon of self-reference appears specifically in the human being—is simply the fact that the human being is a creature with consciousness, and consciousness, as I said earlier, in its essence, at its root, is really self-consciousness. A person has the capacity for reflection, to look at himself, to be aware of himself, something that perhaps other creatures—I don’t know—but perhaps other creatures do not have. And therefore in the human being this matter truly arises, or only in the context of the human being does this matter of self-consciousness arise. And linguistically, that is interesting, because it has a linguistic expression. What is the difference between the word “I” and the word “myself”? I think that is exactly the difference. “I” is an object, one of the objects. There is I, there is you, there is Reuven, there is Shimon. One of the objects is I. What is “myself”? Even in language, if you look at where the word “myself” appears, it is not used in the same way as the word “I.” “I went to Tel Aviv.” Okay, the word “I” is exactly like “you went to Tel Aviv.” There is nothing special here. “I went to Tel Aviv” and “you went to Tel Aviv” are very similar sentences, except that they speak about different people. This one speaks about me and that one speaks about you. When I say “I love myself,” the “I” here functions in the ordinary sense. But “myself” is not “I.” “I love I” is incorrect English. You have to say “I love myself.” Why? Because the term “myself,” in its essence, reflects reflexivity. “Myself” is always something I say about myself. When I relate to myself, I am not relating to the I. But “myself,” unlike “I,” always includes estrangement, because I manage to look at myself as another object that I am looking at, and that is what “myself” means. “I” is the subject who looks, and “myself” is the object at which I look. I look at myself, I love myself, I hate myself. So “I” and “myself” mark the same creature, but they have different linguistic and logical uses. “I” is the subject of a sentence, like “you,” like “Reuven,” like this table, like any other subject. “Myself” is something unique; it has no parallel. “Myself” is when the I functions as an object to which I relate as subject—that is what the word “myself” signifies.
[Speaker C] How does the Rabbi explain the verse “Surely you are my bone and my flesh, and have served me for nothing,” which Lavan says to Jacob? Is that also a kind of relation from the outside inward?
[Rabbi Michael Abraham] Right, I think that is exactly the meaning. When I want to—he cannot say “you are I.” You are not I; you are someone else. But he can say “you are myself.” Why? Because when I relate to myself, that too is seeing me as someone else to whom I relate. Even though it is me, if you ask who this creature is, it is me—but I perform an act of estrangement here when I look at it, when I look at myself. So I place myself as if I were another creature, and I see that other person as if from outside. And what Lavan is basically saying is that Jacob is basically he—he relates to him as if he were his very self. He cannot say “you are I”; he can only say “you are myself,” because he is looking at him from outside and wants to say: I am looking at you from outside the way I look at myself from outside; I see you as me. Okay? That is actually a good example, I think, of the meaning of the word “myself.” It’s interesting, because Agnon has a book called From Myself to Myself, which is of course a problematic play on words. We’re used to it because it’s already the title of a famous book, but when you think about it, it’s a very problematic wordplay. What does “from myself to myself” mean? From which I to myself? What does “from myself to myself” mean? It’s as if there is some third party here. There is, after all, some I from whose standpoint there is a self and another self, and one self speaks to the other self. And I look at this conversation between self and self—that’s double estrangement.
[Speaker C] Right now, for example, I—
[Rabbi Michael Abraham] When I talk about the estrangement within myself, that’s exactly what Agnon did there. Because the fact that I’m talking about it means that now there’s an “I” talking about “I” and “myself,” but the speaking “I” is some third party. Talking about estrangement is actually using two selves, not an “I” and a “self.” Performing estrangement is “I” and “myself”; talking about estrangement is already from myself to myself. Okay? It sounds a bit like wordplay, but I’m trying to sharpen a certain point here, and I think it’s an important point. Ibn Gabirol writes, “I will flee from You to You, and hide from Your wrath in Your shadow,” in Keter Malkhut, in his liturgical poem Keter Malkhut. There’s a book of poems by Rivi that used to be very popular; every religious teenage girl had it: “From You to You I shall flee.” So what does “From You to You I shall flee” mean? It’s again some kind of thing: I’m fleeing from You, but in the end I still can’t get out. Every other place I go, I discover that it’s You again, it’s still You. I can’t escape You. So too a person, as it were, tries to flee from himself. Maybe sometimes he succeeds. We talked about how a person thinks about how human beings think, and about how I myself think. All philosophy too is basically a kind of looking at myself with those same tools through which I investigate—through the tools of thought. I examine how I think. In order to do that I have to create some kind of estrangement; I relate to myself as though I were a stranger, and I look at that stranger and try to understand how he thinks. But of course he’s not really a stranger. Among other things I’m looking at those very tools of thought that I’m using right now; I’m just trying, as it were, to create a situation in which they are something foreign that I’m looking at. Okay? So this is a phenomenon that basically accompanies us all the time, this estrangement. One of the perhaps most prominent examples—or rather, I’ll give two prominent examples of this on philosophical planes. One of them is a statement by Schopenhauer. We know that Kant made a distinction between the thing-in-itself and the thing as it appears to me, the noumenon and the phenomenon. Right? So there is the table itself, and there is the collection of properties as I perceive the table. Now, I don’t really have any way of making contact with the thing-in-itself. All I can grasp are only aspects of its phenomenon, only the ways in which it appears to me. I have no way of grasping the thing as it is in itself. But Schopenhauer argues that there is one very striking exception to this, and that is a person’s perception of himself. I have no way to connect with the thing-in-itself; all I can do is grasp aspects of it. I don’t know what the table is in itself. I know that it’s made of wood, that it has four legs, that it’s tall, that it’s short, that it’s wide, all kinds of things like that. But the table itself—not as the bearer of the properties, but that all these properties are its properties. Who is this object of which all these are properties? It’s the table. What can you say about it if you can grasp it? Every grasp of it will always be expressed in terms of its properties. I have no way to make contact with or grasp the thing-in-itself. Schopenhauer says that this is true in general, but there is one exception: myself. When I perceive myself, I look at myself from within, not from outside, and therefore here I can actually grasp the thing-in-itself too, not only the properties. In self-awareness, it isn’t only awareness of my properties. It’s some kind of connection I have with the bearer of the properties—with myself, with the self. Okay, and in that sense again, this way a person looks at himself is some kind of unique phenomenon that doesn’t appear with other creatures, nor in man’s relation to other things, but only in relation to himself. There is something very intimate here that can exist only in the relation between you and yourself, and not in relation to anything else. For example, right, we talked about—if I go back to Kant’s distinction—so I mentioned this, I think I mentioned it—no, in other contexts—well, yes, I’ve mentioned it many times in other contexts—what a color is, the color red. What is the color red? Very often when I ask what the color red is, people say: the color red is an electromagnetic wave of a certain wavelength. And that is of course not true. An electromagnetic wave of a certain wavelength is what causes my conscious sensation that I call the color red. When an electromagnetic wave of that wavelength hits my retina, some signal enters my brain, undergoes some processing, and then in my consciousness there appears an image of the color red. But the color red exists only in my consciousness. In reality itself there is no color red; in reality itself there is an electromagnetic wave. And if there were a creature built differently from me—I’ve said this many times—if there were a creature built differently from me, such that the signals from the retina went to the hearing center rather than the visual center, then it would hear electromagnetic waves, not see them. Right? “Seeing the sounds,” like at the revelation at Mount Sinai. There is nothing special about how I’m built. I’m built in such a way that the representation of an electromagnetic wave is a representation through colors. But someone else could represent an electromagnetic wave through sounds, or through smells, or through phenomena I don’t know at all because they don’t exist in me; I don’t know. There is nothing truer about my way than about that other person’s. He isn’t built defectively; he’s built differently. Not defectively. I’m not more right than he is. It isn’t that in the world there really are colors, only he hears them as sounds. There is even a phenomenon—I forgot what it’s called—a psychological phenomenon where a person hears colors. In any case, those people aren’t sick; all in all they just perceive things differently from me—perhaps in a certain sense even more richly than I do. And therefore the point is that in the world itself there are no colors. Colors exist only in my consciousness. And the same goes for sounds, and the same for smells, and the same for all the senses: the products of the senses are products that exist only in my consciousness, not in the world itself. In the world itself there are physical triggers that produce these conscious sensations.
[Speaker B] Only in me, but also in everyone. You hear? Only in me, but in everyone. The fact that the whole world sees the color red as red except for a few isolated people means that those few people are defective and the others aren’t.
[Rabbi Michael Abraham] No, no, absolutely not true. You have no way of knowing that you and I see the same color.
[Speaker B] What do you mean? Red is red, for you and for me, for you and for me.
[Rabbi Michael Abraham] Not true. There is no way to know that we really see the same color. This is what some philosophers call the philosophers’ palace. Try to check how you could verify that when I say I see a red ball here and you say you see a red ball here, we mean the same color. You have no way to verify it. It could simply be that I see what you call green.
[Speaker B] It could be, but that doesn’t happen.
[Rabbi Michael Abraham] Who says it doesn’t happen? You can’t know. You have no way to know that. It could be that from birth, what you call green I call red. You see red there; I see green here. I just got used to the fact that this color is called red. So we are always synchronized in spoken language. When you say, “I see something red here,” I also say that I see something red here. But inside my consciousness there may not be the same appearance that exists in your consciousness. We are synchronized only at the level of speech, not at the level of consciousness.
[Speaker B] No, that’s not true. From birth we already got used to seeing the color red as red. Because your mother told you it was red, and my mother told me it was red.
[Rabbi Michael Abraham] Again—but about what? It could be that what she tells me is red is, in my consciousness, what you call green. We see a different color; we just both call what we see here red. And so all our lives we talk and understand one another and are convinced that we’re talking about the same thing, but the truth is that we may be seeing completely different things. By the way, it could even be that I don’t see green at all, but rather hear Beethoven’s Ninth Symphony. When I hear Beethoven’s Ninth Symphony, from birth I’ve been used to saying, “I see the color red here.”
[Speaker B] But if that were the case, there would be problems with traffic lights.
[Rabbi Michael Abraham] What do you mean? No problem at all with traffic lights. What problem with traffic lights? A traffic light would appear, I would hear Beethoven’s Ninth Symphony, and I’d know that when you hear Beethoven’s Ninth Symphony that’s called the color red, and you have to stop, you mustn’t cross the street. There is no problem. Our synchronization is complete—but it is synchronization in the behavioral sense and in speech. In subjective inner consciousness, you have no way of knowing that we are synchronized. None. There is no way to test it. I once thought maybe there was a way to test it—I’ve said this before—that maybe you could test it through connotations. Suppose you see black and I see black. How would we verify that we’re really talking about the same color? If both of us become depressed from it. Black is depressing. But that too is of course not true. It is entirely possible that for me the depression is caused by Beethoven’s Ninth Symphony, and that’s what I’m used to calling seeing the color black. So there is no way through this. Leibowitz, in his little book on the psychophysical problem, basically defines the problem this way. He says that the psychic—the mental or psychic dimension—is a dimension inaccessible to science. We have no way to get to what you see inside your consciousness other than the reports you give us. And therefore science has no way to deal with psychic, mental elements; they are inaccessible. There’s a field in psychology called psychophysics, and it tries to quantify psychic phenomena. For example, it tries—there’s a booklet by Daniel Algom in the Open University series called Perception and Psychophysics. It’s worth reading; it’s a very interesting booklet. There is an age-old dispute over the question: if you double the intensity of the electromagnetic field, by what factor does the brightness of the light or the intensity of the light that I experience increase? Not necessarily by two. If you increase the field by a factor of two—or the field intensity by two, the field itself by the square root of two—then you’ve doubled the field intensity. The question is: by how much does the light appear stronger? You show a subject a light and say, okay, do you see the light? Now I increase it—I measure, and I double the field intensity. Now I ask him: by what factor is the intensity of the light you see now greater? The answers subjects give are very interesting—not at all necessarily by a factor of two. So they take averages over many subjects and try to see subjectively by what factor people report the light intensity. By what factor is the reported light intensity greater? Some claim it goes logarithmically, some claim it goes by powers, there’s a debate about exactly what exponent. Very, very big debates. It’s very, very hard to formulate a quantitative law here, and of course it depends on averages and cultures and all kinds of odd things. And what is the problem here? The problem is that you have no way to approach with a scientific instrument in order to check what intensity of light a given person sees. All you can do is ask him. Ask him by what factor it’s stronger than the previous light, and you are at his mercy. Whatever he tells you is what you have. You have no way to get inside him and ask by what factor the intensity of the light he sees has increased. There is no way to do that with scientific instruments, because scientific instruments measure physical phenomena in the world. Mental phenomena are not accessible to scientific instruments. But I encounter my own mental phenomena directly. Science can’t get there, but I—I see the yellow color with my own eyes, because I am in my consciousness—not with my own eyes. In my consciousness I encounter the yellow color in a completely intimate way. Someone else cannot know that I see yellow, except if I tell him. And even then he cannot know what I mean by yellow. Okay? But I myself see yellow. There is something in the subjective dimension that is accessible only to me, and that is a relation that exists only between me and myself, period. No one else—it is not accessible to him. My inner world of consciousness. And again, I’m not talking about feelings and emotions, where poets are always telling us that no one can understand how another feels. I’m talking about physics. No one can understand what another person sees, not what he feels. What do you see? Yellow. What is yellow? I have no idea. I cannot know what you mean when you talk about yellow. Not the faintest idea; I cannot possibly have the faintest idea. We are used to thinking that you see what I see when I talk about yellow. We’re used to it. There is no way to verify that this is really so. So this basically means that there is some inward encounter a person has with himself, and it is done from within, not from outside. And then the Kantian distinction between phenomenon and noumenon doesn’t exist. Here there is no gap between the electromagnetic wave and its representation as yellow. I see the yellow color itself as it appears in my consciousness. I see it from within, not from outside. In the same sense I encounter myself from within, not from outside. But for me to be able to talk about that inner encounter with myself, I have to go through some process of estrangement. I have to define myself as though it were something else that I’m looking at from outside, even though the looking is from inside. It’s a kind of thing that I don’t know if it can really be fully defined at all. But understand that this accompanies us at every moment. Every one of our thoughts actually includes the awareness that we are thinking. We are not only thinking; we are also aware that we are thinking. And this paradox accompanies us at every moment, every second, every step we take. It isn’t something esoteric that happens once in who knows how long. It is something built in, accompanying us every single moment. That is the first example of this intimacy that a person has with himself: Schopenhauer and the thing-in-itself. The second example is Descartes’ cogito. Descartes’ cogito—“I think, therefore I am.” Here too there is something very, very unique, and not for nothing does Descartes speak of “I think, therefore I am,” because really the way to know that you are thinking—there is no way to know that, except for you to tell me that you are thinking. But I have no scientific way, or direct way, to know that you are thinking. Thinking is not merely a brain activity. Brain activity can be measured today. “Thinking” means an intellectual, mental activity, not a brain activity. Brain activity—my brain is part of my body, and I already said that when the soul relates to the body, that is not self-reference. When I ask whether you are thinking, I do not mean that your brain is working; I mean that your intellect is working. Okay? Therefore I have no way to know. It may be that if the brain is active, usually that happens when the intellect is active. The intellect thinks by means of the brain. So if I see that your brain is active, I assume that your intellect is probably active now too. An assumption. I have no way of reaching directly the fact that your intellect is active right now, that your intellect is thinking right now. I have no way of knowing that you even have an intellect.
[Speaker B] But why do you need another way besides him telling you? You hear? Why do you need another way besides me telling you that I’m thinking?
[Rabbi Michael Abraham] I didn’t say you need one. You don’t need one, but there isn’t one. The claim is that there isn’t one. Maybe you don’t need it, but there isn’t one, okay? And the point is that someone could deceive me and say, “I’m thinking”—suppose he’s a liar for the sake of the discussion. Not everyone is a liar; there’s no need to be suspicious. But if there were a liar, would I have a way to catch the lie? No. Because I have no way to know, no direct way to get into his intellect. Okay, and I’m not talking here about suspicion in the sense that I’m afraid people are lying to me.
[Speaker B] I understand, but in Descartes’ cogito, shouldn’t we really have said: “I think, therefore my self exists,” no? Right.
[Rabbi Michael Abraham] Exactly. Ah, now I’m getting to that. Meaning, how is Descartes’ cogito constructed? Descartes’ cogito does not use “I think” rather than “you think” for nothing. In principle, I could have said, “You think, therefore you exist.” That too is a true sentence. If you think, then obviously you exist, right? More than that: “You walk, therefore you exist,” is also true, because otherwise who is walking? And the same for me, by the way: “I walk, therefore I exist” is a true sentence. So why does Descartes specifically refer to “I think, therefore I exist”? Because Descartes had to build his argument on self-reference. If it weren’t self-reference, it would be worthless. Why? Because to say “I walk, therefore I exist” is a banal sentence. It’s an argument that says: if I assume that I walk, then it follows that I exist. That’s obvious. But who said that I walk? Maybe I don’t walk. What will you say? “I see that I walk.” Fine, I also see that I exist. Philosophers who are looking for proof that they exist presumably don’t accept the mere feeling that they exist; they are looking for proof. A philosopher like that won’t be helped if you tell him, “I walk, therefore I exist.” He’ll ask you: and who said that you walk? Because I feel it, I see that I’m walking—what do you mean? Yes, but for me the fact that I feel or see it is not good enough proof; otherwise I wouldn’t have set out in the first place looking for all kinds of proofs that I exist. Therefore the argument “I walk, therefore I exist” is utterly worthless. Obviously if you walk, then you exist; the question just goes back to who said that you walk. What is special about “I think”? What is special about “I think” is that when I look inward at my thought, I see directly that I am thinking. I cannot doubt that I am thinking. Why? Because if I doubt that I am thinking, that very doubting is itself also a thought. So either way, I am thinking. Even if I think that I am not thinking, that itself is my thought, so I am still thinking. Or in other words, the difference between “I think, therefore I exist” and “I walk, therefore I exist” is not in the derivation of “I exist” from “I think.” That derivation is built in exactly the same way as the derivation of “I exist” from “I walk.” The difference between them is that “I walk” is not a necessary proposition, whereas “I think” is a necessary proposition. Consequently you can derive from it the conclusion that I exist, and if the premise is necessary then the conclusion derived from it is necessary as well. Therefore it is a good argument—or at least Descartes thought it was a good argument. “I walk, therefore I exist”—the derivation of “I exist” from “I walk” is a valid derivation; nobody argues about that. What do they argue about? They argue about whether I am really walking. Who said you are walking? But about “I think” one cannot argue. You can argue about whether I think; I cannot argue about whether I think. Because if I challenge the fact that I think, that very challenge is itself a thought. So again, I am thinking. Therefore, whichever way you turn, I think. And if I think, then I exist. The power of Descartes’ argument lies not in the move from “I think” to “I exist,” but in the fact that “I think” is a necessary proposition. Consequently, if I prove on its basis that I exist, then my existence too is necessary. That’s the sting in Descartes. The sting is not that if I think then I exist, but that I think, and that this is necessary—you cannot escape it. “I walk” is not necessary. So what good would it do to prove that I exist on the basis of “I walk”? One can argue about whether I walk; it’s not necessary. But one cannot argue about the fact that I think. The fact that I think is necessary. Therefore a proof built on the premise that I think is an excellent proof. Whatever I prove on the basis of the sentence “I think,” the conclusion is a necessary conclusion. You see that in fact the sting of Descartes’ cogito comes from the fact that there is self-reference here. Now understand: non-self-reference is when I say, “You think, therefore you exist,” but also when I say, “I walk, therefore I exist”—that too is not self-reference. Because “I walk” refers to my body, not to my thought. Therefore it also won’t help. So the cogito nicely demonstrates what I call self-reference. The cogito can be built only on a sentence that is self-reference. “I walk,” I don’t know, even “I love” is not self-reference. We talked earlier about the fact that “I love” refers to a certain aspect of me, or even “I love” someone else means that I am aware that I love. Right? When I say “I love someone,” the meaning is: I am aware that I love him. That too is a claim about myself, not only about him. But it still is not self-reference, because the “I” that is aware and the “I” of which I am aware are not the same aspect. What I am aware of is my love for so-and-so. My awareness of the thing is not the love; it is awareness. These are different functions of my mind or of my soul. Therefore this is not self-reference in the purest, most precise sense. Self-reference in the pure sense is “I think that I think,” or “I think.” Right? Because here it is the same aspect of the soul. I think, and I am aware of that—meaning, I think that I think. So here this really is reference to the very same aspect of the soul, grasped both as the “I” and as the “self.” Here the estrangement is performed upon the same aspect of me, not on another aspect. It isn’t that my awareness looks at my love; rather, my awareness looks at my awareness, or my thought looks at my thought. And therefore this is self-reference in the most distilled sense. And on that one can try—I claim that in the end it fails—but one can try to build the principle of the cogito. Look, here is a picture I took from the internet. Do you see it? Yes, mirrors and reflection. There are two mirrors here, of course facing one another, and this teddy bear is standing in the middle. Now the teddy bear sees its own image, and that image is reflected in the mirror behind it, and then reflected again in the mirror, and there is an infinite row of bears. Okay? This is really a visual representation of the process of estrangement. When I look at my image in a mirror, that is not called looking at myself. My image in the mirror is another physical object, another optical object. It’s not me; it’s a representation of me. I cannot look at myself. There is no way to look at myself. The eye cannot see the eye. The eye can see a reflection of the eye. A reflection of the eye is another optical object. All right? In essence, self-reference is placing a mirror before myself—that’s the process of estrangement. Placing a mirror before myself and seeing myself as though constructing a model that represents me, that is my reflection. And at that I can look, or with it I can form some sort of connection, or interaction, or maintain a relation between me and myself and it. I think this is a nice representation of the process of estrangement—“and the priests and the people standing in the courtyard,” so to speak. There may be—I’ll give perhaps one more example, one or two interesting examples in this context. In Maimonides, Maimonides claims that there is no overcharging law regarding slaves. I’m descending from the heights of philosophical Olympus to Jewish law. There is no overcharging law regarding slaves, including Hebrew slaves. Why is there no overcharging law regarding slaves? The claim is that the law of overcharging applies only to movable property and not to land, and slaves are compared to land. Okay? And therefore there is also no overcharging law regarding slaves. But Maimonides rules that the law of overcharging does not apply even to a Hebrew slave—not only to a Hebrew slave, but even to a hired laborer. In the Laws of Sale, chapter 13—even to a hired laborer, not only to a Hebrew slave—there is no overcharging law. So everyone asks about Maimonides: a Canaanite slave is compared to land, but a Hebrew slave or a free person—a laborer is a free person—they are not compared to land. So actually there is a Rashi in Kiddushin 56 from which it emerges that a human being in general is compared to land. A human being is compared to land. The practical expression of this appears of course in a Canaanite slave, because only a Canaanite slave can be bought like merchandise. A Hebrew slave or a laborer or something like that—you don’t buy him, so there is no occasion to speak of him in terms of being like land. And so people think that a Canaanite slave is compared to land, but that’s not correct; in fact a human being is compared to land. And here, in this case, regarding the law of overcharging for example, this has relevant implications also for a Hebrew slave or for a laborer. But the comparison between slaves and land is not a comparison of slaves to land; it is a comparison of human beings to land. The common way this is expressed is with slaves: when you sell a person, it is like selling land. When do you sell a person? You sell a person when you sell a slave. Therefore we say that slaves are compared to land, but the truth is that people too are compared to land. By the way, I think in the Taz somewhere he writes that, for example, one who cuts a fingernail on the Sabbath violates the prohibition of reaping, because a person is compared to land. When you detach the nail from the person, it is like detaching it from the ground. Since a person is compared to land, one violates the prohibition of reaping. And he takes “a person is compared to land” much farther than the legal matters of sale and things of that sort. A person is halakhically understood virtually like land. It really is strange, but I am only trying to show that what we have here is actually a broader comparison: all human beings in general are compared to land. The reason this is applied to slaves is that when you sell a person, it is usually in the laws of slavery. Maimonides says: no, it’s not only in the laws of a Canaanite slave; even in the laws of a Hebrew slave or a laborer, there too you buy him in some sense—yes, you buy him—and therefore there, for example regarding the laws of overcharging, it will be like land. But the common view among the commentators is that only a Canaanite slave is compared to land, and then the question returns: so why does Maimonides rule that there is no overcharging law for a Hebrew slave? The Maharit, in a responsum—Maharit writes in Choshen Mishpat, siman 19—claims that the law of overcharging was said only where there is a seller, a buyer, and an object. Reuven sells object X to Shimon, so there are three elements in the transaction: the seller, the buyer, and the object. What happens with a Hebrew slave? Who is the seller? The religious court. No, that’s if the religious court sells him.
[Speaker C] If he sells himself, he—
[Rabbi Michael Abraham] sells himself.
[Speaker C] Yes, he sells himself.
[Rabbi Michael Abraham] So that means there aren’t really three factors here—seller, buyer, and object. The seller and the object are the same thing. By the way, this raises all kinds of problems of “his bill of emancipation and his hand come simultaneously,” of course, all kinds of things of that sort—it’s exactly the same issue. When you want to free the slave, he has to acquire the bill of emancipation. But as long as he is a slave he cannot acquire the bill of emancipation, because who is the buyer here? The buyer here is he himself. But as long as he is a slave he is not legally capable of acquisition; he cannot acquire things. Whatever a slave acquires, his master acquires. So in order to be freed he has to acquire the bill. But in order to acquire the bill he has to be free. So on that the Talmud says: “his bill of emancipation and his hand come simultaneously.” And there too it comes from the same place: in the sale of a slave or the acquisition of a slave there is an identity between the buyer and the object, or between the seller and the object, depending on whether I am selling a slave or buying a slave, freeing a slave or buying a slave. So the Maharit says, in one discussion, that in such a situation the laws of overcharging were not introduced. The laws of overcharging were introduced where there is “do not wrong one another.” When a person sells an object to another person, then there are laws of overcharging. In a case where one of these two factors is missing—one of these two factors being the object—there is no “one man” and “his fellow.” So there are no laws of overcharging. This is of course an exposition that Maharit makes on his own, from his own reasoning. He claims that Maimonides did this. There is no such exposition in the words of the Sages. It is a very interesting thing. There are occasional expositions that the medieval authorities (Rishonim) and later authorities (Acharonim) make, but this really is a rare phenomenon. But again, it shows us that a person can sell himself. And again—self-reference. This is self-reference because in the end only a person can really relate to himself. And by the way, at least with a Canaanite slave—for a Hebrew slave there is discussion about this—but with a Canaanite slave, in the simple sense, what he sells is not only his body. He sells his whole self. In the simple sense this is true, by the way, also of a Hebrew slave. Also with a Hebrew slave, the Talmud says in Kiddushin, “the body of the Hebrew slave is acquired.” Therefore his master gives him a Canaanite maidservant. His master gives him a Canaanite maidservant so that he will produce little slaves for him. His master wants more slaves, so he gives him a Canaanite maidservant. He can use him. Fine, but all in all I am a sovereign person and should decide whom I marry. No—your very personhood is acquired by the master. You sell him your whole self. Therefore when I say that a person sells himself, I do not mean that the soul sells the body. Rather, the soul sells everything, body and soul together. It is somewhat like that in betrothal too, by the way: a woman who becomes betrothed is also, in a certain sense, a woman who performs—or allows the husband to perform—an act upon her. The object that is acquired—this is not acquisition in the sense of creating ownership, but the object that is betrothed is the very object that consents to the betrothal, namely the woman.
[Speaker B] Rabbi, that’s not correct when you say that when a master acquires a slave he acquires both the body and the soul. That’s not correct. He acquires only the body. He can’t acquire the fact that the slave will love someone or think something, etc., etc.
[Rabbi Michael Abraham] On the contrary, that is exactly what he can. You can love whomever you want; you won’t marry her if I don’t agree.
[Speaker B] So very good,
[Rabbi Michael Abraham] So physically you’ll love her and so on; I can’t physically control your thought. Exactly. So that is not what “acquiring” means. Acquiring does not mean physically attaching to the object. Acquiring means a legal right. I have a legal right over the object, and I also have a legal right over your loves.
[Speaker B] Exactly. So the fact that he can marry off his slave to someone doesn’t mean that he acquired the slave’s soul—
[Rabbi Michael Abraham] it means that he acquired the slave’s body.
[Speaker B] No, no, that means exactly that he acquired the slave’s body—
[Rabbi Michael Abraham] and he can do—
[Speaker B] whatever he wants with the slave’s body.
[Rabbi Michael Abraham] Not true, not true—quite the opposite, he acquired the soul. Why? Because you’re saying that “acquiring” means that the soul will be in my hands and that I will decide whom he loves. That’s not correct. It’s like saying that to buy a body, to buy a table, means to turn the table into part of me. The table does not physically become part of me. To buy the table means that I have legal rights in the table, but it remains an object existing on its own; I simply have legal rights over it. Exactly. So he acquires only the body of the table? To acquire the soul of the slave does not mean that now I love in his place. He loves—but I have the legal rights over what his love does. And if I decide that he will not marry the one he loves, then he will not marry her. And if I decide that he will marry someone else, then he will marry someone else. That is what it means to acquire the soul.
[Speaker B] So that’s what I’m saying, but he can’t—but the master can’t decide that the slave will love someone. He can decide that the slave will marry someone, but not—
[Rabbi Michael Abraham] I answered that before, and I answered it. Listen carefully—I answered it.
[Speaker B] He is not the owner of his soul.
[Rabbi Michael Abraham] No, he is the owner of the soul, because to be—so what you are assuming is that to acquire the soul means that I will determine, with electrodes, whom he loves. But the parallel to that is saying that if I buy the table it means the table becomes my hand—
[Speaker B] physically part of me.
[Rabbi Michael Abraham] No, what? No, no, no.
[Speaker B] Buying the table means that I can use the table, its function.
[Rabbi Michael Abraham] Exactly! And acquiring his love means that I can use his love—not that I perform his love. His love exists independently of me, just as the table exists independently of me, but I have rights over everything his love does. These are legal rights; this is not ontic identity. It is not that it becomes me.
[Speaker C] Fine. Why is it that in the Talmud, when it says that a slave acquires himself—“his bill of emancipation and his hand come simultaneously”—why, when he sells himself, don’t we have that same loop that causes a problem? How can I sell myself? After all, I’m not receiving money.
[Rabbi Michael Abraham] No, but that is exactly—there, you asked an excellent question that illustrates exactly what I said last time. Not every self-reference is a paradox. I sell myself—what’s the problem? The fact that I acquire the bill, that’s problematic, because there a paradox really arises—not because it is self-reference. How does the paradox arise? Let’s see. I am now a slave. Now I—that is, I am a slave—you give me a bill of emancipation. In order for me to be freed, I have to acquire the bill of emancipation. I can’t acquire it because a slave cannot acquire. If I acquired the bill of emancipation, then I’m not free. If I’m not free, I didn’t acquire the bill of emancipation. So how can a slave be freed? So you have to say that I was freed before I acquired the bill, in which case the acquisition of the bill is not what freed me. So what freed me? That’s a paradox. But in the acquisition where a slave sells himself, there is self-reference, but it is not paradoxical self-reference. Not every self-reference is a paradox. This is exactly the same feeling I’m talking about—that some people think that every time I identify self-reference, I’ve identified a paradox. No. Not every self-reference is a paradox.
[Speaker C] Here it’s really a classic example that the same person can be in two opposite cases—sometimes it’s a paradox, sometimes it isn’t.
[Rabbi Michael Abraham] Yes, the same self-identity in relation to a person, the same self-reference in relation to a person, yes. Well, still, the second example will take me a bit longer, so I’ll stop here. If anyone wants to comment or ask.
[Speaker B] Rabbi, regarding “speech can cancel speech”—is that also self-reference?
[Rabbi Michael Abraham] No. There is one speech act that cancels another speech act. The only question is whether speech has the power to cancel speech. Yes. It cannot cancel an action. But it is one speech act canceling another speech act; that is not self-reference.
[Speaker E] Rabbi, if I understood correctly, when we talk about self-reference we mean the reflection of the “I,” looking at the self, but not at the self itself—and that is basically what the Rabbi said?
[Rabbi Michael Abraham] I’m saying that in order even to define self-reference, you have to perform some sort of estrangement. And that estrangement is expressed in language by the word “self” as distinct from the word “I.” Of course, that expression in itself does not solve the philosophical problem. How can there be a relation between two objects that are one? It is an expression of the fact that we at least understand that such a thing is possible, but it really is a somewhat tricky question exactly how this happens. We’ll still talk about it, but the linguistic expression is only a symptom; it is not a solution to the problem.
[Speaker F] Wait, Rabbi—saying that there is the “I” and the reflection, and all self-reference refers to the reflection—isn’t that a solution?
[Rabbi Michael Abraham] No, it’s not a solution, because then it’s not really self-reference. Then what you’re really saying is: I build a model of myself, and now I relate to it. That’s another object, no problem. That is not called self-reference. It’s like Narcissus, right? Narcissus who fell in love with his image in the puddle. He didn’t fall in love with himself. He fell in love with the image reflected in the puddle. The fact that that image was produced from him doesn’t mean that it is him. He is the cause that produced it, but he is not it. That is exactly the point. Same thing with the picture I showed earlier, with the teddy bear facing the mirror. Those reflections really are another optical object; they are not me. In our language we say, “Look, that’s me reflected there, my very self.” It is not my very self; that’s only a manner of speaking. It is a model or representation of me by means of a mirror, a reflection in the mirror. But that reflection is another optical object; it is not me. So if I—if all self-references—wait, why don’t you let—
[Speaker E] me—because that’s what happened, basically.
[Rabbi Michael Abraham] Again, if self-reference always means that I construct a model of myself and relate to it, that basically means saying that there is no self-reference. There is no such thing as self-reference. Right.
[Speaker E] And that is aside from, aside from the logical sense.
[Rabbi Michael Abraham] That’s too radical a solution. For example, you won’t be able to formulate Descartes’ cogito in that way. Because it requires genuine self-reference, since you want to prove that I exist, not that my reflection exists. So what you are really saying is that self-reference is impossible. I’m saying: the mirror is a symbol, but it is not a literal symbol. I am speaking about real self-reference, where I perform the estrangement intellectually. Not that there is really something else here, but that intellectually I look at myself as though I were something else.
[Speaker E] Okay. Thank you.
[Rabbi Michael Abraham] I have no idea what David Hume thought about self-reference. That’s it? Okay.
[Speaker E] Kol hakavod, Sabbath שלום.
[Rabbi Michael Abraham] We’ll meet next week. Sabbath peace.
[Speaker E] Sabbath peace.
[Rabbi Michael Abraham] Sabbath peace.