Self-Reference – Lesson 4

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[Rabbi Michael Abraham] Right, I’m just saying that I arrived at this definition by criticizing his definition. Because he really did grasp something—we’ll see, I’ll show this. He grasped something real, but he didn’t exhaust it. When you carry it through all the way, you get to my definition. I’ll show that; I’ll try to explain it. Okay, so look, let’s take for example a classic philosophical problem: solipsism. Right? The question whether there is an external world or whether it’s all our illusions, an illusion. What does that have to do with self-reference? That’s a problem about the world—either it exists or it doesn’t, whatever—but what does that have to do with self-reference? There are quite a few philosophical questions where, on the face of it, it’s not clear why they’re connected to self-reference. His claim is very far from trivial—I mean that one claim of his. The claim that all philosophical issues are rooted, essentially, in self-reference, or in a mixing of the investigator with the thing investigated. Yes, that’s basically what he argues. There are quite a few—in most… In a topic like Descartes’ cogito it’s very clear, because there self-reference is on the table; I talked about it last time. But in most philosophical issues, issues that deal with all kinds of things, what does that have to do with self-reference? There’s no self-reference there. There is self-reference at the principled level in this field called philosophy, because among other things it deals with the question of how I think. In that sense there’s some kind of reference… but that’s not the self-reference he’s talking about. He’s talking about concrete philosophical issues, as I’ll show you. And there, on the face of it, these don’t look like issues grounded in self-reference, yet he claims that they are. Including the issue of solipsism, for example—he claims that this is an issue grounded in self-reference. And I’ll show that in a moment. So that’s why I want to show that his analysis is not trivial. On the contrary: when I read this book, at first it just took my breath away… because it seemed to me like a devastating critique. I mean, it murdered the whole field, dead. Okay? Now, as someone who likes this field and has dealt with it for quite a few years, it was a hard blow for me, because at first glance I was convinced. And I started corresponding with him by email. At the time he was at a conference abroad, he was away abroad for a few months, I don’t know, so we couldn’t meet, but we corresponded by email, and in the end I came to the conclusion that I don’t agree with him. But at the beginning it was really a hard blow for me. Now I want… I want to state the… I want to describe what he writes. He begins, in the introduction to the book, with a parable. Right? An introduction through some kind of fable. He says: there is an enlightened king—I’m telling this in my own words. I’m using here, by the way, the two columns I wrote, 157 and 158 on my site, so you can also read them there afterward. So there is an enlightened king who rules an enlightened country, run with order and integrity, everything excellent. And there of course was a state comptroller who made sure everything was run victoriously—well, properly. Everything was clean, transparent, organized, excellent, wonderful. One day the king wakes up in terror, right? And some concern occurs to him. Namely: what if corruption has spread in the comptroller’s own office? And if so, he doesn’t expose corruption, and therefore all this order and honesty is just an appearance—it doesn’t really exist there. The country could be completely rotten and corrupt, but in the comptroller’s reports, when you read them, everything looks excellent. And maybe the comptroller takes bribes to turn a blind eye to irregularities, and so on and so on. In short, a proposal was made to appoint a committee of four very upright people to audit the comptroller. Fine, at first glance that didn’t sound bad, and of course the question immediately arose: what happens if there is corruption in the office of those four people? They too can take bribes and turn a blind eye to corruption, so you won’t get out of it that way. Fine, the next proposal: those four should audit every day what they did the day before. Because if we appoint others to audit them, then of course in the end we’ll also have to audit the others, and so on, and it will never end. In the end you have to let people audit themselves. They should publish a report on their own auditing process. So every day they’ll audit what they did the previous day. Fine—but maybe their current audit is corrupted, and then it won’t expose the corruption in yesterday’s audit. So there’s no choice: the next proposal was that they must simultaneously audit the auditing process itself. Okay, fine, that was the decision eventually adopted. The committee of these four auditors was appointed in the comptroller’s office; there was this committee of four that was engaged all the time in auditing, and in the process also audited its own audit. And they wrote thick books of criticism, and of course you will not be surprised to discover, as Aharoni says there, that these books were all full of twists and turns and paradoxes and internal contradictions. In short, because such a thing can’t be done—or in the examples he gave, a flashlight cannot illuminate itself, an eye cannot see itself. Self-reference, the paradox of self-reference. And therefore this committee cannot audit itself. The moment it begins to deal with that, the writings that are produced there, the audit reports that are written there—and of course in the analogy these are the books of philosophy—are full of all kinds of logical loops, and you feel suspended in midair, and you can’t move forward, and the arguments are not really arguments. You can say one thing and you can say its opposite, and it’s impossible to decide who is right, and you go around chasing your own tail, and all of history is basically a collection of footnotes to Plato, as Heidegger once said, I think—or Whitehead, I don’t remember anymore. That all of history is footnotes to Plato. Meaning, you don’t get anywhere; all the time you’re just circling around your own tail. So this parable basically explains his fundamental critique of philosophy. And here I want to mention again, to bring back again, the comments I spoke about earlier. And I want to point out that first of all, who said self-reference is a flaw? Or in other words, who said a person cannot criticize himself? If you remember, I think I mentioned in one of the previous sessions that article by Ariel Rubinstein, the economist, winner of the Israel Prize in economics, who once wrote an article—I think I read it in Machshavot, or some version of it appeared in Machshavot—in which he argued that there cannot be an economic theory that describes everything that happens in the world economy. In principle, such a theory cannot exist. A priori, it cannot exist. Why? Because the moment there is such a theory, people will take the theory itself into account, and that will affect the way they make economic decisions. They’ll have economic forecasts, and on that basis they’ll plan their actions, and then it turns out that the theory intervenes in the world it is describing. In other words, self-reference, a kind of circle, and therefore there cannot be—so he argued—a theory that fully describes the economic conduct of the world. That was his claim. And I remember that I was sick then, so I actually formulated for myself and wrote myself a kind of mathematical article showing that he was wrong. I simply showed mathematically—it’s basically parallel to Gödel’s theorem. And why? Because my claim is that there can in fact be—let’s say, what is an economic theory? An economic theory means I take all the existing data—what people think, how much money each person has, each person’s interests—and I tell you what each person will do, in short what the economic state will be at the next moment. Let’s say we’re on a discrete time axis, right? So the state at time n is given, and I ask what the state will be at time n plus one. Okay? So the full, perfect economic theory is supposed to take all the information there is about the whole world and all that is in it, all the people and the interests and the resources, whatever you want, mix well, and tell me what will happen at the next moment. And what Ariel Rubinstein claimed is that such a theory cannot exist, because people who know this theory will take it into account when making decisions, and can change the outcomes—or will use the theory to outmaneuver the theory itself and profit more, or something like that.

[Speaker B] But that would only be a few individuals, Rabbi. For example, if I compare it to Waze, it takes all the parameters, everything everything, and tells you.

[Rabbi Michael Abraham] Yes, but those few individuals—the theory will fail to predict what they do. Who? Those same people who will use the theory to advance themselves even more than the theory predicts. But it’s supposed to describe the state of the entire universe. That’s the output, right? That’s the output of the theory: what each person will have, how much money, what he’ll do at the next moment, everything. You get as input the state at n; the output is the state at n plus one. All right? That’s an economic theory.

[Speaker B] But there are constantly variables!

[Rabbi Michael Abraham] Fine, so the theory describes how it changes—what’s the problem? Assuming such a theory exists, give it the full input at moment n, and it will tell you what will happen at n plus one.

[Speaker B] And then those who wrote the theory—it will get disrupted by people changing it, going in other directions.

[Rabbi Michael Abraham] Not those who wrote the theory, but those who use the theory. Whoever knows the theory can use it and try to beat the market. So that’s basically his claim. Now, why is he wrong? I don’t know whether there is such a theory, but the statement that such a theory cannot exist is not correct. Why? Because again, you can argue with the assumption that the theory—the psychology of human beings—is such that they don’t always behave rationally. But let’s say for the sake of discussion that I’m talking about rational agents, okay? Because that’s a different critique. And let’s say I’m talking about an economy of people who are all perfectly rational. There is no principled obstacle to a certain theory giving each person an optimal situation such that any deviation from it would worsen his condition. It wouldn’t pay him to deviate from the prediction given by the theory. Theoretically such a theory could exist. I don’t know whether it does or not. And I’m not making the claim that such a theory exists; I’m only claiming that there is no proof that it doesn’t exist. All right? Who told you? There could be a theory all of whose predictions are also optimal—at what’s called a fixed point. Okay? This state is an optimal state; you won’t succeed in changing it, because anything you change will only make you lose. Therefore a rational agent—yes, equilibrium, exactly—therefore a rational agent will do what the theory says, because that really is what is most worthwhile for him, even though he knows the theory. The theory takes that into account too. Or in other words, this is basically a theory—let’s call it theory E, economics, as an economic theory. The parameters that this theory receives are all the economic states of the universe, the economic interests, how much money each person has, plus theory E itself. It too is one of the inputs it receives, because all the people know the theory. It too takes itself into account, and it still outputs correct results. There is no principled obstacle to such a function existing. Gödel’s theorem constructs a statement that refers to itself, and that is how it proves the theorem. The Gödel number of the statement that receives its own Gödel number as input is that very number that received itself as input, and it is basically a fixed point of the function, okay? g of x equals x, the fixed point, yes? The function E of x equals x. So the claim that such a function cannot exist is incorrect. Now, all of that is just an example. What I want to say is: same thing here. In other words, the fact that a person uses his tools of thought in order to decipher his tools of thought, or that the auditor wants to audit the auditing processes but uses auditing processes even when he audits—so apparently this is impossible. I say: not true. In principle it may very well be possible. I don’t know. But the claim that it cannot happen is incorrect. Again, I’m being careful with my wording. I cannot claim that this exists or that it is possible; I can claim that it has not been shown to be impossible. And that’s enough for me to deal with his critique, because he is trying to prove that it is impossible. Okay? So basically my first claim against his argument is that it is not true that every self-reference is a flaw, or that it is doomed to fail, that it will not reach correct results. No—they’ll audit themselves, discover their own corruption, and everything will be fine. Again, I’m of course speaking about people who operate in a mechanically rational way. I build some mechanism, and that mechanism audits and also audits itself and corrects itself, gives negative feedback, right? It constantly brings itself back if it deviates; it gives negative feedback. I’m not getting now into human problems where people can deviate because they are corrupt and so on, and they won’t act according to the rules, so what good is it that they audit themselves? They’ll be corrupt and won’t audit themselves. That can always be true. But that is not his critique of philosophy. He is not talking about philosophers being corrupt. He is talking about the fact that their tools of work cannot do the job they purport to do. In my view that’s not true—or not necessary, I mean. Not that it’s false, but that it’s not necessary. Okay? Now, I’ll read you another sentence, because it’s a key sentence for what will come next. This is from the column. Right. It goes like this: “Although this book deals with philosophy, it is completely un-philosophical. It is un-philosophical because there is no such field. Philosophers do indeed appropriate for themselves the question ‘What is philosophy?’ but in truth it belongs to psychology. More specifically, to the psychology of thought. Its meaning is: how does the concept of philosophy operate in human minds? The identification of what kind of thought-structure causes the light of the concept to blink in their mind.” Right—when you identify a certain structure of thinking, the light goes on: ah, this is philosophy, because that sensor starts blinking. You ask yourself: what kind of thought structure triggers this light in me? Okay? That is basically the question “What is philosophy?” But he says: really, this is a completely psychological question. Its solution requires observation of reality, and as the philosophers themselves agree, a philosophical question cannot be answered by observing the world, because observing the world is empirical science. Philosophy is not empirical science. So if I show that some question can be answered by observing the world, I have basically said that it is not a philosophical question but a scientific one. His claim is that the question “What is philosophy?”—for example, that’s his first example—is not a philosophical question at all. It is a scientific question. Why? Go look at what people call philosophy. You’ll see that they look at argument X and say, “Is this philosophy?” Yes? Then that’s philosophy. If they look at argument Y, they’ll say, “Is this philosophy?” No? Okay, then it isn’t. Collect all the arguments they call philosophy, and now you can try to characterize them, and then you’ll discover what philosophy is. And after all, that is exactly what he did. He claims that is exactly what he did. He basically characterized them and discovered that all of them contain self-reference. Okay, the work that he himself did—that is work in empirical psychology, not work in philosophy. He simply looked at what people call philosophy, found the common denominator among all those things, and discovered that the common denominator is self-reference. Therefore the question “What is philosophy?” is an empirical question even before he gets to the answer to that question. The answer is the empty set—there is no such field; it is an imaginary, fictitious field. At the moment I’m speaking even before he reaches the second premise that self-reference is a defect. The very work by which he arrived at premise one—that every philosophical issue is grounded in self-reference—that itself is not philosophical work; it is scientific work. Okay, that’s his claim. Now, is he right about that? What do you say? This is almost the prototype for the whole book, so I’m going to deal with it, even though it’s still only the introduction.

[Speaker B] He’s basically claiming that all philosophical theories are…

[Rabbi Michael Abraham] No, I’m asking whether he is right that the question “What is philosophy?” is a psychological-scientific question and not a philosophical question. Because ostensibly all you need to do is observe what people call philosophy, define the collection of those issues, find what they have in common, and define them. That’s what we do in science. In psychology, say, we observe various phenomena, see what people do, and try to define that set of phenomena, to string them together into some common rule, a common law, something like that. This is exactly the work of empirical psychological science. Is he right?

[Speaker C] But why stop at philosophy? What is the definition of psychology? Who says psychology isn’t self-reference too?

[Rabbi Michael Abraham] I understand, no, I’m not talking about self-reference. I haven’t yet reached the stage where he concluded that philosophy is self-reference. I’m asking the question before that. When I approach the question “What is philosophy?”, where does that question belong? To psychology or to philosophy? To philosophy. Is it an empirical question or not empirical? Before his answer that philosophy is a collection of self-references. I’m still talking about the stage where he asks the question “What is philosophy?”, even before his first premise, yes? So he claims this is a question in descriptive psychology. And I claim he is mistaken. Why?

[Speaker B] What does that have to do with psychology? It belongs to philosophy. How can you define something in terms of something else entirely? Psychology has one definition; philosophy has another. What? He isn’t defining psychology.

[Rabbi Michael Abraham] I’m asking whether the question “What is philosophy?” is a question in psychology. Without defining what psychology is right now. I’m not defining philosophy by means of psychology. I’m asking about the character of the question “What is philosophy?” A legitimate question. Is it a question that belongs to psychology or not? It doesn’t belong to psychology. Let’s leave aside whether it belongs to philosophy. The question is whether it belongs to psychology or not. All right? So he claims it belongs to psychology. Is he right?

[Speaker B] I think not. Why not?

[Rabbi Michael Abraham] How is that different from the question, I don’t know, of what people do when someone slaps them? That’s a question in psychology, right? Let’s look at people getting slapped and see what their reactions are, analyze their reactions, derive some rule that characterizes all those reactions. What has he basically said? Let’s see how people relate to issues, to different forms of thought, what they call philosophy and what they don’t, and let’s try to define the issues they call philosophy, and thereby we’ll arrive at a rule for what philosophy is. How is that different from the psychological research I just described?

[Speaker B] Psychology relates to the person himself, inwardly, not to how he looks at the world outside.

[Rabbi Michael Abraham] Why? Doesn’t psychology deal with the question of how I react to slaps?

[Speaker B] Yes, but how I react.

[Rabbi Michael Abraham] Right. And I’m asking what I call philosophy. Same thing. Ostensibly that’s a question in descriptive psychology. Why do I think he’s wrong? Because suppose people relate—suppose someone says to me that the question whether quantum theory is correct or not is a philosophical question. Will I accept that? No. Now why not? After all, if I’m speaking purely descriptively, then I have no grounds to criticize people. Whatever they tell me is philosophy, I record in my notebook. They tell me that the question whether quantum theory is correct or not is a philosophical question. Fine. Now let’s see what they say about the question whether this book is interesting. Is that a philosophical question? Yes? Okay, so on that too they say it is. I record it; I have no criticism. I’m trying to see what they say, right? That’s descriptive psychology. So why, when someone comes and says to me, “Look, the question whether quantum theory is correct is a question in philosophy,” do I say, “I disagree with you”? Or why wouldn’t I include that as data in the psychological research I’m doing?

[Speaker B] Because if quantum theory is something empirically testable, a kind of science, no?

[Rabbi Michael Abraham] No no, I’m asking whether it’s correct or not.

[Speaker C] Because he too is assuming from the outset that there are fields that are not philosophy, that are well-defined, and that their definition is not through philosophy itself, because he denies that philosophy can be defined that way.

[Rabbi Michael Abraham] No, fine, I have no problem with that. I’m asking in what sense—why can I tell a person who tells me about a certain issue that it isn’t philosophical, or that it is philosophy—on what basis do I criticize him? After all, according to the description Aharoni gives, there is no room for such criticism, right? I only need to record what people treat as philosophy and what they don’t. And now I’ll distill from that the definition of what philosophy is. You understand that if that’s so, then I can never tell someone, “Listen, that issue you think is philosophy is not philosophy.” What do you mean? The data on which I build my definition of what philosophy is consist of what human beings say is philosophy. So you can’t take a person who says issue X is philosophical and tell him, “You’re mistaken, that’s not philosophy.” What do you mean he’s mistaken? On what basis are you building your definition? On the basis of what people told you. So what—you reject what they say? Then I don’t understand: on what basis are you rejecting what they say? You understand that what he says is circular. Aharoni is making a grave mistake. Because basically what he says means that you can never tell someone that what he thinks is philosophy is not philosophy. But I don’t understand—that’s exactly what Aharoni does throughout the whole book. He explains to all the philosophers that the issues they deal with are empirical issues and not philosophical ones. On what basis did you build your definition of philosophy? On the basis of what they say. So I don’t get it—now you say what they say is incorrect? You understand that he himself cannot make his own claim if he were right. An internal contradiction in his doctrine. And where is the mistake? I’ll tell you where the mistake is. The mistake is exactly in the definition of philosophy that I proposed earlier. When I ask “What is philosophy?” I’m not asking a descriptive question at all. I’m not asking what people call philosophy. I couldn’t care less. If all people called the statement two plus three equals five philosophy, I would say all of you are wrong. No—that’s mathematics, not philosophy. So then what is philosophy? Philosophy is what I grasp with the eye of the intellect, with my intuitive contemplation, as the concept philosophy. You asked me what philosophy is, and I’ll answer you. On what basis will I answer? On the basis of my contemplation of this idea or this concept called philosophy. I will tell you whether such-and-such an issue is philosophical or not. And now you can collect what people say and try to propose some formal definition for it; maybe you’ll succeed and maybe you won’t, I don’t know. But you cannot say that the whole essence of the attempt to define philosophy is descriptive. I’ll ask you another question. When you go to people and ask them whether issue X is philosophical, on what basis do they answer you? When you conduct your survey, right—after all he begins with a survey: let’s see what people call philosophy and what they don’t. By what criterion do those people answer? Did they also conduct previous surveys among other people and reach a conclusion? So how did it begin? It reminds me of… my son was in cheder in Bnei Brak, age three or four. In his class there was a boy, apparently dominant, charismatic, named Leiby Shoshan. I remember his name to this day; I never met him again after that. And he would determine the value of every marble. Leiby Shoshan was the governor of the Bank of Israel. A butterfly marble is worth this much, a red one is worth that much—I don’t know whether he also determined the names, probably—but also how much each marble was worth, he was the undisputed boss. I kept asking my son: tell me, according to what does Leiby Shoshan… according to what does Leiby Shoshan know? He made it up. What? He invented it? He’s an appraiser, a marble appraiser, yes. He knows it according to what you think, right? After all, what does an appraiser do? An appraiser basically—it’s like the price list. There’s another famous appraiser named Levi, right? Levi Yitzhak. Now I remember—the famous car appraiser, yes. How does he determine his appraisal? He looks at how much people pay for a car. But how much do people pay for a car? According to what’s written in the appraisal book of Leiby Shoshan—Levi Yitzhak, sorry, I mixed them up already. Right? There’s a fascinating circular process here. Meaning, Leiby Shoshan asks the children how much this marble is worth to them, and then he determines it, and once he determines it, it becomes law given to Moses at Sinai. But he determines it on the basis of what they say. Now I ask: according to what do they answer him when he asks them? How do they decide how much the butterfly marble is worth to them? Intuition. That’s it. Meaning, there’s some metric that determines how much a butterfly marble is worth, how pretty it is, how eye-catching it is, I don’t know exactly what. Okay? There is some such metric. There’s some appraiser who determines it, or conducts a survey among people, because he doesn’t want to rely only on his own personal intuition; it’s not worth more than anyone else’s intuition. He wants to gather everyone’s intuitions and try to establish some metric that everyone will later accept because it’s a kind of average among all of them. So let’s accept the metric of Leiby Shoshan or Levi Yitzhak as some binding metric. Once he determines it, we really will follow him. But his metric is an indication of value; it doesn’t actually constitute the value. What constitutes the value is truly how much I am willing to pay for such a marble or such a car. Later, of course, it’s like the theory that explains the economy: now we take the theory itself into account in order to guide our steps, in order to make economic decisions. In the car market too, after Levi Yitzhak sets the valuation of such-and-such a Daihatsu from such-and-such a year, that of course affects its value. But clearly it doesn’t start there. It starts with how much people are willing to pay for such a car, and Levi Yitzhak tries to weigh what people say and produce some average number that in some way represents what people think. Okay? So to say that Levi Yitzhak determines the price of cars is incorrect; that’s a mistake. In the end he does appraisal work; we are the ones who determine it. Now I ask: on what basis do we determine it? Do we look at what other people are paying? No. It starts from what? From the question how much it’s worth to me. Intuitively. How much I’m willing to pay. That—I hadn’t thought of this before—is a wonderful parable for the question of what philosophy is. In the same way, with the question “What is philosophy?” you want to be the appraiser—you, Ron Aharoni, yes, want to be the appraiser. You want to ask people: tell me, what is a philosophical issue and what is not a philosophical issue? But then you can’t come afterward and tell people they’re confused. Your whole definition of what philosophy is is built on the answers you got from them. And now I ask more than that: not only can’t you tell them they’re confused—on what basis did they answer you? This is circular. They answered you on the basis of the definition you’re proposing to them, and the definition you propose is based on what they answered you. So who is caught in a circle here? Philosophy, or Ron Aharoni? Ron Aharoni is the one in the circle here, not philosophy. And what is the only way out of this circle? That people define a problem as philosophical because they have an intuition that it is a philosophical problem; they understand that it is a philosophical problem. The intuition, for example, that says this problem has no empirical solution. For example, when a person asks himself whether such-and-such an issue is philosophical or not, on what basis does he answer? Does he have some observational, sensory, scientific means by which to determine whether it is philosophical or not? I’m not talking about after Ron Aharoni has already done the survey, written the book, and already determined the definition of a philosophical issue. I’m talking about before. After all, in order to write the book he has to ask all of us what we think. I’m talking about the stage at which I formulate my own position in order to answer Ron Aharoni in the survey. When I formulate my position and ask myself what philosophy is, how do I answer myself? On what basis? I rule out

[Speaker B] other things. I say: it’s not scientific, it’s not empirical, it’s not this—it seems…

[Rabbi Michael Abraham] On the basis of some kind of intuitive contemplation, I understand that this question is a philosophical question—maybe because it isn’t scientific, or whatever. The question whether there is a world outside is not… or whether it can be answered by scientific tools, right? Indeed, I claim it is a philosophical question. That’s all. Now Ron Aharoni will come and ask all of us whether the question of solipsism is philosophical or not. And we will answer yes. Then he will determine that this is philosophy. But he will determine it on the basis of what we answered. Therefore the question “What is philosophy?” is absolutely not a descriptive scientific question. It’s simply a big mistake. The question “What is philosophy?” deals not with what Ron Aharoni will say, but with how the people answering him formulate their views and answer him. Or in other words, I’m asking what philosophy really is, not what people think philosophy is. And when I ask what philosophy really is, if someone comes and tells me, “Look, quantum theory is a philosophical issue,” I’ll tell him: not true. You’re mistaken. Why? Because I contemplate the concept of philosophy and I see that the question about quantum theory doesn’t belong there. So that isn’t philosophy. The very fact that I can criticize the answer he gives me shows that what I’m saying is not merely descriptive. There is something there. If it were merely descriptive, then on what basis would I criticize him? Here is the description; he’s giving me the description. Clearly I have some independent criterion to which I compare what you say, and then I tell you that in my opinion you are not right. And therefore already here, in the introduction, I claim that this is where Aharoni falls—and this is his flaw all the way through—that the question “What is…” and for now this still has nothing to do with self-reference, by the way. I’ll show you that he falls on the question of self-reference too, but I’m already showing it here in the introduction. That when he characterizes, diagnoses the question “What is philosophy?” as a descriptive question, he fails. And just as once I spoke about the circularity in defining intelligence. There too I’m basically asking what people call intelligence, trying to characterize the concept of intelligence, and then I tell them they are mistaken. For example, how did the definition of the concept of intelligence work? Multiple intelligences and all that new fashion—the relatively new fashion, not so new anymore, this fashion. How was it built? After all, we didn’t like the idea that Einstein is a genius and Maradona is an idiot. It’s condescending, chauvinistic—who made you the judge? Why is soccer less worthy than physics? So what happened? We launched a study—a tendentious study, obviously. We tried to define the concept of intelligence. What did we do? We tried to see what characterizes the concept of intelligence as people relate to it. We came up with seven characteristics, or I don’t know how many. Suddenly we discover that Maradona also has those characteristics. Ah, so he too is intelligent exactly like Einstein, and everything is fine, political correctness is beaming with delight. Everyone is smart; no one is more foolish or wiser, everything is wonderful. Except that there is a problematic circle here. Why? Because how did you build the definition of intelligence? You conducted a survey among people and tried to distill from it the characteristics of the concept of intelligence. Now after you distilled it, you built the concept, and then suddenly you tell people: wait, you say Einstein is intelligent and Maradona isn’t? But look, I have a definition of the concept of intelligence—you’re not right. I don’t understand. You built that definition on the basis of what we answered you. What does that mean? That you simply didn’t distill the concept correctly. That’s all—don’t confuse us. You simply did not correctly distill the concept from the answers you got from us. You selected from our answers in a selective way so as to give yourself a definition that would also make Maradona as intelligent as Einstein, and now you come back to us and tell us that we were wrong. Why? Because you decided you don’t want to accept our answers. So if you don’t want to, then don’t rely on our answers. If you were relying on our answers, then go with us. You can’t rely on our answers, build a definition, and then tell us we are wrong. If according to your definition it doesn’t fit the answers you get from us, that doesn’t mean we are wrong. It means your definition failed to capture what we are answering. There’s a mistake in your definition. And it’s exactly the same structure. And therefore now, it’s like a tomahawk. I’m throwing it back at… I’m basically saying that this tomahawk comes back to him. He suffers from circularity, not philosophy. But in a moment—not in a moment, actually in the next class—we’ll get more into his arguments about philosophy, and I’ll show you this problem in greater detail, and this time specifically regarding self-reference. For now I haven’t mentioned any self-reference at all; I’ve only shown you that he gets himself into circularity. But self-reference is something we’ll still get to later on. Okay, does anyone want to comment or ask? Now’s the time. A real question about the paradox

[Speaker C] of repentance. In a model, say, like the Rabbi suggests in “Man Is Like Grass,” let’s say I derive my values from contemplation of the idea of the good, for example—doesn’t that solve the paradox of repentance? Because I… there’s a process that takes time in which I derive new values.

[Rabbi Michael Abraham] No, but then what was there before, when I committed the sin?

[Speaker C] I only had a basic value of contemplating the idea of the good. I did it again and reached different conclusions.

[Rabbi Michael Abraham] Based on what the first time? Ah, so before I had conclusions X, I contemplated again and now I have conclusions Y. Well then that’s not repentance; it’s a change of views. After all, there I distinguished between repentance, between what today is called “becoming religious” and what in rabbinic literature is called repentance. What today is called someone who “became religious” is someone who changes his worldview. He was secular and became religious. In Jewish law and thought, in traditional literature, a penitent is someone who changes no worldview at all. He knew what was right and wrong even when he sinned—that was his sin. Only now he changes his behavior so that it matches the values he always knew were right. That is the traditional penitent. Because the “penitent” of today doesn’t really need to repent for what he did; what he did flowed from a different worldview. He was compelled—that’s what he thought then, so what do you want from him?

[Speaker B] He was a different person.

[Rabbi Michael Abraham] Yes, exactly. Anyone else? Okay, happy new year, may you be inscribed and sealed for good. We still have another class on Thursday, and after that we’ll probably already go into the recess period, I think; I haven’t looked at the calendar there exactly. Okay, more power to you.